FIC: Skin 1a

[laguera25]

Title: Skin

Author: laguera25

Fandom(s): CSI:NY, with mentions of HP

Rating: R/RFM for violent imagery

Pairing: Flack/OFC

Spoilers: Spoilers through 608, "Cuckoo's Nest".

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events in the NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis.

All characters in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

A/N: Set post-"Cuckoo's Nest" in the Flack/Stanhope crackverse.


Do you remember the way that you touched me before
All the trembling sweetness I loved and adored--"Skin", Natalie Merchant

She doesn't know what to think when she sees him standing woefully in the doorway with a midnight smudge on one eye and a fat lip. It's been an all-too-common occurrence of late to see him staggering through the door in rumpled clothes that stink of booze and stale sweat, a paper bag in one unsteady hand. She'd tried to talk to him at first, to persuade him to put down the bottle and come to her instead. She'd tried logic and reason, appealed to his love for the job. She'd even begged him to remember his love for her, to sacrifice the comfort proffered by the contents of his new best friend in the name of protecting her from the demons that drifted from his pungent breath like wraiths to insinuate themselves into her dreams. That, at least, had stopped him for a while, but he'd always returned to the cool, glass teat, peering at her with a foggy expression of sullen, regretful defiance as he took a long pull.

"Just for tonight," he'd say in his slurred, underwater voice. "I'll stop tomorrow. Promise." Another desperate pull, and then he'd wobble to her and press a soft kiss to the crown of her head that was awful in its tenderness.

"All right," she'd say, bile and sorrow warring in her throat, and retreat to the safety of her office, where the smell of the bogeyman couldn't reach. Sometimes, he stumbled to bed, and when he did, she'd lie beside him in the dark and listen to him snore and breathe through her mouth to avoid the brimstone stink of cheap whiskey, the phantom stink of her parents, come to haunt her twenty years after she'd left it behind in a filthy, hotbox house in Whiting's Glen, Florida. She'd curl on her side of the bed, oddly exposed without the comforting ridge of his back and shoulder and the familiar warmth of his skin to shield her from the cold and the bitter memories that lurked in the darkness beyond the bed. In the morning, she'd awaken to his wet retching in the bathroom and the sharp, yellow stink of unwashed body on the sheets. Sometimes, while the water burbled and splutted into the sink or gurgled throatily in the toilet, she'd turn her head and weep.

Most of the time, though, she'd awaken alone and emerge from the bedroom to find him a rumpled heap on the sofa, one hand sagging limply from the cushions as though reaching for the half-empty bottle of dimestore hooch that inevitably lolled there on the carpet. When that happened, she'd swallow her hurt and disgust and shake him until his guttural, droning snores stuttered to stop and he opened bleary, bloodshot eyes and blinked owlishly at her face.

"Mornin', doll," he'd slur cheerfully at her, and then he'd reach for her with drifting, fluttering hands. Hands from which she often retreated with a mewl of helpless disgust. "Wha'ss the matter?" he'd implore plaintively, and then the booze would twist his guts in greasy, poisonous fists, and he'd blunder for the bathroom with his stomach trapped precariously inside his bulging cheeks.

She had watched and waited and prayed for the storm to pass, sure that when the immediate hammerblow of Angell's death had faded to the niggling, nettling sting of past regret, he would stopper the bottle and begin the ruthless, necessary scut work of outliving a friend, but the wound of loss hadn't healed. It had grown infected instead, impervious to the slow, cleansing burn of the alcohol that Don drank in ever-increasing quantities. As days passed into weeks and then to months, the infection had spread, had stolen into his eyes in a glassy, red fog that clouded his lovely blue eyes and turned them inward. It had crept into his hands and feet and made him totter and lurch. More than once, she had been jerked from the miserable, gritty-eyed solace of grading papers by the sharp, dismayed yelp of broken glass and found him in the kitchen, standing unsteadily over the toothy remnants of a shattered glass. Once, she had found him crouched dumbly over the fragments of a broken plate with blood and ceramic dust smeared on his fingertips and pattering lazily onto the floor. The blood had been so startlingly bright against the pallor of his skin that she'd experienced a sudden wave of nausea. He'd looked up at the sound of her approach and tried to smile, but it hadn't reached his eyes, which had been unfocused and bloodshot and bleak. Her prince of Helios had lost his light, and the realization had hollowed her chest and belly.

Oh, love, she'd thought. Oh, my love.

"Brka plat," he'd informed her with his strange, thick tongue, and tried to pick up a shard in hands that wavered and dipped and pawed. His only reward had been a thin, weeping cut across the palm of his hand. He'd blinked in surprise at the sudden spark of pain. "Fuck," he'd said matter-of-factly, and it would've been funny if she hadn't been able to smell the Beam on his breath at five paces.

"I can see that," she'd said when she could trust herself to speak. "And it looks like it's had its revenge. Leave that alone. I'll clean it up." She had drawn his injured hand to her and kissed his bleeding fingers, and then she'd inspected the cut on his palm. "No need for stitches, thank God."

He'd smiled that awful, loose smile and looked at her with those vacant eyes. It had taken her twice as long as it should have to wash and mend his cuts because her own hands had been unsteady and suddenly too cold. She'd chivvied him off to bed and set about cleaning up the plate herself, and though she'd been stone cold sober as she'd fumbled with the slippery pieces of ceramic, she'd fared no better for the tears in her eyes. The cuts on her fingers had throbbed and burned in time with her heartbeat, and her blood had mixed with his on the linoleum floor.

Been here before,, she'd thought numbly as she'd wiped up the blood with a wadded dishcloth. Except the blood was on the bedsheets, and it was all mine. Blood and seed stippled on the bedclothes, signatures on a sacred covenant, as binding as law and Divine as God's word. I entered into that covenant joyfully, averred my devotion to it with every breathless, giddy, erratic thrust of my deflowered virgin's hips. I can claim no ignorance then. But oh, my God, what am I signing now? She hadn't known, but she'd gone on signing it just the same with every whorl and loop of her throbbing wrist and shoulder, the soap settling into her cuts like salt.

The infection had spread to his face, stained his chin with coarse stubble that rasped her cheek whenever he kissed her, and soured the smell that had wafted from his skin and clothes, the once-comforting, masculine scent that her heart called Don--Irish Spring and Right Guard, coffee and clean skin. He'd smelled yellow and stale, as though his innards festered with a necrotizing disease that rotted him from the inside out. On the weekends, he'd smelled pickled, brine and juniper and turpentine. His clothes had reeked of wood polish and cigarette smoke and sloshed Guinness, souvenirs from a sojourn at Sullivan's. The corruption had stirred her guts and pinched her gorge. It had been too familiar, the rotgut stink of her parents as they spoiled for a fight by the watery, black-and-white light of a cracked television set that had teetered inelegantly on the edge of a chipped kitchen countertop, the burnt-match promise of their hatred as the alcohol sharpened their teeth and tongues and coaxed them to a battle that would rage until the booze was spent and they were sprawled bonelessly in their respective corners, unconscious and unheeding of the small, bent child they so deeply regretted and so bitterly resented. It had been the smell of isolation and abandonment, the woodsmoke and paint thinner tang of loneliness and hunger and cold. It was a smell she had come to associate with monsters, and to smell it on Don inspired a nauseating, feral terror. She'd gathered his clothes and separated them from hers in an effort to keep the stink from spreading to her clothes, or the baby's. She'd washed his clothes twice and thrice and hung them on the clotheslines on the building's roof to let the sun cleanse the fabric of that pervasive taint. Sometimes, when she'd plucked his shirts from the line, she'd held them to her nose and drawn deep breaths in search of her husband. Sometimes she found him hiding at collar or sleeve, but more often than not, she found only the bilious, grease-fat kiss of whiskey and old vomit.

When she couldn't chase the ghosts of her parents from his clothes, she'd cleaned everything else, had mopped and vacuumed until the apartment reeked of orange-scented Febreze and scrubbed the toilet until the astringent reek of Comet had smothered the vinegar and bile hint of spent stomach. Foaming armies of Scrubbing Bubbles had marched on the walls of the bathtub, their popping, hissing bodies blanketing every surface until they smothered the piquant, fetid odor of sweat and too many late nights. She'd changed the linens of their bed obsessively, breathing through her mouth to avoid the scent of restless sleep and sweat-sour skin and reluctant to touch the sheets on Don's side of the bed. She'd opened the windows as far as she could and let the jungly, industrial odor of the city settle over everything like in organic pollen, the silt of concrete and the carcinogenous, black dust of asphalt and sloughed rubber. It had been obnoxious and noxious, but sweeter than the smell of frayed nerves and broken hearts and dying dreams that had hung over the apartment in a palpable, cloying pall.

Don had always kept a bottle of Jagermeister or bourbon in the cupboard and a few bottles of beer or Guinness in the refrigerator. They had been staples in the apartment for as long as she'd known him, had, in fact, predated her, and she'd never begrudged him because he'd never abused them. He'd kept the Jager on hand to blunt the worst of the horrors his job hurled at him. He'd drunk to wash away the memory of a dead child floating facedown in a filthy retention pond or of a young housewife with her panties around her ankles and her toddler screaming from his seat beside her drying brains, his pudgy hands patting her cooling face or tugging desperately at her blood-matted hair. The Guinness and beer had been for hockey games and the occasional card game with Danny and a handful of detectives from the precinct. They'd been an accent to his fun, not its nexus, and he'd never gotten falling-down drunk. Tipsy and amiable and wont to call her over for a kiss and a fond stroke of her hair, but always present in the moment and shrewd enough to call Messer's miserable attempts at bluffing.

Then Simon Cade had murdered Jessica Angell in a hail of bullets and shattered glass, and a forest of amber-tinted glass had sprouted behind the lone sentry in the cabinet above the sink. Soon, the forest had outgrown its particleboard borders and spilled into the cabinets beneath the sink. A legion of Guinness bottles had invaded the refrigerator. There were so many that they'd begun to crowd the rest of the occupants, phalanx them like a besieging force. She'd had to fumble among their ranks for Junior's applesauce and her lunches. They'd overrun the lettuce and subjugated the macaroni casserole. They'd even overwhelmed the box of baking soda that served as a freshener. It had toppled forlornly onto its back and stared stupidly into the refrigerator light, flecks of white powder ringing its ragged, dead cardboard lip like foam bubbling from the slack lips of a drowned sailor.

She'd tried to purge the apartment of alcohol, of course. She'd bought lawn and garden trash bags and stuffed them with cold, brown bottles, yanking them from their places in the cupboard like malignant tubers. She'd seized the scrawny, glass throats of the refrigerator sentries and tossed them headlong into the bulging, black bags, where they had settled and shifted like hastily-concealed bodies. She'd picked and tossed for hours, muscles straining and sizzling with the grim effort of unfamiliar movements, and filled bags until the plastic squeaked in muffled, mutinous protest and sweat beaded on her feverish, flushed skin. One bag, two bag, three bag, four, until she'd resembled an alcoholic Kris Kringle, surrounded by bags of beer and bourbon and watching her infant son clamber happily over the plastic dunes as if they were the salt-slick shoals of Rockaway Beach. She'd panted and sworn and cursed the smell of yeast and whiskey, and then she'd wrestled her chattering child onto her lap and dragged the bags to the garbage chute one by one, a bedraggled executioner disposing of her victims. Junior had laughed and clapped his hands at the merry, tinkling music of the bottles as they'd disappeared into the abyss, and she'd simultaneously blessed and envied his innocence.

None of it had made any difference. His clothes had gone right on stinking of beer and cigarettes and sour sweat and her mother's hot molasses breath, and the beer and bourbon had reappeared, carried inside underneath his arms or clutched in broad, strong hands. The forests and legions had gradually retaken the cupboards and refrigerator a bottle and a fifth at a time, and she could only watch helplessly as Don had arranged them neatly on the shelves with a murmured promise that they would be the last, that after they'd sacrificed themselves to his gullet, there would be no more. She'd watched and nodded and said nothing, and beneath her clothes, her shoulders and back had ached with the promise of another fruitless afternoon bent gracelessly to the task of culling, her overstuffed head thrust into the refrigerator as though it were a guillotine. Let it be the last time,, she would pray in silent desperation. The next evening, there would be another bottle on the kitchen counter or the hall table, waiting for her in its crumpled paper sack, a malevolent toadstool that had sprouted when her back was turned.

The infection had spread with every sip, every bottle she found in the sink or wedged into the couch cushions. Into his fingernails, which grew ragged and dirty and chewed to the raw, bloody quick. Into his belly, which had rumbled for want of food, but which had rejected everything but liquid solace. Into his prick, which had grown slumbrous and stupid and sleepily disinterested in the scant comfort to be found in her arms and between her accommodating thighs. He's tried to love her only twice since he came home with glassy, disbelieving eyes and Angell's blood smeared on his shirt in a gaudy splatter, and they'd been muddy, fumbling couplings born of need rather than love or passion. He'd stunk of despair and old rotgut as he'd moved against her, his usually expert lover's hands clumsy and rough and his lips bitter and cracked against her skin. He'd wept the first time, head buried in the crook of her neck as he'd thrust into her in stiff, jerky movements, his breath a plosive rasp against her goose-pimpled flesh as his groping fingers had pressed bruises into her ass and the bony spars of her hips. She'd endured rather than enjoyed. There had been no pain--her body had drawn upon sweeter memories to ensure that mercy at least--but when it was over and he'd rolled off her and into sleep, she'd closed her legs and swallowed a wave of shame. She'd loved him a thousand times, had even let him bind her with the steel tools of his trade and slip his greedy cock into her mouth or up her ass with a proprietary, atavistic grunt, but no matter how filthy dirty their lovemaking had been, how primitive or primal or inelegant, lovemaking was precisely what it had been. She'd never felt anything but venerated by the sweat and friction of love between the sheets, but that night, she'd felt used, as though she'd been not a willing partner in love's most sacrosanct dance, but a convenient and necessary amanuensis for an unspoken longing that her angular frame, spindly legs and mother's cunt simply couldn't fill. She'd waited until his snores had deepened and settled into a steady, monotonous rhythm, and then she'd slipped out of bed and crept into the bathroom to reclaim her battered dignity beneath a cleansing spray of hot water. She'd shuddered convulsively as the hot water had scoured and reddened her skin and the steam had shrouded her in a thick, Arthurian mist. She'd stayed huddled in her shower chair until the water had grown cold, and then she'd returned to bed and watched the dawn bleed into the cityscape from the comfortless, barren safety of a protective huddle on her side of the bed.

He'd come to her once more after that, as lost and unfamiliar as the last time, and she'd closed her eyes and pretended they were sometime else, in the early, heady days of their marriage, when fucking had carried no weight but that with which the magic of love had naturally invested it, and when Don's belly had been unmarred by the filthy, plastic claws of a cellphone and a plummeting Xerox machine. When she'd been sure that her childhood misery had paid for her present happiness and ensured their future comfort. When his eyes hadn't been filled with blood and dust and stinging, acrid cordite and her mouth hadn't been filled with copper and wormwood. She'd been glad when it was over, and deeply ashamed of that treacherous gladness. He hasn't tried to bed her since June. It's late September now, and though her belly and cunt twist with a constant, feverish hunger, she's glad he hasn't reached for her. Still glad, and still ashamed deep in her bones.

She'd surrendered in mid-August, beaten by the sultry summer heat of the city and the relentless tide of bottles. She'd stopped in mid-cleaning, had simply dropped the trash bag and put down the bottle she'd been wrestling from the refrigerator and sat in the middle of the kitchen with the bag slouched indolently at her feet, a fat, white cat waiting for its next kipper. She'd stayed there until the warning ache in her shoulders and the avid, too-hot twinge in the small of her back had retreated, and then she'd quietly closed the refrigerator door and left the room. She'd left the bag where it was, disgusted and indifferent to its contents. It had remained there until Don had straggled home, red-eyed and silent and moving as though his joints had pained him. He'd stared at it in silence for a long moment; his mouth had opened as though to speak, perhaps to offer yet another impotent apology or empty promise. In the end, he'd simply bent and retrieved the bag without a word, Sisyphus retrieving his inescapable burden. He'd replaced the bottles with persnickety care, arranging them in neat rows and turning the labels out. He'd neither spoken nor met her gaze, and when the last bottle had been restored to its pride of place, he'd plucked one from the refrigerator door and twisted off the cap with a flick of his wrist. She'd retreated to the safety of her office before he'd taken that first desperate, sensuous pull, but she'd seen it anyway, as an image etched into the blackness behind her eyelids--the gluttonous bob of his Adam's apple and the languorous peristalsis of his throat as he swallowed his golden mistress in gulping draughts. The ecstatic flutter of his lovely, dark eyelashes as she slipped deep inside him, to the dark and secret hollows in his belly and heart that once only she had been able to touch. She'd seen it all despite her willful, panicky blindness, and she'd hated him for it.

She'd washed her hands of him then. She'd stopped pleading and cajoling, stopped searching for her Prince Charming in the swollen, cloudy eyes of the stranger he'd become. She'd retreated behind the cold, impregnable walls of her fortress and slammed the doors. She'd cooked for Junior and cleaned his rooms, determined that the apartment and his rooms remain a place of sanctuary, but she'd stopped cooking Don's favorite meals and leaving them to languish behind the ranks of beer and Guinness bottles. She'd left his clothes in rumpled drifts where they lay and let the unopened mail and discarded newspapers and empty beer and takeout cartons accumulate on the counters and coffee table and kitchen table like dust and desert sand. Shot glasses piled in the sink and dotted the counter like amber moles, and she'd left them be. The apartment had begun to stink of wet ink and old yeast and moldering cardboard, and she'd closed her eyes and stiffened her neck and learned to live in the sordid rankness. When the air had grown too close and stifling in the squalid, dirty rooms, she'd taken Junior and her papers to the airy, green expanse of Central Park and graded papers while he toddled in the grass and bent to clutch clumps of cool, black dirt in his chubby fingers and crow with an explorer's delight at his discovery. She'd graded until white paper had bled to red beneath her slashing fingers and let Junior toddle and caw himself into happy exhaustion, and when the last paper had offered itself to her excoriating pen and her son's soft, pleasantly warm cheek had drooped heavily against the slender crook of her neck and his tiny fingers had sleepily worried at the chain of her necklace and the wisps of hair at her nape, she'd pressed a tremulous, dry-lipped kiss to the crown of his head and gathered him up and reluctantly returned to the quiet, fetid gloom of what had once been a place of happily ever after. And while he'd slept in a crib safeguarded from the pungent caress of the monster without the door to his nursery by protective wards and liberal applications of Febreze and Lysol, she'd lain in the darkness of her foundering, dying marriage bed and listened to the dragon breathe beside her.

And you hated, Alice croons from astride her toadstool. Oh, how you hated. She's resplendent in her filthy, ragged pinafore, old ivory and rotted lace. She crouches atop the toadstool's malignant, spongy cap and smiles from behind a curtain of lank, matted hair, her teeth sharp and yellow inside her leering, thin-lipped mouth. A caterpillar leg dangles delicately from one blackened, pitted gum, and the breath that wafts from her mouth reeks of blood and putrid fat and chocolate gone rich and white with maggots. She rocks back on her haunches, and the soles of her Mary Janes squeeze a thick, yellow liquid from the cap of the toadstool with a viscous, glottal squelch. It reminds Rebecca of pus from an infected wound and carries the same high, sweet, pork-fat stink. Alice deepens her crouch and widens her smile, and her soot-smudge eyes glitter with gleeful malice inside her gaunt, jaundiced face.

Your hatred of Jessica Angell grew with every sip he took, and why shouldn't it have done? she lisps, and sucks the point of her index finger into her mouth in a coquettish gesture. He started drinking his way to perdition the day she had a side of lead with her frigid whore's turkey bacon, and he hasn't stopped yet. Not for you, and not for his son. He's chasing her across a sea of bourbon and beer, so single-minded in his purpose that everything--everyone--else has faded into insignificance. You and Junior no longer exist in his world. Her slack, pale face and bloody, bubbling guts are all he sees even when his eyes are open. He's willing to drown to escape those memories, and you curse his cowardice and Jessica Angell for having the power to command such bottomless grief. Such power should've been yours by right, one of the few rights not wrested from you by the demands of the job or presumed upon by oblivious, entitled fools who consider the sudden forfeiture of his life for theirs a luxury afforded by the payment of their taxes. If you could not have his time or his heart or the willing sacrifice of his life for yours, then at least you could draw a measure of bitter comfort from the knowledge that he would mourn your loss as no other. If your last meal was the bug-pocked grille of the crosstown express, then he would grieve for you for the rest of his days. His grief would hollow him, reduce him to a wraith that drifted from room to room and day to day in search of the heart that Fate had so cruelly stolen from him. He would yearn and long and ache and weep for the memory of you, and even when his grieving was done and he'd moved on, part of his lover's heart would count the days until he was reunited with you at the gates to eternity. What he'd denied you in life would be yours forever in death--his devotion and all the time in the universe with which to savor it.

Even that's gone now. There's nothing left for you. He flits and staggers from room to room with a bottle in his hand as though it were his mother's bracing fingers. It's as if Jessica Angell took the best of him with her when she went into the earth. He's carrying a lover's loss, and that's not right, not bloody fair, because he promised his heart and his love to you. And you've done your best to be worthy of such a wondrous gift. You've kept his house and his secrets and spread your legs and your arms for him. You've given him a son and abandoned your world and your friends, chosen not to make him choose between two worlds. You've been the good and faithful wife, and for six years, you've swallowed the indignity and shame of being the last in a line that numbers in the millions. You've asked so little, and he's asked so much, and now, he can't even give you the sorry satisfaction of knowing he'd miss you when you were gone.

Fool, Alice sneers, and rocks on her toadstool. It's a dirty, undulating shimmy that starts in her toes and slithers into her hips like a hand slipping between parted thighs. Her child's hips buck with a woman's knowledge, and her vicious, cracked-lip smile widens further still. He warned you, Snape did. He told you that love was poison, a dangerous weakness, but despite your pretensions to jaundiced Slytherin cynicism, you had a Gryffindor's stupid optimism. You wanted to believe in happily ever after despite all the evidence to the contrary. You wanted to believe that a beggar's soul in a badly-wrought body was worth the love of God and a handsome, good man. You wanted to believe that you could inspire hopeless love and insatiable desire, be the center of someone's world, and so when Don came along with declarations of love and proclamations of devotion unending, you cast aside all sense and warning and jumped in with both feet, a naive, starry-eyed, not-so-pretty maid.

Stupid, silly child. The position of princess was never yours to claim. You were ever meant to be the cinder girl, the spinster-in-waiting who watched the beautiful women with envy in her heart and ashes in her mouth. The slipper was meant for another, as evinced by the countless bloody cuts that start at one sole and end in another, fluttering behind your heartbeat like slivers of glass. You're just too stubborn to surrender the slipper and admit your mistake. You'd rather walk your feet to bloody stumps than go back to what you were, a lonely child of the shadows who knew neither light nor warmth, and whose only lover lived at the end of her palsied hands. You'd rather suffer together than die alone.

You actually believed him, that's the hurt that refuses to die. You took him at his word when he knelt at the altar of a stone-dead god and swore to forsake all others until death did you part, and when he held you in his arms at the top of those cathedral steps and whispered, I got you. You just go ahead and shine. It was an impossible blessing, more tenderness and love than you had ever imagined in your wildest fantasies and you drank deeply of faith's waters and followed him with steps that never wavered. Because he was your improbable Prince Charming, and he would never let you fall.

You should've seen it coming the day Angell became his partner. She was Snow White come to the cottage of the bent and loveless witch, apple-cheeked and rose-lipped, with deep brown eyes and a light to match his. But you never spared it a thought because he was your prince and this was your fairy tale, and your faith was absolute. If unease tickled your heart with a cold, prodding finger, you thought of that morning on the cathedral steps and the promise whispered into your ear, and it disappeared. This was Don, and he had no equal among men. So when he started coming home late and having more and more coffee dates with Angell, you chalked it up to his enthusiasm for a new partner and his inherent desire to protect "his people." It was just another example of his endearing Gryffindor's heart. You never thought to sniff his collars for the scent of foreign perfume or riffle the contents of his wallet in search of condoms, never thought to inspect his memo book or the backs of his business cards for hastily-scribbled phone numbers. The very idea appalled you, struck you as indecent, an insult to his unimpeachable character.

You never suspected a thing until he came home with blood on his shirt and nothing in his eyes, and even then, your first thought was for him. You thought the blood was his, that another scumbag had tried to finish what Lessing had started. You thought he'd been shot or stabbed, and you cried out when you saw the tacky redness at his belly. You rushed to him and plucked at him with frantic, scrabbling fingers, trying to find the source of the blood.

He let you tug at his shirt while the breath and terror whistled through your teeth, and then he reached out and circled your wrists with his hands. It's not mine, he said gently, and kissed your trembling knuckles. Rebecca, it's not mine, sweetheart. It's Jess'. It was the last time he saw you. Then his voice and his heart broke, and he stood over you with his head bowed and a strangled, animal keening wrenching from his throat. It was the one of the few times you'd seen him cry in earnest, and the sound broke your pounding heart. You opened your arms to draw him in, but he was already disentangling from you, twisting away and tottering towards the bedroom, pulling off the bloodstained shirt as he went. He shed it with a grimace and garbled bark of disgust. He left it where it lay, left it for you to pick up while he waded into the closet for a fresh shirt. It was still there after he left, a swatch of bloody gauze left behind after a failed operation, and you hesitated to touch it, reluctant to feel the wet tack of drying blood on your fingertips or smell cold iron, but you were afraid of what might happen if it were still there when he came home, and so you picked it up and carried it to the trash chute.

He came home late the next afternoon, haggard and exhausted, the tang of cordite dusted over his wrinkled clothes like scorched pepper. He met your anxious, fluttering kiss with an absent, tepid brush of his lips and lurched unsteadily into the living room, where he blinked stupidly in the soft, white light of the table lamp.

We got that motherfucker, he croaked to no one in particular, and scrubbed his face with his palms. New York brined his tongue, and you would have found it sexy if he hadn't sounded so fragile, violin strings stretched past endurance, or looked so old and lost. The silver hairs that had come along with the scars from the bombing, Lessing's final, enduring gift, had suddenly stood in stark relief against his dark hair. Most times, that dusting of silver made him look distinguished, and you often delighted in carding your fingers through his hair and calling him your silver fox as you pulled him in for a kiss, but that afternoon, with blowback on his clothes and bleakness in his eyes, they'd made him look drained and used-up. Forty-five instead of thirty-one. You wanted to enfold him in the protective circle of your arms, shield him from the horrors that clearly gnawed his bones, but by the time you'd gathered your wits, he was already shuffling into the bedroom, shoulders hunched against an unseen blow.

You followed him, of course, found him kneeling at the feet of his porcelain god and retching endlessly into the cool basin. The wet, ratcheting burps prompted a rumble of sympathy from your own uneasy stomach, and you watched helplessly as his mouth yawped in an agonized scream over and over again, until nothing emerged but air and stringers of clear saliva. You reached for him, intending to brush your cold fingers over his burning nape, but he recoiled.

Don', he muttered thickly.

You withdrew, stung, and memories of another, crueler rejection stirred beneath your skin like turning larvae. Go entertain yourself for a while. You've done enough damage.

You curled your hand into a tight fist and made to leave, but his hand rested over yours, raw-knuckled and simmering with a slick, sticky heat, as though he were coming down with the flu.

I know you're just-you're just tryin' to look out for me. His voice resonated from the interior of the bowl. But I can't. I can't. I just need... He stopped as another wave wrenched his guts, and his fingers seized your wrist in time with the contraction. I just need...some time, doll, he panted, and surrendered to another spasm of nausea.

He didn't come out for the rest of the night, and the soup you warmed for him after you put Junior to bed went untouched. He simply curled in on himself beneath the sheets and stared at the far wall. When you climbed into bed, he shifted to let you in, but he never said a word, nor did he roll to tuck you against the contours of his body as he usually did. He simply lay there, wide-eyed and silent and walking the paths of his own mind. You listened to him breathe the humid summer air and watched his forgotten bowl of soup congeal on the nightstand. You willed his arm to curl possessively over your hip or his chin to tuck snugly into the crook of your neck, but neither did, and in the end, exhaustion pulled you under to the midnight murmur of the city that never sleeps.

You awoke in the night to the sound of weeping, and your ever-fretful mother's brain prodded you to consciousness with the specter of a wet-diapered Junior lying in a broken, paralyzed heap on the nursery floor. You were still groping for the edge of the coverlet when you realized it wasn't Junior. It was too deep and too close, a throttled, furtive huffing interspersed with the gurgling slosh of liquid. The hand wrangling with the coverlet drifted to Don's side of the bed and found it empty. The sheets were cool to the touch, and your heart thudded painfully inside your chest.

It was the summer of Paddy Mc-AK all over again, when the ghost of a dead Irish drug runner had driven Don from your bed and hounded him to the fire escapes and the basement and the rooftop, where he'd jumped rope until the soles of his feet had bruised and his shins had screamed for respite from the jarring impact. Sometimes you had followed him to the roof, the wheels of your chair scraping the risers of the staircases like runners over thin ice as the Levitating Charm defied the established rules of bodily law, and found him crouched on the rooftop like a gargoyle, bare skin white as polished ivory in the silvery half-light of the moon. Most of the time, he'd be well back from the ledge, flat-footed and pensive as he had gazed at the city below, but a few times, he was so close to the edge that his toes had hung over the gritty stone ledge, and you'd been afraid to call out, lest he startle and topple headlong into the abyss. Part of you had been terrified that he'd topple anyway, that he'd turn that bottomless gaze on you and smile farewell before he tilted forward and joined his dead baby sister at the bottom of the stairs. On those nights, your cheeks ached with suppressed terror and the maddening impulse to pray, and your skin was cold despite the heat that wafted from the rooftop like the Devil's breath. You were never sure if you were going to be able to coax him inside, afraid that the charms of love had finally reached their limits. He always came, but you couldn't shake the feeling that you hadn't brought all of him back. To this day, you wonder how much of him is still on that roof, baked into the asphalt by the passage of sweltering summer, how much of his skin remains on the pavement to be trod upon by unknowing feet. How much of his soul still hovers and flutters above the city, clinging to a gargoyle's indifferent wings.

You scrubbed the sleep from your eyes with the back of your palm and squinted into the darkness. He was a slumped shadow on the opposite wall, seated on the floor with his knees drawn up and the glint of a bottle braced against his quadriceps. You watched the vague glint drift upward, a fairy child rising through the night, and heard the sea-foam gurgle of liquid. A hitching breath, another slosh, and the fairy child plummeted gracelessly behind the forbidding peaks of his knees again.

Don? You struggled to your elbows, fighting the persistent clutch of the bedsheets and the obdurate stiffness of spastic muscles rudely pulled from the temporary release of sleep. Honey, what is it? You fumbled fruitlessly for the touch lamp on your side of the bed, eyes fixed on the formless, unmoving bulk of your husband.

Don', he lowed, and his mouth was full of cotton. Don'. Then, quite clearly amid the determined rustling of sheets, You can' lift me up, doll. Not this tim'. The rough, conspiratorial rasp of metal on glass, and then the indistinct loam of your husband was rising unsteadily in the darkness, the peaks of his knees unfolding into the more familiar geography of his long legs. The fairy child hung dispiritedly from one hand, a swan with a broken neck, and as he stumbled closer, you realized it was the bottle of Jagermeister from above the sink. Half a bottle had become quarter-bottle, and Don rode its stupefying tides with slaloming, vertiginous grace as his face loomed on the cusp of bedroom midnight. His free hand reached out and pulled the disheveled covers to your throat, smoothed them with meticulous care. Then he caressed your forehead and cupped your cheek, drew his thumb over the thin spar of bone. G'sleep, he hissed, and pressed a reverent kiss to your forehead. There were fresh tears on his face, and his eyes were cloudy and swollen.

It was those tears that stirred the embers of suspicion inside your heart. The tears that had fallen from his eyes from the moment he'd staggered home with the news of Angell's death in his mouth like a scalding stone. You hadn't been surprised to see them in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, when her blood had been a tacky, maroon smear on his shirt; she was his partner and his sister in blue, and a strike against her was a strike against everything for which he stood--honor and decency and fairness, the pure justice that found life only in dreams and the gaudy brightness of Superman comics. He'd cried for Aiden the day Hawkes had identified her charred remains, had come home with smoke and burning fat on his clothes and skin and told you that the woman who'd helped you into your wedding gown on your wedding day had been murdered by a piece of human garbage that Mac had failed to catch the first time around. His voice had broken and he'd rested his head on your knees as if it had been too heavy to hold up, and he'd wept into the folds of your skirt while you stroked his crown and pulsing temples with numb fingers. He'd cried hard and ugly, but the storm had been brief, a fierce squall that had spent itself in ten minutes, and when he was done, he was done for good. He'd shared his sorrow with a bottle of Jager at the kitchen table, had blunted the jagged edge of her loss with a solid drunk, but his eyes had been dry, and when he was drunk enough, he'd put the bottle in the cupboard and left it there. He'd come to bed and let you offer what comfort you could with kisses and caresses and the living warmth of your cunt, and in the morning, the bottle had stayed in the cupboard.

But those dreadful, day-after tears were different, symptom of a deeper wound. You recognized them because you had cried them yourself for eight days in May of 2006, when Don had danced precariously on the gossamer tightrope stretched between the shores of the river Styx and you had been faced with the possibility of losing him forever. They were the tears of impending widowhood, wept in muffled terror at the prospect of living the rest of your long life without him. They were the tears of love long lost, of heartbreak, pure and simple. Your love had glimpsed his Angell-less future and found it wanting in spite of you. The tears in his eyes washed the scales from yours, and the strength ran from your bones. A heart breaks, not with an ostentatious snap, but with a tear and a single, ragged breath. You sank onto the pillows, dazed, and furious that they would neither bear you up nor shield you from the pickled despair that emanated from your fallen prince's pores like cologne. Don mistook your collapse for groggy tranquility and hummed in satisfaction.

'S my girl, he murmured, and smoothed your sheets with exaggerated care. He pressed a kiss to your lips, and you tried to taste him--toothpaste and coffee and the cut-paper woodiness of toothpick--but there was only the Jager, sticky and sweet, like scorched molasses. He righted himself with stilted precision, and then he slipped through the bedroom door and closed it behind him, left you alone in the dark.

And the darkness became your canvas. With secondhand whiskey on your lips, your broken heart painted the shadows with images of what was and what might have been. Memories of rosy twilight strolls with Don through Central Park shared the night with those of Don and Angell entangled in the sheets of an anonymous hotel bed, moving in a sweaty, sensuous dance without name. The gentle, grand first dance of your wedding reception waltzed alongside the sight of Don and Angell kissing in the rain while raindrops beaded in their hair like diamonds in a diadem. Your prince had found a more fitting princess, and with his lovely consort, he had shared a secret, beloved kingdom. The bloody joy of Junior's birth contested with Don and Jessica Angell laughing over a plate of mussels in the flickering candlelight of Salvatore's. She had taken your place at the table, and she was lovelier than you had ever been, straight and graceful and fluid as she slurped the mussels between her lips in sly, salacious invitation. The homey comfort of watching television with Don's head pillowed on your lap warred with the voyeuristic vision of Don fucking his prized consort in her living room, her lithe legs wrapped around his hips with a surety your tortured, unfinished muscles could never achieve.

One after another, these visions danced before your eyes in a flickering, ever-changing tapestry. Each was a new and terrible treachery, a grain of salt dropped into a fresh wound by the malicious hand of your imagination, a hand steadier and far colder than the sad specimens that spasmed and twitched at the ends of your wrists. On and on with the beat of your heart, until your pulse pounded inside your temples and your hands wrung the hapless bedclothes like an unprotected throat. A howl massed inside your heaving chest and bubbled into your constricted throat like phlegm, but you never loosed it, no matter how insistent its press on the roof of your mouth and the backs of your gums. You swallowed it like the bitterest medicine, swallowed it in great, slurping gulps and let it take root in the fertile soil of your heart and belly. You took your medicine and watched the phantoms writhe on the night air, and when night lightened to dawn and revealed the empty expanse of your deserted marriage bed, the medicine settled deep within the soil and woke the cold rage that slept there.

You resisted a while longer; the Gryffindor child had grown strong after years of marriage and sloe-eyed security, and you longed to believe her when she insisted it was naught but shock that had turned your love's heart to brittle shale inside his chest, but though I had grown complacent, stupid with happiness, I have never gone to sleep, not really. Roused from my torpor by the galling heat of a medicine no sugar could sweeten, I ignored the naive witterings of your witless, desperate heart, narrowed my pitiless eyes, and watched. And as I have ever done, your faithful watcher in the night saw the truth. And because I am a survivor, I would not let you turn from it.

Don was still hollow and distant by the morning of Angell's funeral, slumped and silent in the pew beside you, his head bowed and his white-gloved hands clamped around the smooth, polished wood of the pew in front of him. He wept anew each time he looked at Angell's casket, and as he mourned her in the suit in which he'd married you, there could be no doubt. The seedling anger nestled within your belly like a cherished fetus blossomed into sudden, vengeful flower, a strangling wisteria that silenced the simpering platitudes of the Gryffindor child with a single, contemptuous twist of its vine. The Slytherin woman in your marrow remembered herself at the last, and she rose to the surface in the somnolent silence of the church. Your hands itched with the need to strike and claw and etch bloody weals into Don's haggard face, but you forced them to be still, buried them within the folds of your proper mourning clothes. Angell might have been a harlot, but she was also a sister and a daughter, and her brothers and father deserved to grieve in peace, to cling to their beloved illusions. Besides, vengeance is best served, not in haste, but well-prepared and cold as the heart that fashioned it. So you sat in your chair and kept a stiff upper lip, and while the rest of the congregation prayed for the soul of Jessica Angell, fallen hero, you closed your eyes and called for me.

And I came. Of course I did. We are of a piece, you and I. I am Alice, and you are the Queen of Hearts. Neither can exist without the other. I am your fire and your hatred, unbreakable and eternal and inexorable as the passing of days. I run when you cannot, breathe for you when your mouth is full of blood and your fickle, feeble heart has turned to lead inside your puny chest. I am spirit unbowed. The world calls me ugly, uncouth, savage. Wicked. But you recognize me for who I am. I am the brutish, grunting survivor who stands astride the bones when all others have fallen and the earth is red and wet with blood and slick with the offal of simpering optimists. I am what lives beneath the skin, and I have saved you times uncounted. I have lusted and hated and cursed and driven you beyond mortal endurance, but I have never lied to you, never made a promise I couldn't keep. I've never left you when the shit got thick. I'm the will to live without its civilized makeup, and you knew that when all the promises of (light)polite society failed, I wouldn't.

So I took you in, shepherded you behind the steadfast walls of your fortress, and its frigid, grey walls insulated you from the nettling, suppurating hurt of Don's abandonment. From behind the safety of its walls, you could watch him stumble around the living room and feel nothing but distant contempt. You could awaken in the night to the dull moonscape of your half-empty bed and feel only blessed numbness. I cannot heal your wounds; such gifts are for kinder natures than mine, but I could grant you the gift of all-consuming anger, that devouring, white-hot tide of rage that devours everything in its path. It is a paradox of human nature that such vicious, unreasoning fury can leave you so serene, so focused on the matter of your own survival. My gift has burnt away the soporific fog of love and attachment and left nothing in its place but the hard, flinty ore of necessity. You know now what you must do, and because of me, you will have the strength to do it, though it leave your hands bloody and your son's heart broken. Because of me, you will survive.

You could leave now if it weren't for the baby, the cherubic, toddling consequence of your folly. You've been setting money by since the day after Angell's funeral, tucking spare money into a Gringotts account beyond the wall. Between that and the funds that have been collecting dust and interest from your Hogwarts days, when Social Security deposited your monthly stipend into what it thought was a Muggle checking account, you could be comfortable, perhaps even wealthy. You can certainly afford a small brownstone on the Hudson and a house elf or two to help with your squalling progeny. It wouldn't take much to contact Hogwarts and prevail upon that tartan do-gooder, McGonagall, to return Dinks. He is, yours, after all, and would gladly return to the blue, archless feet of his mistress. A well-appointed life awaits you beyond the wall if you would but embrace it.

Yet you linger here, a queen deposed by the sainted memory of a murdered whore, bound to these overthrown walls by twenty pounds of baby boy. Junior has not forgotten his love for his father. In his child's eyes, the prince has not fallen, but is a king. He shrieks with glee at the sight of his father and holds out his chubby arms, heedless of the pungent aroma of bourbon and barrel-aged whiskey and unfettered by remembrance of bleary-eyed phantoms who tottered and reeled and meted out justice on the end of a hairbrush. Daddy still scoops him up and holds him tight and swings him above his head in a giddy, weightless orbit that makes him squeal with delight, and if that wondrous, breathless arc wavers and teeters as Daddy wrestles the drink in his veins for gravitational dominance, so much the better. Daddy is still warmth and light and every good thing to your son, whose love is born, not of oaths of fidelity sworn before an altar of glossy wood, but of blood and bone and raw instinct, and you cannot bear to break his heart, too. So, you sit and bleed and recede deeper into the blessed numbness behind your walls.

The Professor was right. Love is a killing weakness. If it weren't, you wouldn't be curled within yourself and puling for the warmth of his hand like every spineless milksop you publicly derided and privately envied from the cold shelter of your squalid spinster's bed.

Cont'd