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Title: Secret Keeper Id--COMPLETE
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laguera25
Fandom: CSI:NY/HP
Rating: FRM
Pairing: Flack/OFC
SPOILERS: HP through HBP; CSI:NY through S6, especially "Pay Up" and "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 immediately after "Skin" in the Flack/Stanhope crackverse.
Part Ia Part Ib Part Ic
He didn't, but he does now, oh, yes. Baby, hey, hey, baby, I'm here. Can you see me? Broken glass crunching beneath his feet and his tie dangling over her dazed, slack finger like a lifeline as he'd bent and scooped her from the floor and the rapidly-spreading pool of blood.
He's comforted far too many people in their last moments, leaned over too many contorted, frightened faces while the life ebbed from their eyes and lips and fruitlessly-flaring nostrils and spun his merciful lies. He's appeared in their fading vision like an angel from on high to offer powerless platitudes and to coax dying declarations from numb lips, He's used countless endearments and honorifics--buddy, sweetheart, kiddo, kid, lady, miss--but he's never called any of them "baby". He doesn't know why it should have fallen from his lips in that moment, a rare and precious gem passed to the wrong outstretched hand.
You were panicked, that's all, offers the thin, uneasy voice of his overburdened conscience. The adrenaline was off the charts, and she was your friend, bleeding there on the floor, and it was the first word that came to mind.
Or maybe, pipes up Shane Casey, slouched in his corner with his greasy hair in his eyes and his Cheshire-cat grin looming out of the shadows like a malignant moon, maybe your heart isn't as faithful and pure as you want to believe. Maybe you wanted a slice of that Angell food cake, after all, and just never got the chance to get yourself a taste. How about it, detective? Maybe your wife isn't as dumb as she looks.
Fuck you, Casey, he snarls. I love her. I wouldn't do that.
Casey crosses his arms and shrugs. You never thought you'd ever blow a man's brains out just because you could, either, he points out with malevolent pragmatism, and sweeps the hair from his eyes with stout, graceless fingers.
The hand on his wrist tightens and grows heavier, and he nearly screams, sure that Angell is going to yank him into the bloody tub to lie with him in a lovers' embrace. What has cast its shadow over your heart? she asks, but it's Rebecca's voice that comes from her lips, and when he blinks again, it's Rebecca he sees, weary and watchful and adrift in blessedly clear water. "Hmm?" she persists, and brings her warm, dripping hand to his cheek, and he presses it into the soft wetness of her palm and reminds himself that it's water, just water, that's running down the side of his face. "What made you crawl into a bottle and as far away from me as you could?"
He doesn't answer her, but sits back on his socked heels and rolls up his sleeves. "I thought I was that guy," he tells the cheap, plastic button that serves as a cufflink. "The guy you thought you were sayin' yes to in church that day. The boy scout who caught the bad guys and helped kittens out of trees and helped little old ladies across the street. I tried to be that guy every day, and most of the time, it was so easy to be the good guy that I thought that's who I really was."
"But you're not?" No condemnation. No surprise, either, no confusion. Just curiosity.
A helpless shrug. "I don't know. I want to be; God. I want to be that guy. For you. For everybody. I want to be the kind of guy Junior can look up to, you know? A stand-up guy who makes the world a better place than it was when he came into it. But how can I be when I shot a guy in the head?"
"The Cade shooting?" Puzzlement now. He can hear the furrow in her brow that he won't let himself see. The water sloshes as she shifts in the tub. "Honey love, the IAB cleared you. They called it a good shoot."
His anger at himself boils over, spills onto her like hot oil. "That doesn't mean it was a good shoot," he snaps. "It just means they can't find proof it wasn't. 'Sides, it's not like they looked that closely. They usually don't strain themselves when a cop killer goes down." His anger has vanished as quickly as it came, and now he's hollow and sick and ashamed.
She's silent, and he's not sure if it's anger or forebearance or the sting of another unexpected and undeserved lash that holds her cutting tongue. Another splash, the furtive plip of an alligator slipping below the murky waters of the bayou.
He clears his throat and shifts, and the joints of his knees creak and groan in protest, and Christ, when did he start feeling so damn old, hunched and stooped and painfully contracted inside his skin? "I lied." The simple utterance is a verbal clean-and-jerk that he feels in his jaws and throat and chest. The pain of it even reaches between his shoulders and squeezes with relentless, hot-nailed pressure. It settles at the base of his spine like an incipient cramp, and he's sure it will still be there tomorrow and for several days thereafter, the hot, bruised-muscle memory of deadlifting a body off a filthy diner floor. "I lied," he repeats, and it hurts just as much the second time.
Nothing this time, not even a stealthy plip., and he chances a quick glance at her. She's supine in her bath seat, toes and breasts peeking above the water and fingers spread in an amphibious splay. Her eyes are half-closed, but he sees the predatory, avid gleam of them behind delicate, water-dark eyelashes. She's waiting, an alligator watching its unsuspecting prey from the concealing murk of the shallows. Just a little closer. A little closer now...
He drops his gaze before her lips part to reveal too many teeth. "I told them Cade was reaching for his gun and was an imminent threat, but-shit." He swallows with an audible click and scrubs desperately at his nape. "But he was already down. I coulda cuffed him, but I saw his gun, and-" He shifts, twists from the truth as if it were a poisonous nostrum. "You have to understand, doll," he pleads, and Christ, his voice is reedy and pathetic, hardly the voice of the strong prince she'd once believed him to be. "It was the fifty-caliber Desert Eagle, the same gun that killed Jess, and all I could see was her lyin' in that wrecked diner with her eyes rollin' in her sockets. All I could feel was the way her blood kept runnin' through my fingers no matter how hard I tried to keep it in. She was my friend, and that bastard shot her like a dog, and she didn't deserve to die like that." His voice has risen steadily, and his words are a tangled, forlorn wail of jumbled syllables and inarticulate anguish. He takes a deep, shuddering breath and sinks onto his heels and keeps his unsteady, astigmatic gaze fixed on the blank, idiotic whiteness of the tub's lip so that he won't have to see the disappointment blossom in her eyes like nightshade. "He killed her, so I killed him," he croaks. "I stood over him and put a bullet right between his murderin' eyes, and then I walked up the stairs and went on being one of the good guys."
He stops, panting, fists clenched and chest heavy with the certitude that now judgment must surely come, that his avenging angel must rise from her repose and cut him down with a point of her finger, that his punishment will come in a flash of red and a welling of blood or in the stony silence of begone. But nothing comes and nothing changes, and when he tears his gaze from the safe blandness of the tub, she's lying in the same position, toes flexing and curling helplessly and fingers splayed atop the water. She blinks indolently at him, beaded water dripping from her lashes like tears, and then she opens her mouth and laughs.
It begins as a low. sporadic rumble in her belly, the uneven, coughing sputter of a reluctant engine, but soon it is a full-throated cackle, and she throws back her head and closes her eyes as though it were delicious. It's a queerly orgasmic posture, eyes closed and mouth open and breasts swaying with the force of her laughter, and it would be erotic if her weren't on his knees beside the tub with his bewildered, murderer's heart lodged in his throat. He doesn't understand. He had imagined many reactions to his confession, but never this one, never this cold, dark amusement.
"You were afraid I'd leave you because you stepped on a maggot?" Soft and incredulous, and she laughs again.
"Goddammit, Rebecca, I killed a man. I shot him in cold blood, just because I could. Just because I didn't ever want to imagine him sittin' in a cell and jerkin' it to the taxpayer-funded cable. I pulled the trigger and became a murderer."
She sits up so suddenly that water slops over the side of the tub and soaks into the knees of his dress pants, and he recoils in shock. She is seldom so fast, his plodding, deliberate, stiff-jointed girl. "No," she hisses, and her eyes are bright and cold and terribly aware inside her face. "No. You listen to me, Donald Flack, and you listen well. You're no more a murderer than is the exterminator who sprays the deli on 38th once a month. Simon Cade was a cockroach, and you stepped on him. The end."
"Not the end, Rebecca. I shot an unarmed man in the head because he shot Jess. How does that make me any better than the asshole who shoots his wife because she's two-timin' him with the mailman?" he demands.
A scornful snort. "Simon Cade wasn't fucking your wife; he shot a cop and tried to shoot you. He forfeited his right to life the moment he drove an armored car into a diner and opened fire. He earned his death with Angell's and lost any hope for mercy or pity when he shot at you. Perhaps my heart is blacker than yours, but I'll not shed a tear or waste a moment's breath on a man who sought to make me a widow and our son an orphan. Cade deserved to die, whether at the end of a needle or at the end of a bullet. You did the world a favor. I can't ask you to be glad of it; such wickedness simply isn't in your damnably Gryffindor nature, but you have no cause to throw your life after his in a fit of misguided contrition. Nobility is the swiftest road to perdition."
He'd like to say he doesn't recognize the hard, merciless creature before him, but he's caught glimpses of it before in the courtroom at Lessing's sentencing hearing and in the reaction to the Paddy Mc-AK shooting, when she'd said much the same. In the mute, bridling creature that had shifted and seethed beside him in the pew and kept its unkind counsel behind its locked teeth. He suspects that this is the endgame, its final metamorphosis. Very soon now, he will see its true form, and the thought fills him with a mixture of swooning dread and dry-mouthed anticipation. He doesn't want to know, and yet, like Bluebeard's wife before him, he must know, must see what lies behind the forbidden door.
"Would you be here if you'd let him leave that room?" she continues.
He thinks of the hatred in Cade's eyes as he'd lain on the floor with a bullet in his gut and a taunting smirk on his face, thinks of the way his eyes had slid to the gun that had been just out of reach. "No," he says. "I mean, I don't know. He might've just escaped out the back door."
"Bullshit," comes the flat retort.
"Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't, but it doesn't matter because he was down and I coulda cuffed him. I just- Life just didn't seem fair. Nobody gave Jess her life back."
She snorts. "So much wasted sentiment. You're a survivor, Don. Everyone is, beneath the skin. Self-preservation is innate. Newborn babies who don't yet have the ability to understand fear understand danger. They scream when they're cold and when they're hungry and when the wolf in desperate teenage mother's clothing dumps them into garbage bin behind the Shake Shack. You could abandon a newborn in a godforsaken sewer where no one will ever hear it, and it will still scream for its life, scream until its body arches from the blankets. Life knows the hunger for survival from the moment it awakens. Life is selfish. Life is greedy. Life will destroy another to preserve itself for just one more moment, one more breath. Life will grind the loftiest ideals beneath its heel if the alternative is death, and it will do the same to a human throat if it must. You wanted to live. You shot him. Self-preservation is the most human emotion of all, and there's no shame in it."
She's sitting so far forward now that her bony knees have drawn up toward her breasts in a bid to ease the strain on her hamstrings, and the hand that grips the side of the tub is a livid, batrachian claw, wet and eldritch and perverse as it spasms and pulses. Her wet hair frames her face in thick hanks, and though her face is drawn and taut with the effort of maintaining her mutinous balance, her eyes are luminous, alight with an unflinching resolve that puckers his skin into gooseflesh and raises his hackles. There's even the sharp curve of a smile in the corners of her bloodless mouth. She looks more a child of Innsmouth than of heaven, eternal and inhuman and deathless.
Almost there, he thinks.
She stares at him a moment longer with her piercing, alien gaze, and then she settles in her seat again and brushes a clump of sodden hair out of her face with stiff, splayed fingers. "Nothing wrong with vengeance, either, come to think of it," she murmurs, and lets her head loll against the wall. She laughs, a satisfied chuckle, and closes her eyes.
"Yeah, well, it might be satisfyin, but it's illegal." He's relieved, but he's also afraid and possessed of the urge to flee, to avert his eyes and scuttle beyond her reach. He has his absolution, his impossible pardon, but he's not sure who has granted it and even less sure that he should accept it. Beware the fruit of the poisoned tree, he thinks deliriously, and watches the ripples created in the water by the steady rise and fall of her belly.
A careless, one-shouldered shrug, and water beads in the prominent ridge of her collarbone like a scattering of diamonds. "Doesn't mean it's immoral."
"You sound like a defense attorney."
Another shrug. "Pragmatism sits more easily on my bones, I suppose. Ideals have a way of disappointing." Her eyes cloud with visions only she can see for an instant, but then she purses her lips and turns that unsettling gaze on him once more. "Besides, splitting hairs requires an exceedingly sharp knife-" A fleeting twist of lip. "And I have those in plenty." She smiles, little more than a moist glint of saliva on enamel.
He doesn't find it at all reassuring. "You didn't kill Lessing when he got off with a trip to the rubber room," he points out.
"No. I didn't," she says softly, and when she smiles this time, he sees it in full splendor, the dybbuk that hides behind her face, the crouching, antediluvian creature of yellow eyes and curved, dirty claws that carry suppurating infection and a mouth that holds too many teeth, teeth yellow with plaque and black with old blood
This. This is what they saw when she was seventeen years old and rolling over bodies on some godforsaken moor in Scotland, breathing magic and stuffing black mud into the open mouths of the dying. Sharp teeth and a hard face and dead eyes. It frightens him, but it fascinates him, too, and he finds himself wondering if her lovely, golden hair fell into their gaping, gasping mouths as she stuffed wet earth into them, a final ray of sunshine to accompany them on their descent into eternal darkness. He wonders if it tasted of wheat.
It's a perverse, nonsensical thought, but he can't shake it as he sinks even further onto his knees. "Who are you?" he croaks.
Her answer does not surprise him. "A survivor." Stark. "And so are you."
He can't think of anything to say after that, and so, he sits with his wet hands on his quadriceps and watches her splayed hand bob on invisible currents. He imagines it holding a fistful of dark, squelching mud.
It's she who breaks the silence. "Love makes monsters of us all," she says, and the tenderness in her voice threatens to undo him. "You loved Jessica Angell. I don't want to know why or how; not now, and not ever, but you loved her." A lament, and she turns her head to study the tile wall and hide the tears that spill from her eyes to mingle with the beads of water stippled on her cheeks.
He hears the coda she refuses to add, whether through kindness or exhaustion. The way you never loved me. His heart throbs painfully inside his constricted chest, and he rises to his knees and plucks her hand from the water. He kisses it and threads his fingers between hers. "How long?"
She offers her answer to the wall. "I always knew, you know," she says listlessly. "That I would never ... That you'd never be able to love me more than the job, but you loved me as well and as much as you could, and for a long time, that was enough--more than enough. It was good, and it was sweet, and I felt lucky and cherished because I knew it was me you wanted to come home to, that you were proud of me. I knew you would always make a place for me." She swipes peevishly at her eyes.
"Then Lessing and his bomb happened, and everything changed. There was no balance anymore. Everything you had went to the job, and every time you tried to restore the balance, to offer me a scrap of time or affection, the job came and gobbled it up. You loved the job so much that you let it take our home and make a shame of me. You left me with nowhere to go and no hope of respite, and I hated it, but I didn't hate you. Oh, I was pissed, and I thought vicious, poisonous things, but I still thought you loved me, still wanted to be with me."
"I did, doll. I do." It hurts to breathe, and there's ground glass in his throat in the shape of the words he speaks. "I never meant for things to get so badly out of whack, Rebecca, but I swear to you that you own my heart. Every inch of it." He squeezes her restless fingers.
A soft, strengthless laugh that bears an uneasy resemblance to the death rattles of white-faced victims bleeding out onto the filthy sidewalk or the pristine, white linens of a gurney, and he knows she doesn't believe him. "How long?" he repeats.
She licks her lips and blinks at the wall. "I still thought you loved me, even after that. Even after you called to extend my sentence in that beautiful purgatory. I thought it was just the job being a merciless bitch, playing on your maddening, glorious need to be someone's hero. And then-,"
She swallows with an audible click. "I know I'm not good at much. I'm not good at being a domestic goddess or a master-bedroom porn star, and evidently, I'm not much for being the supportive officer's wife, but I am good at that. In fact, there's nobody better than me when it comes to speaking the secret language of the wordless. Charlie, maybe, but not even he knows all the dialects that numbers speak or how to interpret the stories they can tell with their rigid tongues. I can hear their music."
"I don't get many chances to shine. I'm a research mathematician who spends most of her time breathing chalk dust and wasting her breath on bored, distracted children in adult skins just counting the minutes until class is over. Every now and then, I stumble over a bright mind that wants to learn, but most of my days are spent staring at a sea of bovine faces, proving my worth and intelligence to skeptical parents who can't see past the wheels bearing up my ass, and sitting in interminable departmental meetings wherein Krantz and a member of the Board of Regents bloviates on the government's latest testing mandates. I'm just another dull bead in this country's crumbling abacus. Even when we math nerds gather at conventions, it's usually just an excuse to play convoluted math games and perform the nerdy version of the Venice Beach posedown. Everyone needs what we do, but no one really gives a damn how we do it."
"So, when Charlie and I finished our paper on biomechanical mathematics and their practical applications in the development of restorative medical procedures and prostheses and NYU extended the invitation to present it to a group of botoxed philanthropists and influential laypeople, I was so excited. It was a chance to show off, sure, but mostly, it was finally my chance to show off for you, my one night to make you proud. Math makes me feel alive and beautiful, and that night, at the presentation, my plumage was on full display. What little light I have was shining as brightly as it could. I was as beautiful as I was ever going to be that night, and I still couldn't turn your head." Her voice catches and wavers, a tightrope walker pinwheeling on her narrow nylon ledge, but it doesn't break and neither does the rest of her. Her face remains impassive save for a fleeting, contractive twitch in her jaw and her gaze remains fixed on the tile wall.
He didn't come. He had important things do do, his dead sister tells Gert Rabinowicz and the stupid, bare floor of the P.S. 109 green room, and he's moving before he's aware of it, spinning on his throbbing knees like a crazed Solid Gold dancer and scrabbling frantically for the purchase of the toilet seat. He grips it in numb, frozen hands and heaves himself upright and over the bowl just as the remnants of the pastrami on rye he'd scarfed in a thirty-second lunch outside the precinct puts in an unpleasant reappearance. His nose and eyes burn with tears and bile, and he tastes rye and spicy mustard and the salty, garlicky meatiness of pastrami and the burnt-earth bitterness of coffee. He retches and squeezes the toilet seat in cold, convulsing fingers, and though he screws his eyes shut, he can still see Diana in her recital finery, howling her misery into the protective, encircling arms of Gert Rabinowicz. The anguish in her eyes and the snot on her upper lip and the clawing desperation with which she'd clung to the arms that cradled her. He can still hear her, too, the shrill, wounded-animal keening of her, lost and raw and brimming with a nameless rage that he had nevertheless understood. It had been the cry of the fatally betrayed, equal parts war cry and mournful wail, and as his stomach does its best to turn itself inside out, he wonders if this is who she might have become in the fullness of time, this cold survivor of impossibly-steep angles and fathomless hollows and insufficient soul to paper the holes.
But in truth, he can muster precious little scorn. He remembers himself as well, the seething, atavistic, hatred for his father that had coated the back of his throat like clove honey and gall as he'd lain in the dark beside his feverish, sleeping sister and watched the slumped form of his father on the edge of her unoccupied bed, slack hands dangling between his naked knees and tears carving silver tracks down a face he couldn't see. He remembers the urge to bite and snap and tear his father's indecisively-hovering fingers from his hand. He remembers reveling in his mother's righteous anger as it had wafted through the thin walls of their house like the smoke from a great and terrible fire, remembers how his soul had sung as she'd lain his father bare and called out his sin in a clear, brittle voice of cracked plaster and shattered china. Most of all, he remembers how right he'd felt as he'd curled protectively around his sister and sworn never to be like that, how sure and goddamned holy as he'd stared at his father's dangling hands and hairy shins. He'd laugh if he could, but his spasming throat is choked with burning clots of guilt and slaw.
He is no stranger to failure, or to penance before the porcelain god. He has grieved with his stomach since he was a boy, has knelt here to shed the tears his eyes can never seem to express, but this time, there is no cool hand to comfort him, no brush of his mother's hand over his straining back or clammy brow, no cushioning softness of her housecoat against his burning temple as she croons a mother's solace into his ear. There isn't even the bony, blue-veined comfort of Gert Rabinowicz, that venerable angel in an old woman's skin who had borne his sister up and eased her out of that hard, dead, grey room, stroking her hectic face and muttering Yiddish endearments that had sounded like prayers offered up in God's native tongue. There isn't even the unseen weight of his father hovering just outside the bathroom door with the sports section rolled in one broad, gun-callused hand, a poor substitute for the sure heft of his favorite nightstick.
He retches again and again, retches until his jaws creak and pop and his throat prickles and burns with a thousand hot darning needles. He heaves until his chest aches and his stomach is bruised and sprung and his arms are leaden sticks of soft tallow on the ends of his sore shoulders. I'm not that guy, he thinks as thick strings of clear bile threaten to suffocate him and black spots bloom before his bulging eyes. I'm not that guy.
The fit passes, though the nausea remains, greasy and heavy in the pit of his stomach, and he stays on his knees and rests his forehead on the shelf of his forearm. There is no sound in the room save for his ragged breathing as it echoes hollowly inside the cool, damp cavern of the toilet bowl. There isn't even the sound of Rebecca splashing and scrabbling and flailing in order to drag herself out of the tub and reach him. He takes a deep breath that tastes of Clorox and vomit and turns to look at her.
She hasn't moved, and her face is an inscrutable mask. Only her eyes betray any emotion, and though there is tenderness and sorrow and love, there is also a glimmer of an emotion he cannot quite place, a flicker of something hard and bitter and older than the knowledge of fire. It's the cold, dead, assessing gleam of a predator's yellow eye in the dense, green underbrush, and he can't shake the feeling that she's taking his measure. And oh, but somehow, he thinks she finds him wanting. He gropes for the toilet handle with nerveless fingers, and as the great god Bog consumes his sacrifice, he lets himself slide to the floor and sags dispiritedly against the toilet, a deposed Roman prince in final, disconsolate repose.
"I don't wanna be that guy," he says plaintively.
"But you are," she says implacably, and stirs the water with pale, thin fingers.
Yes, he supposes he is. His head is so heavy, and he lets it droop to his chest and stares at the outline of his toes, which press against the nappy cotton of his socks like hastily-covered bodies. "Why?" he asks. It's an effort, like pushing water from drowning lungs. "Why did you stay if you felt that way? Why stay in my bed? Why did you have Junior with me if you were so damn sure I didn't love you?"
"Because I love you," she answers, and the ferocity of it startles him. He raises his head to find her clutching the side of the tub again, holding herself in some semblance of upright by sheer force of will. "Because you weren't always that guy, and because I want to believe." She collapses against her bath seat with an undignified, bone-rattling slap of wet flesh. More water sloshes over the side of the tub, and the pragmatist in him whispers of mildew and moldy grout.
"Come?" she implores, and holds out her arms.
He goes to her. Of course he does. He has never been able to do anything else. It takes him but a few moments to shed his clothes. Most of them fall into the water on the floor. He finds he doesn't care. He eases her gently forward as he prepares to step in behind her, and he's shocked at the thinness of her skin and the prominence of her scapula beneath his hand. She's stretched too thin, his girl, and he briefly wonders just who is housed in this shelter of flesh and bone. He shifts and lifts and arranges until she's resting on him, her ass settled against his quiescent prick and the fleshy heaviness of his balls and her head lolling against his breastbone. She should be so much heavier, but it's as though her bones have been hollowed, and he loops an arm around her belly to keep her from flying away.
She turns in his embrace, burrows into his warmth, and he wills it into her. She presses her hand to the center of his chest, and for an instant, he's sure she's going to push him beneath the water and hold him there until his hidden sin rises to the surface, a fire-eyed inquisitor intent on rooting out the witch among them. But she does no such thing. She only runs her fingers through the sparse hairs of his chest and plants a soft feverish kiss on his rotator cuff. "I love you," she breathes into his flesh, and it is both blessing and curse.
He reaches up to stroke her hair. "I love you, too, Rebecca. Always. I love you. I love-"
He enfolds her in a reverent embrace. Once, in a land and time ruled by zealots and madmen, the water had carried judgment on its tides. Guilt or innocence had been proven by its caprice. The innocent had sunk to the bottom of the river and gone to God on its slow and steady current. The guilty had remained afloat and gone to their eternal reward on a cloud of noxious smoke and all-consuming flame.
He takes a deep breath and tightens his grip and closes his eyes and waits for the water to decide.
Author:
laguera25Fandom: CSI:NY/HP
Rating: FRM
Pairing: Flack/OFC
SPOILERS: HP through HBP; CSI:NY through S6, especially "Pay Up" and "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 immediately after "Skin" in the Flack/Stanhope crackverse.
Part Ia Part Ib Part Ic
He didn't, but he does now, oh, yes. Baby, hey, hey, baby, I'm here. Can you see me? Broken glass crunching beneath his feet and his tie dangling over her dazed, slack finger like a lifeline as he'd bent and scooped her from the floor and the rapidly-spreading pool of blood.
He's comforted far too many people in their last moments, leaned over too many contorted, frightened faces while the life ebbed from their eyes and lips and fruitlessly-flaring nostrils and spun his merciful lies. He's appeared in their fading vision like an angel from on high to offer powerless platitudes and to coax dying declarations from numb lips, He's used countless endearments and honorifics--buddy, sweetheart, kiddo, kid, lady, miss--but he's never called any of them "baby". He doesn't know why it should have fallen from his lips in that moment, a rare and precious gem passed to the wrong outstretched hand.
You were panicked, that's all, offers the thin, uneasy voice of his overburdened conscience. The adrenaline was off the charts, and she was your friend, bleeding there on the floor, and it was the first word that came to mind.
Or maybe, pipes up Shane Casey, slouched in his corner with his greasy hair in his eyes and his Cheshire-cat grin looming out of the shadows like a malignant moon, maybe your heart isn't as faithful and pure as you want to believe. Maybe you wanted a slice of that Angell food cake, after all, and just never got the chance to get yourself a taste. How about it, detective? Maybe your wife isn't as dumb as she looks.
Fuck you, Casey, he snarls. I love her. I wouldn't do that.
Casey crosses his arms and shrugs. You never thought you'd ever blow a man's brains out just because you could, either, he points out with malevolent pragmatism, and sweeps the hair from his eyes with stout, graceless fingers.
The hand on his wrist tightens and grows heavier, and he nearly screams, sure that Angell is going to yank him into the bloody tub to lie with him in a lovers' embrace. What has cast its shadow over your heart? she asks, but it's Rebecca's voice that comes from her lips, and when he blinks again, it's Rebecca he sees, weary and watchful and adrift in blessedly clear water. "Hmm?" she persists, and brings her warm, dripping hand to his cheek, and he presses it into the soft wetness of her palm and reminds himself that it's water, just water, that's running down the side of his face. "What made you crawl into a bottle and as far away from me as you could?"
He doesn't answer her, but sits back on his socked heels and rolls up his sleeves. "I thought I was that guy," he tells the cheap, plastic button that serves as a cufflink. "The guy you thought you were sayin' yes to in church that day. The boy scout who caught the bad guys and helped kittens out of trees and helped little old ladies across the street. I tried to be that guy every day, and most of the time, it was so easy to be the good guy that I thought that's who I really was."
"But you're not?" No condemnation. No surprise, either, no confusion. Just curiosity.
A helpless shrug. "I don't know. I want to be; God. I want to be that guy. For you. For everybody. I want to be the kind of guy Junior can look up to, you know? A stand-up guy who makes the world a better place than it was when he came into it. But how can I be when I shot a guy in the head?"
"The Cade shooting?" Puzzlement now. He can hear the furrow in her brow that he won't let himself see. The water sloshes as she shifts in the tub. "Honey love, the IAB cleared you. They called it a good shoot."
His anger at himself boils over, spills onto her like hot oil. "That doesn't mean it was a good shoot," he snaps. "It just means they can't find proof it wasn't. 'Sides, it's not like they looked that closely. They usually don't strain themselves when a cop killer goes down." His anger has vanished as quickly as it came, and now he's hollow and sick and ashamed.
She's silent, and he's not sure if it's anger or forebearance or the sting of another unexpected and undeserved lash that holds her cutting tongue. Another splash, the furtive plip of an alligator slipping below the murky waters of the bayou.
He clears his throat and shifts, and the joints of his knees creak and groan in protest, and Christ, when did he start feeling so damn old, hunched and stooped and painfully contracted inside his skin? "I lied." The simple utterance is a verbal clean-and-jerk that he feels in his jaws and throat and chest. The pain of it even reaches between his shoulders and squeezes with relentless, hot-nailed pressure. It settles at the base of his spine like an incipient cramp, and he's sure it will still be there tomorrow and for several days thereafter, the hot, bruised-muscle memory of deadlifting a body off a filthy diner floor. "I lied," he repeats, and it hurts just as much the second time.
Nothing this time, not even a stealthy plip., and he chances a quick glance at her. She's supine in her bath seat, toes and breasts peeking above the water and fingers spread in an amphibious splay. Her eyes are half-closed, but he sees the predatory, avid gleam of them behind delicate, water-dark eyelashes. She's waiting, an alligator watching its unsuspecting prey from the concealing murk of the shallows. Just a little closer. A little closer now...
He drops his gaze before her lips part to reveal too many teeth. "I told them Cade was reaching for his gun and was an imminent threat, but-shit." He swallows with an audible click and scrubs desperately at his nape. "But he was already down. I coulda cuffed him, but I saw his gun, and-" He shifts, twists from the truth as if it were a poisonous nostrum. "You have to understand, doll," he pleads, and Christ, his voice is reedy and pathetic, hardly the voice of the strong prince she'd once believed him to be. "It was the fifty-caliber Desert Eagle, the same gun that killed Jess, and all I could see was her lyin' in that wrecked diner with her eyes rollin' in her sockets. All I could feel was the way her blood kept runnin' through my fingers no matter how hard I tried to keep it in. She was my friend, and that bastard shot her like a dog, and she didn't deserve to die like that." His voice has risen steadily, and his words are a tangled, forlorn wail of jumbled syllables and inarticulate anguish. He takes a deep, shuddering breath and sinks onto his heels and keeps his unsteady, astigmatic gaze fixed on the blank, idiotic whiteness of the tub's lip so that he won't have to see the disappointment blossom in her eyes like nightshade. "He killed her, so I killed him," he croaks. "I stood over him and put a bullet right between his murderin' eyes, and then I walked up the stairs and went on being one of the good guys."
He stops, panting, fists clenched and chest heavy with the certitude that now judgment must surely come, that his avenging angel must rise from her repose and cut him down with a point of her finger, that his punishment will come in a flash of red and a welling of blood or in the stony silence of begone. But nothing comes and nothing changes, and when he tears his gaze from the safe blandness of the tub, she's lying in the same position, toes flexing and curling helplessly and fingers splayed atop the water. She blinks indolently at him, beaded water dripping from her lashes like tears, and then she opens her mouth and laughs.
It begins as a low. sporadic rumble in her belly, the uneven, coughing sputter of a reluctant engine, but soon it is a full-throated cackle, and she throws back her head and closes her eyes as though it were delicious. It's a queerly orgasmic posture, eyes closed and mouth open and breasts swaying with the force of her laughter, and it would be erotic if her weren't on his knees beside the tub with his bewildered, murderer's heart lodged in his throat. He doesn't understand. He had imagined many reactions to his confession, but never this one, never this cold, dark amusement.
"You were afraid I'd leave you because you stepped on a maggot?" Soft and incredulous, and she laughs again.
"Goddammit, Rebecca, I killed a man. I shot him in cold blood, just because I could. Just because I didn't ever want to imagine him sittin' in a cell and jerkin' it to the taxpayer-funded cable. I pulled the trigger and became a murderer."
She sits up so suddenly that water slops over the side of the tub and soaks into the knees of his dress pants, and he recoils in shock. She is seldom so fast, his plodding, deliberate, stiff-jointed girl. "No," she hisses, and her eyes are bright and cold and terribly aware inside her face. "No. You listen to me, Donald Flack, and you listen well. You're no more a murderer than is the exterminator who sprays the deli on 38th once a month. Simon Cade was a cockroach, and you stepped on him. The end."
"Not the end, Rebecca. I shot an unarmed man in the head because he shot Jess. How does that make me any better than the asshole who shoots his wife because she's two-timin' him with the mailman?" he demands.
A scornful snort. "Simon Cade wasn't fucking your wife; he shot a cop and tried to shoot you. He forfeited his right to life the moment he drove an armored car into a diner and opened fire. He earned his death with Angell's and lost any hope for mercy or pity when he shot at you. Perhaps my heart is blacker than yours, but I'll not shed a tear or waste a moment's breath on a man who sought to make me a widow and our son an orphan. Cade deserved to die, whether at the end of a needle or at the end of a bullet. You did the world a favor. I can't ask you to be glad of it; such wickedness simply isn't in your damnably Gryffindor nature, but you have no cause to throw your life after his in a fit of misguided contrition. Nobility is the swiftest road to perdition."
He'd like to say he doesn't recognize the hard, merciless creature before him, but he's caught glimpses of it before in the courtroom at Lessing's sentencing hearing and in the reaction to the Paddy Mc-AK shooting, when she'd said much the same. In the mute, bridling creature that had shifted and seethed beside him in the pew and kept its unkind counsel behind its locked teeth. He suspects that this is the endgame, its final metamorphosis. Very soon now, he will see its true form, and the thought fills him with a mixture of swooning dread and dry-mouthed anticipation. He doesn't want to know, and yet, like Bluebeard's wife before him, he must know, must see what lies behind the forbidden door.
"Would you be here if you'd let him leave that room?" she continues.
He thinks of the hatred in Cade's eyes as he'd lain on the floor with a bullet in his gut and a taunting smirk on his face, thinks of the way his eyes had slid to the gun that had been just out of reach. "No," he says. "I mean, I don't know. He might've just escaped out the back door."
"Bullshit," comes the flat retort.
"Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't, but it doesn't matter because he was down and I coulda cuffed him. I just- Life just didn't seem fair. Nobody gave Jess her life back."
She snorts. "So much wasted sentiment. You're a survivor, Don. Everyone is, beneath the skin. Self-preservation is innate. Newborn babies who don't yet have the ability to understand fear understand danger. They scream when they're cold and when they're hungry and when the wolf in desperate teenage mother's clothing dumps them into garbage bin behind the Shake Shack. You could abandon a newborn in a godforsaken sewer where no one will ever hear it, and it will still scream for its life, scream until its body arches from the blankets. Life knows the hunger for survival from the moment it awakens. Life is selfish. Life is greedy. Life will destroy another to preserve itself for just one more moment, one more breath. Life will grind the loftiest ideals beneath its heel if the alternative is death, and it will do the same to a human throat if it must. You wanted to live. You shot him. Self-preservation is the most human emotion of all, and there's no shame in it."
She's sitting so far forward now that her bony knees have drawn up toward her breasts in a bid to ease the strain on her hamstrings, and the hand that grips the side of the tub is a livid, batrachian claw, wet and eldritch and perverse as it spasms and pulses. Her wet hair frames her face in thick hanks, and though her face is drawn and taut with the effort of maintaining her mutinous balance, her eyes are luminous, alight with an unflinching resolve that puckers his skin into gooseflesh and raises his hackles. There's even the sharp curve of a smile in the corners of her bloodless mouth. She looks more a child of Innsmouth than of heaven, eternal and inhuman and deathless.
Almost there, he thinks.
She stares at him a moment longer with her piercing, alien gaze, and then she settles in her seat again and brushes a clump of sodden hair out of her face with stiff, splayed fingers. "Nothing wrong with vengeance, either, come to think of it," she murmurs, and lets her head loll against the wall. She laughs, a satisfied chuckle, and closes her eyes.
"Yeah, well, it might be satisfyin, but it's illegal." He's relieved, but he's also afraid and possessed of the urge to flee, to avert his eyes and scuttle beyond her reach. He has his absolution, his impossible pardon, but he's not sure who has granted it and even less sure that he should accept it. Beware the fruit of the poisoned tree, he thinks deliriously, and watches the ripples created in the water by the steady rise and fall of her belly.
A careless, one-shouldered shrug, and water beads in the prominent ridge of her collarbone like a scattering of diamonds. "Doesn't mean it's immoral."
"You sound like a defense attorney."
Another shrug. "Pragmatism sits more easily on my bones, I suppose. Ideals have a way of disappointing." Her eyes cloud with visions only she can see for an instant, but then she purses her lips and turns that unsettling gaze on him once more. "Besides, splitting hairs requires an exceedingly sharp knife-" A fleeting twist of lip. "And I have those in plenty." She smiles, little more than a moist glint of saliva on enamel.
He doesn't find it at all reassuring. "You didn't kill Lessing when he got off with a trip to the rubber room," he points out.
"No. I didn't," she says softly, and when she smiles this time, he sees it in full splendor, the dybbuk that hides behind her face, the crouching, antediluvian creature of yellow eyes and curved, dirty claws that carry suppurating infection and a mouth that holds too many teeth, teeth yellow with plaque and black with old blood
This. This is what they saw when she was seventeen years old and rolling over bodies on some godforsaken moor in Scotland, breathing magic and stuffing black mud into the open mouths of the dying. Sharp teeth and a hard face and dead eyes. It frightens him, but it fascinates him, too, and he finds himself wondering if her lovely, golden hair fell into their gaping, gasping mouths as she stuffed wet earth into them, a final ray of sunshine to accompany them on their descent into eternal darkness. He wonders if it tasted of wheat.
It's a perverse, nonsensical thought, but he can't shake it as he sinks even further onto his knees. "Who are you?" he croaks.
Her answer does not surprise him. "A survivor." Stark. "And so are you."
He can't think of anything to say after that, and so, he sits with his wet hands on his quadriceps and watches her splayed hand bob on invisible currents. He imagines it holding a fistful of dark, squelching mud.
It's she who breaks the silence. "Love makes monsters of us all," she says, and the tenderness in her voice threatens to undo him. "You loved Jessica Angell. I don't want to know why or how; not now, and not ever, but you loved her." A lament, and she turns her head to study the tile wall and hide the tears that spill from her eyes to mingle with the beads of water stippled on her cheeks.
He hears the coda she refuses to add, whether through kindness or exhaustion. The way you never loved me. His heart throbs painfully inside his constricted chest, and he rises to his knees and plucks her hand from the water. He kisses it and threads his fingers between hers. "How long?"
She offers her answer to the wall. "I always knew, you know," she says listlessly. "That I would never ... That you'd never be able to love me more than the job, but you loved me as well and as much as you could, and for a long time, that was enough--more than enough. It was good, and it was sweet, and I felt lucky and cherished because I knew it was me you wanted to come home to, that you were proud of me. I knew you would always make a place for me." She swipes peevishly at her eyes.
"Then Lessing and his bomb happened, and everything changed. There was no balance anymore. Everything you had went to the job, and every time you tried to restore the balance, to offer me a scrap of time or affection, the job came and gobbled it up. You loved the job so much that you let it take our home and make a shame of me. You left me with nowhere to go and no hope of respite, and I hated it, but I didn't hate you. Oh, I was pissed, and I thought vicious, poisonous things, but I still thought you loved me, still wanted to be with me."
"I did, doll. I do." It hurts to breathe, and there's ground glass in his throat in the shape of the words he speaks. "I never meant for things to get so badly out of whack, Rebecca, but I swear to you that you own my heart. Every inch of it." He squeezes her restless fingers.
A soft, strengthless laugh that bears an uneasy resemblance to the death rattles of white-faced victims bleeding out onto the filthy sidewalk or the pristine, white linens of a gurney, and he knows she doesn't believe him. "How long?" he repeats.
She licks her lips and blinks at the wall. "I still thought you loved me, even after that. Even after you called to extend my sentence in that beautiful purgatory. I thought it was just the job being a merciless bitch, playing on your maddening, glorious need to be someone's hero. And then-,"
She swallows with an audible click. "I know I'm not good at much. I'm not good at being a domestic goddess or a master-bedroom porn star, and evidently, I'm not much for being the supportive officer's wife, but I am good at that. In fact, there's nobody better than me when it comes to speaking the secret language of the wordless. Charlie, maybe, but not even he knows all the dialects that numbers speak or how to interpret the stories they can tell with their rigid tongues. I can hear their music."
"I don't get many chances to shine. I'm a research mathematician who spends most of her time breathing chalk dust and wasting her breath on bored, distracted children in adult skins just counting the minutes until class is over. Every now and then, I stumble over a bright mind that wants to learn, but most of my days are spent staring at a sea of bovine faces, proving my worth and intelligence to skeptical parents who can't see past the wheels bearing up my ass, and sitting in interminable departmental meetings wherein Krantz and a member of the Board of Regents bloviates on the government's latest testing mandates. I'm just another dull bead in this country's crumbling abacus. Even when we math nerds gather at conventions, it's usually just an excuse to play convoluted math games and perform the nerdy version of the Venice Beach posedown. Everyone needs what we do, but no one really gives a damn how we do it."
"So, when Charlie and I finished our paper on biomechanical mathematics and their practical applications in the development of restorative medical procedures and prostheses and NYU extended the invitation to present it to a group of botoxed philanthropists and influential laypeople, I was so excited. It was a chance to show off, sure, but mostly, it was finally my chance to show off for you, my one night to make you proud. Math makes me feel alive and beautiful, and that night, at the presentation, my plumage was on full display. What little light I have was shining as brightly as it could. I was as beautiful as I was ever going to be that night, and I still couldn't turn your head." Her voice catches and wavers, a tightrope walker pinwheeling on her narrow nylon ledge, but it doesn't break and neither does the rest of her. Her face remains impassive save for a fleeting, contractive twitch in her jaw and her gaze remains fixed on the tile wall.
He didn't come. He had important things do do, his dead sister tells Gert Rabinowicz and the stupid, bare floor of the P.S. 109 green room, and he's moving before he's aware of it, spinning on his throbbing knees like a crazed Solid Gold dancer and scrabbling frantically for the purchase of the toilet seat. He grips it in numb, frozen hands and heaves himself upright and over the bowl just as the remnants of the pastrami on rye he'd scarfed in a thirty-second lunch outside the precinct puts in an unpleasant reappearance. His nose and eyes burn with tears and bile, and he tastes rye and spicy mustard and the salty, garlicky meatiness of pastrami and the burnt-earth bitterness of coffee. He retches and squeezes the toilet seat in cold, convulsing fingers, and though he screws his eyes shut, he can still see Diana in her recital finery, howling her misery into the protective, encircling arms of Gert Rabinowicz. The anguish in her eyes and the snot on her upper lip and the clawing desperation with which she'd clung to the arms that cradled her. He can still hear her, too, the shrill, wounded-animal keening of her, lost and raw and brimming with a nameless rage that he had nevertheless understood. It had been the cry of the fatally betrayed, equal parts war cry and mournful wail, and as his stomach does its best to turn itself inside out, he wonders if this is who she might have become in the fullness of time, this cold survivor of impossibly-steep angles and fathomless hollows and insufficient soul to paper the holes.
But in truth, he can muster precious little scorn. He remembers himself as well, the seething, atavistic, hatred for his father that had coated the back of his throat like clove honey and gall as he'd lain in the dark beside his feverish, sleeping sister and watched the slumped form of his father on the edge of her unoccupied bed, slack hands dangling between his naked knees and tears carving silver tracks down a face he couldn't see. He remembers the urge to bite and snap and tear his father's indecisively-hovering fingers from his hand. He remembers reveling in his mother's righteous anger as it had wafted through the thin walls of their house like the smoke from a great and terrible fire, remembers how his soul had sung as she'd lain his father bare and called out his sin in a clear, brittle voice of cracked plaster and shattered china. Most of all, he remembers how right he'd felt as he'd curled protectively around his sister and sworn never to be like that, how sure and goddamned holy as he'd stared at his father's dangling hands and hairy shins. He'd laugh if he could, but his spasming throat is choked with burning clots of guilt and slaw.
He is no stranger to failure, or to penance before the porcelain god. He has grieved with his stomach since he was a boy, has knelt here to shed the tears his eyes can never seem to express, but this time, there is no cool hand to comfort him, no brush of his mother's hand over his straining back or clammy brow, no cushioning softness of her housecoat against his burning temple as she croons a mother's solace into his ear. There isn't even the bony, blue-veined comfort of Gert Rabinowicz, that venerable angel in an old woman's skin who had borne his sister up and eased her out of that hard, dead, grey room, stroking her hectic face and muttering Yiddish endearments that had sounded like prayers offered up in God's native tongue. There isn't even the unseen weight of his father hovering just outside the bathroom door with the sports section rolled in one broad, gun-callused hand, a poor substitute for the sure heft of his favorite nightstick.
He retches again and again, retches until his jaws creak and pop and his throat prickles and burns with a thousand hot darning needles. He heaves until his chest aches and his stomach is bruised and sprung and his arms are leaden sticks of soft tallow on the ends of his sore shoulders. I'm not that guy, he thinks as thick strings of clear bile threaten to suffocate him and black spots bloom before his bulging eyes. I'm not that guy.
The fit passes, though the nausea remains, greasy and heavy in the pit of his stomach, and he stays on his knees and rests his forehead on the shelf of his forearm. There is no sound in the room save for his ragged breathing as it echoes hollowly inside the cool, damp cavern of the toilet bowl. There isn't even the sound of Rebecca splashing and scrabbling and flailing in order to drag herself out of the tub and reach him. He takes a deep breath that tastes of Clorox and vomit and turns to look at her.
She hasn't moved, and her face is an inscrutable mask. Only her eyes betray any emotion, and though there is tenderness and sorrow and love, there is also a glimmer of an emotion he cannot quite place, a flicker of something hard and bitter and older than the knowledge of fire. It's the cold, dead, assessing gleam of a predator's yellow eye in the dense, green underbrush, and he can't shake the feeling that she's taking his measure. And oh, but somehow, he thinks she finds him wanting. He gropes for the toilet handle with nerveless fingers, and as the great god Bog consumes his sacrifice, he lets himself slide to the floor and sags dispiritedly against the toilet, a deposed Roman prince in final, disconsolate repose.
"I don't wanna be that guy," he says plaintively.
"But you are," she says implacably, and stirs the water with pale, thin fingers.
Yes, he supposes he is. His head is so heavy, and he lets it droop to his chest and stares at the outline of his toes, which press against the nappy cotton of his socks like hastily-covered bodies. "Why?" he asks. It's an effort, like pushing water from drowning lungs. "Why did you stay if you felt that way? Why stay in my bed? Why did you have Junior with me if you were so damn sure I didn't love you?"
"Because I love you," she answers, and the ferocity of it startles him. He raises his head to find her clutching the side of the tub again, holding herself in some semblance of upright by sheer force of will. "Because you weren't always that guy, and because I want to believe." She collapses against her bath seat with an undignified, bone-rattling slap of wet flesh. More water sloshes over the side of the tub, and the pragmatist in him whispers of mildew and moldy grout.
"Come?" she implores, and holds out her arms.
He goes to her. Of course he does. He has never been able to do anything else. It takes him but a few moments to shed his clothes. Most of them fall into the water on the floor. He finds he doesn't care. He eases her gently forward as he prepares to step in behind her, and he's shocked at the thinness of her skin and the prominence of her scapula beneath his hand. She's stretched too thin, his girl, and he briefly wonders just who is housed in this shelter of flesh and bone. He shifts and lifts and arranges until she's resting on him, her ass settled against his quiescent prick and the fleshy heaviness of his balls and her head lolling against his breastbone. She should be so much heavier, but it's as though her bones have been hollowed, and he loops an arm around her belly to keep her from flying away.
She turns in his embrace, burrows into his warmth, and he wills it into her. She presses her hand to the center of his chest, and for an instant, he's sure she's going to push him beneath the water and hold him there until his hidden sin rises to the surface, a fire-eyed inquisitor intent on rooting out the witch among them. But she does no such thing. She only runs her fingers through the sparse hairs of his chest and plants a soft feverish kiss on his rotator cuff. "I love you," she breathes into his flesh, and it is both blessing and curse.
He reaches up to stroke her hair. "I love you, too, Rebecca. Always. I love you. I love-"
He enfolds her in a reverent embrace. Once, in a land and time ruled by zealots and madmen, the water had carried judgment on its tides. Guilt or innocence had been proven by its caprice. The innocent had sunk to the bottom of the river and gone to God on its slow and steady current. The guilty had remained afloat and gone to their eternal reward on a cloud of noxious smoke and all-consuming flame.
He takes a deep breath and tightens his grip and closes his eyes and waits for the water to decide.