Title: Skin 1B--COMPLETE
Author:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
laguera25
Fandom(s): CSI:NY, with mentions of HP
Rating: R/RFM for violent imagery
Pairing: Flack/OFC
Spoilers: Spoilers through 608, "Cuckoo's Nest".
Part Ia
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events in the NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis.
All characters in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: Set post-"Cuckoo's Nest" in the Flack/Stanhope crackverse.
Now he's standing in the doorway of their apartment with last night's sins on his face and gazing at her with a desperate intensity that sends a ripple of unease through her despite the numbness and her thick fortress walls. She pauses in her sorting of the mound of papers and crumpled wrappers strewn over the coffee table and surveys him in dispassionate silence. She considers asking how he got the bruises and the fat lip and the speckling of blood that kisses his temple and fades into his crown, then decides it doesn't matter. She's too tired to hear another lie from those lovely lips. She turns back to the drifts of paper at her fingertips and waits to hear the sound of his footfalls on the kitchen linoleum as he makes his beeline for the bourbon above the sink.
Instead, she hears his tread on the carpet, soft as a whisper, as though he were walking in socked feet. She glances up from her perusal, an overdue phone bill in one hand, and is startled to see him standing over her, swaying delicately. He's looking at her with feverish hope.
"I really don't care where you've been," she says dully. "Your preferred wet nurse is over there." She jerks her head in the direction of the kitchen.
"Rebecca," he croaks.
"What?" Impatient as she returns her attention to the bill and calculates how badly his lack of give a shit has torpedoed their budget.
Then he's eye-to-eye with her, on his knees in front of her chair. He reaches out to cup her face, and his hands are steady and deliciously warm. It's been a long time since he's been so gentle, and she lets the bill sink to her lap, momentarily forgotten. "Rebecca," he repeats, and his voice cracks. "Doll, please."
"What?" she repeats, and is surprised at how hoarse and brittle she sounds, how old. Twenty-nine, she thinks wearily. I'm only twenty-nine.
He shifts on his knees and swallows with an audible click, and when he meets her gaze, his eyes are wet. He takes a deep breath, and his mouth works. "I've spent-," he begins, and grinds to a halt. A huff, Another swallow. "I've spent most of the day tryin' to think of what to say..." He trails off again, drops his head, and draws a deep, shuddering breath, as though the effort of speech is too great. The balls of his thumbs draw slow, reverent circles over her cheekbones, the pads roughened by handcuff steel and gun butt plastic and the ceaseless grit thrown up by his beloved city. "I know I don't have much right to ask you for this after...after these...after everything," he says hesitantly.
She closes her eyes to savor the warm press of his palms against her cheeks, and her mouth opens in an involuntary sigh of pleasure. It would be so easy to surrender now, to lean forward and burrow into him, to bury her face in the crook of his neck and inhale the scent of his wool cardigan and his shampoo and the lingering traces of Irish Spring. She thinks she could find it if she breathed deeply enough. She could fall into him and let him lift her aching, frozen body from this chair and carry her to the snug nest of their bed, where once upon a time, he'd coaxed life into her a thrust at a time. She could let him apologize with his full, eager mouth and his broad, deliciously-kneading hands and pretend that done was done. She's done it before, after all; when he'd spent four months swanning among the city's empty-headed glitterati with Devon Maddox on his arm like so much costume jewelry, she'd bowed her head and accepted her exile to California and the harried, congenial neglect of Charlie Eppes with the briefest of complaints, and when he'd beckoned her home again, she'd returned to his bed and assured him that the hurt was done even as it had bubbled in her griping belly and slick throat like lye. She had done it when he'd left her in the hospital, her belly high and swollen with Junior, to chase another bogeyman. She could close her eyes to the hurt that swells behind her breastbone like an abscess again, grant him absolution with a caress and the eldritch power of a murmured, "I love you," could store it with all the others in the secret room at the cold, lightless bottom of her soul and let it rot while life went on and time and secret sorrow threaded her hair with garlands of silver and white.
The idealistic Gryffindor child who had gone so joyfully to the altar and the marriage bed wants to do just that. She wants to preserve the Eden she'd once imagined beneath a veil of lace, the Eden to which she'd sacrificed her freedom and her maidenhead. It would be easiest, she counsels, and prudent, the act of a good policeman's wife. You knew the price his job would require of you, knew that it would demand more than he could give, she whispers. You knelt before Father Carmichael with your hands in his and swore that you could and would bear that burden for the rest of your life, no matter how much blood or how many tears it wrung from you. You have no right to protest now, to stomp your feet like a petulant child and howl at him for trusting your word. You bought and paid for this with your name and the ring on the third finger of your left hand, bought it along with the joy of his kisses and the peaceful security of his embrace at night. You cannot pick and choose. It's all or nothing. Keep your silence and cherish the fleeting slivers of happiness it buys, summer mist on your upturned face, and when the city releases what's left of him from its dusty, concrete grasp, then you can reap your reward, spend your twilight years shuffling through the streets his youth made safe or sunning your wrinkled, parchment skin on a beach in Key West while he peddles garlic-and-lime-crusted shrimp to soft-bellied tourists with rumbling stomachs and money to burn. Good things come to those who wait.
It's the voice of reason, the voice of her grandfather and McGonagall, and of twinkling, scarlet-robed headmasters. It's the voice of the hardshell Southern Baptist she'd been in a small Florida backwater a lifetime ago, and of the Roman Catholic woman she'd become in order to marry Don at St. Patrick's. It's the quiet, patient voice of forebearance, the voice to which she has listened for eight turbulent years. The voice to which she knows she should pay heed.
But Rebecca is tired, and the voice is strained. Alice has found her room of secret hurts and gorged upon them like tart currants. She's grown strong upon her toadstool, sustained by the resentments Rebecca has buried, ignored, or denied, and so, when Rebecca opens her mouth, it's Alice who speaks.
"What? Hm? What? I've done everything you've ever asked of me. I've swallowed my pride and turned my head while you swanned around the city with a prissy debutante cunt on your arm and pissed on our marriage for a fistful of jewelery and a useless, paper 'atta boy' in your personnel file. I've supported whatever lie you've had to tell for the sake of your sworn duty, no matter how painful or humiliating, no matter how many scores it leaves on my soul. I've come when you called and left when I was no longer convenient. I've kissed the mouth that told me I'd done enough damage; I've held your hand through three IAB hearings in two years. I've surrendered my job, my independence, and my entire world so that you could be someone else's hero. And for four months, I've watched you mourn your dead whore in our home and never said a goddamn word. So what could you possibly ask of me now?"
The color drains from his face, and his brows knit in wounded confusion. His mouth works. "Rebecca, I don't under-,"
"Don't LIE to me!" she hisses through gritted teeth, and recoils from the seductive cup of his palms. "Don't you dare lie to me, Donald Flack. You've spent every cent of credit you ever fucking had, so don't you dare kneel there and tell me you don't understand. You've been a bastard more than once, but you've never been an imbecile."
He's shaking his head, and his eyes are full of anguish. "Rebecca, sweetheart, I don't know what you're talking about."
And Alice roars. "DON'T! Don't fucking patronize me. My love for you hasn't made me such a blind simpleton that I can't see what's right in front of me. Would God that it had. It would've been a mercy. "
Her eyes sting and needle with tears, and rage is spicy and sweet on her tongue, cumin and clove honey. Anger burns in her belly, and the flare of warmth is exhilarating, almost erotic in its intensity. It's life, primal and unapologetic, possessed of an intoxicating clarity, and she opens her soul and drinks it in. Heat floods her veins, and her nerve endings sizzle with a nascent power. Magic pools in her fingertips and dances over her skin like electric charge. She could release it if she wished, could expel it in a single, explosive contraction that shattered windows for three floors or sent him crashing into the opposite wall in a tangle of limbs and plywood and plaster dust. She could hurt him, exact her revenge in a furious instant and send him to his precious whore,rotting beneath the earth in a Bronx cemetery. She is not powerless, after all. The knowledge soothes her.
Love might have ensnared you, made you impotent, but I will set you free, Alice lisps, and chuckles, a mud-choked drain in high summer.
"You think I haven't noticed you licking your wounds one drop at a time, mooning after your dearly departed piece of ass like an emo poster child? You think I don't hear you crying for her in the middle of the night, cradling your bottle like a dead whore's tit? You think I don't know why you spend the night on the couch? I suppose even your drunkard's conscience knows it would be impolitic to pine for your rotting trollop in the bed you share with your wife. Or hell, maybe you're not sleeping at all. Maybe you're beating off, easing the ache in your heart with the one between your legs and reliving all the illicit rendezvous you enjoyed in squad cars and precinct bathroom stalls while I was here, wiping Junior's ass and parenting for two."
"Rebecca, stop, please," he pleads. His eyes are wide, shocked. He drops his hands and encircles her wrists. "Please. I know-I know I haven't been there for you and Junior like I should have." His voice catches, and he blinks back tears. "Just give me a chance to explain, sweetheart." He presses a kiss to her knuckles.
Her lips curl in a sneer. "What's to explain? 'Angell made me feel ten yards long and didn't curse my job for every lost minute, so I spread her from New York to L.A. every chance I got.'?" Tears stream down her face and dangle from her chin like beads of condensation, but her voice is low and steady.
"I didn't-,"
"Oh, please. Of course you did. Of course. Why else wouldn't you let me go to the wake with you? Wouldn't want to embarrass the grieving father of your mistress by having your charmless, homely, misbegotten, inconvenient wife in the parlor with her bereaved mother, making awkward small talk over stale crudites." Each poisonous adjective fans the flames of her repressed fury, and heady intoxication sours to cancerous misery in her bones.
Silly little girl, playing princess while wallowing in cold ashes. An inarticulate animal whine emerges from her throat, and she growls in disgust and swipes irritably at her traitorous, weeping eyes.
A flicker of comprehension behind the haze of wounded bewilderment. He closes the meager distance between them; his thighs graze her knees, intimate and oddly tender. She can smell him, too, and though there is the all-too-familiar hint of old booze on his breath, there is also the scent of soap and shampoo. Not Irish Spring, no; it's not sharp enough, not crisp, pine and cut paper. It's waxy, tallow and beeswax. Ivory, perhaps.
He's still in there, your love, whispers a small, quiet voice. Listen. The Gryffindor child cowers beneath the mold-blackened cap of Alice's diseased toadstool, hidden from her adversary by its tumescent shadow. She's vulnerable and frail, all hard, gangly angles as she curls beneath the toadstool, knees pulled to her chest and arms folded over the peaks of her knees. Her cheeks are thin and tear-stained, and her eyes are heavy-lidded, but there is a quiet resolve in them, a steel-spined determination. Fight, she hisses urgently. Stand and fight. If you let her win, she will devour everything. Above her, Alice rocks gleefully on her heels, mouth stretched in a vulpine grin and one hand buried beneath her greasy yellow pinafore.
"Sweetheart, that wasn't what you think," he says. "Christ, I never thought about how that must've looked to you, but sweetheart, I was so fucked up then that I wasn't thinkin' much of anythin'. I just wanted to-,"
But before he can finish, Junior barrels from his nursery, arms outstretched and chubby infant's legs toddling with wobbly enthusiasm. He's been fussing for his father for hours, crowing and chirping and occasionally abandoning his play to wander out and gaze expectantly at the front door, as though he could will his daddy through it by force of will and plaintive calls of, "Daaayeee!" Don's voice has drawn him out, and he clambers onto him, oblivious to the tension between his parents. He wraps his fingers around the sleeves of Don's cashmere pullover and tugs.
"Dayeee!" he crows exultantly, and tugs again.
Don hesitates a moment, clearly desperate to reach her, but when Junior begins to whine, he relents and releases her hands.
"Hey, buddy." He enfolds his son and kisses the downy crown of his head.
The sudden loss of contact stings, fresh salt cast upon a festering wound, and the Gryffindor child disappears from view, swallowed by the image of Don's exposed throat as Angell sucks his cock in a precinct stairwell. "Go on," she says brusquely, and disentangles herself with a sharp backward roll of her wheels.
"Rebecca."
"Go on," she repeats. "He's been waiting for you all day, and besides, I've got to clean up this mess."
"Rebecca," he says softly. "We can talk after he goes to bed. Anything you want to know." It's as much question as promise.
"And what if I don't want to know anything?" she croaks. "What if I just want you to shut the fuck up and go away because I can't find the strength to give a damn anymore?"
If that were true, Miss Stanhope, then surely the pain would not cut so deep? murmurs a soft, sage voice inside her head, and in her mind's eye, she sees a flash of scarlet robe and white beard and twinkling, blue eyes behind half-moon spectacles.
I should have known you'd turn up, Headmaster. You never could resist meddling in others' affairs, particularly in matters of love and conscience. I'm only surprised you didn't turn up sooner to chastise me for ingratitude, she muses wryly. You seldom missed a chance to bludgeon a man with his shortcomings. In fact, you made quite the sport of it with the Professor, preyed upon his considerable faults like the canny old vulture you are and turned his guilt to your own ends. Did it with Harry, too, like as not. All while ignoring the beams lodged magnificently in your own eyes. Tidy gambit, that. One from which you carved your bloody sainted legacy. I suppose you've come to peddle your tiresome brand of selfless Gryffindor piety and nobility in the hopes of converting me at the last.
It's rotten thing for both of us, then, that I'm still Slytherin to the marrow and too damn jaded to listen to your optimistic piffle. Now leave me be.
Don's breath catches, and he closes his eyes, and the tears that have threatened since he appeared in their doorway spill down his cheeks. He clears his throat, swallows and clears his throat again. "I promised you that day I married you that I'd give you anything you wanted, and I will. Even that."
He rises to his feet with the creak and pop of tendons and joints, Junior cradled snugly in the crook of his arm. The baby croons contentedly when Don's broad, protective hand splays over his small back to keep him from tumbling to the floor with the sudden, fluid motion. Don kisses the shell of his ear and whispers precious secrets there, and then he carries Junior into the nursery. He spares her a last, beseeching look and closes the door with the soft, metallic snick of tumbler meeting jamb, and then she is alone in the living room, surrounded by the close, meaty funk of old Chinese food, the musty, iron piquancy of old newspapers, and the bitter, ozone tang of her anger. For a moment, she is afraid; the emptiness feels too complete, too final, a churchyard in which no new souls will ever rest. Then she blinks and squares her shoulders, and there is only the dirty living room and her need to set it right.
She works in the silence, insulated from the ever-nattering voices by the banked-ember burn of exertion in her shoulders and lower back. It's pleasant now, but if she works long enough, pleasure will become pain, a simmering, thunderous tension that poisons her muscles and makes them cramped and hot beneath her skin. If she ignores the warning twinges that settle into her back and neck like serrated claws and septic teeth, she will make her penance writhing on the bathroom floor to the rhythm of the iron-fingered spasms that force bile from her throat and tears from her eyes and rich, fecund shame from her helplessly clenching buttocks. She will scream and plead for mercy from the indifferent, idiot gaze of the television and drum a frantic tattoo on the carpet with her heels and flexing, fisting fingers, and when she is spent and her confessor has wrung her dry and left her to lick her wounds, she will loll bonelessly on the floor and drift on the gentle, rolling tides of oblivion. It would be humiliating for Don to find her lying insensate in her own effluvium, logy and weak and pitiful, but still, she could escape for a time, and maybe when she came to, her sorrow would be diminished, expelled with the vomit and the urine and the excrement. Maybe she would be clean again. There is no greater purifier than pain, after all. Pain tempers and strengthens. If its embrace doesn't smother you, pain makes you whole.
So she ignores the twinges and the bright-hot sparks of discomfort that sizzle along her spine and dance along her nerve endings like ill-kept secrets escaped from their prison of dentin and bone. She bends to gather dirty shirts and old socks and ties that loll from the back of the sofa like raggedly severed tongues. She bends and swings her arms to drive the fluttering pages of old newspapers into a garbage bag, and she stretches to reach unopened mail that has fallen from the coffee table. She stretches until her fingers splay and tremble and expose her first knuckles, the ivory throats of maidens offered to the sacrificial knife. She entices the poison to her muscles and the claws to her throat with every motion, and though her arms and shoulders ache and needle with the promise of pain and her back burns and thrums with dull dissatisfaction, there comes no iron vise around her chest or clamped viciously around the small of her back. She will suffer tonight, but there will be no sweet, stupid release from the misery, no purgative spasms to set her free. She laughs through her nose as she works, breathless and bitter, and hates the world.
Astride her toadstool, Alice throws back her head and laughs, and beneath her soiled pinafore, her dirty-nailed hands continues its, sinuous, feverish dance of triumph.
It's half-past seven by the time she concedes defeat and looks up from her work. The fingers of her right hand ache with the effort of clutching the armrest to anchor herself to the chair. Her palm is red and raw from the scrape of the foam grip, and her shoulder throbs from the strain. Her hair hangs in her face in disheveled profusion, and her face is blotchy and hot from the repeated rush of blood. Her legs tremble with exhaustion tremors. Her toes curl and splay inside her shoes by turns. She feels fragile and ill-made, a child's stick figure on the verge of collapse. She would cry if there were tears or energy left, but her tears are spent and she is hollow, and so she merely wipes the sweat and dust from her overheated face with the back of an unsteady hand and rolls toward the nursery. She turns the doorknob and nudges the door open with her footplates.
The door swings wide to reveal Don standing in the middle of the room with Junior on his hip. Don has shed most of his clothes since he slipped into the nursery, and Junior sags heavily against one bare shoulder, one chubby arm around his father's neck and the thumb of the other hand lodged snugly in his mouth. Don rocks softly from foot to foot and hip to hip, murmuring soft endearments to their son. It's a lovely, soothingly hypnotic motion, a paternal waltz in which she would gladly revel if she weren't so tired and angry. She opens her mouth to ask why Don is rocking in nothing but his boxers and a pair of socks, but then he turns, and the question lies fallow on her usually-fertile tongue. She sees his belly and the ugly mottle of bruises from hip to sternum, and remembers.
In this room, Alice cannot speak. Beneath the toadstool, the Gryffindor child stirs.
She reaches him in a single, forward snap of her arms, the wheels of her chair crossing the smooth floor with the hissing, fretful rumble of muffled voices. "What happened?" she demands brusquely. It's a ragged croak, and the tears she had thought spent cloud her vision.
Why is it always the belly? howls the Gryffindor child inside her head. It's like they know, the fuckers. The rotten fuckers. It's an irrational, animal thought, but she understands it, nonetheless. Two years ago, she'd spent eight days bargaining with God for his life because Lessing had blown up an apartment building and lain open his guts with a Xerox machine, and three months after that smearing his mended belly with iodine and antibiotic creams to keep infection at bay. She's caressed the scars the explosion left behind most nights since, cupped them beneath the protective dome of her hand and promised to keep him safe, keep him whole.
And as part of that bargain with God, you swore that if He let Don live, if He gave you more time, you'd never forget to cherish it, to make the most of it. You wouldn't waste it on anger and bitterness and petty vengeance. Yet here you are just a few years later, drowning in bitterness at all the time you've lost to his job and damning him because he's too weak to best his demons. As if you're so much better on that score. If you were, Alice wouldn't be so powerful. How much time with him have you lost to her and your unceasing anger? The Gryffindor child emerges from the overripe shelter of the toadstool's blighted canopy. She's weak-kneed and pale and streaked with mud the color of bootblack from toe to knee, but she's on her feet, and her voice is strong and buoyed by a quiet dignity.
I'm not the one who cheated, Rebecca protests. I'm not the one who pissed on our marriage to please the PD brass and the Tiffany and Cartier crowd.
You don't know that he did cheat, the child counters with maddening implacability, and for a befuddled moment, Rebecca wonders if the Headmaster and the Professor had created a child in their own images, equal parts guile and velvet-handed frankness. If you were certain, you wouldn't be here, son or no. As to the rest of it, that hurt is as old as its wound. Are you really going to seek payment for it now, a year after you took him to your bed and told him that you understood?
Her hands drift to the bruises, cautious and solicitous. Now that her work is done, they've begun to cool, and she expects him to twist from her touch, but he doesn't. He closes his eyes and presses himself against her palms. The bruises are hot and swollen beneath her skin, ripe with blood. She winces and gingerly peels back the waistband of his boxers in search of further discoloration, but the flesh of his groin is unmarred, pink and healthy above a coarse thicket of black curls. She slowly releases the elastic and resumes her probing. Her fingers graze the wattled flesh of his scar, and she pauses to rest her hand there.
"I got mugged in the subway last night." His voice is quiet, little more than a rumble in his chest. "I was drunk, and two guys jumped me. It would've been a whole lot worse in Terrance hadn't turned up. I spent the mornin' at his place, soberin' up and gettin' myself together. I didn't want to face you lookin' like a bum." Shame, now.
"Bit late to be worrying about that, isn't it?" she asks, and immediately regrets it when he flinches and retreats.
He turns away from her and bounces Junior on his hip. "Let's get you ready for bed, buddy." He carries the baby to the changing table and lays him on it.
Junior grizzles and fusses and squawks irritably, squirming impatiently on the pad. He catches sight of her and stretches out his chubby hands. Drool dangles from one thumb in a gossamer strand. "Mumm!" he commands imperiously, and begins to cry.
She rolls to the changing table and grips one small foot. It disappears into her palm, fleshy and warm, and she rubs the sole with the ball of her thumb. "Ssssh, my boy. Mmmm Mmmm. Mama's here." She clucks and tsks and hums until he settles into wet-eyed silence, and then she rolls to the other side of the changing table and strokes his soft, downy hair. "Sssh, poppet. Mommy and Daddy are here, and soon, you're going to be snug in your crib, hmm?"
"Hmg," comes Junior's skeptical retort, and she snorts in amusement. "There's my chip off the old block," she says ruefully.
Don avoids her gaze and busies himself with worrying the baby wipes and picking at the tape on Junior's Huggies. He picks up the baby powder and puts it down again and reaches beneath the changing table to retrieve a diaper. He pulls one out, but makes no move to use it. He simply holds it in his hands, kneads it between his fingers like unleavened dough. He clears his throat and studies the wall. His Adam's apple bobs, a pigeon snapping up breadcrumbs, and she smothers the impulse to rest a soothing hand on the small of his back, to stretch her inflexible arms and cup his nape.
Sober enough to hurt now, she thinks, and oh, baby, don't I know a thing or two about that? "What was Terrance doing on the same subway train?" she asks.
Don doesn't look at her, but his throat ceases its terrible spasming, and his hands still. He shrugs and sets the battered diaper on the edge of the table. "Don't know," he answers as he tugs at the fasteners at Junior's hips. "Damn lucky he was, though. The felonious Frick and Frack were about a breath away from knifin' me for my wallet." He lifts up Junior's wriggling feet over a grunt of protest and removes a wet diaper. "Thought so," he murmurs.
"A knife?" she croaks stupidly. "One of them had a knife?" Almost lost you again, and I never would've had a chance to say goodbye. The horror overwhelms her, and she gropes for the soiled diaper with numb, clumsy fingers. Her fingertips find wet warmth, and she blinks as she realizes that's she's dipped them into her son's urine, a penitent dipping fingers into a holy font in search of absolution. She grimaces in disgust, seizes the diaper, and feeds it into the salaciously puckered mouth of the Diaper Genie, which accepts it with gluttonous fervor. She absently wipes her fingers on the leg of her sweatpants.
If he notices her discomfiture he gives no sign. He plucks a baby wipe from the nearby container and cleans Junior's wriggling buttocks and damp groin. He stops for a moment to inspect the crease of one thigh. "Hand me the Desitin?"
She gropes for it amid the various nostrums stored inside an old Tupperware bowl. "Here," she says. The tube is almost empty, a wad of chewed gum between her fingers.
He frowns at it. "I'll pick up more on the way home from work tomorrow." He unscrews the cap, squeezes a measure onto his fingertips, and dabs it onto the baby's chafed thigh. He works quietly, gently. He's no stranger to this, the unglamorous work of parenthood. For all his shortcomings as a husband, he's never begrudged Junior a single moment. He's been involved since the day Junior was born, changing diapers and burping and soothing colic with endless circuits around the apartment at three in the morning. When Junior had discovered his feet, it had been Don who'd shown him how to use them, who'd placed his tiny feet atop his own and walked him around the living room while Junior had squealed with a delight she understood and envied, for not so long ago, her feet had rested there, bound by Velcro as he'd waltzed her across a wooden, reception hall floor. It had been a lesson only he could teach, and she'd sat on the couch with her heart in her throat, torn between gratitude and despair.
"He needs you," she says softly.
Don pauses in his application of baby powder to Junior's freshly-washed backside. "What's that supposed to mean?" Wary, a wounded mouse peering from its burrow.
"You're a good father."
"Just a shit husband." Bitter and sharp with hurt.
He doesn't speak again until he's buttoning their drowsy child into his sleeper. He pauses in mid-button, hands hovering over the tiny, metal snap like an angel's wings. He speaks to her, but studies Junior's face. "I know I didn't have much to offer you when I slid that velvet box across the table, and I've delivered even less, but I love you. I never expected it to be this hard. Most cops go their whole careers without getting hurt in the field or having to blow some scumbag to hell or bein' accused of killin' a kid in their custody or bein' asked to be someone they're not or havin' to bury a partner and then look their father and brothers in the eye and admit you couldn't save 'em. I never thought it would happen like this, and I wish it was different. I wish none of it had happened, that you never had to carry any of that."
"'Had to carry' it? You never let me try. You just shoved me aside the second the shit got thick, like I was a liability you didn't need, and called me back when it was over. 'Good dog, Rebecca, good dog. Come for your doggie treat.'"
"You're my clean, well-lighted place." Plaintive.
"I want to be your partner. Maybe I can't be the center of your universe, but why can't I be that?"
"Dammit, Rebecca, you are." He finally turns his gaze on her, and his eyes are wet and raw and anguished. "You are my partner. You're my partner, my queen, the fucking reason I breathe. Every joy in my world springs from you."
"Then why-?"
"Because I need you to be safe, to be fuckin' clean!" he snaps, and the sudden shout startles a dozing Junior, who begins to scream. "Shit," Don says dully, and he scoops the howling baby from the changing table and begins to sway. "Sssh. I'm sorry, buddy. Sssh." Then, quietly. "I need one place in this world that isn't jaded and broken and hip-deep in blood and bullshit. I need you to keep believin' in magic."
Oh, love, if you only knew, she thinks, and Lessing's screaming, fleshless face and the blood-slick floor of the Shrieking shack fill her mind. "I don't think he's going to need Goodnight, Moon tonight." She nods at Junior, who continues to hiccough and whimper and splutter despite his ministrations.
"No, but I think you do," he says. He lays Junior on the changing table again and is rewarded with renewed squalling. Then he turns and holds out his hands. "Let me help you into the rocker?"
If you accept, you accept more than an invitation to rock,, warns a voice inside her head. It's an invitation to resume the walk you started when you wobbled down the steps of St. Patrick's. If you accept it, you accept everything that comes with it, and there's no turning back.
She surveys him in silence. She is older now, and wiser, no longer cocooned by innocence and the naive optimism of youth. She knows what awaits her if she should take his proffered hands. There will be more nights alone and more canceled vacations, more postponed dinners and more aborted massages, more kisses stolen as he rushes out the door with his Superman cape tucked beneath his Kevlar vest. More chances for fate to snatch him from her.
His outstretched hands waver. "It'll get better, doll. It has to. Just trust me like you did when we got married."
It's all right, doll; I got you. You just go ahead and shine. Lace on her skin and rice in her hair and one delicate, white-slippered foot poised delicately between one riser and the next, naught between her and disaster except absolute faith and Don's encircling arm.
She hold out her hands. They're immediately swallowed in Don's, and then she's on her feet and enfolded in his arms. They're as warm and strong as she remembers them, and she surrenders to his embrace, weak-kneed and relieved and ashamed of her need. She presses her face to his chest and breathes him in, lets the sparse, coarse hairs tickle her cheek. She can feel his heartbeat beneath his skin, steady and strong, and it comforts her. It's the sound of home and the sea, the ebb and flow of life and the promise of love.
I'm weak, she thinks. Weak and foolish and too damn human, and I don't know when it happened, when I went soft in the center and fragile as dust and porcelain at the edges. I do know that I can't go back to who I was, that hard, hateful child who shunned the light and needed no one. Once tasted, love can never be untasted. It's the deepest, grubbiest, most lethal addiction there is, and I cannot surrender it. God help me, I don't want to.
"I love you," she whispers, her breath a warm puff that stirs the hairs of his chest. "As God is my witness, I love you so. I just...I don't know what to do." Beside her, Junior howls, desperate for sleep and the attention of his parents.
"Look at me," Don says, and when she does, he leans down and presses his lips to hers. They're warm and soft and sweetly hesitant. For a moment, he only lingers there and breathes against her mouth, and then he parts her lips with a brush of his tongue. His tongue caresses hers and fills her with a glorious, liquid heat that makes her heart stutter. There's nothing lascivious in it; it's simple solace, two hearts speaking without voice. She shudders and closes her eyes and remembers another kiss on a chilly night in March, when he'd captured her heart in the cup of his hand and claimed it as his own.
A grace note, she thinks as she gropes for the smoothness of his nape. This is a grace note. Please God that I should cherish it well.
His hands slip to her hips, and he pivots her towards the rocking chair. He breaks the kiss reluctantly, with a final, proprietary nip of her bottom lip, and then he eases her into the chair, one socked foot wedged beneath the runner to keep it from tipping her onto the floor. She settles with a grimace as her right hip sings its displeasure at the renewed contracture. Early-onset arthritis if she's lucky; osteoporosis if she isn't. Yet another consequence of life lived at waist-level. When the low, ground-glass throb subside, she wriggles further back into the chair, until her spine feels the bony press of wooden slats through her blouse. She sighs and flexes her feet, watches impassively as they judder and twitch while cramped muscles unfurl and realign. Her feet are cold, and her calves ache with unseen bruises, She wonders how many there will be come morning, when she's fighting her feet for the right to touch the floor and shaking the blood into her extremities. She rolls her neck and shoulders, opens and closes her hands, and then she reaches for her caterwauling son.
"Here, now, poppet," she soothes as she struggles to lift him onto her lap. He's so much bigger now, and it's not as easy as it was when he was small and helpless and possessed of no inclination to exert his will. He reaches for her and pedals his feet as if to propel himself to the safety of her lap, and his body bows with the effort. She almost loses her fierce, spastic grip, but Don braces him with a hand beneath his bottom, and she heaves him onto her lap, where he stands with his feet pressed to her thighs. "Mmmm!" he grunts triumphantly, and flops gracelessly onto his buttocks. He squirms and fusses and butt-bumps until his rump is tucked snugly against her lower belly. He grins up at her, his chin wet with saliva, and curls one chubby fist in her long, blonde hair in a possessive clench.
"Mummm," he declares, and tugs sleepily on the golden strands.
"Yes, and Mommy loves you." She tucks him closer still and begins to rock. The creak and groan of the rocker is a companionable noise, and she relaxes by degrees, lulled by the rhythm and the disgruntled murmur of the wood.
She expects Don to leave now that she's comfortable, to retreat to the living room and watch ESPN until she emerges, but he doesn't. He sits cross-legged on the floor in front of the rocker and rests his head on her knees and wraps his arms around her spindly legs. His nape is exposed, pale and fragile in the soft light of the nursery. He's vulnerable now, prostrate and submissive before he. She could hurt him if she wanted, could bring her fisted hand down on him or claw the flesh until blood stippled on his raw skin and beaded under her nails. Instead, she strokes his nape with sore fingers and delights in the fresh-shaven cleanness. It's been too long since she's been afforded this simplest of intimate pleasures. For months, she's found nothing but intrusive hairs whenever she's managed to steal a caress as he sprawls on the couch with a bottled cradled to his chest. She moves to his head and cards her splayed fingers through his hair, which is soft and clean and freshly-trimmed.
He's trying, the Gryffindor child whispers urgently. He's fighting. You've no reason not to.
"There's something I have to tell you," he tells the valley between her knees, and begins to massage her calves, as though he sees the bruises she can't.
Her throat constricts, and her heart begins to pound. She tightens her one-armed grip on Junior, who lolls bonelessly against her, one thumb lodged inside his mouth like a cork. "I don't want to know what happened between you and Angell. Never. I can't. I don't want my nose rubbed in my wifely shortcomings. If I know, I won't have any choice, and I don't want to leave you."
He looks at her, eyes red and tired and damp. "I swear on Junior and on my sister's soul that nothing happened between me and Angell. It wasn't like that. I think she wanted it to be, and it could've been if I wasn't married, but I was, and I am, and I want to be. She was my friend and my professional partner, and that's the end of it."
She wants to believe him, but though Alice be without voice here, she is not without power. She crouches atop her toadstool in malevolent majesty, and Rebecca's mind fills with images of her love en flagrante with Angell, all sweat and languid heat,and the guttural, primitive joy of release.
"If you never fucked her, then why in God's name have you spent the last four months trying to drink yourself anywhere else?"
"Because something happened, and I never thought it would, and I don't understand what it means about who I am. Who I thought I was. I don't know what it makes me."
"You just said you never slept with Angell."
"And I didn't." A note of exasperation now, perhaps even anger. "There are worse sins in the world than sex." Junior stirs restively on her lap and whimpers in his sleep, and Don closes his eyes and rubs her calves in slow, soothing strokes . "It happened after...after she died," he continues more quietly. "It was quick, and it was ugly, and I don't even fuckin' know how to even get my head around it because I never thought I'd be that fuckin' guy, that fuckin-,"
He stops, and his breathing is rapid and ragged. His formerly massaging hands are clamped convulsively around the backs of her knees, and it's an effort not to betray the pain. She strokes his cheek with the back of her fingers. "Love, what is it? What's broken your heart?"
He swallows and shakes his head. "Not tonight. Tomorrow. There's a good chance that you'll hate my guts, and I want to be your Prince Charmin' for one more night." He captures her stroking hand and kisses it. "I know I'm all out of favors with you, Rebecca, but please. Just love me for one more night."
She wants to weep, to tell him that she will love him forever, that her love for him is as jealous and pitiless and unyielding as the grave, but it's a weakness her pride will not abide, not yet, not with her anger so near, and so she simply nods once. "All right," she says, "all right. One more night."
"Mmm," he manages, and gives a jerky nod of acknowledgment. Then his forehead returns to her knees, and the only sound is the creak and shush of the rocker.
She sits in the nursery with her son heavy and slack on her lap and her husband spent and wracked at her knees, and the Gryffindor child closes her eyes and sends out a small, quiet prayer.
Author:
laguera25Fandom(s): CSI:NY, with mentions of HP
Rating: R/RFM for violent imagery
Pairing: Flack/OFC
Spoilers: Spoilers through 608, "Cuckoo's Nest".
Part Ia
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events in the NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis.
All characters in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: Set post-"Cuckoo's Nest" in the Flack/Stanhope crackverse.
Now he's standing in the doorway of their apartment with last night's sins on his face and gazing at her with a desperate intensity that sends a ripple of unease through her despite the numbness and her thick fortress walls. She pauses in her sorting of the mound of papers and crumpled wrappers strewn over the coffee table and surveys him in dispassionate silence. She considers asking how he got the bruises and the fat lip and the speckling of blood that kisses his temple and fades into his crown, then decides it doesn't matter. She's too tired to hear another lie from those lovely lips. She turns back to the drifts of paper at her fingertips and waits to hear the sound of his footfalls on the kitchen linoleum as he makes his beeline for the bourbon above the sink.
Instead, she hears his tread on the carpet, soft as a whisper, as though he were walking in socked feet. She glances up from her perusal, an overdue phone bill in one hand, and is startled to see him standing over her, swaying delicately. He's looking at her with feverish hope.
"I really don't care where you've been," she says dully. "Your preferred wet nurse is over there." She jerks her head in the direction of the kitchen.
"Rebecca," he croaks.
"What?" Impatient as she returns her attention to the bill and calculates how badly his lack of give a shit has torpedoed their budget.
Then he's eye-to-eye with her, on his knees in front of her chair. He reaches out to cup her face, and his hands are steady and deliciously warm. It's been a long time since he's been so gentle, and she lets the bill sink to her lap, momentarily forgotten. "Rebecca," he repeats, and his voice cracks. "Doll, please."
"What?" she repeats, and is surprised at how hoarse and brittle she sounds, how old. Twenty-nine, she thinks wearily. I'm only twenty-nine.
He shifts on his knees and swallows with an audible click, and when he meets her gaze, his eyes are wet. He takes a deep breath, and his mouth works. "I've spent-," he begins, and grinds to a halt. A huff, Another swallow. "I've spent most of the day tryin' to think of what to say..." He trails off again, drops his head, and draws a deep, shuddering breath, as though the effort of speech is too great. The balls of his thumbs draw slow, reverent circles over her cheekbones, the pads roughened by handcuff steel and gun butt plastic and the ceaseless grit thrown up by his beloved city. "I know I don't have much right to ask you for this after...after these...after everything," he says hesitantly.
She closes her eyes to savor the warm press of his palms against her cheeks, and her mouth opens in an involuntary sigh of pleasure. It would be so easy to surrender now, to lean forward and burrow into him, to bury her face in the crook of his neck and inhale the scent of his wool cardigan and his shampoo and the lingering traces of Irish Spring. She thinks she could find it if she breathed deeply enough. She could fall into him and let him lift her aching, frozen body from this chair and carry her to the snug nest of their bed, where once upon a time, he'd coaxed life into her a thrust at a time. She could let him apologize with his full, eager mouth and his broad, deliciously-kneading hands and pretend that done was done. She's done it before, after all; when he'd spent four months swanning among the city's empty-headed glitterati with Devon Maddox on his arm like so much costume jewelry, she'd bowed her head and accepted her exile to California and the harried, congenial neglect of Charlie Eppes with the briefest of complaints, and when he'd beckoned her home again, she'd returned to his bed and assured him that the hurt was done even as it had bubbled in her griping belly and slick throat like lye. She had done it when he'd left her in the hospital, her belly high and swollen with Junior, to chase another bogeyman. She could close her eyes to the hurt that swells behind her breastbone like an abscess again, grant him absolution with a caress and the eldritch power of a murmured, "I love you," could store it with all the others in the secret room at the cold, lightless bottom of her soul and let it rot while life went on and time and secret sorrow threaded her hair with garlands of silver and white.
The idealistic Gryffindor child who had gone so joyfully to the altar and the marriage bed wants to do just that. She wants to preserve the Eden she'd once imagined beneath a veil of lace, the Eden to which she'd sacrificed her freedom and her maidenhead. It would be easiest, she counsels, and prudent, the act of a good policeman's wife. You knew the price his job would require of you, knew that it would demand more than he could give, she whispers. You knelt before Father Carmichael with your hands in his and swore that you could and would bear that burden for the rest of your life, no matter how much blood or how many tears it wrung from you. You have no right to protest now, to stomp your feet like a petulant child and howl at him for trusting your word. You bought and paid for this with your name and the ring on the third finger of your left hand, bought it along with the joy of his kisses and the peaceful security of his embrace at night. You cannot pick and choose. It's all or nothing. Keep your silence and cherish the fleeting slivers of happiness it buys, summer mist on your upturned face, and when the city releases what's left of him from its dusty, concrete grasp, then you can reap your reward, spend your twilight years shuffling through the streets his youth made safe or sunning your wrinkled, parchment skin on a beach in Key West while he peddles garlic-and-lime-crusted shrimp to soft-bellied tourists with rumbling stomachs and money to burn. Good things come to those who wait.
It's the voice of reason, the voice of her grandfather and McGonagall, and of twinkling, scarlet-robed headmasters. It's the voice of the hardshell Southern Baptist she'd been in a small Florida backwater a lifetime ago, and of the Roman Catholic woman she'd become in order to marry Don at St. Patrick's. It's the quiet, patient voice of forebearance, the voice to which she has listened for eight turbulent years. The voice to which she knows she should pay heed.
But Rebecca is tired, and the voice is strained. Alice has found her room of secret hurts and gorged upon them like tart currants. She's grown strong upon her toadstool, sustained by the resentments Rebecca has buried, ignored, or denied, and so, when Rebecca opens her mouth, it's Alice who speaks.
"What? Hm? What? I've done everything you've ever asked of me. I've swallowed my pride and turned my head while you swanned around the city with a prissy debutante cunt on your arm and pissed on our marriage for a fistful of jewelery and a useless, paper 'atta boy' in your personnel file. I've supported whatever lie you've had to tell for the sake of your sworn duty, no matter how painful or humiliating, no matter how many scores it leaves on my soul. I've come when you called and left when I was no longer convenient. I've kissed the mouth that told me I'd done enough damage; I've held your hand through three IAB hearings in two years. I've surrendered my job, my independence, and my entire world so that you could be someone else's hero. And for four months, I've watched you mourn your dead whore in our home and never said a goddamn word. So what could you possibly ask of me now?"
The color drains from his face, and his brows knit in wounded confusion. His mouth works. "Rebecca, I don't under-,"
"Don't LIE to me!" she hisses through gritted teeth, and recoils from the seductive cup of his palms. "Don't you dare lie to me, Donald Flack. You've spent every cent of credit you ever fucking had, so don't you dare kneel there and tell me you don't understand. You've been a bastard more than once, but you've never been an imbecile."
He's shaking his head, and his eyes are full of anguish. "Rebecca, sweetheart, I don't know what you're talking about."
And Alice roars. "DON'T! Don't fucking patronize me. My love for you hasn't made me such a blind simpleton that I can't see what's right in front of me. Would God that it had. It would've been a mercy. "
Her eyes sting and needle with tears, and rage is spicy and sweet on her tongue, cumin and clove honey. Anger burns in her belly, and the flare of warmth is exhilarating, almost erotic in its intensity. It's life, primal and unapologetic, possessed of an intoxicating clarity, and she opens her soul and drinks it in. Heat floods her veins, and her nerve endings sizzle with a nascent power. Magic pools in her fingertips and dances over her skin like electric charge. She could release it if she wished, could expel it in a single, explosive contraction that shattered windows for three floors or sent him crashing into the opposite wall in a tangle of limbs and plywood and plaster dust. She could hurt him, exact her revenge in a furious instant and send him to his precious whore,rotting beneath the earth in a Bronx cemetery. She is not powerless, after all. The knowledge soothes her.
Love might have ensnared you, made you impotent, but I will set you free, Alice lisps, and chuckles, a mud-choked drain in high summer.
"You think I haven't noticed you licking your wounds one drop at a time, mooning after your dearly departed piece of ass like an emo poster child? You think I don't hear you crying for her in the middle of the night, cradling your bottle like a dead whore's tit? You think I don't know why you spend the night on the couch? I suppose even your drunkard's conscience knows it would be impolitic to pine for your rotting trollop in the bed you share with your wife. Or hell, maybe you're not sleeping at all. Maybe you're beating off, easing the ache in your heart with the one between your legs and reliving all the illicit rendezvous you enjoyed in squad cars and precinct bathroom stalls while I was here, wiping Junior's ass and parenting for two."
"Rebecca, stop, please," he pleads. His eyes are wide, shocked. He drops his hands and encircles her wrists. "Please. I know-I know I haven't been there for you and Junior like I should have." His voice catches, and he blinks back tears. "Just give me a chance to explain, sweetheart." He presses a kiss to her knuckles.
Her lips curl in a sneer. "What's to explain? 'Angell made me feel ten yards long and didn't curse my job for every lost minute, so I spread her from New York to L.A. every chance I got.'?" Tears stream down her face and dangle from her chin like beads of condensation, but her voice is low and steady.
"I didn't-,"
"Oh, please. Of course you did. Of course. Why else wouldn't you let me go to the wake with you? Wouldn't want to embarrass the grieving father of your mistress by having your charmless, homely, misbegotten, inconvenient wife in the parlor with her bereaved mother, making awkward small talk over stale crudites." Each poisonous adjective fans the flames of her repressed fury, and heady intoxication sours to cancerous misery in her bones.
Silly little girl, playing princess while wallowing in cold ashes. An inarticulate animal whine emerges from her throat, and she growls in disgust and swipes irritably at her traitorous, weeping eyes.
A flicker of comprehension behind the haze of wounded bewilderment. He closes the meager distance between them; his thighs graze her knees, intimate and oddly tender. She can smell him, too, and though there is the all-too-familiar hint of old booze on his breath, there is also the scent of soap and shampoo. Not Irish Spring, no; it's not sharp enough, not crisp, pine and cut paper. It's waxy, tallow and beeswax. Ivory, perhaps.
He's still in there, your love, whispers a small, quiet voice. Listen. The Gryffindor child cowers beneath the mold-blackened cap of Alice's diseased toadstool, hidden from her adversary by its tumescent shadow. She's vulnerable and frail, all hard, gangly angles as she curls beneath the toadstool, knees pulled to her chest and arms folded over the peaks of her knees. Her cheeks are thin and tear-stained, and her eyes are heavy-lidded, but there is a quiet resolve in them, a steel-spined determination. Fight, she hisses urgently. Stand and fight. If you let her win, she will devour everything. Above her, Alice rocks gleefully on her heels, mouth stretched in a vulpine grin and one hand buried beneath her greasy yellow pinafore.
"Sweetheart, that wasn't what you think," he says. "Christ, I never thought about how that must've looked to you, but sweetheart, I was so fucked up then that I wasn't thinkin' much of anythin'. I just wanted to-,"
But before he can finish, Junior barrels from his nursery, arms outstretched and chubby infant's legs toddling with wobbly enthusiasm. He's been fussing for his father for hours, crowing and chirping and occasionally abandoning his play to wander out and gaze expectantly at the front door, as though he could will his daddy through it by force of will and plaintive calls of, "Daaayeee!" Don's voice has drawn him out, and he clambers onto him, oblivious to the tension between his parents. He wraps his fingers around the sleeves of Don's cashmere pullover and tugs.
"Dayeee!" he crows exultantly, and tugs again.
Don hesitates a moment, clearly desperate to reach her, but when Junior begins to whine, he relents and releases her hands.
"Hey, buddy." He enfolds his son and kisses the downy crown of his head.
The sudden loss of contact stings, fresh salt cast upon a festering wound, and the Gryffindor child disappears from view, swallowed by the image of Don's exposed throat as Angell sucks his cock in a precinct stairwell. "Go on," she says brusquely, and disentangles herself with a sharp backward roll of her wheels.
"Rebecca."
"Go on," she repeats. "He's been waiting for you all day, and besides, I've got to clean up this mess."
"Rebecca," he says softly. "We can talk after he goes to bed. Anything you want to know." It's as much question as promise.
"And what if I don't want to know anything?" she croaks. "What if I just want you to shut the fuck up and go away because I can't find the strength to give a damn anymore?"
If that were true, Miss Stanhope, then surely the pain would not cut so deep? murmurs a soft, sage voice inside her head, and in her mind's eye, she sees a flash of scarlet robe and white beard and twinkling, blue eyes behind half-moon spectacles.
I should have known you'd turn up, Headmaster. You never could resist meddling in others' affairs, particularly in matters of love and conscience. I'm only surprised you didn't turn up sooner to chastise me for ingratitude, she muses wryly. You seldom missed a chance to bludgeon a man with his shortcomings. In fact, you made quite the sport of it with the Professor, preyed upon his considerable faults like the canny old vulture you are and turned his guilt to your own ends. Did it with Harry, too, like as not. All while ignoring the beams lodged magnificently in your own eyes. Tidy gambit, that. One from which you carved your bloody sainted legacy. I suppose you've come to peddle your tiresome brand of selfless Gryffindor piety and nobility in the hopes of converting me at the last.
It's rotten thing for both of us, then, that I'm still Slytherin to the marrow and too damn jaded to listen to your optimistic piffle. Now leave me be.
Don's breath catches, and he closes his eyes, and the tears that have threatened since he appeared in their doorway spill down his cheeks. He clears his throat, swallows and clears his throat again. "I promised you that day I married you that I'd give you anything you wanted, and I will. Even that."
He rises to his feet with the creak and pop of tendons and joints, Junior cradled snugly in the crook of his arm. The baby croons contentedly when Don's broad, protective hand splays over his small back to keep him from tumbling to the floor with the sudden, fluid motion. Don kisses the shell of his ear and whispers precious secrets there, and then he carries Junior into the nursery. He spares her a last, beseeching look and closes the door with the soft, metallic snick of tumbler meeting jamb, and then she is alone in the living room, surrounded by the close, meaty funk of old Chinese food, the musty, iron piquancy of old newspapers, and the bitter, ozone tang of her anger. For a moment, she is afraid; the emptiness feels too complete, too final, a churchyard in which no new souls will ever rest. Then she blinks and squares her shoulders, and there is only the dirty living room and her need to set it right.
She works in the silence, insulated from the ever-nattering voices by the banked-ember burn of exertion in her shoulders and lower back. It's pleasant now, but if she works long enough, pleasure will become pain, a simmering, thunderous tension that poisons her muscles and makes them cramped and hot beneath her skin. If she ignores the warning twinges that settle into her back and neck like serrated claws and septic teeth, she will make her penance writhing on the bathroom floor to the rhythm of the iron-fingered spasms that force bile from her throat and tears from her eyes and rich, fecund shame from her helplessly clenching buttocks. She will scream and plead for mercy from the indifferent, idiot gaze of the television and drum a frantic tattoo on the carpet with her heels and flexing, fisting fingers, and when she is spent and her confessor has wrung her dry and left her to lick her wounds, she will loll bonelessly on the floor and drift on the gentle, rolling tides of oblivion. It would be humiliating for Don to find her lying insensate in her own effluvium, logy and weak and pitiful, but still, she could escape for a time, and maybe when she came to, her sorrow would be diminished, expelled with the vomit and the urine and the excrement. Maybe she would be clean again. There is no greater purifier than pain, after all. Pain tempers and strengthens. If its embrace doesn't smother you, pain makes you whole.
So she ignores the twinges and the bright-hot sparks of discomfort that sizzle along her spine and dance along her nerve endings like ill-kept secrets escaped from their prison of dentin and bone. She bends to gather dirty shirts and old socks and ties that loll from the back of the sofa like raggedly severed tongues. She bends and swings her arms to drive the fluttering pages of old newspapers into a garbage bag, and she stretches to reach unopened mail that has fallen from the coffee table. She stretches until her fingers splay and tremble and expose her first knuckles, the ivory throats of maidens offered to the sacrificial knife. She entices the poison to her muscles and the claws to her throat with every motion, and though her arms and shoulders ache and needle with the promise of pain and her back burns and thrums with dull dissatisfaction, there comes no iron vise around her chest or clamped viciously around the small of her back. She will suffer tonight, but there will be no sweet, stupid release from the misery, no purgative spasms to set her free. She laughs through her nose as she works, breathless and bitter, and hates the world.
Astride her toadstool, Alice throws back her head and laughs, and beneath her soiled pinafore, her dirty-nailed hands continues its, sinuous, feverish dance of triumph.
It's half-past seven by the time she concedes defeat and looks up from her work. The fingers of her right hand ache with the effort of clutching the armrest to anchor herself to the chair. Her palm is red and raw from the scrape of the foam grip, and her shoulder throbs from the strain. Her hair hangs in her face in disheveled profusion, and her face is blotchy and hot from the repeated rush of blood. Her legs tremble with exhaustion tremors. Her toes curl and splay inside her shoes by turns. She feels fragile and ill-made, a child's stick figure on the verge of collapse. She would cry if there were tears or energy left, but her tears are spent and she is hollow, and so she merely wipes the sweat and dust from her overheated face with the back of an unsteady hand and rolls toward the nursery. She turns the doorknob and nudges the door open with her footplates.
The door swings wide to reveal Don standing in the middle of the room with Junior on his hip. Don has shed most of his clothes since he slipped into the nursery, and Junior sags heavily against one bare shoulder, one chubby arm around his father's neck and the thumb of the other hand lodged snugly in his mouth. Don rocks softly from foot to foot and hip to hip, murmuring soft endearments to their son. It's a lovely, soothingly hypnotic motion, a paternal waltz in which she would gladly revel if she weren't so tired and angry. She opens her mouth to ask why Don is rocking in nothing but his boxers and a pair of socks, but then he turns, and the question lies fallow on her usually-fertile tongue. She sees his belly and the ugly mottle of bruises from hip to sternum, and remembers.
In this room, Alice cannot speak. Beneath the toadstool, the Gryffindor child stirs.
She reaches him in a single, forward snap of her arms, the wheels of her chair crossing the smooth floor with the hissing, fretful rumble of muffled voices. "What happened?" she demands brusquely. It's a ragged croak, and the tears she had thought spent cloud her vision.
Why is it always the belly? howls the Gryffindor child inside her head. It's like they know, the fuckers. The rotten fuckers. It's an irrational, animal thought, but she understands it, nonetheless. Two years ago, she'd spent eight days bargaining with God for his life because Lessing had blown up an apartment building and lain open his guts with a Xerox machine, and three months after that smearing his mended belly with iodine and antibiotic creams to keep infection at bay. She's caressed the scars the explosion left behind most nights since, cupped them beneath the protective dome of her hand and promised to keep him safe, keep him whole.
And as part of that bargain with God, you swore that if He let Don live, if He gave you more time, you'd never forget to cherish it, to make the most of it. You wouldn't waste it on anger and bitterness and petty vengeance. Yet here you are just a few years later, drowning in bitterness at all the time you've lost to his job and damning him because he's too weak to best his demons. As if you're so much better on that score. If you were, Alice wouldn't be so powerful. How much time with him have you lost to her and your unceasing anger? The Gryffindor child emerges from the overripe shelter of the toadstool's blighted canopy. She's weak-kneed and pale and streaked with mud the color of bootblack from toe to knee, but she's on her feet, and her voice is strong and buoyed by a quiet dignity.
I'm not the one who cheated, Rebecca protests. I'm not the one who pissed on our marriage to please the PD brass and the Tiffany and Cartier crowd.
You don't know that he did cheat, the child counters with maddening implacability, and for a befuddled moment, Rebecca wonders if the Headmaster and the Professor had created a child in their own images, equal parts guile and velvet-handed frankness. If you were certain, you wouldn't be here, son or no. As to the rest of it, that hurt is as old as its wound. Are you really going to seek payment for it now, a year after you took him to your bed and told him that you understood?
Her hands drift to the bruises, cautious and solicitous. Now that her work is done, they've begun to cool, and she expects him to twist from her touch, but he doesn't. He closes his eyes and presses himself against her palms. The bruises are hot and swollen beneath her skin, ripe with blood. She winces and gingerly peels back the waistband of his boxers in search of further discoloration, but the flesh of his groin is unmarred, pink and healthy above a coarse thicket of black curls. She slowly releases the elastic and resumes her probing. Her fingers graze the wattled flesh of his scar, and she pauses to rest her hand there.
"I got mugged in the subway last night." His voice is quiet, little more than a rumble in his chest. "I was drunk, and two guys jumped me. It would've been a whole lot worse in Terrance hadn't turned up. I spent the mornin' at his place, soberin' up and gettin' myself together. I didn't want to face you lookin' like a bum." Shame, now.
"Bit late to be worrying about that, isn't it?" she asks, and immediately regrets it when he flinches and retreats.
He turns away from her and bounces Junior on his hip. "Let's get you ready for bed, buddy." He carries the baby to the changing table and lays him on it.
Junior grizzles and fusses and squawks irritably, squirming impatiently on the pad. He catches sight of her and stretches out his chubby hands. Drool dangles from one thumb in a gossamer strand. "Mumm!" he commands imperiously, and begins to cry.
She rolls to the changing table and grips one small foot. It disappears into her palm, fleshy and warm, and she rubs the sole with the ball of her thumb. "Ssssh, my boy. Mmmm Mmmm. Mama's here." She clucks and tsks and hums until he settles into wet-eyed silence, and then she rolls to the other side of the changing table and strokes his soft, downy hair. "Sssh, poppet. Mommy and Daddy are here, and soon, you're going to be snug in your crib, hmm?"
"Hmg," comes Junior's skeptical retort, and she snorts in amusement. "There's my chip off the old block," she says ruefully.
Don avoids her gaze and busies himself with worrying the baby wipes and picking at the tape on Junior's Huggies. He picks up the baby powder and puts it down again and reaches beneath the changing table to retrieve a diaper. He pulls one out, but makes no move to use it. He simply holds it in his hands, kneads it between his fingers like unleavened dough. He clears his throat and studies the wall. His Adam's apple bobs, a pigeon snapping up breadcrumbs, and she smothers the impulse to rest a soothing hand on the small of his back, to stretch her inflexible arms and cup his nape.
Sober enough to hurt now, she thinks, and oh, baby, don't I know a thing or two about that? "What was Terrance doing on the same subway train?" she asks.
Don doesn't look at her, but his throat ceases its terrible spasming, and his hands still. He shrugs and sets the battered diaper on the edge of the table. "Don't know," he answers as he tugs at the fasteners at Junior's hips. "Damn lucky he was, though. The felonious Frick and Frack were about a breath away from knifin' me for my wallet." He lifts up Junior's wriggling feet over a grunt of protest and removes a wet diaper. "Thought so," he murmurs.
"A knife?" she croaks stupidly. "One of them had a knife?" Almost lost you again, and I never would've had a chance to say goodbye. The horror overwhelms her, and she gropes for the soiled diaper with numb, clumsy fingers. Her fingertips find wet warmth, and she blinks as she realizes that's she's dipped them into her son's urine, a penitent dipping fingers into a holy font in search of absolution. She grimaces in disgust, seizes the diaper, and feeds it into the salaciously puckered mouth of the Diaper Genie, which accepts it with gluttonous fervor. She absently wipes her fingers on the leg of her sweatpants.
If he notices her discomfiture he gives no sign. He plucks a baby wipe from the nearby container and cleans Junior's wriggling buttocks and damp groin. He stops for a moment to inspect the crease of one thigh. "Hand me the Desitin?"
She gropes for it amid the various nostrums stored inside an old Tupperware bowl. "Here," she says. The tube is almost empty, a wad of chewed gum between her fingers.
He frowns at it. "I'll pick up more on the way home from work tomorrow." He unscrews the cap, squeezes a measure onto his fingertips, and dabs it onto the baby's chafed thigh. He works quietly, gently. He's no stranger to this, the unglamorous work of parenthood. For all his shortcomings as a husband, he's never begrudged Junior a single moment. He's been involved since the day Junior was born, changing diapers and burping and soothing colic with endless circuits around the apartment at three in the morning. When Junior had discovered his feet, it had been Don who'd shown him how to use them, who'd placed his tiny feet atop his own and walked him around the living room while Junior had squealed with a delight she understood and envied, for not so long ago, her feet had rested there, bound by Velcro as he'd waltzed her across a wooden, reception hall floor. It had been a lesson only he could teach, and she'd sat on the couch with her heart in her throat, torn between gratitude and despair.
"He needs you," she says softly.
Don pauses in his application of baby powder to Junior's freshly-washed backside. "What's that supposed to mean?" Wary, a wounded mouse peering from its burrow.
"You're a good father."
"Just a shit husband." Bitter and sharp with hurt.
He doesn't speak again until he's buttoning their drowsy child into his sleeper. He pauses in mid-button, hands hovering over the tiny, metal snap like an angel's wings. He speaks to her, but studies Junior's face. "I know I didn't have much to offer you when I slid that velvet box across the table, and I've delivered even less, but I love you. I never expected it to be this hard. Most cops go their whole careers without getting hurt in the field or having to blow some scumbag to hell or bein' accused of killin' a kid in their custody or bein' asked to be someone they're not or havin' to bury a partner and then look their father and brothers in the eye and admit you couldn't save 'em. I never thought it would happen like this, and I wish it was different. I wish none of it had happened, that you never had to carry any of that."
"'Had to carry' it? You never let me try. You just shoved me aside the second the shit got thick, like I was a liability you didn't need, and called me back when it was over. 'Good dog, Rebecca, good dog. Come for your doggie treat.'"
"You're my clean, well-lighted place." Plaintive.
"I want to be your partner. Maybe I can't be the center of your universe, but why can't I be that?"
"Dammit, Rebecca, you are." He finally turns his gaze on her, and his eyes are wet and raw and anguished. "You are my partner. You're my partner, my queen, the fucking reason I breathe. Every joy in my world springs from you."
"Then why-?"
"Because I need you to be safe, to be fuckin' clean!" he snaps, and the sudden shout startles a dozing Junior, who begins to scream. "Shit," Don says dully, and he scoops the howling baby from the changing table and begins to sway. "Sssh. I'm sorry, buddy. Sssh." Then, quietly. "I need one place in this world that isn't jaded and broken and hip-deep in blood and bullshit. I need you to keep believin' in magic."
Oh, love, if you only knew, she thinks, and Lessing's screaming, fleshless face and the blood-slick floor of the Shrieking shack fill her mind. "I don't think he's going to need Goodnight, Moon tonight." She nods at Junior, who continues to hiccough and whimper and splutter despite his ministrations.
"No, but I think you do," he says. He lays Junior on the changing table again and is rewarded with renewed squalling. Then he turns and holds out his hands. "Let me help you into the rocker?"
If you accept, you accept more than an invitation to rock,, warns a voice inside her head. It's an invitation to resume the walk you started when you wobbled down the steps of St. Patrick's. If you accept it, you accept everything that comes with it, and there's no turning back.
She surveys him in silence. She is older now, and wiser, no longer cocooned by innocence and the naive optimism of youth. She knows what awaits her if she should take his proffered hands. There will be more nights alone and more canceled vacations, more postponed dinners and more aborted massages, more kisses stolen as he rushes out the door with his Superman cape tucked beneath his Kevlar vest. More chances for fate to snatch him from her.
His outstretched hands waver. "It'll get better, doll. It has to. Just trust me like you did when we got married."
It's all right, doll; I got you. You just go ahead and shine. Lace on her skin and rice in her hair and one delicate, white-slippered foot poised delicately between one riser and the next, naught between her and disaster except absolute faith and Don's encircling arm.
She hold out her hands. They're immediately swallowed in Don's, and then she's on her feet and enfolded in his arms. They're as warm and strong as she remembers them, and she surrenders to his embrace, weak-kneed and relieved and ashamed of her need. She presses her face to his chest and breathes him in, lets the sparse, coarse hairs tickle her cheek. She can feel his heartbeat beneath his skin, steady and strong, and it comforts her. It's the sound of home and the sea, the ebb and flow of life and the promise of love.
I'm weak, she thinks. Weak and foolish and too damn human, and I don't know when it happened, when I went soft in the center and fragile as dust and porcelain at the edges. I do know that I can't go back to who I was, that hard, hateful child who shunned the light and needed no one. Once tasted, love can never be untasted. It's the deepest, grubbiest, most lethal addiction there is, and I cannot surrender it. God help me, I don't want to.
"I love you," she whispers, her breath a warm puff that stirs the hairs of his chest. "As God is my witness, I love you so. I just...I don't know what to do." Beside her, Junior howls, desperate for sleep and the attention of his parents.
"Look at me," Don says, and when she does, he leans down and presses his lips to hers. They're warm and soft and sweetly hesitant. For a moment, he only lingers there and breathes against her mouth, and then he parts her lips with a brush of his tongue. His tongue caresses hers and fills her with a glorious, liquid heat that makes her heart stutter. There's nothing lascivious in it; it's simple solace, two hearts speaking without voice. She shudders and closes her eyes and remembers another kiss on a chilly night in March, when he'd captured her heart in the cup of his hand and claimed it as his own.
A grace note, she thinks as she gropes for the smoothness of his nape. This is a grace note. Please God that I should cherish it well.
His hands slip to her hips, and he pivots her towards the rocking chair. He breaks the kiss reluctantly, with a final, proprietary nip of her bottom lip, and then he eases her into the chair, one socked foot wedged beneath the runner to keep it from tipping her onto the floor. She settles with a grimace as her right hip sings its displeasure at the renewed contracture. Early-onset arthritis if she's lucky; osteoporosis if she isn't. Yet another consequence of life lived at waist-level. When the low, ground-glass throb subside, she wriggles further back into the chair, until her spine feels the bony press of wooden slats through her blouse. She sighs and flexes her feet, watches impassively as they judder and twitch while cramped muscles unfurl and realign. Her feet are cold, and her calves ache with unseen bruises, She wonders how many there will be come morning, when she's fighting her feet for the right to touch the floor and shaking the blood into her extremities. She rolls her neck and shoulders, opens and closes her hands, and then she reaches for her caterwauling son.
"Here, now, poppet," she soothes as she struggles to lift him onto her lap. He's so much bigger now, and it's not as easy as it was when he was small and helpless and possessed of no inclination to exert his will. He reaches for her and pedals his feet as if to propel himself to the safety of her lap, and his body bows with the effort. She almost loses her fierce, spastic grip, but Don braces him with a hand beneath his bottom, and she heaves him onto her lap, where he stands with his feet pressed to her thighs. "Mmmm!" he grunts triumphantly, and flops gracelessly onto his buttocks. He squirms and fusses and butt-bumps until his rump is tucked snugly against her lower belly. He grins up at her, his chin wet with saliva, and curls one chubby fist in her long, blonde hair in a possessive clench.
"Mummm," he declares, and tugs sleepily on the golden strands.
"Yes, and Mommy loves you." She tucks him closer still and begins to rock. The creak and groan of the rocker is a companionable noise, and she relaxes by degrees, lulled by the rhythm and the disgruntled murmur of the wood.
She expects Don to leave now that she's comfortable, to retreat to the living room and watch ESPN until she emerges, but he doesn't. He sits cross-legged on the floor in front of the rocker and rests his head on her knees and wraps his arms around her spindly legs. His nape is exposed, pale and fragile in the soft light of the nursery. He's vulnerable now, prostrate and submissive before he. She could hurt him if she wanted, could bring her fisted hand down on him or claw the flesh until blood stippled on his raw skin and beaded under her nails. Instead, she strokes his nape with sore fingers and delights in the fresh-shaven cleanness. It's been too long since she's been afforded this simplest of intimate pleasures. For months, she's found nothing but intrusive hairs whenever she's managed to steal a caress as he sprawls on the couch with a bottled cradled to his chest. She moves to his head and cards her splayed fingers through his hair, which is soft and clean and freshly-trimmed.
He's trying, the Gryffindor child whispers urgently. He's fighting. You've no reason not to.
"There's something I have to tell you," he tells the valley between her knees, and begins to massage her calves, as though he sees the bruises she can't.
Her throat constricts, and her heart begins to pound. She tightens her one-armed grip on Junior, who lolls bonelessly against her, one thumb lodged inside his mouth like a cork. "I don't want to know what happened between you and Angell. Never. I can't. I don't want my nose rubbed in my wifely shortcomings. If I know, I won't have any choice, and I don't want to leave you."
He looks at her, eyes red and tired and damp. "I swear on Junior and on my sister's soul that nothing happened between me and Angell. It wasn't like that. I think she wanted it to be, and it could've been if I wasn't married, but I was, and I am, and I want to be. She was my friend and my professional partner, and that's the end of it."
She wants to believe him, but though Alice be without voice here, she is not without power. She crouches atop her toadstool in malevolent majesty, and Rebecca's mind fills with images of her love en flagrante with Angell, all sweat and languid heat,and the guttural, primitive joy of release.
"If you never fucked her, then why in God's name have you spent the last four months trying to drink yourself anywhere else?"
"Because something happened, and I never thought it would, and I don't understand what it means about who I am. Who I thought I was. I don't know what it makes me."
"You just said you never slept with Angell."
"And I didn't." A note of exasperation now, perhaps even anger. "There are worse sins in the world than sex." Junior stirs restively on her lap and whimpers in his sleep, and Don closes his eyes and rubs her calves in slow, soothing strokes . "It happened after...after she died," he continues more quietly. "It was quick, and it was ugly, and I don't even fuckin' know how to even get my head around it because I never thought I'd be that fuckin' guy, that fuckin-,"
He stops, and his breathing is rapid and ragged. His formerly massaging hands are clamped convulsively around the backs of her knees, and it's an effort not to betray the pain. She strokes his cheek with the back of her fingers. "Love, what is it? What's broken your heart?"
He swallows and shakes his head. "Not tonight. Tomorrow. There's a good chance that you'll hate my guts, and I want to be your Prince Charmin' for one more night." He captures her stroking hand and kisses it. "I know I'm all out of favors with you, Rebecca, but please. Just love me for one more night."
She wants to weep, to tell him that she will love him forever, that her love for him is as jealous and pitiless and unyielding as the grave, but it's a weakness her pride will not abide, not yet, not with her anger so near, and so she simply nods once. "All right," she says, "all right. One more night."
"Mmm," he manages, and gives a jerky nod of acknowledgment. Then his forehead returns to her knees, and the only sound is the creak and shush of the rocker.
She sits in the nursery with her son heavy and slack on her lap and her husband spent and wracked at her knees, and the Gryffindor child closes her eyes and sends out a small, quiet prayer.