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Title: Et Tu 12a/?
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laguera25
Rating: FRM
Fandom(s): CSI:NY/Numb3rs/HP
Pairing: Don Flack/OFC
SPOILERS: CSI:NY S1-S403; Numbers through S3; HP through Book 6
Disclaimer(s): All recognizable characters, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis.
All recognizable characters, places, and events in the HPverse are the property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Brothers, Inc.
Numb3rs and its respective properties belong to Cheryl Heuton, Nicolas Falacci, CBS, and Scott Free Productions.
No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII Part IX Part Xa Part Xb Part XIa Part XIb
June 24, 2007. 1:32AM.
His belly burns. It's a steady, dull, radient heat that welters and oozes from his insides. It reminds him of the lazy heat that rises from the cracked, runnelled blacktop of the basketball courts across from the precinct, where he plays one-one-one with Messer every now and then, and from the blacktop courts of his faded childhood memories, where the heat had wafted from the tarmac like a sleeping dragon's breath to scald his knees and claw his face. It's a soupy, living heat, animal and dangerous, and he wonders if this is how you feel just before you take a breath and burst into flames, leaving nothing behind but a man of ash and a few bits of charred bone.
If it is, he wonders how long it will take, and what the responding officers will say when they make entry into the bedroom, guns drawn, and find him smoldering in the sheets like the world's biggest charcoal briquet. If they're rookies and greenhorns, he suspects at least one of them will need to make the rookie sprint to the nearest gutter to empty his guts. If they're not, they'll stand around with their thumbs hooked into their gun belts, making tired cracks about smoking in bed and speculating about which vengeful perp scumbag hated him enough to light him on fire and leave him to burn in his bed. They will also, he knows, salute what's left of him when Sid rolls it into the back of his van with grim-faced reverence.
Mostly he wonders what the nerd squad will think when they file in to dissect his life and take crisp, digital photos of his miserable end. Stella will blink away tears as she crouches over him, beautiful in her anger as she tweezes bits of his shirt from his blackened skin. She'll pray for him with her lapsed Catholic tongue and swear vengeance with her Greek one, Pallas Athene with a sterile cotton swab in one small, fierce fist.
Mac will stand over him in silence, rigid as a tentpole, jaw hard and square as he surveys the mess. He'll be as bland as marble on the outside, all cool professionalism and terse orders, but inside, he'll burn with a fire of his own. He'll take the death as an affront, a mark of personal failure, and though he'll pray to no God, he'll promise vengeance, too. Not in Greek, but in the language of autopsy reports and tox screens and extensive research into his arrest records. He'll be relentless in his quest and will leave no stone unturned. He'll even subject Rebecca to the harsh light of scrutiny, determined not to falter in a moment of useless and dangerous mercy. Given the bitter blood between Mac and Rebecca in the wake of the bombing and the Truby investigation, he hopes Mac remembers to temper his righteousness with regret, lest Rebecca remind him that she is not without venom. Rebecca will make him bleed for every tear she sheds, a firm believer in tit for tat and the black-hearted equilibrium of retribution.
Hawkes will gaze at his charred remains in bewildered fascination and hate himself for his curiosity. He'll insulate himself from the horror of scraping a second friend and colleague from the wreckage of their ignominious end behind the impersonal lens of the camera. Either that, or he'll busy himself with anything but the body, turn his face from the empty eye sockets and obscenely white teeth that grin at him from the sheets and crawl along the floor in search of trace. He'll shine his Maglite and his ALS light beneath the bed in search of accelerants or biological trace, a knight thrusting the purifying light of Excalibur into the unknown wilds of the Kingdom of Underbed, where dust bunnies and old socks live in darkness undisturbed.
He thinks Hawkes will be the one to shepherd Rebecca through her grief, persuade her to release it from her icy-fingered grip. She's always been fond of him, with his doctor's knowledge of her infirmity and his steadfast resolve to see her as nothing less than a human being who happens to have a set of wheels under her ass, and it'd been Hawkes who'd remembered to look after her while the rest of his world had collapsed around him and his guts had been exposed to the sepulchral darkness and dusty, infectious breath of a ruined apartment building. He'd noticed that she was too white around the lips and eyes and too wild in them, that she was stretched too thin around her bones, gaunt and too quiet and swallowing nothing but wordless terror and an endless volley of screams. He'd followed her into the ladies' room and pulled her from the clutches of her waking nightmare. He'd reached beneath the sink with his slender, steady surgeon's hands and midwifed her into the world again from a womb of linoleum and grimy, soap-slicked formica. He'd coaxed her out and pressed his ear to her trembling lips, the better to hear the story she could tell to no one else, and then he'd convinced her to eat a bowl of soup and a few pieces of toast before she resumed her vigil.
Hawkes will be her rock once he is gone; he will let her cry when the grief and the anger come to make her sing a song no one wants to hear. He will hover discreetly in the background when a young officer in dress blues hands her a folded flag with his badge and a rose inside, and he will not ask her to be brave. Not like Mac, who would abjure her to honor his memory by bearing up with dignity. Hawkes will let her honor him with her anger, will let her rage against the dying of the light, and when her fury threatens to devour her and pull her headlong into the abyss, Hawkes will hold out his hand and draw her into the light.
Messer will seethe, eyes wet with tears and fingers slick with blood from another unseen wound. He'll snap on his gloves to keep his fingers intact and hold the blood in his mouth while he carefully sifts through the bits and bobs and domestic detritus of his best friend's personal life, the life he'd lived behind the blue curtain. Danny will open the dresser drawers and peer at the contents through lenses rimed with salt and smudged with fog. He'll lift up the cyclopean eye of the camera and photograph the pairs of socks that sprout from the topmost drawer like bulbs of garlic or the timid caps of mushrooms. The brown and black dress socks of his duty and the thick, white athletic socks of his Saturdays with the YMCA kids. He'll look at them, mouth closed against the blood that wells from his invisible wound, and wonder why some of them are arranged unevenly. He'll never know it's because Rebecca often tires near the end of folding laundry and substitutes practicality for perfection. As long as they're paired and matched and ready when he needs them, she calls it good. And so does he. Because it is enough. More than enough.
He hopes it's Danny who finds his secret, buried so carefully in Rebecca's haphazard sock garden, who plunges his hand into the soft, cotton and wool soil and emerges with the tiny seedling embroidered with the Yankees logo. Danny would cup the tiny booties in his hand, mouth parted in disbelief, and because he's Danny, he would assume the worst and rage at the injustice of it. He would assume that Don had sown a seed of his own before he'd died in his bed and left behind a child who would never know his face.
"Aw, no, aw, God, Mac, no. Tell me I'm not seein' what I'm seein'," he'd plead, choked and stunned. He'd hold out his trembling hand to show the others, and his Adam's apple would click and bob convulsively. "He's havin' a kid, Mac." And from that moment, Danny wouldn't rest until he'd solved the mystery of how Don Flack, Jr., hotshot cop, had gone up in smoke without so much as a cooling ember to blame it on. Danny would pursue it long after everyone else had exchanged outrage for acceptance and marked his passing an inexplicable, tragic quirk of fate. Danny would run himself ragged, to splinter and bone if need be, and if anyone asked him why he chased old ghosts and wisps of smoke into moldering cold files and the bottoms of dirty shot glasses, Danny would fix them with his wounded, haunted stare and tell them about the tiny pair of socks he'd found in his best friend's underwear drawer.
It's selfish, the desire for Danny to be the one to find them, and he knows it. Danny carries too many scars already, none of them well, and most bleed and weep and scour him to the bone with every step. Louie, a living grave he tends twice a month with quiet visits to the rehab hospital out on Long Island. Aiden, a granite tomb he tends with growing infrequency and exponentially increasing guilt. Graves whose names were etched into the stone long before Flack knew him, and whose restless occupants whisper to him still. The guilt of sins not yet committed. Danny would go crazy without the mad rhythm of work to distract him, would shatter from the soles up and still dig his disarticulated fingers into the earth and inch forward another step, another stolen breath. He has no right to bequeath the secret of those socks to a man buckling beneath the weight of his own sorrow.
But he hopes it's Danny all the same, because Danny would understand. Mac would cock his head and purse his lips and wonder why a childless man had booties stashed inside his sock drawer. When he found out that Rebecca's womb was still fallow, he'd sigh and shrug and let it go. Hawkes would, too; Stella would look at them with a twinge of pity, perhaps even longing. Danny would look at them with recognition. He'd see what they really were even without his glasses, because for all his bluster and swagger, Danny was a smart guy. He'd know hope when he saw it, held its machine-washable threads in his palm. After all, he'd nursed hopes of his own once upon a time, and still bears the evidence of their failure. The broken wrist that had put paid to his promising baseball career, the official reprimand in his police jacket that had snatched a promotion from his grasp, the broken and crushed fingers that ache and throb when it rains and threaten to cost him his job with their lingering clumsiness.
Danny would know that he'd been trying to build a future from tiny socks and feverish promises whispered in the middle of the night while two became one. Danny would understand the simple, stark power of wish, and God bless him, he would protect it and respect it. And when he figured out that a wish was all that it had ever been and now could be, he would go right on respecting it. Not like the others, who would mourn it and let it go, shake their heads and remark to each other how sad it was that poor Flack had died before he could start a family.
Danny would mourn it, too, he supposes; Danny mourns for the world every day he's in it, but Danny wouldn't bury it. He would hold on to it, cherish it as a souvenir from a long-lost friend. Danny would let it grow into what it could have been, and if Rebecca ever decided to talk about it, Danny would let her. He'd take her to the diner on 34th Street or the somber solitude of St. Patrick's, where the dream had begun with the clasping of hands, and let her paint pictures of the fairy tale she'd never gotten to live. Danny wouldn't think either of them were crazy for dreaming bigger and better for themselves or for wishing themselves to Camelot with nothing but a cheap pair of Yankees booties to take them there. He would only wonder why they'd waited so long to reach for it.
Anyone but Lindsay, he thinks, and his stomach burbles in sour agreement.
It's an awful sentiment, but one he can't help. She's a good scientist, tenacious and thorough, but she's cold, too, and self-infatuated, Narcissus enamored of his own reflection. As far as Lindsay's concerned, she's the axis upon which the universe turns. If she found the booties, her first thoughts wouldn't be for him, or for Rebecca, but for herself. She'd wonder why no one had told her he was expecting a child, as though that were information to which she had an inalienable right, and then fret over how breaking the news of his death to Rebecca would make her feel. Rebecca and the booties and Danny's raw anguish would be so many tawdry set pieces in her great drama, and when they held no more interest for her, she'd cast them aside, enter the booties into evidence and consign them to the evidence warehouse, where lives and dreams moldered and yellowed into obsolescence.
Play, huh? he muses. What would she call this one? Death of a Policeman? He snorts and belches softly. The belch is hot and sickly-sweet, chocolate and bile and cheap champagne, and he grimaces.
Well, she might not ignore Messer, there, kid, Gavin amends thoughtfully. Like as not, she'd turn it to her advantage, use his grief to winnow her way into his affections and into his bed. She's been after him since day one, subtle as a sledgehammer with her moonin' and heavy-handed snoopin'. She'd do anythin' to get the keys to Messer's kingdom, includin' pump Stella for information about his relationship with Aiden while the former was still scrubbin' bits of the latter from the charred upholstery with a toothbrush and a pair of tweezers. You can still remember the disgust on Stella's face when she stomped into the locker room that evening, shuckin' her lab coat as she entered.
I guess a little decorum was too much to ask, she muttered, and slammed the door of her locker hard enough to rattle it.
You were well aware of Stella's legendary temper, had experienced it for yourself durin' the Moretti investigation into a severed hand discovered in an abandoned church, and you had no desire to revisit that particular briar patch. So, you almost kept your mouth shut and didn't ask, but you kept thinkin' about Aiden and the mystery her life had become since she'd left the job. You wondered how differently things might'a turned out if you'd dropped by her place with a bag of takeout and a couple'a beers now and then. Maybe she wouldn'ta ended up embedded in the upholstery of a burned-out car, bound to the melted vinyl by bits of blackened flesh. So you swallowed your sense of self-preservation.
You all right there, Stell? you asked, and loosened your tie. It was a stupid question under the circumstances, but you couldn't think of any way to express your concern that wasn't stupid, and so you picked the least of the many evils.
Stella didn't answer. She just threw up her hands and stalked from the locker room with them held above her slowly shaking head, a perp surrendering to the impassive gaze of a drawn Glock. That was Stella for Not now, Flack, so you let it go and finished peeling the job from your gritty skin. You exchanged one button-down for another and trudged to the precinct shower, where you scalded the stink of burning fat from your skin and let the hard, needling water ease the ache that had settled at the base of your skull and spread over your crown in a throbbing, feverish skullcap.
Stella told you about it later, though, over beers at Sullivan's. Mac and Hawkes were long gone, and Danny and Lindsay were playing pool on the other side of the bar, a dowdy, cornfed Gweniviere jousting an unsuspecting Lancelot for his heart. Stella watched the game in silence, her half-empty stein balanced on one knee. She was drawn and pallid in the dim light, her eyes puffy and smudged with exhaustion. Memories grow heavier when they're all that's left, and the work of unearthin' them had taken their toll. Her eyes were still sharp, though, and she saw everythin'-Lindsay's coy smile, her unconscious flirtation as she tucked stray strands behind her ear before she bent to line up her shot, her eager, greedy gaze on Danny as he bent to make his. She took it in without a word, but now and then she snorted or gave a nigh-imperceptible toss of her head.
She asked me about Aiden and Danny today, she offered quietly, and took a sip from her stein.
Yeah? You weren't sure where she was going with this, but you were careful not to step in it with an ill-advised remark. What about, exactly? You took a pull from your own bottle.
She shrugged, a loose-jointed roll of shoulder that made the dwindling contents of her stein slosh. Hard to tell. She said that Danny talked about her all the time. Said they must've been close.
She was fishing for the goods on Messer's love life while you were crawlin' around in a car full of Aiden dust?
Stella closed her eyes and slowly rolled her head in a wide lazy circle. Sounded that way, she said when she opened her eyes again. I don't know; maybe I'm just touchy because it's Aiden. She studied the game of pool with heavy-lidded eyes.
But you don't think so? You watched her thoughtfully and resisted the urge to reach out and knead the tension from her shoulder.
She was quiet for such a long time that you thought she wasn't gonna answer. She simply took a long, gulpin' swallow from her stein and watched Danny and Lindsay from over the sudsy rim. Then she set the nearly-drained mug on her knee and said, No. I don't. God.
Hence your observation in the locker room earlier?
Stella nodded.
You shook your head in disbelief. Jesus. Then, There's a time and a place, you know?
Stella did know, but she didn't say so. In fact, that was the last of the talkin' she did that night. She was all talked out. You weren't much better. Askin' her if she wanted another round was like recitin' Beowulf in Old English. The words were clumsy and unfamiliar, pebbles caught beneath your tongue. It was easier to sit and wash them down with Guinness and beer, and when you shared a cab home with her that night, she didn't say goodnight. She just kissed you on the cheek in wordless farewell and slipped into the night. You went home and slept it off, and a cup of Rebecca's special tea was waitin' for you in the mornin'.
Stella might'a second-guessed herself about Lindsay Monroe, but you didn't second-guess her. She was sharp as a tack and possessed an eye for detail and a keen nose for bullshit. In the pre-Frankie era, before her confidence was shattered on the end of a bullet, there was no finer judge of character than Stella Bonasera. You thought she was right on about the motives of one Lindsay Monroe, and less than a year later, Lindsay proved you both right.
You don't remember it, of course. You were adrift on obsidian seas, your guts held together by surgical string and the deft, God-touched hands of Dr. Singh. You lost eight days to that darkness. Only Rebecca's voice reached you on those still, vast waters, and even it was distant and fleeting, lost beneath the white-noise roar of absolute nothingness. You know what happened because Rebecca told you, thin-lipped and contemptuous as she drew her cool thumb over your knuckles in a slow, soothing line. It was a gesture meant to comfort you, an offering of quiet dignity when most of yours had been ripped away with the briskly efficient removal of your catheter, but it had been Rebecca who'd needed a small comfort then. Anger had pinched her in its diseased, bone-fingered grip, made her tremble and seethe, warm as a kiln beneath her pale, waxy flesh.
You all right, doll? Slurred and thick with morphine and the dull bone-weariness of recovery. You gently squeezed her fingers.
'M fine, honey. Just worried about your plumbing. She managed a faint, lopsided smile.
You don't need to worry about me. I'm good and getting better every day.
She reached out and brushed her fingers through your hair. I know you are. That just looked like it hurt. She cast another pitying gaze at your johnnie-covered johnson.
Naw. It was true, too. All you felt was the niggling, poison-sumac itch of irritated tissue. Maybe it did, but I didn't feel it. I'm too damned stoned.
That actually prompted laughter, a brief spark of mirth that lit her whole face. There was a note of surprise in it as well, as though she hadn't expected the blade of your tongue to pierce the thick, stupefying gauze of your potent painkiller cocktail. The surprise pleased you, a salve to your tattered pride. The laughter made your heart sing, liquid sunshine in your veins. It meant that she was healing along with you, coming up for air at last. Even flat on your ass and blitzed to the gills on Harvard-issue heroin, you were still a husband to her.
If I didn't know better, I'd say you liked being wasted with a doctor's consent, she said fondly.
It beats the alternative.
Her fledgling smile faltered. I bet it does, she said softly, and you were set to curse your idiot mouth. Then she rallied. Besides, who's to say I'm not jealous that other women are touching your tackle?
You blinked at her in logy astonishment. First of all, that's a romantic description of my manhood.
Would you rather I called it 'your love needle?' she asked sweetly, and gazed at you in wide-eyed innocence.
Second, that nurse was as sexy as a used bedpan, you went on before the image of a needle dick could imprint itself on your vulnerable mind.
So you weren't too stoned to notice that? she countered. Uh huh. Her tone was severe, but she was grinnin' for the first time since you'd opened your gummy eyes to the sight of her blotchy, tear-scoured face loomin' over you like a low-hangin' moon.
She kinda had my dick in her hand-
I believe that was my point, she interrupted mildly, and scowled at the nurses' station through the glass wall of your room.
-and guys tend to take careful note of who handles that particular piece of standard issue, you finished.
She sniffed daintily. So do their wives, I assure you. She sighed and adjusted her hips in her wheelchair. The cushion hissed beneath her as she shifted, and the plastic footplates creaked with the sudden burden of weight from her spasmin' feet. Anyway, I thought getting a sponge bath from a naughty nurse in a tight little uniform was every guy's fantasy. One of them, anyway, she amended.
Not when they look like a Hungarian power lifter, you pointed out, and spared a furtive glance out the glass just in case she was within earshot. God knew what the woman could do with a length of rubber tubing if she had the chance. Fortunately for the family jewels, she was nowhere to be seen. Looked like she had ear hair, for Christ's sake. I got standards, you know, you muttered sulkily.
Mmm, Rebecca grunted indulgently.
Pretty high ones, too. Look who I married.
She blushed at that, a rosy glow that transformed her haggard, insomnia-bruised face and made it radiant. Lovely. There in that room that stank of piss and alcohol and human rot and misery sat the beautiful, young girl you'd married one cold February mornin' three years ago, the china doll who'd been so much bisque porcelain in your arms on the reception-hall dance floor as you'd whirled around and around with her in a graceful, giddy waltz. She was a miraculous vision and a precious reminder of the home and the life you were fightin' for. It made your chest hurt to look at her, but it was a warm, vital hurt, not the cold, gnawin' hurt of your shredded guts. It was oddly pleasant, and you didn't want it to stop.
'Sides, I thought you girls had a fantasy about men in uniform.
Another huff of laughter. Well, then, it looks like I've fulfilled that one doesn't it? She raised your hand to her lips and kissed the knuckles, careful not to disturb the tape that bound your morphine drip to the back of your palm.
You lay quietly for a while, drinkin' in the companionable silence that was broken only by the chirp of your cardiac monitor and the periodic, Pez-dispenser click of your morphine drip. You drowsed while she held your hand and flipped idly through the channels on the hospital television set. Sometimes she sighed or hummed to herself. It would've been idyllic if it hadn't been from the throbbing, ragged mouth in your belly that pulsed with every heartbeat and opened into a toothless scream if you breathed too deeply. It was alive beneath its gag of sterile gauze and the liberal application of iodine and antiseptic. It burrowed beneath your skin, seethed within the meticulous catgut stitches. It itched maddeningly in the throes of its exorcism, and the slightest movement made you scream, morphine be damned.
Sometimes, it exerted its terrible, ulcerated will beyond the flimsy confines of its cotton prison and dug its fingers into your chest, where they simmered like banked embers or wrapped themselves around your bruised sternum and made it hard to breathe. Sometimes, just before you descended into the deeper waters of healing sleep, you thought you felt the sudden, crushing weight of a Xerox machine settle over you, a succubus come to drain the dregs of your life as you slept. Then Rebecca would sigh or shift or stroke your fingers with her cool, thin ones, and there would be only the comforting embrace of the threadbare sheets wrapped tidily around your bare legs to keep them warm.
Such was the strange rhythm of your world for three weeks that summer. You drowsed and lost yourself to sleep so often that the days ran together, wax tableaus hastily carved and then held over a candle's lascivious, eager tongue. So many memories are distorted or gone altogether, consumed by an act of candle cunnilingus. But this one you remember because she was so happy and beautiful before you opened your idiot mouth again and went asking after Danny Messer, that Cain whom you loved in spite of his mark.
So, have any of the guys dropped by? Has Messer smuggled in any contraband from my favorite deli? you asked, and flashed a loose, groggy grin.
And just like that, the shadows settled over her face again, a plume of ash blotting out the sun. She paled, and her sunny grin faded into a bloodless line of lip. I wouldn't count on Danny busting his balls to get here. It was a snarl, and her fingers flexed and twitched fretfully in your grip.
The sudden change in demeanor made your stomach twist painfully, and you hissed at a sudden cramp deep in your gut.
That brought her around, and her face softened, though that exquisitely rosy blush didn't return to her cheeks. I'm sorry, babe. I didn't mean to upset you. Her voice was brittle and too high, glass on the verge of shatterin'(like the glass in those Tiffany's display cases, you thought distantly, whole one second and broken and scattered the next. Bet Danny's dog could hear the frequency even if I can't. Bet it sounds like the roar of collapsin' masonry or the busy, insectile hum of a Xerox machine as it makes color copies of your dust-covered guts). Her fingers increased their anxious flutterin', butterflies trapped beneath the protective cup of your hand.
Hey, sssshhh, you didn't, you soothed. You didn't upset me; you didn't do anything. You're good, I'm good, we're good.
It was a necessary lie; you were upset. Your lovely china doll had disappeared again and left this harried, miserable creature in its place, but you recognized the symptoms of an impending Rebecca meltdown, and the last thing you needed was your exhausted, frightened wife writhin' on the floor while invisible hands crushed her muscles in their malicious, iron grip. She'd end up in the bed next to yours, doped to the gills with muscle relaxants and sedatives, and you'd be too damn weak and wracked with pain to look after her, keep her clean and safe and safeguarded from the pryin', clinical eyes of the doctors.
You let go of her hand long enough to cup her cheek and draw your thumb over the long, thin spar of bone. She was too warm, and her skin was oily to the touch, as though her deep and intimate relationship with bathing had been reduced to a strained, nodding acquaintance. She let out a ragged, shudderin' breath and closed her eyes, pressed her cheek into your palm.
You don't have to hang on so tight anymore, you said quietly. I'm gonna be okay, sweetheart. You can let go now.
Never. It was choked, but resolute as tempered steel. I'll never let go.
Mingled pride and sorrow tightened your chest like a stifled breath. It was pure Rebecca, beautiful and terrible. She shouldered too much and called it insufficient penance for her flawed existence, and you wanted to reach over the damn bedrail, seize her by the scrawny shoulders, and shake her until the undeserved and self-imposed guilt sloughed off like shed skin. This isn't your fault, dammit, and you don't have to be perfect, you wanted to shout, but such drastic movements would've been an invitation to agony, and so you let your hand slide to her shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze.
Rebecca, look at me.
She opened her eyes. They were red-rimmed, crusted with fragments of forgotten slumber, and smudged with weariness.
Do you trust me?
She blinked in surprise. Of course I do. Shrill and bewildered. What makes you think I don't?
You ignored the question. The pain in your gut and the river of dope coursin' through your bloodstream often conspired to sap your strength, and the familiar heaviness was stealin' into your limbs and fillin' the hollows of your bones with wet sand. Soon, it would find its way into your skull and smother thought and consciousness in a steadily creepin' tide. You were runnin' outta time and energy, and you needed her to hear this before you forgot how to operate the complex, bivalve machinery of your mouth.
Then I want you to listen to me. You need to let go, Rebecca. She opened her mouth to protest, but subsided at your expression. Apparently, your facial muscles were still fully operational. Not completely-Christ, I love you more than I can fuckin' tell you, and it means the world to me that you want to take care of me-but you don't need to take the whole world on your shoulders right now. It's too much for anybody. Wonder Woman couldn't handle this alone. You need to let go, just a little. Do what you need to do for yourself. Cry. Cuss. Get some sleep and somethin' to eat, go have a soak in the tub. You're tense as hell. Your muscles are stone underneath your clothes. To emphasize your point, you gave her shoulder another, firmer squeeze.
She winced, and a small moan escaped her.
This isn't good for you, doll. We both know what happens when you get like this. You get sick, and your nervous system goes haywire, and I end up watching you contort yourself into the letters of an alphabet that nobody can pronounce. I can't handle that right now, and neither can you.
A strangled mewl escaped her, and she shrank into her chair as if you'd cast an indictment against her, hard and pitiless as a hurled stone.
I know, you murmured, and cupped her chin. I know why you've been going so crazy. For a while there, you were scared to move or blink too hard just in case the change in air pressure was the final straw that earned me an express ticket to Hammerback's luxury accommodations in the basement of the crime lab. You thought that if you turned your head for a second, I'd be gone when you looked back, and some douchebag from One PP would be offerin' you his sincerest and most useless condolences for your loss. Am I right?
Another pitiful squeak and a jerky nod. Tears spilled down her cheeks. You hated to see her cry. She'd probably done more than her fair share of weepin' while you were on your all expenses-paid cruise on the River Lethe, but the heaviness in your limbs was growin' by the heartbeat, and your vision was dimmin' at the edges as the sands of sleep drifted into view and blanketed everythin' in a hazy, astigmatic fog. It wouldn't be long until you were lost to oblivion for hours, and urgency made you clumsy and a trifle cruel.
Don't cry, doll. I understand why you're doing what you're doing, why you're hanging on so tight, and I know those damn seizures aren't you fault, some damned husbandly fire drill you pull for shits and giggles. Another cry, louder than the others, and you were sure she was gonna lose it, buckle from a caress that had somehow become a slap.
Your hand left her quiverin' shoulder and slipped beneath the lank, dispirited strands of her hair to find her neck. It was taut and cramped with a dangerous tension, and your fingers sought out the sharp nub of a cervical vertebra and began to knead the sheath of muscle and tendon that covered it. She dropped her head to her chest and issued a guttural moan of relief that went straight to your balls. The resultant cramp from your gut as your cock tried to report for duty was a rusty blade behind your navel, and you pressed your lips together to stifle the scream that welled in your throat. Rebecca, shielded by the fall of her hair and absorbed in the practiced work of your fingers, didn't notice.
Your fingers descended to the next rung on the vertebral ladder and resumed their patient work, and you didn't speak until you were sure your voice wouldn't betray you. All I'm saying is that I need you to be selfish and take care of yourself while I can't. It's killin' me to see you like this.
She sniffled and swiped at her streamin' eyes with the heel of her palm. I just-, She straightened and took a deep breath in order to regain her tattered composure. I hate leaving you here. Feels like I'm escaping.
Rebecca, it's a hospital, not Riker's.
Same difference, she muttered darkly, voice thick with snot and hoarse with tears.
You knew that convincing her hospitals were houses of healing was a losin' proposition, so you cut your losses and said, Just promise me you'll go home and get some rest and a bite to eat. I got my first therapy session tomorrow mornin', and there's no use in you sitting around here by yourself while Nurse Ratchett puts me on the rack.
You joke, but you have no idea how close you are to the truth, she said, and her lips quirked in a mirthless smile.
She was right about that, as it turned out, plenty right, and had you known what waited for you the followin' day, the unimagined agonies carried in on the wings of the nurse's crepe-soled shoes when she rolled that saggy-seated, Wal-Mart-quality wheelchair into your room, you might not'a been so cheeky, but you were stoned and blissfully ignorant and fightin' the insistent tug of sleep, and so you mustered a blurry, waverin' grin and said, Then seein' a beautiful woman waitin' for me in my room when I get back oughta be just what the doctor ordered.
She snorted. Trust me, babe. The only thing you'll have eyes for by the time you get back to your room is your morphine drip.
I think you underestimate your sexiness, doll.
We'll see.
Just promise me you'll take care of yourself.
She sighed and scrubbed her face with her palms. Yeah, all right. I've probably become a rolling biohazard.
You sagged with relief. That's my girl. Thank you. You were quiet for a moment. Now why are you so sure Messer won't be gracin' me with his presence?
It's nothing you need to worry about right now, she said stiffly.
Doll? you persisted. You don't tell me, and all I'm gonna do is worry.
She eyed you warily. Finally, she said, I imagine he's too busy boning his cornpone centerfold.
Lindsay?
She uttered a disgusted harrumph. You're lying in intensive care with your guts held together by stitching, surgical netting, and the medical equivalent of superglue, and Little Miss Drama Whore is pissing and moaning about a superficial cut on her forehead. As if that's going to ruin her devastating good looks. Cooze.
Don't hold back, Rebecca. Tell me how you really feel. You expected her to flush with embarrassment, but she didn't. Her expression remained thunderous.
And what does Danny do? Falls all over himself to drive her home, pecker at high noon. Not like his best friend could use a little moral support. There's Mac and Stella for that bothersome business. Why should he be assed to care about anything but himself when he's got a chance to plow himself a Montana wheat field? Fucking obnoxious cocksucking peckerwood. She lapsed into mutinous silence, chest heaving
You goggled at her, impressed by her creative invective. She was positively venomous, and fury had made her radiant. Her eyes flashed and glittered, and her lips were a pouty rose. Her hair was still dull and lank, but her chest was outthrust, her small breasts high and firm beneath her rumpled blouse, and the caperin' caveman who lived in the primitive basement of your brain was only too happy to supply you with images of those breasts covered by her hair in its normally golden profusion, strands of spun gold that spilled over her shoulders and fanned over her chest.
You're beautiful, you croaked, and licked dry lips. You only wished happiness could have the same effect. Anger was a zero-sum game in the end.
And you're high, she snapped, and then softened. Sorry, babe. I didn't mean to snap at you. She reached out and stroked your forehead. My point is that Danny Messer is a sniveling pissant, and you deserve better in a best friend.
Pure poetry.
What?
'Snivelin' pissant'. It wasn't the impassioned defense of Messer that you'd intended, but you were so tired, and the pain in your belly made it hard to think. It was growin', sharpenin' its darnin'-needle teeth on your ribcage, and if you didn't slip into the shelterin', soothin'ly amniotic waters of deep sleep soon, it would be unbearable.
It's apt is what it is, she countered primly. Now go to sleep, babe. Don't fight it.
I love you. Want to m'k sure you're okay… The words were muddy and indistinct on your sluggish tongue, as if you'd already gone under.
She blinked numerous times in rapid succession. I know, sweetheart. I love you, too. As long as you're with me, I'm fine. Now hush.
Don' eat m'Jello, you murmured dreamily.
I wouldn't dream of it, she assured you, and the last thing you felt before you went out on Morpheus' dark tide was the cool, moist brush of her lips on the side of your mouth.
The next time you saw her, she had showered and changed clothes and gotten some sleep just like she'd said she would. Too bad you weren't in any shape to appreciate it, busy as you were tryin' not to puke down your legs from the distress signals sent by your tortured abdominal muscles. You cried like a little girl, arms folded over your sore belly to protect it from further assault, as if hidin' it from view would keep that sadistic prick rehab therapist from wrenchin' another set of static crunches from your obliques. You barely made it to the bed before you were heavin' into the vomit bowl Rebecca held under your mouth, and oh, wasn't that a treat? It was as if Atilla the Hun had unzippered your guts with the rusty tip of his long spear. You couldn't get to that morphine drip fast enough.
Rebecca was right about Danny, too, and Lindsay. Messer turned up often enough, but he never stayed long, and he spent most of his visits hunkered gracelessly in a bedside chair and makin' stilted small talk, rubbin' his hands together or jabbin' his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose with a restless index finger. Sometimes, he'd start to speak only to stop in mid-sentence, or stare at you in mute desperation while his toes tapped out a frantic rhythm on the linoleum.
So, he'd say, and pause to push his glasses onto the narrow bridge of his nose. Doc says you were really lucky, there.
So I've heard, you'd reply. Think Dr. Singh's the only doctor Rebecca's ever wanted to nominate for man of the year.
Not a fan of doctors, huh?
Understatement of the year, my friend.
'S a good thing Mac was there. Me, I'da been worse than useless. Taptappitytappitytaptappitytappitytap.
Don't worry about it, you'd reply. I got a feelin' Mac would out MacGyver MacGyver. I'd just like to get my hands on that fuckstick with the Ipod. Hadn't been for that asshole, I'd've made it out, no problem. Dickhead.
He'd laugh, a nervous, throaty chuckle, and fidget. Yeah, I hear ya. But he'd never look at you when he said it, would avert his half-lidded eyes from the gauze bandage that covered your abdomen, as though to look at it was to see somethin' shameful. You'd been broken on the job, become one of Those, and like all good boys in blue, Messer kept his distance just in case your misfortune was contagious.
You understood it; of course you did. When you were a kid, you spent your childhood hopin' it was someone else's father who got tapped for the Ultimate Sacrifice by a cold, copper-jacketed finger, and when you joined the line yourself, you prayed it wasn't you who wound up in a wheelchair or suckin' puddin' through a straw after a gangbanger put one in your back and one in your neck. Just last year, you'd stood at attention at Robert Velasquez' funeral and thanked God that it wasn't you inside the flag-draped coffin. Better you than me is a common human shame that dwells in every heart, so you couldn't blame Danny for bein' spooked. But you wanted to strangle him all the same for bein' so damn obvious about it. Friends strapped it on and waded in when the shit got thick. Danny just stood on the muddy banks with his hands in his pockets and hoped the current never brought you close enough to touch.
The few times he did make the effort and extend support, Lindsay was there to cut him off at the knees. If he showed up with a bag of tacos for him, a milkshake for you, and plans to watch the ballgame, Lindsay inevitably tugged on his electronic leash and summoned him home before the third inning. She wanted him, she said, and besides, you needed your rest. As if you had anythin' more to look forward to than a respite from the regimented torture of your rehab sessions and a bland, cafeteria-catered dinner with Rebecca. And Messer-whipped, ever-dutiful Messer-always went, head hung and hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, thirty going on ten. And you always let him.
You suppose you should'a been pissed at him for tuckin' and runnin', should'a shared Rebecca's sour, barb-tongued contempt for him, but you couldn't because it was Danny. You'd known him since your rookie days, when you were both snot-nosed punks convinced you could single-handedly clean up the city with nothin' but a pair of shiny, metal cuffs and a solid set of brass fuckin' balls. You'd called him friend for five years and best friend for four, and that wasn't a title you gave lightly or recalled easily. Danny was flighty and could be a thoughtless bastard, but he was also the first one swingin' when you were under attack, whether from a scumbag perp or ass-coverin' brass. If you were his people-what Messer called 'decent people'-you were his forever, come what may.
At least, that's how it used to be, before the specter of Sonny Sassone and the Tanglewood boys rose from its uneasy grave and demanded Louie in tribute before it was banished to the mass grave of Sing Sing, where thousands of lost souls rot and wither within the damp, grey walls. Losin' Louie to the human vegetable garden of the rehab hospital changed Danny. He'd always been a carpe diem guy, eager to seize the day as it came to him and happy to chase rainbows simply for the sake of seein' where they led and what might be waitin' at the end of 'em. But he never worried if there was no gold, or even if there was no pot. He'd just shrug his shoulders and move to the next one, sure that one day, his luck would change, that someday there'd be more than just dreams of gold dust on his hands. There was always more time and another rainbow.
But that all changed when Sonny pulverized Louie's skull and pureed his brain with a Louisville slugger. Danny didn't just catch life in his hands; he seized it and squeezed until knuckle turned to bone. He stopped takin' things as they came and started seekin' them out with fanatical determination. He drank more and ate more and fucked more, and there was no joy in it, just a wide-eyed need that made your stomach flutter uneasily whenever you caught a glimpse of it. He was a Lost Boy, not gently turned out of Never-Neverland by a beneficent hand, but ruthlessly upended from his cradle in the middle of the night and left to fend for himself while God went wanderin' with blind eyes and indifferently gropin' fingers. Louie's brush with death had brought home his own mortality with a clarity no stranger's death could ever achieve, and Danny meant to do it all before Death ran him to ground.
And you couldn't blame him for that, either, because hadn't you done the same since your baby sister went ass over teakettle down the rickety stairs of the Whisper House and left a sister-sized hole in your heart? To the rest of the world, she's been gone thirteen years. Mac would tell you that she's so much teeth and bone inside her casket, a sad jumble of little girl lost inside the Communion dress your parents buried her in, but you know better. Diana is alive. She's lived inside your veins and nested inside your heart since the day she died, and every breath you take is a breath breathed for two. She tastes what you taste and feels what you feel and every heartbeat powers two lives. You live durin' the day, and she lives at night in your dreams, an eternal child who'll never die again, never slip into the two-dimensional existence of memories flash-frozen and trapped behind tacky plastic sheetin'.
Sometimes she's so heavy, but you'll never put her down, not after you broke her heart and sent her to her grave thinkin' that's where you wanted her to be. The headshrinkers at the department would cluck and shake their heads and call it an unnecessary burden, survivor's guilt or PTSD, but you know better. It's nothin' more or less than the way it should be, a brother's penance and your personal mark of Cain. You'll carry her until you can't, and then you'll lie down in green pastures forever.
Danny's carryin' Louie now, doin' his penance by drinkin' for two and lyin' awake at night so Louie has a chance to see through his eyes. He's livin' hard and fast and doublin' down to make up for lost time, and deep in his gut, he's regrettin' all the time he let slip through his fingers. He's wishin' he'd made more time to catch a few beers after shift or caught a few more ballgames, wishin' he'd been more patient when Louie failed to live up to his grand expectations and kickin' himself for every nasty remark that ever crossed his lips or floated to the surface of his mind in a fit of anger. He's haunted by his own Pitkin Park, and it rattles around his insides and harrows his conscience with poisonous fingers until it's all he can see. Hell, it's got a mental theater to itself, and you can bet it's replayed itself ad infinitum since Louie closed up shop and retreated to the deepest recesses of his damaged brain. And you can also lay your paycheck on the fact that that particular mind-movie will never fade or stutter to a stop because the film wore too thin. That baby'll be a first-run production for the duration, until Danny Messer Productions goes under by six feet.
You can't blame Danny for takin' on a brother's penance, because you've been walkin' that walk since you were sixteen, and you'll be damned if you'll be a hypocrite on top of everything else. But you can and do blame Lindsay Monroe. She's been lookin' for a way in since she hit the city, and there's nothin' she won't do to gain a foothold, includin' exploitin' his vulnerability and grief. It's not fair, what she's doin' and has done in the name of her twisted version of love, not right. The fundamental wrongness of it sets your teeth on edge and raises your hackles, curls your fingers into fists. It's disturbin' to watch them together, like watchin' a grown man caress the cheek of a twelve-year-old girl. It's not love, but dominion, the law of the jungle enacted in break rooms and bars.
Sometimes you see 'em together, and it takes all your willpower not to call out a warnin'. Watch out, Messer. You never do, though, because you understand that to call out would be to cross the point of no return. You and Messer might not be quits if you warned him away from Lindsay and her siren call, but you'd never be the same. Your disapproval would hang between you, an invisible barrier that would stifle your former camaraderie and turn it into a grim exercise in habits jealously guarded and reluctantly practiced. One day ten years from now, you'd be nursin' beers at Sullivan's together, and you'd catch sight of your reflection in the mirror behind the bar and wonder just who the hell you were sittin' next to.
So, you keep your mouth shut. You've lost your baby sister, and her death took your old man's love for you with her, and my love for my boy took me, and you can't stand to lose anyone else. You've got the job, sure, and it's the best job in the world, and you've got Rebecca, and she's the best wife in the world, and you got your YMCA kids. Any man would take one look at your life and say you had it made, and it would be hard to argue the point. But without Messer to stir the pot, your life wouldn't be the same. He's the dash of salt that brings the sweetness to the fore, the pinch of pepper in a mango sorbet. And Christ, it sounds like such pussy bullshit, but it's the truth, the whole truth, and nothin' but the truth, so help you God.
The real bitch of it is, you don't think Lindsay's bulldozin' him on purpose, a succubus who takes perverse pleasure in drainin' him dry and bendin' him to her implacable, insatiable will. She's just as broken and lost as Messer is, so used to lookin' out for herself that she can't see beyond her own nose anymore. The world as she knows it is Lindsay Monroe, population one. She's alone in a city of twelve million people, adrift in a sea of strangers, and in Danny, she sees her clean, well-lighted place. It doesn't matter that he's unequipped to be anyone's knight in shinin' armor, with insufficient light for his own soul, let alone enough to warm someone else. Lindsay's cut her teeth on the idea that anything is possible with enough steel in your spine, and she's made a life by pullin' herself up the ladder of success one bootstrap at a time. She's convinced that she can make a whole from broken halves, and she's been workin' her knuckles raw stitchin' 'em together.
It's insane, an exercise in futility, and you want to grab 'em both by the shoulders and shake until sense rattles into their bones, until the glasses and scales fall from Messer's squinty eyes and the tension ebbs from Monroe's perpetually-clenched jaws. But you don't bother because the efforts of your graspin' fingers would be just as useless as those of her endlessly stitchin' ones. You see that knowledge in their faces and the panicky tightness with which they cling to each other. They know it'll never work, but they're gonna try anyway because at this late date, hope is all they've got left.
And who are you to take that from them? You, who lucked into your miracle on 34th Street. No one lookin' at your marriage would think it had a prayer. She's nothin' but gossamer and willpower, and certainly not the loudmouthed, New York goddess you'd envisioned for yourself, and you're too stubborn and too often absent, a prodigal son of the city who loses himself in its concrete wilderness and returns to her just long enough to break her heart again. You should be another casualty of the war on crime, sundered and bitter, but you're not. You're still arm-in-arm, dancin' through the years in defiance of the odds. Sometimes the steps change-there's been too much runnin' man and too little waltz these past few years-but the dance never stops. It drifts from dreamin' to wakin' to dreamin' again in an eternal rhythm and moves to the music made by lips and hearts and entangled fingers. No one can dance to that music but you, and none but you can end it. It's more precious to you than the second heart clipped to your hip or hangin' from a lanyard 'round your neck, and you'd rather die than lose it.
So, who the fuck are you to tell Messer he can't have that, too? Or Lindsay? Even shrews deserve to dance. Maybe Danny's lookin' to put down roots and leave somethin' behind before it's too late. He's the last chance now that Louie's growin' into the soil of his bed and waterin' it with his own saliva, the last shot to sow the Messer family seed and assure Louie, Sr. a window to tomorrow. Maybe Lindsay needs Danny because she can't see her dead friends' faces when she's nestled in Danny's arms or ridin' it out beneath his body while the lightin' crashes outside the bedroom window. Maybe when he's with her, discussin' the point of a Montana wheat field, Danny can't hear his brother's skull splittin' like an overripe cantaloupe or see Sonny's grinnin', blood-spattered face as he stands over Louie's twitchin' body. Everyone needs a totem against the nightmares. You know that because you've got plenty of those rattlin' round in your head, and when they come callin', sometimes Rebecca's music is the only thing that can drive them out.
Part XIIb
Author:
laguera25Rating: FRM
Fandom(s): CSI:NY/Numb3rs/HP
Pairing: Don Flack/OFC
SPOILERS: CSI:NY S1-S403; Numbers through S3; HP through Book 6
Disclaimer(s): All recognizable characters, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis.
All recognizable characters, places, and events in the HPverse are the property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Brothers, Inc.
Numb3rs and its respective properties belong to Cheryl Heuton, Nicolas Falacci, CBS, and Scott Free Productions.
No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII Part IX Part Xa Part Xb Part XIa Part XIb
June 24, 2007. 1:32AM.
His belly burns. It's a steady, dull, radient heat that welters and oozes from his insides. It reminds him of the lazy heat that rises from the cracked, runnelled blacktop of the basketball courts across from the precinct, where he plays one-one-one with Messer every now and then, and from the blacktop courts of his faded childhood memories, where the heat had wafted from the tarmac like a sleeping dragon's breath to scald his knees and claw his face. It's a soupy, living heat, animal and dangerous, and he wonders if this is how you feel just before you take a breath and burst into flames, leaving nothing behind but a man of ash and a few bits of charred bone.
If it is, he wonders how long it will take, and what the responding officers will say when they make entry into the bedroom, guns drawn, and find him smoldering in the sheets like the world's biggest charcoal briquet. If they're rookies and greenhorns, he suspects at least one of them will need to make the rookie sprint to the nearest gutter to empty his guts. If they're not, they'll stand around with their thumbs hooked into their gun belts, making tired cracks about smoking in bed and speculating about which vengeful perp scumbag hated him enough to light him on fire and leave him to burn in his bed. They will also, he knows, salute what's left of him when Sid rolls it into the back of his van with grim-faced reverence.
Mostly he wonders what the nerd squad will think when they file in to dissect his life and take crisp, digital photos of his miserable end. Stella will blink away tears as she crouches over him, beautiful in her anger as she tweezes bits of his shirt from his blackened skin. She'll pray for him with her lapsed Catholic tongue and swear vengeance with her Greek one, Pallas Athene with a sterile cotton swab in one small, fierce fist.
Mac will stand over him in silence, rigid as a tentpole, jaw hard and square as he surveys the mess. He'll be as bland as marble on the outside, all cool professionalism and terse orders, but inside, he'll burn with a fire of his own. He'll take the death as an affront, a mark of personal failure, and though he'll pray to no God, he'll promise vengeance, too. Not in Greek, but in the language of autopsy reports and tox screens and extensive research into his arrest records. He'll be relentless in his quest and will leave no stone unturned. He'll even subject Rebecca to the harsh light of scrutiny, determined not to falter in a moment of useless and dangerous mercy. Given the bitter blood between Mac and Rebecca in the wake of the bombing and the Truby investigation, he hopes Mac remembers to temper his righteousness with regret, lest Rebecca remind him that she is not without venom. Rebecca will make him bleed for every tear she sheds, a firm believer in tit for tat and the black-hearted equilibrium of retribution.
Hawkes will gaze at his charred remains in bewildered fascination and hate himself for his curiosity. He'll insulate himself from the horror of scraping a second friend and colleague from the wreckage of their ignominious end behind the impersonal lens of the camera. Either that, or he'll busy himself with anything but the body, turn his face from the empty eye sockets and obscenely white teeth that grin at him from the sheets and crawl along the floor in search of trace. He'll shine his Maglite and his ALS light beneath the bed in search of accelerants or biological trace, a knight thrusting the purifying light of Excalibur into the unknown wilds of the Kingdom of Underbed, where dust bunnies and old socks live in darkness undisturbed.
He thinks Hawkes will be the one to shepherd Rebecca through her grief, persuade her to release it from her icy-fingered grip. She's always been fond of him, with his doctor's knowledge of her infirmity and his steadfast resolve to see her as nothing less than a human being who happens to have a set of wheels under her ass, and it'd been Hawkes who'd remembered to look after her while the rest of his world had collapsed around him and his guts had been exposed to the sepulchral darkness and dusty, infectious breath of a ruined apartment building. He'd noticed that she was too white around the lips and eyes and too wild in them, that she was stretched too thin around her bones, gaunt and too quiet and swallowing nothing but wordless terror and an endless volley of screams. He'd followed her into the ladies' room and pulled her from the clutches of her waking nightmare. He'd reached beneath the sink with his slender, steady surgeon's hands and midwifed her into the world again from a womb of linoleum and grimy, soap-slicked formica. He'd coaxed her out and pressed his ear to her trembling lips, the better to hear the story she could tell to no one else, and then he'd convinced her to eat a bowl of soup and a few pieces of toast before she resumed her vigil.
Hawkes will be her rock once he is gone; he will let her cry when the grief and the anger come to make her sing a song no one wants to hear. He will hover discreetly in the background when a young officer in dress blues hands her a folded flag with his badge and a rose inside, and he will not ask her to be brave. Not like Mac, who would abjure her to honor his memory by bearing up with dignity. Hawkes will let her honor him with her anger, will let her rage against the dying of the light, and when her fury threatens to devour her and pull her headlong into the abyss, Hawkes will hold out his hand and draw her into the light.
Messer will seethe, eyes wet with tears and fingers slick with blood from another unseen wound. He'll snap on his gloves to keep his fingers intact and hold the blood in his mouth while he carefully sifts through the bits and bobs and domestic detritus of his best friend's personal life, the life he'd lived behind the blue curtain. Danny will open the dresser drawers and peer at the contents through lenses rimed with salt and smudged with fog. He'll lift up the cyclopean eye of the camera and photograph the pairs of socks that sprout from the topmost drawer like bulbs of garlic or the timid caps of mushrooms. The brown and black dress socks of his duty and the thick, white athletic socks of his Saturdays with the YMCA kids. He'll look at them, mouth closed against the blood that wells from his invisible wound, and wonder why some of them are arranged unevenly. He'll never know it's because Rebecca often tires near the end of folding laundry and substitutes practicality for perfection. As long as they're paired and matched and ready when he needs them, she calls it good. And so does he. Because it is enough. More than enough.
He hopes it's Danny who finds his secret, buried so carefully in Rebecca's haphazard sock garden, who plunges his hand into the soft, cotton and wool soil and emerges with the tiny seedling embroidered with the Yankees logo. Danny would cup the tiny booties in his hand, mouth parted in disbelief, and because he's Danny, he would assume the worst and rage at the injustice of it. He would assume that Don had sown a seed of his own before he'd died in his bed and left behind a child who would never know his face.
"Aw, no, aw, God, Mac, no. Tell me I'm not seein' what I'm seein'," he'd plead, choked and stunned. He'd hold out his trembling hand to show the others, and his Adam's apple would click and bob convulsively. "He's havin' a kid, Mac." And from that moment, Danny wouldn't rest until he'd solved the mystery of how Don Flack, Jr., hotshot cop, had gone up in smoke without so much as a cooling ember to blame it on. Danny would pursue it long after everyone else had exchanged outrage for acceptance and marked his passing an inexplicable, tragic quirk of fate. Danny would run himself ragged, to splinter and bone if need be, and if anyone asked him why he chased old ghosts and wisps of smoke into moldering cold files and the bottoms of dirty shot glasses, Danny would fix them with his wounded, haunted stare and tell them about the tiny pair of socks he'd found in his best friend's underwear drawer.
It's selfish, the desire for Danny to be the one to find them, and he knows it. Danny carries too many scars already, none of them well, and most bleed and weep and scour him to the bone with every step. Louie, a living grave he tends twice a month with quiet visits to the rehab hospital out on Long Island. Aiden, a granite tomb he tends with growing infrequency and exponentially increasing guilt. Graves whose names were etched into the stone long before Flack knew him, and whose restless occupants whisper to him still. The guilt of sins not yet committed. Danny would go crazy without the mad rhythm of work to distract him, would shatter from the soles up and still dig his disarticulated fingers into the earth and inch forward another step, another stolen breath. He has no right to bequeath the secret of those socks to a man buckling beneath the weight of his own sorrow.
But he hopes it's Danny all the same, because Danny would understand. Mac would cock his head and purse his lips and wonder why a childless man had booties stashed inside his sock drawer. When he found out that Rebecca's womb was still fallow, he'd sigh and shrug and let it go. Hawkes would, too; Stella would look at them with a twinge of pity, perhaps even longing. Danny would look at them with recognition. He'd see what they really were even without his glasses, because for all his bluster and swagger, Danny was a smart guy. He'd know hope when he saw it, held its machine-washable threads in his palm. After all, he'd nursed hopes of his own once upon a time, and still bears the evidence of their failure. The broken wrist that had put paid to his promising baseball career, the official reprimand in his police jacket that had snatched a promotion from his grasp, the broken and crushed fingers that ache and throb when it rains and threaten to cost him his job with their lingering clumsiness.
Danny would know that he'd been trying to build a future from tiny socks and feverish promises whispered in the middle of the night while two became one. Danny would understand the simple, stark power of wish, and God bless him, he would protect it and respect it. And when he figured out that a wish was all that it had ever been and now could be, he would go right on respecting it. Not like the others, who would mourn it and let it go, shake their heads and remark to each other how sad it was that poor Flack had died before he could start a family.
Danny would mourn it, too, he supposes; Danny mourns for the world every day he's in it, but Danny wouldn't bury it. He would hold on to it, cherish it as a souvenir from a long-lost friend. Danny would let it grow into what it could have been, and if Rebecca ever decided to talk about it, Danny would let her. He'd take her to the diner on 34th Street or the somber solitude of St. Patrick's, where the dream had begun with the clasping of hands, and let her paint pictures of the fairy tale she'd never gotten to live. Danny wouldn't think either of them were crazy for dreaming bigger and better for themselves or for wishing themselves to Camelot with nothing but a cheap pair of Yankees booties to take them there. He would only wonder why they'd waited so long to reach for it.
Anyone but Lindsay, he thinks, and his stomach burbles in sour agreement.
It's an awful sentiment, but one he can't help. She's a good scientist, tenacious and thorough, but she's cold, too, and self-infatuated, Narcissus enamored of his own reflection. As far as Lindsay's concerned, she's the axis upon which the universe turns. If she found the booties, her first thoughts wouldn't be for him, or for Rebecca, but for herself. She'd wonder why no one had told her he was expecting a child, as though that were information to which she had an inalienable right, and then fret over how breaking the news of his death to Rebecca would make her feel. Rebecca and the booties and Danny's raw anguish would be so many tawdry set pieces in her great drama, and when they held no more interest for her, she'd cast them aside, enter the booties into evidence and consign them to the evidence warehouse, where lives and dreams moldered and yellowed into obsolescence.
Play, huh? he muses. What would she call this one? Death of a Policeman? He snorts and belches softly. The belch is hot and sickly-sweet, chocolate and bile and cheap champagne, and he grimaces.
Well, she might not ignore Messer, there, kid, Gavin amends thoughtfully. Like as not, she'd turn it to her advantage, use his grief to winnow her way into his affections and into his bed. She's been after him since day one, subtle as a sledgehammer with her moonin' and heavy-handed snoopin'. She'd do anythin' to get the keys to Messer's kingdom, includin' pump Stella for information about his relationship with Aiden while the former was still scrubbin' bits of the latter from the charred upholstery with a toothbrush and a pair of tweezers. You can still remember the disgust on Stella's face when she stomped into the locker room that evening, shuckin' her lab coat as she entered.
I guess a little decorum was too much to ask, she muttered, and slammed the door of her locker hard enough to rattle it.
You were well aware of Stella's legendary temper, had experienced it for yourself durin' the Moretti investigation into a severed hand discovered in an abandoned church, and you had no desire to revisit that particular briar patch. So, you almost kept your mouth shut and didn't ask, but you kept thinkin' about Aiden and the mystery her life had become since she'd left the job. You wondered how differently things might'a turned out if you'd dropped by her place with a bag of takeout and a couple'a beers now and then. Maybe she wouldn'ta ended up embedded in the upholstery of a burned-out car, bound to the melted vinyl by bits of blackened flesh. So you swallowed your sense of self-preservation.
You all right there, Stell? you asked, and loosened your tie. It was a stupid question under the circumstances, but you couldn't think of any way to express your concern that wasn't stupid, and so you picked the least of the many evils.
Stella didn't answer. She just threw up her hands and stalked from the locker room with them held above her slowly shaking head, a perp surrendering to the impassive gaze of a drawn Glock. That was Stella for Not now, Flack, so you let it go and finished peeling the job from your gritty skin. You exchanged one button-down for another and trudged to the precinct shower, where you scalded the stink of burning fat from your skin and let the hard, needling water ease the ache that had settled at the base of your skull and spread over your crown in a throbbing, feverish skullcap.
Stella told you about it later, though, over beers at Sullivan's. Mac and Hawkes were long gone, and Danny and Lindsay were playing pool on the other side of the bar, a dowdy, cornfed Gweniviere jousting an unsuspecting Lancelot for his heart. Stella watched the game in silence, her half-empty stein balanced on one knee. She was drawn and pallid in the dim light, her eyes puffy and smudged with exhaustion. Memories grow heavier when they're all that's left, and the work of unearthin' them had taken their toll. Her eyes were still sharp, though, and she saw everythin'-Lindsay's coy smile, her unconscious flirtation as she tucked stray strands behind her ear before she bent to line up her shot, her eager, greedy gaze on Danny as he bent to make his. She took it in without a word, but now and then she snorted or gave a nigh-imperceptible toss of her head.
She asked me about Aiden and Danny today, she offered quietly, and took a sip from her stein.
Yeah? You weren't sure where she was going with this, but you were careful not to step in it with an ill-advised remark. What about, exactly? You took a pull from your own bottle.
She shrugged, a loose-jointed roll of shoulder that made the dwindling contents of her stein slosh. Hard to tell. She said that Danny talked about her all the time. Said they must've been close.
She was fishing for the goods on Messer's love life while you were crawlin' around in a car full of Aiden dust?
Stella closed her eyes and slowly rolled her head in a wide lazy circle. Sounded that way, she said when she opened her eyes again. I don't know; maybe I'm just touchy because it's Aiden. She studied the game of pool with heavy-lidded eyes.
But you don't think so? You watched her thoughtfully and resisted the urge to reach out and knead the tension from her shoulder.
She was quiet for such a long time that you thought she wasn't gonna answer. She simply took a long, gulpin' swallow from her stein and watched Danny and Lindsay from over the sudsy rim. Then she set the nearly-drained mug on her knee and said, No. I don't. God.
Hence your observation in the locker room earlier?
Stella nodded.
You shook your head in disbelief. Jesus. Then, There's a time and a place, you know?
Stella did know, but she didn't say so. In fact, that was the last of the talkin' she did that night. She was all talked out. You weren't much better. Askin' her if she wanted another round was like recitin' Beowulf in Old English. The words were clumsy and unfamiliar, pebbles caught beneath your tongue. It was easier to sit and wash them down with Guinness and beer, and when you shared a cab home with her that night, she didn't say goodnight. She just kissed you on the cheek in wordless farewell and slipped into the night. You went home and slept it off, and a cup of Rebecca's special tea was waitin' for you in the mornin'.
Stella might'a second-guessed herself about Lindsay Monroe, but you didn't second-guess her. She was sharp as a tack and possessed an eye for detail and a keen nose for bullshit. In the pre-Frankie era, before her confidence was shattered on the end of a bullet, there was no finer judge of character than Stella Bonasera. You thought she was right on about the motives of one Lindsay Monroe, and less than a year later, Lindsay proved you both right.
You don't remember it, of course. You were adrift on obsidian seas, your guts held together by surgical string and the deft, God-touched hands of Dr. Singh. You lost eight days to that darkness. Only Rebecca's voice reached you on those still, vast waters, and even it was distant and fleeting, lost beneath the white-noise roar of absolute nothingness. You know what happened because Rebecca told you, thin-lipped and contemptuous as she drew her cool thumb over your knuckles in a slow, soothing line. It was a gesture meant to comfort you, an offering of quiet dignity when most of yours had been ripped away with the briskly efficient removal of your catheter, but it had been Rebecca who'd needed a small comfort then. Anger had pinched her in its diseased, bone-fingered grip, made her tremble and seethe, warm as a kiln beneath her pale, waxy flesh.
You all right, doll? Slurred and thick with morphine and the dull bone-weariness of recovery. You gently squeezed her fingers.
'M fine, honey. Just worried about your plumbing. She managed a faint, lopsided smile.
You don't need to worry about me. I'm good and getting better every day.
She reached out and brushed her fingers through your hair. I know you are. That just looked like it hurt. She cast another pitying gaze at your johnnie-covered johnson.
Naw. It was true, too. All you felt was the niggling, poison-sumac itch of irritated tissue. Maybe it did, but I didn't feel it. I'm too damned stoned.
That actually prompted laughter, a brief spark of mirth that lit her whole face. There was a note of surprise in it as well, as though she hadn't expected the blade of your tongue to pierce the thick, stupefying gauze of your potent painkiller cocktail. The surprise pleased you, a salve to your tattered pride. The laughter made your heart sing, liquid sunshine in your veins. It meant that she was healing along with you, coming up for air at last. Even flat on your ass and blitzed to the gills on Harvard-issue heroin, you were still a husband to her.
If I didn't know better, I'd say you liked being wasted with a doctor's consent, she said fondly.
It beats the alternative.
Her fledgling smile faltered. I bet it does, she said softly, and you were set to curse your idiot mouth. Then she rallied. Besides, who's to say I'm not jealous that other women are touching your tackle?
You blinked at her in logy astonishment. First of all, that's a romantic description of my manhood.
Would you rather I called it 'your love needle?' she asked sweetly, and gazed at you in wide-eyed innocence.
Second, that nurse was as sexy as a used bedpan, you went on before the image of a needle dick could imprint itself on your vulnerable mind.
So you weren't too stoned to notice that? she countered. Uh huh. Her tone was severe, but she was grinnin' for the first time since you'd opened your gummy eyes to the sight of her blotchy, tear-scoured face loomin' over you like a low-hangin' moon.
She kinda had my dick in her hand-
I believe that was my point, she interrupted mildly, and scowled at the nurses' station through the glass wall of your room.
-and guys tend to take careful note of who handles that particular piece of standard issue, you finished.
She sniffed daintily. So do their wives, I assure you. She sighed and adjusted her hips in her wheelchair. The cushion hissed beneath her as she shifted, and the plastic footplates creaked with the sudden burden of weight from her spasmin' feet. Anyway, I thought getting a sponge bath from a naughty nurse in a tight little uniform was every guy's fantasy. One of them, anyway, she amended.
Not when they look like a Hungarian power lifter, you pointed out, and spared a furtive glance out the glass just in case she was within earshot. God knew what the woman could do with a length of rubber tubing if she had the chance. Fortunately for the family jewels, she was nowhere to be seen. Looked like she had ear hair, for Christ's sake. I got standards, you know, you muttered sulkily.
Mmm, Rebecca grunted indulgently.
Pretty high ones, too. Look who I married.
She blushed at that, a rosy glow that transformed her haggard, insomnia-bruised face and made it radiant. Lovely. There in that room that stank of piss and alcohol and human rot and misery sat the beautiful, young girl you'd married one cold February mornin' three years ago, the china doll who'd been so much bisque porcelain in your arms on the reception-hall dance floor as you'd whirled around and around with her in a graceful, giddy waltz. She was a miraculous vision and a precious reminder of the home and the life you were fightin' for. It made your chest hurt to look at her, but it was a warm, vital hurt, not the cold, gnawin' hurt of your shredded guts. It was oddly pleasant, and you didn't want it to stop.
'Sides, I thought you girls had a fantasy about men in uniform.
Another huff of laughter. Well, then, it looks like I've fulfilled that one doesn't it? She raised your hand to her lips and kissed the knuckles, careful not to disturb the tape that bound your morphine drip to the back of your palm.
You lay quietly for a while, drinkin' in the companionable silence that was broken only by the chirp of your cardiac monitor and the periodic, Pez-dispenser click of your morphine drip. You drowsed while she held your hand and flipped idly through the channels on the hospital television set. Sometimes she sighed or hummed to herself. It would've been idyllic if it hadn't been from the throbbing, ragged mouth in your belly that pulsed with every heartbeat and opened into a toothless scream if you breathed too deeply. It was alive beneath its gag of sterile gauze and the liberal application of iodine and antiseptic. It burrowed beneath your skin, seethed within the meticulous catgut stitches. It itched maddeningly in the throes of its exorcism, and the slightest movement made you scream, morphine be damned.
Sometimes, it exerted its terrible, ulcerated will beyond the flimsy confines of its cotton prison and dug its fingers into your chest, where they simmered like banked embers or wrapped themselves around your bruised sternum and made it hard to breathe. Sometimes, just before you descended into the deeper waters of healing sleep, you thought you felt the sudden, crushing weight of a Xerox machine settle over you, a succubus come to drain the dregs of your life as you slept. Then Rebecca would sigh or shift or stroke your fingers with her cool, thin ones, and there would be only the comforting embrace of the threadbare sheets wrapped tidily around your bare legs to keep them warm.
Such was the strange rhythm of your world for three weeks that summer. You drowsed and lost yourself to sleep so often that the days ran together, wax tableaus hastily carved and then held over a candle's lascivious, eager tongue. So many memories are distorted or gone altogether, consumed by an act of candle cunnilingus. But this one you remember because she was so happy and beautiful before you opened your idiot mouth again and went asking after Danny Messer, that Cain whom you loved in spite of his mark.
So, have any of the guys dropped by? Has Messer smuggled in any contraband from my favorite deli? you asked, and flashed a loose, groggy grin.
And just like that, the shadows settled over her face again, a plume of ash blotting out the sun. She paled, and her sunny grin faded into a bloodless line of lip. I wouldn't count on Danny busting his balls to get here. It was a snarl, and her fingers flexed and twitched fretfully in your grip.
The sudden change in demeanor made your stomach twist painfully, and you hissed at a sudden cramp deep in your gut.
That brought her around, and her face softened, though that exquisitely rosy blush didn't return to her cheeks. I'm sorry, babe. I didn't mean to upset you. Her voice was brittle and too high, glass on the verge of shatterin'(like the glass in those Tiffany's display cases, you thought distantly, whole one second and broken and scattered the next. Bet Danny's dog could hear the frequency even if I can't. Bet it sounds like the roar of collapsin' masonry or the busy, insectile hum of a Xerox machine as it makes color copies of your dust-covered guts). Her fingers increased their anxious flutterin', butterflies trapped beneath the protective cup of your hand.
Hey, sssshhh, you didn't, you soothed. You didn't upset me; you didn't do anything. You're good, I'm good, we're good.
It was a necessary lie; you were upset. Your lovely china doll had disappeared again and left this harried, miserable creature in its place, but you recognized the symptoms of an impending Rebecca meltdown, and the last thing you needed was your exhausted, frightened wife writhin' on the floor while invisible hands crushed her muscles in their malicious, iron grip. She'd end up in the bed next to yours, doped to the gills with muscle relaxants and sedatives, and you'd be too damn weak and wracked with pain to look after her, keep her clean and safe and safeguarded from the pryin', clinical eyes of the doctors.
You let go of her hand long enough to cup her cheek and draw your thumb over the long, thin spar of bone. She was too warm, and her skin was oily to the touch, as though her deep and intimate relationship with bathing had been reduced to a strained, nodding acquaintance. She let out a ragged, shudderin' breath and closed her eyes, pressed her cheek into your palm.
You don't have to hang on so tight anymore, you said quietly. I'm gonna be okay, sweetheart. You can let go now.
Never. It was choked, but resolute as tempered steel. I'll never let go.
Mingled pride and sorrow tightened your chest like a stifled breath. It was pure Rebecca, beautiful and terrible. She shouldered too much and called it insufficient penance for her flawed existence, and you wanted to reach over the damn bedrail, seize her by the scrawny shoulders, and shake her until the undeserved and self-imposed guilt sloughed off like shed skin. This isn't your fault, dammit, and you don't have to be perfect, you wanted to shout, but such drastic movements would've been an invitation to agony, and so you let your hand slide to her shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze.
Rebecca, look at me.
She opened her eyes. They were red-rimmed, crusted with fragments of forgotten slumber, and smudged with weariness.
Do you trust me?
She blinked in surprise. Of course I do. Shrill and bewildered. What makes you think I don't?
You ignored the question. The pain in your gut and the river of dope coursin' through your bloodstream often conspired to sap your strength, and the familiar heaviness was stealin' into your limbs and fillin' the hollows of your bones with wet sand. Soon, it would find its way into your skull and smother thought and consciousness in a steadily creepin' tide. You were runnin' outta time and energy, and you needed her to hear this before you forgot how to operate the complex, bivalve machinery of your mouth.
Then I want you to listen to me. You need to let go, Rebecca. She opened her mouth to protest, but subsided at your expression. Apparently, your facial muscles were still fully operational. Not completely-Christ, I love you more than I can fuckin' tell you, and it means the world to me that you want to take care of me-but you don't need to take the whole world on your shoulders right now. It's too much for anybody. Wonder Woman couldn't handle this alone. You need to let go, just a little. Do what you need to do for yourself. Cry. Cuss. Get some sleep and somethin' to eat, go have a soak in the tub. You're tense as hell. Your muscles are stone underneath your clothes. To emphasize your point, you gave her shoulder another, firmer squeeze.
She winced, and a small moan escaped her.
This isn't good for you, doll. We both know what happens when you get like this. You get sick, and your nervous system goes haywire, and I end up watching you contort yourself into the letters of an alphabet that nobody can pronounce. I can't handle that right now, and neither can you.
A strangled mewl escaped her, and she shrank into her chair as if you'd cast an indictment against her, hard and pitiless as a hurled stone.
I know, you murmured, and cupped her chin. I know why you've been going so crazy. For a while there, you were scared to move or blink too hard just in case the change in air pressure was the final straw that earned me an express ticket to Hammerback's luxury accommodations in the basement of the crime lab. You thought that if you turned your head for a second, I'd be gone when you looked back, and some douchebag from One PP would be offerin' you his sincerest and most useless condolences for your loss. Am I right?
Another pitiful squeak and a jerky nod. Tears spilled down her cheeks. You hated to see her cry. She'd probably done more than her fair share of weepin' while you were on your all expenses-paid cruise on the River Lethe, but the heaviness in your limbs was growin' by the heartbeat, and your vision was dimmin' at the edges as the sands of sleep drifted into view and blanketed everythin' in a hazy, astigmatic fog. It wouldn't be long until you were lost to oblivion for hours, and urgency made you clumsy and a trifle cruel.
Don't cry, doll. I understand why you're doing what you're doing, why you're hanging on so tight, and I know those damn seizures aren't you fault, some damned husbandly fire drill you pull for shits and giggles. Another cry, louder than the others, and you were sure she was gonna lose it, buckle from a caress that had somehow become a slap.
Your hand left her quiverin' shoulder and slipped beneath the lank, dispirited strands of her hair to find her neck. It was taut and cramped with a dangerous tension, and your fingers sought out the sharp nub of a cervical vertebra and began to knead the sheath of muscle and tendon that covered it. She dropped her head to her chest and issued a guttural moan of relief that went straight to your balls. The resultant cramp from your gut as your cock tried to report for duty was a rusty blade behind your navel, and you pressed your lips together to stifle the scream that welled in your throat. Rebecca, shielded by the fall of her hair and absorbed in the practiced work of your fingers, didn't notice.
Your fingers descended to the next rung on the vertebral ladder and resumed their patient work, and you didn't speak until you were sure your voice wouldn't betray you. All I'm saying is that I need you to be selfish and take care of yourself while I can't. It's killin' me to see you like this.
She sniffled and swiped at her streamin' eyes with the heel of her palm. I just-, She straightened and took a deep breath in order to regain her tattered composure. I hate leaving you here. Feels like I'm escaping.
Rebecca, it's a hospital, not Riker's.
Same difference, she muttered darkly, voice thick with snot and hoarse with tears.
You knew that convincing her hospitals were houses of healing was a losin' proposition, so you cut your losses and said, Just promise me you'll go home and get some rest and a bite to eat. I got my first therapy session tomorrow mornin', and there's no use in you sitting around here by yourself while Nurse Ratchett puts me on the rack.
You joke, but you have no idea how close you are to the truth, she said, and her lips quirked in a mirthless smile.
She was right about that, as it turned out, plenty right, and had you known what waited for you the followin' day, the unimagined agonies carried in on the wings of the nurse's crepe-soled shoes when she rolled that saggy-seated, Wal-Mart-quality wheelchair into your room, you might not'a been so cheeky, but you were stoned and blissfully ignorant and fightin' the insistent tug of sleep, and so you mustered a blurry, waverin' grin and said, Then seein' a beautiful woman waitin' for me in my room when I get back oughta be just what the doctor ordered.
She snorted. Trust me, babe. The only thing you'll have eyes for by the time you get back to your room is your morphine drip.
I think you underestimate your sexiness, doll.
We'll see.
Just promise me you'll take care of yourself.
She sighed and scrubbed her face with her palms. Yeah, all right. I've probably become a rolling biohazard.
You sagged with relief. That's my girl. Thank you. You were quiet for a moment. Now why are you so sure Messer won't be gracin' me with his presence?
It's nothing you need to worry about right now, she said stiffly.
Doll? you persisted. You don't tell me, and all I'm gonna do is worry.
She eyed you warily. Finally, she said, I imagine he's too busy boning his cornpone centerfold.
Lindsay?
She uttered a disgusted harrumph. You're lying in intensive care with your guts held together by stitching, surgical netting, and the medical equivalent of superglue, and Little Miss Drama Whore is pissing and moaning about a superficial cut on her forehead. As if that's going to ruin her devastating good looks. Cooze.
Don't hold back, Rebecca. Tell me how you really feel. You expected her to flush with embarrassment, but she didn't. Her expression remained thunderous.
And what does Danny do? Falls all over himself to drive her home, pecker at high noon. Not like his best friend could use a little moral support. There's Mac and Stella for that bothersome business. Why should he be assed to care about anything but himself when he's got a chance to plow himself a Montana wheat field? Fucking obnoxious cocksucking peckerwood. She lapsed into mutinous silence, chest heaving
You goggled at her, impressed by her creative invective. She was positively venomous, and fury had made her radiant. Her eyes flashed and glittered, and her lips were a pouty rose. Her hair was still dull and lank, but her chest was outthrust, her small breasts high and firm beneath her rumpled blouse, and the caperin' caveman who lived in the primitive basement of your brain was only too happy to supply you with images of those breasts covered by her hair in its normally golden profusion, strands of spun gold that spilled over her shoulders and fanned over her chest.
You're beautiful, you croaked, and licked dry lips. You only wished happiness could have the same effect. Anger was a zero-sum game in the end.
And you're high, she snapped, and then softened. Sorry, babe. I didn't mean to snap at you. She reached out and stroked your forehead. My point is that Danny Messer is a sniveling pissant, and you deserve better in a best friend.
Pure poetry.
What?
'Snivelin' pissant'. It wasn't the impassioned defense of Messer that you'd intended, but you were so tired, and the pain in your belly made it hard to think. It was growin', sharpenin' its darnin'-needle teeth on your ribcage, and if you didn't slip into the shelterin', soothin'ly amniotic waters of deep sleep soon, it would be unbearable.
It's apt is what it is, she countered primly. Now go to sleep, babe. Don't fight it.
I love you. Want to m'k sure you're okay… The words were muddy and indistinct on your sluggish tongue, as if you'd already gone under.
She blinked numerous times in rapid succession. I know, sweetheart. I love you, too. As long as you're with me, I'm fine. Now hush.
Don' eat m'Jello, you murmured dreamily.
I wouldn't dream of it, she assured you, and the last thing you felt before you went out on Morpheus' dark tide was the cool, moist brush of her lips on the side of your mouth.
The next time you saw her, she had showered and changed clothes and gotten some sleep just like she'd said she would. Too bad you weren't in any shape to appreciate it, busy as you were tryin' not to puke down your legs from the distress signals sent by your tortured abdominal muscles. You cried like a little girl, arms folded over your sore belly to protect it from further assault, as if hidin' it from view would keep that sadistic prick rehab therapist from wrenchin' another set of static crunches from your obliques. You barely made it to the bed before you were heavin' into the vomit bowl Rebecca held under your mouth, and oh, wasn't that a treat? It was as if Atilla the Hun had unzippered your guts with the rusty tip of his long spear. You couldn't get to that morphine drip fast enough.
Rebecca was right about Danny, too, and Lindsay. Messer turned up often enough, but he never stayed long, and he spent most of his visits hunkered gracelessly in a bedside chair and makin' stilted small talk, rubbin' his hands together or jabbin' his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose with a restless index finger. Sometimes, he'd start to speak only to stop in mid-sentence, or stare at you in mute desperation while his toes tapped out a frantic rhythm on the linoleum.
So, he'd say, and pause to push his glasses onto the narrow bridge of his nose. Doc says you were really lucky, there.
So I've heard, you'd reply. Think Dr. Singh's the only doctor Rebecca's ever wanted to nominate for man of the year.
Not a fan of doctors, huh?
Understatement of the year, my friend.
'S a good thing Mac was there. Me, I'da been worse than useless. Taptappitytappitytaptappitytappitytap.
Don't worry about it, you'd reply. I got a feelin' Mac would out MacGyver MacGyver. I'd just like to get my hands on that fuckstick with the Ipod. Hadn't been for that asshole, I'd've made it out, no problem. Dickhead.
He'd laugh, a nervous, throaty chuckle, and fidget. Yeah, I hear ya. But he'd never look at you when he said it, would avert his half-lidded eyes from the gauze bandage that covered your abdomen, as though to look at it was to see somethin' shameful. You'd been broken on the job, become one of Those, and like all good boys in blue, Messer kept his distance just in case your misfortune was contagious.
You understood it; of course you did. When you were a kid, you spent your childhood hopin' it was someone else's father who got tapped for the Ultimate Sacrifice by a cold, copper-jacketed finger, and when you joined the line yourself, you prayed it wasn't you who wound up in a wheelchair or suckin' puddin' through a straw after a gangbanger put one in your back and one in your neck. Just last year, you'd stood at attention at Robert Velasquez' funeral and thanked God that it wasn't you inside the flag-draped coffin. Better you than me is a common human shame that dwells in every heart, so you couldn't blame Danny for bein' spooked. But you wanted to strangle him all the same for bein' so damn obvious about it. Friends strapped it on and waded in when the shit got thick. Danny just stood on the muddy banks with his hands in his pockets and hoped the current never brought you close enough to touch.
The few times he did make the effort and extend support, Lindsay was there to cut him off at the knees. If he showed up with a bag of tacos for him, a milkshake for you, and plans to watch the ballgame, Lindsay inevitably tugged on his electronic leash and summoned him home before the third inning. She wanted him, she said, and besides, you needed your rest. As if you had anythin' more to look forward to than a respite from the regimented torture of your rehab sessions and a bland, cafeteria-catered dinner with Rebecca. And Messer-whipped, ever-dutiful Messer-always went, head hung and hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, thirty going on ten. And you always let him.
You suppose you should'a been pissed at him for tuckin' and runnin', should'a shared Rebecca's sour, barb-tongued contempt for him, but you couldn't because it was Danny. You'd known him since your rookie days, when you were both snot-nosed punks convinced you could single-handedly clean up the city with nothin' but a pair of shiny, metal cuffs and a solid set of brass fuckin' balls. You'd called him friend for five years and best friend for four, and that wasn't a title you gave lightly or recalled easily. Danny was flighty and could be a thoughtless bastard, but he was also the first one swingin' when you were under attack, whether from a scumbag perp or ass-coverin' brass. If you were his people-what Messer called 'decent people'-you were his forever, come what may.
At least, that's how it used to be, before the specter of Sonny Sassone and the Tanglewood boys rose from its uneasy grave and demanded Louie in tribute before it was banished to the mass grave of Sing Sing, where thousands of lost souls rot and wither within the damp, grey walls. Losin' Louie to the human vegetable garden of the rehab hospital changed Danny. He'd always been a carpe diem guy, eager to seize the day as it came to him and happy to chase rainbows simply for the sake of seein' where they led and what might be waitin' at the end of 'em. But he never worried if there was no gold, or even if there was no pot. He'd just shrug his shoulders and move to the next one, sure that one day, his luck would change, that someday there'd be more than just dreams of gold dust on his hands. There was always more time and another rainbow.
But that all changed when Sonny pulverized Louie's skull and pureed his brain with a Louisville slugger. Danny didn't just catch life in his hands; he seized it and squeezed until knuckle turned to bone. He stopped takin' things as they came and started seekin' them out with fanatical determination. He drank more and ate more and fucked more, and there was no joy in it, just a wide-eyed need that made your stomach flutter uneasily whenever you caught a glimpse of it. He was a Lost Boy, not gently turned out of Never-Neverland by a beneficent hand, but ruthlessly upended from his cradle in the middle of the night and left to fend for himself while God went wanderin' with blind eyes and indifferently gropin' fingers. Louie's brush with death had brought home his own mortality with a clarity no stranger's death could ever achieve, and Danny meant to do it all before Death ran him to ground.
And you couldn't blame him for that, either, because hadn't you done the same since your baby sister went ass over teakettle down the rickety stairs of the Whisper House and left a sister-sized hole in your heart? To the rest of the world, she's been gone thirteen years. Mac would tell you that she's so much teeth and bone inside her casket, a sad jumble of little girl lost inside the Communion dress your parents buried her in, but you know better. Diana is alive. She's lived inside your veins and nested inside your heart since the day she died, and every breath you take is a breath breathed for two. She tastes what you taste and feels what you feel and every heartbeat powers two lives. You live durin' the day, and she lives at night in your dreams, an eternal child who'll never die again, never slip into the two-dimensional existence of memories flash-frozen and trapped behind tacky plastic sheetin'.
Sometimes she's so heavy, but you'll never put her down, not after you broke her heart and sent her to her grave thinkin' that's where you wanted her to be. The headshrinkers at the department would cluck and shake their heads and call it an unnecessary burden, survivor's guilt or PTSD, but you know better. It's nothin' more or less than the way it should be, a brother's penance and your personal mark of Cain. You'll carry her until you can't, and then you'll lie down in green pastures forever.
Danny's carryin' Louie now, doin' his penance by drinkin' for two and lyin' awake at night so Louie has a chance to see through his eyes. He's livin' hard and fast and doublin' down to make up for lost time, and deep in his gut, he's regrettin' all the time he let slip through his fingers. He's wishin' he'd made more time to catch a few beers after shift or caught a few more ballgames, wishin' he'd been more patient when Louie failed to live up to his grand expectations and kickin' himself for every nasty remark that ever crossed his lips or floated to the surface of his mind in a fit of anger. He's haunted by his own Pitkin Park, and it rattles around his insides and harrows his conscience with poisonous fingers until it's all he can see. Hell, it's got a mental theater to itself, and you can bet it's replayed itself ad infinitum since Louie closed up shop and retreated to the deepest recesses of his damaged brain. And you can also lay your paycheck on the fact that that particular mind-movie will never fade or stutter to a stop because the film wore too thin. That baby'll be a first-run production for the duration, until Danny Messer Productions goes under by six feet.
You can't blame Danny for takin' on a brother's penance, because you've been walkin' that walk since you were sixteen, and you'll be damned if you'll be a hypocrite on top of everything else. But you can and do blame Lindsay Monroe. She's been lookin' for a way in since she hit the city, and there's nothin' she won't do to gain a foothold, includin' exploitin' his vulnerability and grief. It's not fair, what she's doin' and has done in the name of her twisted version of love, not right. The fundamental wrongness of it sets your teeth on edge and raises your hackles, curls your fingers into fists. It's disturbin' to watch them together, like watchin' a grown man caress the cheek of a twelve-year-old girl. It's not love, but dominion, the law of the jungle enacted in break rooms and bars.
Sometimes you see 'em together, and it takes all your willpower not to call out a warnin'. Watch out, Messer. You never do, though, because you understand that to call out would be to cross the point of no return. You and Messer might not be quits if you warned him away from Lindsay and her siren call, but you'd never be the same. Your disapproval would hang between you, an invisible barrier that would stifle your former camaraderie and turn it into a grim exercise in habits jealously guarded and reluctantly practiced. One day ten years from now, you'd be nursin' beers at Sullivan's together, and you'd catch sight of your reflection in the mirror behind the bar and wonder just who the hell you were sittin' next to.
So, you keep your mouth shut. You've lost your baby sister, and her death took your old man's love for you with her, and my love for my boy took me, and you can't stand to lose anyone else. You've got the job, sure, and it's the best job in the world, and you've got Rebecca, and she's the best wife in the world, and you got your YMCA kids. Any man would take one look at your life and say you had it made, and it would be hard to argue the point. But without Messer to stir the pot, your life wouldn't be the same. He's the dash of salt that brings the sweetness to the fore, the pinch of pepper in a mango sorbet. And Christ, it sounds like such pussy bullshit, but it's the truth, the whole truth, and nothin' but the truth, so help you God.
The real bitch of it is, you don't think Lindsay's bulldozin' him on purpose, a succubus who takes perverse pleasure in drainin' him dry and bendin' him to her implacable, insatiable will. She's just as broken and lost as Messer is, so used to lookin' out for herself that she can't see beyond her own nose anymore. The world as she knows it is Lindsay Monroe, population one. She's alone in a city of twelve million people, adrift in a sea of strangers, and in Danny, she sees her clean, well-lighted place. It doesn't matter that he's unequipped to be anyone's knight in shinin' armor, with insufficient light for his own soul, let alone enough to warm someone else. Lindsay's cut her teeth on the idea that anything is possible with enough steel in your spine, and she's made a life by pullin' herself up the ladder of success one bootstrap at a time. She's convinced that she can make a whole from broken halves, and she's been workin' her knuckles raw stitchin' 'em together.
It's insane, an exercise in futility, and you want to grab 'em both by the shoulders and shake until sense rattles into their bones, until the glasses and scales fall from Messer's squinty eyes and the tension ebbs from Monroe's perpetually-clenched jaws. But you don't bother because the efforts of your graspin' fingers would be just as useless as those of her endlessly stitchin' ones. You see that knowledge in their faces and the panicky tightness with which they cling to each other. They know it'll never work, but they're gonna try anyway because at this late date, hope is all they've got left.
And who are you to take that from them? You, who lucked into your miracle on 34th Street. No one lookin' at your marriage would think it had a prayer. She's nothin' but gossamer and willpower, and certainly not the loudmouthed, New York goddess you'd envisioned for yourself, and you're too stubborn and too often absent, a prodigal son of the city who loses himself in its concrete wilderness and returns to her just long enough to break her heart again. You should be another casualty of the war on crime, sundered and bitter, but you're not. You're still arm-in-arm, dancin' through the years in defiance of the odds. Sometimes the steps change-there's been too much runnin' man and too little waltz these past few years-but the dance never stops. It drifts from dreamin' to wakin' to dreamin' again in an eternal rhythm and moves to the music made by lips and hearts and entangled fingers. No one can dance to that music but you, and none but you can end it. It's more precious to you than the second heart clipped to your hip or hangin' from a lanyard 'round your neck, and you'd rather die than lose it.
So, who the fuck are you to tell Messer he can't have that, too? Or Lindsay? Even shrews deserve to dance. Maybe Danny's lookin' to put down roots and leave somethin' behind before it's too late. He's the last chance now that Louie's growin' into the soil of his bed and waterin' it with his own saliva, the last shot to sow the Messer family seed and assure Louie, Sr. a window to tomorrow. Maybe Lindsay needs Danny because she can't see her dead friends' faces when she's nestled in Danny's arms or ridin' it out beneath his body while the lightin' crashes outside the bedroom window. Maybe when he's with her, discussin' the point of a Montana wheat field, Danny can't hear his brother's skull splittin' like an overripe cantaloupe or see Sonny's grinnin', blood-spattered face as he stands over Louie's twitchin' body. Everyone needs a totem against the nightmares. You know that because you've got plenty of those rattlin' round in your head, and when they come callin', sometimes Rebecca's music is the only thing that can drive them out.
Part XIIb