on these better nights

[amnesty] Battlestar Galactica: Few Paths Forbidden

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 02:29:02 GMT

Summary: Trigger by trigger, drink by drink, Lee died all the times he met Helena Cain.

Characters: Lee Adama, Helena Cain

Warnings: Lots of character death. Alternate universe.

Background: Total crackfic about what would have happened had Lee been on Pegasus during the Cylon attack. I honestly think he would have gotten himself killed early on, but this goes a way darker route. This Lee is definitely not the Lee that emerged on Galactica. Incomplete due to many reasons, the primary one being that it jumps around and lacks a lot of the transition scenes I would have liked to have gotten around to writing. I did, however, change the ending for this post (and last edit), just to give it finality. I actually really like how it ends now - fits the tone of the story much, much better.

Few Paths Forbidden
by Llethe

The first time he met Helena Cain, she was a commander, and he was a sophomore at U-Cap Delphi. It had been a Friday afternoon in Caprica City, unusually cold, rainy, and altogether shitty for the early summer season. Helena - "Lee, I'm on leave, and you're nowhere near the Colonial Fleet; drop the 'commander'" - had opted out of wearing either a bra or a shirt that could properly enhance that fact. Before he exchanged one "hello" with her, he'd already known her cup size.

She had shook his hand, narrowed her eyes without dropping her gaze from his, and smirked. At nineteen, he'd been obtuse enough to smirk back, despite his upper Caprican upbringing whispering "she's white trash, Lee, look at her" in his ear.

Nonetheless, he was forty minutes late in bringing Commander Cain, Ophion, to meet Commander Adama, Valkyrie. "My flight was a bit late, and I got turned around in the terminal. All apologies, Bill," Helena had covered for them both. Afterward, Lee spent the afternoon in his best friend's driveway, trying his damndest to scrub come out of his car's backseat upholstery and dodge questions of who helped him frak up his car.

Lee never told.

---

The next time Lee met Helena Cain was four years after their adventure in his backseat.

Pegasus was his first battlestar, exclusive of flight pod qualifications during flight school. Atlantia had been a sure thing, he'd thought, before he'd really thought about it and concluded that the good Commander had pulled some weight. Long story short, he was frakked and on the Colonial Fleet's number two battlestar instead of its first, where he belonged.

The first he saw of her was two days after his arrival. The predatory look in her eyes and the quirk that pulled the corners of her mouth upward did everything to enhance his anxiety. (He was more than frakked; he was batfrakked. Totally batfrakked.)

Nothing came of it. There were no late night pages to her quarters, no inappropriate eye fraks. In fact, he only saw her as much as a junior pilot customarily sees his or her commander, until one afternoon four months in.

"Do you drink?" she'd asked, a half-full, transparent carafe of what looked to be scotch in her hand. She'd already brought out two cups.

"It depends on the occasion, Commander."

"Then let's call today one of those occasions, Lieutenant."

...

Cain gave him no time to question, to interrupt what came next. Her tone was cool, even, and, oh, was her caustic technique meticulous. "That said, I'll just cut to it. Early this morning, there was an accident involving your brother. His Viper malfunctioned, he crashed, and he died."

Lee stared for a moment, his mouth cotton-dry, his throat tight. He fell back onto training, threw himself into autopilot without thinking twice (and if he forgot to press the clutch down first, then no one but him heard the shrill, awful grind or saw the damage left in the wake), and fooled the human in him into believing that Lieutenant, J.G. Adama was just one of the few pilots who placed into Vipers but couldn't handle it. Lieutenant, J.G. Adama was nothing more, nothing less than that, and he was certainly not his kid brother. It's all the service would allow.

Cain held out a cluster of yellow order papers, and Lee took them without pause.

"Effective immediately, your flight status is revoked. Your transport to Caprica has already been arranged; Lieutenant Cinchaso will be waiting for you in the starboard hangar at 1830 hours. You have two weeks."

"Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir. Permission to leave, Sir."

Cain looked him over, took another drink, and pressed her lips together. "Permission granted."

Lee stood and saluted - eyes ahead, jaw set, a soldier until there was no one to see him flounder. Cain did the same.

He ripped into the nearest head (enlisted, of course, and he stood out all the better for it), banged into a stall, and tried to control the panic coursing through him and the tears tearing at his eyes. All he managed to do was stifle the loudness of his sobs and stop himself from screaming.

===

The day of the Cylon attack was the last day of his tour. Technically, he wouldn't have arrived home for another deadening twenty-four hours of space flight and layovers, but once off Pegasus, he would have counted himself free, clear, and on glorious leave, even if the Scorpion shipyard had been as far out as all motherfrak.

He'd been finishing up packing - which translated as stealing stuff back from Pucked - when the Condition One alarm sounded. Already in his flight suit, Lee wasn't halfway to the starboard hangar deck when Pegasus jumped. He hadn't moved another step when Cain's voice came over the PA, didn't say a word or share a look when Sunfork, Klempt, and Stinger came up beside him.

Cylon attack. Scorpion shipyard nuked. The world was ending, and all he could think about was domestic. At least seven hundred of the crew had been off the ship already. Fling and Ducker had been in the heart of the shipyard, cajoling alcohol and junk food for the five hour flight to Libran that they, Mints, Fibone, and Lee himself were supposed to share. Fibone had left the ship fifteen minutes earlier to make an intersystem call to his husband from the port.

"We cut and run. We gods damn cut and run."

---

Months passed.

A civilian fleet came and went. (He didn't pull the trigger. He didn't. He didn't. He didn't.)

Petty Officer Gina Hess killed seven men and confessed to being a Cylon. ("They look like us now? What the frak are we supposed to do with that?")

More brig space was built, lines were formed, and Lee gave his first illegal order after the Tresapeake massacre. (Screams and rain and panicked voices for ten minutes. He was CAG by minute six. Commander Sellis, visiting from Pacifica when the Cylons hit, was shot dead trying to stop it all.)

He saw Helena Cain - not an admiral, not a murderer (they were all murderers), but a fractured woman. He saw her hands shake, tears pleat in her eyes, and he couldn't judge her. He could drink her liquor, though, to liberate him from sobriety and himself and her eyes.

His first illegal order made a line disappear. For Mom and Craig, Bill and Kara, Ducker and Fibone, all the lost friends and lives, the pregnant woman he didn't shoot (he didn't he didn't he didn't he'd never), he made the Cylon cunt scream.

---

"We're murderers, Lee. Rapists. Does it mean anything to you?"

Does it mean anything to him? Of course not. Nothing has meant anything since the Cylons nuked the last inch of value from his life, since Cain's eyes became black holes and Pegasus became a choice between orders and blood stains.

"Because I can't bring myself to care. And I know that's wrong. It's not human."

Lee dies in a glass of scotch.

"What's wrong and inhuman are the Cylons. And you can't rape a machine. Sir."

---

Lee is asleep when they stumble onto Galactica. Klempt shakes him awake, tosses his Class A's at him, and speeds through an explanation that leaves Lee numb.

On Galactica's hangar deck, he stands beside Cain and stares ahead, the good soldier. He doesn't want to see Kara, or Saul, or his dad. He doesn't want to know that there's 50,000 survivors, a President, morals kept alive. His dad played for keeps: they turned nothing into everything. In Lee's world, everything was for nothing.

Two years of estrangement goes unrecognized when his father pulls him into a tight hug. Lee only reciprocates as much as needed. It's not that he's still pissed; he can barely remember what that type of feeling was like or where he'd found it. No, the problem is that his father doesn't know what he's spent months mourning. His father doesn't know that Lee was stripped away conversation by conversation, trigger by trigger until there wasn't anymore of Lee left.

Tigh shows him the still, snuggled away in Chief Tyrol's tool room. Kara embraces him, laughs and breathes "yes yes yes" in his ear. Cain pulls him aside and affirms what he already knows.

---

When the Case Orange came down after Resurrection, Lee waited thirty-three minutes, until they were alone.

"You are to terminate Commander Adama's command. Do you understand?"

He got it. Oh, did he get it. There wasn't a choice, because Adama would never forgive him. He would never understand. The relationship they had as father and son dissipated two and half years ago, and it would never survive the sins of Pegasus.

In a twisted, frakked up way, this was Cain's show of loyalty. She wasn't sending Fisk or a generic Marine to do the job, wasn't allowing Lee to hear the news second-hand. It's his choice, and he has no idea what she'd do if he said no.

They didn't face each other, not even when Adama was trying to have a heart-to-heart.

"Lee… Everything that happened in the past, I'd like for it to stay in the past. You're alive. We're alive. That's all that matters."

The sudden hands on his shoulders had spiked cold adrenaline through his body. The accompanying squeezes felt so familiar, so reminiscent of when he was a teenager, a college graduate, a full-fledged Viper pilot for the first time.

"Lee."

Lee looked his father in the eye and put three bullets into his skull with a silenced gun. When he left his father's quarters, weapon hidden away inside his flight suit, he told the Marines that Adama had asked to be left alone until further notice. From Pegasus or not, it was a son and officer's privilege to go undoubted.

A corridor down from Adama's quarters, four of Cain's razors joined up beside him. The CiC never stood a chance.

---

When Saul was hauled through Pegasus's starboard hangar bay, hands bound behind him, Lee stood to the fore of the crew, next to Fisk. Lee held Saul's gaze, read the incomprehension there, almost didn't hear Saul's hiss of "you son of a frakking bitch." No one missed Saul's booming shout of "he was your father!" that seemed to echo in Lee's gut long after Saul was locked in the brig for doing nothing but being Adama's XO.

Roslin tried to take control of the fleet, a weak attempt at best. She worked up the civilians well enough, caused riots throughout every ship out there. Tom Zarek - Tom frakking Zarek, for frak's sake - was the loudest. Cain shut him up with one order given to the CAP: "Destroy Astral Queen."

Lee killed Roslin himself.

He stood in front of her with his six Marines behind him, gun in his hand, hand at his side, and told her to surrender. She stood with her arms crossed, glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, and looked him over before meeting his eyes.

"Spare me, Captain. You murdered your own father. What are the chances I'm getting off this ship alive?"

Lee gave her a slow nod and unloaded his entire clip into her chest. There weren't very many screams from her people, just what looked like cold shock.

"Sergeant, take your Marines. Kill the pilots, strip the FTL drive and nav system, and load up their supplies for Pegasus. Anyone throws a fit... You know what to do."

"Yes, Sir."

"Everyone else, relax. You get the ship and the President. Don't worry about us coming back to bother you. We won't."

---

Galactica and Pegasus personnel were swapped in and out, thoroughly mixing the two crews. Fisk went to command Galactica, and Lee himself became Cain's XO. He wasn't sure if serving under Fisk on Galactica would have been worse.

In his dreams, he kills Cain, takes command of Pegasus, and kills everybody. He concedes the Cylon point and gives them the day off. His dreams aren't completely impractical - take out his gun, blow out Cain's brains from behind, and let the Marines gun him down. Leave the battlestars to whatever. Whoever.

Lee doesn't expect to get that far. Cain was delusional for ever thinking that Galactica was worth a damn to her cause. Adama's influence on them was crystallized with his assassination. Lee expects one of them to shoot him, any day now. If he was still flying, it would have happened before most of the Galactica pilots forgot how to face down Raiders.

Cole had asked him once, twice, maybe three times how many they were going to allow to kill themselves. Lee never gave him an answer, not after he'd blown his father's head off and destroyed a civilization.

No, Lee had stood in Combat, next to Cain, and listened as reports of deaths came in without the prelude of screams overlapping screams. When Galactica pilots died, there was never anything but the rain.

Cain didn't care. Her "kids out the airlock" speech didn't apply to Adama's cast-offs. They didn't even get memorial services.

Lee developed a habit of resting his hand on his weapon. Once or twice, he popped the button and eyeballed the best angle.

---

One night, Racecar or Raceway or Race-something pulled a gun on him on D Deck. She didn't shoot immediately. She didn't say anything; she just let tears roll and clenched her jaw.

Lee brushed her hand aside and continued past her. They were all dead, anyway. No need to make an messy example of her, not in the least for getting as far as she did.

"If you decide to do it," he calls back to her, "just make sure that you're not alive to be a Cylon whore afterward."

She didn't shoot immediately.

-end

posted November 2009
began July 2006
word count: ~2300

Disclaimer: I do not own Battlestar Galactica. Title for the story comes from the SNES game Seiken Densetsu 3.

[amnesty] Battlestar Galactica: Not Always, Quietude

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 01:19:04 GMT

Summary: Just a Cylon attack and nothing but the rain.

Characters: Lee Adama, Cole Taylor/Stinger, Racetrack, Bill Adama, Anastasia Dualla

Background: This story was written before the beginning of season three, based heavily on spoilers. It does not follow any of the canon series beyond the end of season two, especially concerning Cylon identities. I worked on the fic into late 2007, around the time my interest in the show began to wane. It began as nothing near what this turned out be; rather, it focused entirely on what happened after New Caprica was liberated. Then it turned into a narrative of my then-crack theory of a spin-off about Pegasus. It very much revolves around Lee's state of mind after Resurrection Ship-2. As posted, I'm not incredibly happy with some of the prose, very happy with a lot of the prose, and the story as a whole tends to skip around without any explanation or much set-up. It was intended to be a large - much larger - story than it is now, but I think it does pretty well on its own - but not well enough to qualify as a finished, polished story that I would post elsewhere.

Important Facts that Didn't Get Written: Pegasus gets hit by a couple of nukes when battling above New Caprica after Galactica has already jumped away due to damage. Pegasus loses databanks and has to blind jump, with no way back to any common ground had with Galactica, including New Caprica.

Warnings: Not very nice to Kara near the end. Stated character death. Alternate universe.

Not Always, Quietude
by Llethe

|1| Acheron: 'Tis But the Ecstasy of Death

With one charge from two defibrillators, fathoms of black water bled from the Pirene Bay cove and forsaked nothing but Lee Adama.

When he died, his body rested on the gulf's soft bed of loose sand and dirt. Afterward, when he lived, he laid in a hard desert of the same gulf, enclosed by the same moss-laden cliffs. He stared at the sky and never dared look to the shore; he didn't want to see those long dead and others who should be.

Passage of time meant little. The sun rose and fell, leaving him either too warm or too cold, but this was his frakking cove, and therefore everything was just fine. The ground was hard and unaccommodating, the water missed, but that was okay, too. Lee kept his eyes closed and rode through the kicks of guns numbing his hand and spurts of adrenaline-fueled panic.

One day, Zak stood over him, and Lee forgot to question how Zak had left the shore.

"This is your choice."

The water returned, Lee still on the lake bed, before he had the chance to speak. There isn't much choice in kneejerk reactions, Lee wanted to tell Zak, but the moment he breached the surface, Pirene Bay flaked away into reality.

Not always, he believes that he is still laboring the last breath of his first life, swells of water tugging him under to quietude. Not always, he doesn't believe that Racetrack forced his heart to beat. Not always is often enough.

---

The muscles in his shoulder and chest heal too tight. When he's pummeling the Pegasus punching bag, his right arm is slow to respond, and his one-two punch awkward and weak. Even when he's stretching, the muscles strain and complain. He's lost crucial range and responsiveness.

Cottle looks him in the eye, and Lee looks straight back. Between them it's unspoken: Cottle knows that Lee can't help but know. Still, the knowledge doesn't register until Lee looks at his own updated record and reads "indefinitely grounded" under flight status.

He felt his life collapsing around him, the career he never wanted but wanted more than ever curling away with every moment he spent processing its dissolution. Pegasus became a prison with a façade of temporality - even though he knew - gods damn it, he knew - that it had never been anything less than permanent. And how that ends his career is evident in the amount of crew he has left, in what he does on a daily basis.

Before, he'd at least had the illusion of an option. An option to take his Viper out for a joyride after a long day. An option, a fantasy, to go back to being CAG before Pegasus, Cain, and his suicide.

Lee stops working out. He is well aware that he's pussyfooting, avoiding reminders, wallowing in having a rug pulled out from under him. But reminders come with baggage: Kara crippled him and then mustered out with her two-second Zak replacement. He's left without the ability to fly a Viper and with an empty battlestar he's hated since his first transfer there. There's nothing to do but think, eat, do paperwork, and one day realize that his glory days were over before they started.

So he stops wearing his wings and knocks up Dee.

---

Their baby's skin is the color of black coffee mixed with too much milk. At birth, a month early, she weighed five pounds and was quite frakking dead. It blows his mind how minuscule she is, how tiny her hand is compared to his.

When his dad comes, Lee isn't crying. Dee is bawling, openly devastated in a way that makes Lee feel surreal, but he isn't crying. This baby he wanted; this baby he watched stretch her mother's belly; this baby he talked to and felt kick and named. But he doesn't cry. In his tears' stead, the knowledge that his father doesn't have sticks on the tip of his tongue.

How would he react? How would anyone react to the discovery that Lee frakking Adama lost a fiance and an unborn child in the Cylon attack? They wouldn't believe it. Not always, he doesn't believe it himself; that life is too far away to have been real.

Bill sits next to him in his quarters and doesn't say a word. They drink Cain's or Fisk's or Garner's stash of whiskey, and Lee wonders how Bill sees him. As his kid? As his adult son? As his immediate successor at the helm of a battlestar with nightmares trapped between its walls?

Lee thinks Bill would react badly, though not to the news that he lost a previous daughter-in-law and a grandsomething. The reaction wouldn't be palpable, not really, just subtle differences and a frakload of disappointment and hurt in his eyes.

What would cause Bill to flinch is the insight into how little seventeen months of reconciliation had mattered, how commanding a fleet together didn't cede to open admissions and conversation.

Maybe Lee would tell Bill that he never intended to invite him to the wedding or let his child anywhere near him; that even though he was almost glad that Gianne was at ground zero of the Caprica City nuke, he had planned to reconcile with her after the decommissioning and raise his child. Maybe he would tell Bill that he was going to welcome Craig, his would-be stepfather-in-theory, with open arms and a smile. Craig would be "grandpa"; Bill, nothing more than a headless body in old photographs.

Lee wants his Dad's eyes to hurt, if only to have something new to look at after nine months. But he doesn't say any of it, won't dare, even though he thinks he wouldn't feel guilt if he did.

"Dee and I never talked about a name. We taped possibilities on the wall over there," Lee gestures to the main door, "and took down the ones we didn't like. It was stupid. We were going to name it after family from day one."

Lee doesn't mention how uneasy taping the names there made him. Cain should have had no hand in his kid's life, even if that hand was as trivial as where her brains splattered over a year prior.

"What'd you settle on?"

"Stacia Caroline."

Lee doesn't cry. He didn't want his kid raised on a battlestar, let alone Pegasus. The entire damned ship is still nothing but rape and murder, tears and blood and semen and a sickening smell that still recycles through the ship's ventilation system.

Somehow, without his really even noticing, he loses Dee. She goes back to Galactica, and he remains on his ship with all of its ghosts.

|2| Phlegethon: Will to Power

With the return of the Cylons comes the return of purpose.

The burn of adrenaline and nerves ablaze in his gut is met with appreciation, and he is under no illusions whatsoever: a year and a half ago, he didn't live for war. A year and a half ago and all the years before, he hadn't known what being alive was like.

---

Tom Zarek calls the liberating battle "the Last Stand of New Caprica." After Lee swears Zarek in - it's just his luck that Galactica got all the priests - the term is coined for the first time, in Zarek's inaugural speech. Lee would have rolled his eyes, had he wanted history to record it.

Not many Galactica pilots ended up on Pegasus. Racetrack, Hotdog, and Hammerhead are the only three he really knows; he is familiar with Linds, Treetop, and Beehive, but there's nothing special there beyond having served on Galactica together, before the reprieve of Pegasus. The other three Galactica pilots he doesn't know at all: they were nuggets after his time as CAG. Showboat and Stinger made it back, along with maybe fifteen other Pegasus natives. Twenty-six pilots is good, compared to the thirteen or fourteen he had left after Flat Top's thousandth landing.

Zarek doesn't buy the "good" part, not when there are 160 birds ready to fly. There is only one LSO, no deck chief, and one commander basking in it all.

All Lee wants to do is stand nose-to-nose, fist-to-fist with a basestar. He misses the time when he could linger behind Galactica and the fleet, to pop a few more rounds off before jumping.

|3| Cocytus: The Sound of the Ticking of Clocks

"I had a daughter. She would have been three a week after the Cylons hit," Cole says, his shit-eating sneer making its way onto his face. "I didn't know what to get her, and my ex was just waiting for me to frak it up. After everything… Nothing seemed worth it."

After everything. Lee remembers that Cole, a man he wrote off as just another ace in the hole for Cain. Until he read the logs, Lee hadn't realized how much dead desperation fueled the crew, nor had he realized how much it had fueled him when his most desired, most unattainable goal was finding an accidental death.

Lee lost the two closest friends he'd ever had: John "Oh My" Gahds and Derek "Tort" Sills, the guys responsible for his call sign. Tort had been on Triton, had undoubtedly known Crashdown, but Lee never asked Crash about him. Oh My had been on Solaria; there's no sob story, no connection, no "well, he'd had a choice between Solaria and Pegasus," just a Cylon attack and nothing but the rain.

Lee had stared at the notice of Atlantia's destruction, his last posting he'd had before the attack, until he couldn't keep his eyelids open. He lulled himself to sleep for weeks by naming every person he'd left behind there, every person who had been there when Zak died.

He didn't watch them disappear into a mushroom cloud, smiles on their faces because they had three months of leave one transport away. He didn't execute civilians or leave them to die by an admiral's order. He didn't think of survival as a burden, nor did he think the human race to survive within the confines of just one undermanned battlestar, only to find 50,000 people still alive, under another battlestar's guard.

Not for the first time, the crucial role his father played for Galactica hits him. The need to replicate that role for his crew overwhelms him. He's twenty-eight, barely afloat himself, and thinks about overthrowing President Zarek every day.

"I had a pregnant fiancé," Lee answers, continuing the only tradition they have as CO and XO. "She told me about the baby the day before the Cylons hit, and I never saw her again. I forgot about her until the third, maybe fourth day in. And I was relieved that I didn't have to deal with it."

Cole looks at him, the sneer replaced with his thinking face (which, in all honesty, isn't quite that different), and pours them both another round.

"I was relieved when my ex died. Frakking bitch."

"I just didn't want the kid."

The irony hangs in the air, between them.

---

Supplies aren't going to last. Fuel can't be refined without a refinery, and food can't be grown without soil. The one supply that will last is another worry in and of itself: Pegasus has 90% of the medicine from the original fleet. He's left his family - Dad, Kara, Roslin, Tigh, Ellen - and the fleet he died and killed for without medicine, for frak's sake.

Lee has long since replaced thoughts of Atlantia and all those two-years dead (Zak's been dead for four - mind blowing). Instead, he reruns the final moments of the Last Stand of New Caprica, even though he knows he did everything he could. His decisions, tactics, and strategies had been sound. Three too many nukes hit the wrong places; he couldn't have avoided that, not without risking the fleet.

He can still feel the adrenaline that surged through him when Combat went dark. He can still feel the cold drop of his stomach when Greenleaf exploded en route, two thousand dead because there weren't enough ships and suicide runs for Pegasus were never not an option. He can still remember closing his eyes during the blind jump and praying - actually praying. He can still remember opening them to blue lights, shattered glass, and nightmare sitreps. He remembers the four days he spent trying to remember Kobol's coordinates, trying to do something to compensate for all the databases and chances they lost.

Occasionally, when he can no longer tolerate rethinking that day, he fantasizes about Baltar ending up on Pegasus. He dreams of the impeachment process, the treachery charge, the airlock, and justice done for five thousand dead, including those of his fifth and sixth families, those who suicide bombed and were captured and tortured and never made it back.

It doesn't make sense, yearning for the days of sixteen hour CAP rotations and good company. It doesn't make sense, those being the glory days.

Food will last for six months, only having about four thousand mouths to feed altogether. Rations will be hard, and the civilians will have to learn to go without until they find their miracle. (There's always a miracle.) Fuel could last a year, but sending Raptors out for food and water is a crucial drain. Lee thinks a refinery could be built instead of Vipers.

---

Achieving 100% pressure in the port flight pod takes twenty days. It was supposed to have taken fourteen. Cole, he's found, doesn't like to yell, but a concentration of his shit-eating sneer usually substitutes well enough - except for when construction ran behind and breaches continued to push completion back, day by day. Lee's patience only lasted three days past the completion date, and then crew began to avoid him. In retrospect, it was almost cute.

The day Pegasus, Adriatic One, and Cyrene are refueled, Lee feels relaxed for the first time since the Last Stand.

"We're making it work," Cole said, smiling and showing teeth. It cracked Lee up, seeing Cole smile and be optimistic, and their command staff fake-ignored them as they frakking giggled in the middle of Combat.

They're making this unmanageable situation work. That in and of itself is ludicrous.

Food is still a problem, though, and when he wakes up in sickbay, it's the first thought on his mind.

---

"Captain Edmonson stabbed you in the lung and neck."

The words assail him every time water crests over his head. They ricochet, back and forth, between rock and water, pounding in his head until he screams and nearly drowns. Zak pulls him upward, every time, and holds him above the surface.

As long as Zak has him, the words fade into the background, and Lee forgets what has returned him to this place. Not always, he thinks he's caught between Elysium and Tartarus, but he knows where murderers are sent.

One day, Lee wakes up on the shore, alone but for Tom Zarek and a presence stroking his hair. Lee lays in the sand, Tom sits next to him, and he can neither speak nor think straight.

"Colonel Taylor airlocked her five days ago, amid adamant calls from the public. No trial," Zarek says, his expression and tone sympathetic and fake. "You're a very well-liked commander, Lee."

They're all standing now, Zarek far away and Zak in front of Lee. Zak pulls on Lee's arm, and Lee lets him. He stumbles over nothing, and when the water reaches his chest, he almost forgets to swim.

---

The struggle back to lucidity is more difficult than he recalls. Bits and pieces of reality harden into memory, while the rest - faces, jumbled words, ephemeral worries - fall through fuzzy cracks. The clearest memories are of Marcia smiling, saying something about not losing their only commander worth a damn; and Cole not saying anything at all, just staring past him.

Coherency comes inch by agonizing inch, until there's only a light fog to squint through. The juice Sallow feeds him through the IV makes him restless and weak, both eager and apprehensive to fall asleep. He can breathe on his own but can't talk, and his limbs feel so heavy that he doesn't really try to move. He feels claustrophobic. Altogether, Cole picked a damned lousy time to breach the issue of Racetrack.

Guilt and doubt subdue Cole's arrogance, rips away at his confidence in his abilities as an officer. Lee saw it with Tigh, all of those years ago, and he saw it in himself after the Olympic Carrier incident.

"You didn't want her in that brig. You don't want that on your ship. We can't go back to that."

Cole sounds crazy and broken, but Lee knows Gina's rapists by sight, not confession.

"I did what needed to be done."

Cole goes quiet, slumps in his seat, and doesn't look like a pilot. Lee doesn't think he looks like a pilot anymore, either. Before, in the world that maybe never existed, neither of them would have made CAG yet.

---

There are children on port hangar deck, now, some as young as five. That's inevitable; older children will bring their younger siblings, if the age gap is negligible, like the twenty month gap between him and Zak had been. Children on the hangar deck: it's insane, yet perhaps not more insane than children being raised on a battlestar.

It's also the first phase of manipulating the general public into loving the military, and one day stepping out of "national service" - someone give him a gods damned break - and into voluntary service.

Zarek doesn't believe it's necessary; he made that quite clear after Racetrack. Zarek says that the public love Lee Adama, love Pegasus, trust both without reserve. They're stupid, all of them, their small number not lending itself to enough diversity in opinion. They see the man who delivered their President-turned-prophet to Kobol, the officer who railed against the only known Colonial Fleet hub left in existence, the moral compass for the masses. Before the Holocaust, Bill Adama never believed in many of the things he did after it. Absolute command is funny like that.

Sometimes, perched above the hangar deck, arms on white rails, unofficial Marine escort lingering somewhere near, he watches the kids crash in the simulators. The kids laugh and scream and think dying in a Viper is the best thing ever. There are no aged trees to scale and fall from, no sandlots, no gods awful merry-go-rounds or slides. There's engines and thrusters, kills and victories, Vipers and Raptors, and Marine guards to dodge and outsmart.

If they live to eighteen and fly a real Viper against real enemies, they'll learn that the bodies don't come back. The bodies never come back, save for the oxygen-starved one salvaged from its ejection seat.

Out of all the pilots in all the months who died in battle, it was the only one to be seen after the loss of its ship. But it's still just a body, walking amongst the living and, after a time, fooling itself into believing that the depression lifted and it's glad to have survived itself. But it's still just a body, biding its time, negatively fixing its own Viper requalifications, and maybe commanding a battlestar.

A body or two might come back, he'll concede, but the people inside never do. That's an absolute.

---

In war, there is no standard issue allotment for morbidity. Jobs get done or everyone dies, and it truly is that simple. People die anyway, but the difference is the blemishes left behind.

Thirteen pilots died on Galactica's port hangar deck, and the next day the kill site was walked over and ignored. Sleeping arrangements in the pilots' quarters rarely remained the same month to month; pilots died, their racks were given to someone else, and their possessions auctioned or given away. Twelve people were slashed apart by Centurions, their blood ingrained in Galactica's grated floor, and, a day later, hundreds of pairs of hard eyes stared ahead and didn't spare a glance of rememberance downward.

Commander John Sellis' brains and flesh still faintly stain the CiC, and Lee feels nothing for the man who had his command usurped by a batshit admiral and his people massacred on the same admiral's order. Admiral Helena Cain and Commander Jack Fisk were murdered in the quarters Lee's called home for three years, and he couldn't care less.

Morbidity comes with war. It comes with friends. It comes with family. It's to be ignored, wholly. The problem, Lee has found, is that morbidity in a war usually doesn't come with living with one's own blood stain.

Most of it has been scrubbed away. Someone moved the furniture to cover the worst of the blood, but nothing could have been more transparent. Inbetween the couch cushions, there's dried blood, arbitrarily flaking onto his clothes or hands. Cain and Fisk, at least, had the right idea: die and leave someone else the mess.

Months passed, and the blood, his wounds, and Racetrack's absence were all that he had of the incident. Memory of the event itself refused to surface as anything but passing nightmares. For all he could remember, he'd been making an ass of himself with Cole in Combat, and then he'd been laid up in sickbay for nearly a month.

One commonplace day, the door to his quarters hisses shut behind him, and the memory floats to him - a huge ass piece of driftwood that Zak tries to push away, again and again, but Zak was always best at failure.

The incident was nothing remarkable. He hadn't realized what was wrong beyond the idea that something was wrong. He hadn't thought anything of the twinge in his neck or the new warmth there, until oxygen was snatched from his lungs and he couldn't breathe or yell or say "motherfrakkin' shit" like he'd wanted.

After the incident… After the incident is enough to drown him, to make him truly want to inhale water and again feel the blessing of dead descent.

When his legs gave out, he saw enough of Racetrack to see vacant complacency turn into terrorized panic. Her arms wrapped around his chest, tamed his fall. Her hands pressed against his wounds, dragged barbs of pain across his body, even as she screamed and cried and said his name.

Lee sits where she sat and presses his face into his arms and knees. But only until he remembers that she probably isn't really all that dead. (And didn't the original Sharon get over the whole "shit, I'm a Cylon" thing quick enough?)

---

More and more, he craves the water.

He doesn't know if that means he's suicidal or in need of a vacation. That he isn't sure pretty much means that he is no longer fit for command (had he ever been, since that day?). Then again, neither is anyone else, so he commits to the idea of finding the only common ground he has with Galactica: Earth.

It's the only responsible thing to do: give everything back to Dad and try to throttle Zarek when no one is looking.

---

At first, he mistakes Earth for Kobol. The initial footage of the planet didn't lend much in the way of differentiation. The land survey shots reveal no ruins, no City of the Gods, no Tomb of Athena. When Raptor Two jumped back and reported passing through the Lagoon Nebula, Lee didn't really know what to do.

Stand ground and hope the lack of Cylon contact in the past eight months meant that Racetrack was their last link? Or jump away and hope the Cylons weren't looking?

Lee stands his ground. Seven months later, Galactica pops in.

The celebration lasts about five seconds: there's only fifteen or so ships in the fleet, and Kara's voice announces that she's Galactica Actual.

Adama died a year and a half before; Roslin and Tigh, on New Caprica. Martial law saw half the civilian fleet stripped and left behind, five months after Adama died.

Zarek promotes him to admiral on the spot and doesn't provide commentary on the cold shock boiling in their stomachs. Lee gives Galactica to Cole and promotes Marcia to colonel and Pegasus XO.

Lee calls Kara a half-assed Cain repeat to her face.

-end

posted November 26, 2009
began April 2006

word count: ~4,000

[Amnesty] X-Men: Five Scenes from a Death Story

Fri, 08 May 2009 03:19:11 GMT

Disclaimer: I don't own X-Men. Section break titles from T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland."

Timeframe: Twenty years before X1.
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Logan, Xavier, Erik
Summary: Before the claws came Xavier's Institute for Gifted Youngsters.

Author's Note: This was primarily written in mid-summer 2007 and takes nothing from X-Men Origins: Wolverine into account. I used bits and pieces from the comic book, but I somewhat consider it a personal re-imagining of Logan's and Erik's stories, based upon canon established and hinted upon in X1 and X2. For example, I'm not a fan of the bone claws retcon; as such, when Stryker told Logan that he gave Logan claws, that's what I believe really happened.

I'm not entirely happy with this story; in fact, I'm more happy with the story I wrote after it, and much of the goodwill I feel toward this story comes from the sequel. There is at least one big, gaping plothole that will forever keep this story marked as "incomplete" for me - but I won't elaborate. :)

Five Scenes from a Death Story
by llethe

“You haven't told him about his past, have you?” / “I put him on the path. Logan's mind is still fragile.” / “Is it? Or are you afraid of losing one of your precious X-Men?”

Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier, X2: X-Men United

* * *

I. The Dry Salvages

Erik smiles, bounces on the balls of his feet once or twice. Charles nearly rolls his eyes at the excitement Erik feels toward the Auschwitz man from fifty years past: the man who saved Erik, gave Erik enough money to thrive for years, sent Erik on a chance to safety while he left the death camp for Normandy. If Charles lingers long enough, he can smell the burnt bodies.

“He hasn’t changed one bit,” Erik says quietly, not quite in awe. The man had healed inked numbers from his wrist, taken a barrage of bullets in the back and carried a child past the final wire to freedom five minutes later. Following that display of indestructible brawn, having aged would seem so disappointing.

“So,” the man says, rested against the side of his car, hands stuffed in pockets of expensive jeans, “if you’re done staring, to what do I owe the honor?”

No offer of a handshake, no tilt or nod of the head in greeting, just animal eyes with a promise of a threat and a too-easy smile.

“Logan, please,” Charles offers, “come inside. We have much to discuss.”

A fully loaded Glock is tucked into the back of Logan’s jeans, hidden by his untucked, black button-down shirt. Charles isn’t getting him into the mansion without that gun; uneasy, he allows it, unmentioned.

“There’s a knife, too,” Erik whispers conspiratorially, smirking.

II. The Waste Land

Logan stares out the window with his arms crossed and shoulder pressed against the pane. The view is of the southern part of the school - the lake, gardens, trees - and reminds Logan of driving south on the backroads near the Ohio-Indiana border. There, there's nothing to see but small, unique bridges over dirty creeks and miniscule towns with either more abandoned buildings or more churches than anything else.

Driving south with the evening sun burning in his peripheral vision – maybe the only reason he wasn’t driving west – he cleared a hill and was taken aback by the sudden sight of miles of green, grassy fields, and the sudden southern beginning of sprawling hills. All of his years, all of his travels, all of his languages and expertise, and it was topping a hill on a rural road that stole his breath.

“Do you know what that’s asking?” Logan asks quietly.

“Yes, I do. I’ve thought long and hard about this…”

“Have you?” Logan interrupts, his voice louder, his eyes locked on some point outside the window. “Have you really thought this through?”

“If you’re saying that you’re unable to…”

“I’m saying that you haven’t thought this through,” Logan says again, finally turning his gaze onto Xavier. “For starters, I’m just a guy who can’t die. If it goes wrong, what are you going to do? Kill me?”

You’re a schoolteacher trying to play spy. He’s not making weapons of mutants if he can’t control them afterward. What the hell are you trying to do?

“I’ll be relying on you to do it right."

Logan looks back to the window.

“But if something happens to you, I will do everything in my power to help,” Xavier lies and lies well. Logan isn’t worth his school, let alone a premature outset of a war. Xavier simply hopes that Logan is astute enough to realize that.

III. After Strange Gods

“You can control your healing,” Xavier mentions. “That’s quite impressive.”

“Just another way to hide,” Logan replies, offhand. He takes a bishop.

“Where did you learn, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Myself.”

He cuts himself, purposely, stares at the wound and wills it to remain. He does this hundreds of times, until he finds the click in his mind, the buzz in his body that means he’s done it right. He remembers, he practices, and he hones; no one will ever take from him his freedom, his right to live how he sees fit, simply because he can’t die.

Xavier makes his move, dissecting the game the same way he dissects Logan. Never is it “because I can heal” but “because I can’t die”: the means have no relation to the end. He plays a fast and incisive game: the means are an obstacle to the end.

Under the clothes and the smile is a brusque personality, though his external tricks are designed - or perhaps just ended up this way - to cloud that personality with his attitude: self-assured, haughty, and arrogant.

Altogether, Charles sees room for impulsiveness, carelessness, and he wants to say brawn over brains, but yet… They play five short, to-the-point games. Logan wins, every time, and looks downright bored by the final move of the evening.

So many contradictions.

So many sins.

“Logan, tell me, why are you willing to consider doing something of this magnitude?”

For a long moment, there's silence and little else. Logan is back at the window, gaze blending into the night.

“There isn’t a lot that really touches me, unless I let it.” Auschwitz. World War II. His world holds the same colors, smells, and fears as Erik’s. It’s all the answer he needs. “You live as long as I have, and all the petty fucking issues in the world just…slide.”

“And this one?”

“How can it, for people like us?”

Xavier feels the power behind those words in his gut.

IV. Murder in the Cathedral

Five years is nothing for a man like Logan. It’s merely a footnote in an endless life, perhaps one of a just few that would attempt to make his inherent criminality seem lesser.

Oh, was he something to behold. He added ten years to his physical thirty by growing out his hair and a beard, welled hate and bitterness from any number of events in his life, and he detested the mutant phenomena in all the right places for all the right people and eventually earned his in with Stryker.

Logan made himself smirk when he pulled his Glock. Spit on her body. Went for drinks, smiled and laughed and wanted to die so hard he’d thought it’d be enough to do it.

It was the first time he’d thought himself a murderer. Later, drowned in whiskey that didn’t affect him, he fell to his knees and bawled, face pressed into the edge of the mattress of his bed.

Logan was marvelous, horrifying for five years.

Xavier knows something has gone wrong when his weekly read on Logan lies somewhere between incoherent, indifferent, and panicked. There’s an undercurrent of fatigue, faintness. Dare he say, Logan’s been given a drug that works on him?

Days later, there is a margin of lucidity: help me.

Xavier senses a remnant of shame in the request. A remnant of a memory of a mutant girl – “never forgive me for what I’m about to do to you” - and the idea that help shouldn’t come to those who don’t deserve it.

Then Logan is gone, until out of nowhere, he screams – such a loud thinker. Xavier screams with him, the force between them shattering glass in the room. Xavier is left on his knees, images of bubbling metal and needles burned into the forefront of his mind.

Xavier blocks Logan. It's all he can do. There are no more screams and no more of such a self-sufficient powerhouse of life entreating for help in his thoughts. No more.

Two weeks later, Xavier opens the doorway again and is met with silence.

Such a loud thinker, that one.

V. The Three Voices

“Charles, for what you did to him, that man would kill you in an instant,” Erik doesn’t gloat. His expression is vexed. “You don’t need me to tell you to leave the Wolverine as he is.”

“Lesser,” Charles spits the word.

“Perhaps,” Erik says with all solemnity, a moment before his lips turn upward, “but a fan.”

-end

TDK: We Who Were Living

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:07:20 GMT

Summary: That impossible anger strangling the grief.
Category: Drama, gen
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Bruce, Rachel
Warnings: Spoilers for The Dark Knight.

Challenge: Written for knightfest. Prompt: “God takes time to explain how it's wrong to want a city like this one to burn. ...But you'll be left with the question: why your city's been spared when nobody's different." -Carl Dennis.

Rachel didn't have many close friends; you'd learned that much from her death. You and Alfred, her mother and Harvey: her family, you'd like to think, at least.

Her father had died before you met her, all of those lifetimes ago. Your own father had adored her; you, the same. Back then, the Wayne family had been more than the Waynes, in a way you’d never been able to replicate.

For so long, your family had included no one more than Alfred; Rachel had become a distant sort of memory, one which you saw infrequently. Different schools, different lives, different childhoods, and, in many ways, different cities.

It was her, not you, who saw your father’s dream of Gotham; she knew enough to fight for it early. And she was good, in so many ways. She was so good that you managed to find something of it, too. Enough of it, at least, to stand against Ducard in those early days, to try to prove the injustice of setting cities to burn.

She told you, before she knew about your gun, what had become of Gotham in the fourteen years since your parents had been killed. She explained to you the difference between good people and bad people, and you told her…

You told her that you weren’t one of those good people.

You’d never used Batman as a way to show her how wrong you’d thought yourself to be. Now, you’re very glad for that: you’re still right, and she’s still dead.

Rachel didn’t have many close friends; you’d learned that much from her death. You and Alfred, her mother and Harvey: another dead family. And so it’s up to you to go to her apartment, collect her belongings, and promise her mother that you’ll be kind to her daughter’s memory.

“She always liked you, you know. My mother,” Rachel had maybe said, after you’d come home. “She really does still miss you.”

You start with her car. In 1996, when she’d bought it off a dealership’s lot, the car had been almost brand new. Seven years later, after you’d come home from chasing the world’s shadow, you couldn’t believe how well she’d kept it.

She didn’t like your cars, didn’t like how inheriting billions at eight years old had rubbed off on you. When you think back, she never gave up trying to snap you to her level. You were never vocal enough to make Gotham better; when you showed her how you’d become more, your face hadn’t been an acceptable loss.

So you had let her drive you, when you had driven together, and you never stopped thinking of the one time you sat in that seat with a gun in your hand.

Only she’s dead now, and you’re sitting in the same seat, only in the parking space behind her building. “My mom adores you, you know,” she’d really said, that half-smirk of hers clueing you in to the rest of her sentence before she’d probably even thought it. Her eyes had never left the road. “Hasn’t picked up a tabloid in a while. She still thinks you’re eight years old.”

She’d meant to be joking.

Now, sitting in this car again, in this seat, in this car so unlike you, you’re not holding a gun. You feel like you should be.

“Poison in your veins,” Ducard had said. He’d been right, then, about that. But this? This is everything else you’d feared when coming back into Gotham with a dream of a symbol. You never wanted her to become poison; you never wanted this city to become it, either. But there it is.

Rachel didn’t have many close friends; you’d learned that much from her death. Maybe her ideals and her passion – as subdued as it had been – kept her removed. After all, when Batman called her his best friend and her boyfriend was Harvey Dent, where else was there really to go? What other chances were there?

“What chance does Gotham have when the good people do nothing?”

She’d meant to inspire you. Maybe she had. Maybe she hadn’t. For all the good she did, for all the barbs directed toward your uselessness, it hadn’t really been her that had driven you to chase the world’s shadow.

Her question had been very naïve and so, so easy. You’d always known the answer; it’d just taken you nearly a decade to realize it.

Your parents had been good people; they had done something. After they were dead, apathy and fear overtook the city again, until Batman weaponized terror and polarized beliefs. It only took Dent a year to rise and fall. It only took Rachel standing in the middle, between them. It only took your choice to kill Batman – and Ducard’s philosophy that a manmade symbol could ever truly be incorruptible. It only took a year for the good people to die again.

The cycle is just as rigid as that of the League of Shadows; what the latter hadn’t realized was how unneeded they were to achieve their goals. When the good people lose, as they inevitably do, the downfall is natural.

Gotham has shown itself, proved the Joker and Ducard wrong. People can be inherently selfless, just as rampant injustice does not have to be abiding. But when the good people are dead, what chance does Gotham really have at all?

It all comes back to you being unable to see the difference between saving Gotham and saving those you used to love. After all, what chance does Gotham have when it’s a city that deserves to die?

--end

llethe / November 2008

TDK: The Killing Fields

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:55:13 GMT

Summary: When Gotham was through with them, there wasn’t anything left.
Category: Drama, gen
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Bruce
Warnings: Spoilers for The Dark Knight.

Author's Note: Written for the "mismatched" theme at

batfic_contest .

The Killing Fields

Rachel was going to wait for you, as neither of you once stopped long enough to think about you outliving her. Always left unspoken had been that you would die for her, especially since you’d die for Gotham.

The thing about losing Rachel is that you didn’t lose her. You didn’t save her, and you didn’t kill her. You failed her. What you can tell yourself is that Rachel didn’t die because of you; she died so that Harvey Dent would live long enough. Perhaps that’s the worst part of her murder, which you and everyone else have chosen to call a death.

It’s that death which has brought each of your facades into the public eye.

With her mother, you cannot act the needed part. She knew you too well in the past and would never be so easily fooled by pretense, not like Rachel had been before she found out about your mask. Can you downplay her daughter’s murder for the sake of a faux reputation – and is it even a question you can ask yourself?

As Batman, you’ve already shown too much. Jumping out of windows to save her. Staying at her first grave for hours, long after Gordon told you to leave. Somehow, when the fire department had found Dent’s coin where she had died, it had been enough to move you. You’d showed too much, then, when too many people had been watching and wondering, “Just what did Rachel Dawes mean to the Batman?”

Before then, the Joker had already thought enough about it to presume that Dent could have been Batman, if only because of the one link they’d each called Rachel. And if the Joker had noticed, others would notice the parallels and similarities, those that stood transparent between Batman’s sorrow and the devastation you don’t want to hide behind a persona that you detest.

For more than a year, you’ve tried to make yourself and Batman as mismatched as possible. It used to be easy to make Bruce Wayne, the fake, into money, possessing just enough brains to keep Wayne Enterprises relevant to the needs of the city. For more than a year, you’ve played that game: how mismatched can you make yourself? How mismatched can you be?

It’s not so much a game, anymore.

You no longer care about an identity that gets you nowhere but surrounded by police. Even when you wouldn’t go back a year and bury the mask to be with Rachel, even when you would not tell her to stop waiting for Batman to be finished, you still think that Batman isn’t worth the other toll.

You don’t want to hang pretty, fake blondes with pretty, fake breasts on your arms. You don’t want to buy hotels so that you can swim in their pools. You don’t want to smile for the ugly eyes of Gotham. You’d much rather leave your injuries unexplained and let them wonder what you do with your spare time and disposable money.

Maybe when you can no longer decide which voice to use, it’s time to stop. Batman has become a symbol, indelible but not incorruptible. Batman has done what you set out to accomplish: defeated Falcone, allowed justice back into the courts, taken the streets from the criminals and corrupt police. You’ve done it, and Dent was right: Batman has lived too long.

Any longer, and it will become about revenge again. The Joker is a prisoner, relegated to Arkham, and it’s still not enough. Dent is dead, glorified because of you, and it’s still not enough. You’d thought it might be, but you hadn’t hoped.

Here, only at Rachel’s funeral will you let her stop waiting. But not before you fortify one last wall: buttress the lie, if only so that Alfred is protected. You’ll downplay Rachel’s death, shrug off what a lifelong friendship means to Bruce Wayne, the fake, and that way, every one of the voices you can’t choose between will become each as much a villain.

After all, Rachel is dead, and Batman is a murderer. You can say that Gotham is better for it, but Batman knows the better truth: that you have thoroughly failed in what you set out to do.

-end
llethe / September 25, 2008

Nolanverse: (p) Lex Luthor

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:24:41 GMT

Summary: Superman actually caught it.
Category: Gen
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Bruce, Clark
Warnings: Spoilers for TDK.

Author’s Note: This is as close to a fun romp as I’m ever going to get. I wrote Clark and Lex with their Smallville characterizations in mind, but seeing as how it’s a “future” fic, there’s a lot of general DCU in them, too. Written for the theme "doll" at batfic_contest.

And yes, the title makes absolutely no sense at all. I've had two law professors abbreviate "patent" as "(p)" - and then I go to Wikipedia, and (p) stands for phonogram copyright whut. But! In some dimension these guys visit, (p) really does mean patent. *nods*

---

Once, Bruce blinked for too long and opened his eyes to an empty basement of Wayne Tower. In Lucius’ stead, the original Tumbler sat in the corner where Bruce had first seen it; the original bat suit, in its drawer. He’d never found out why: if he hadn’t come home yet, if his final day with Ducard hadn’t swung so far in his favor, or maybe if he’d died in Crime Alley with his parents.

Another few times, Dent still had his face and his job. Rachel was there with him, wedding set on her left finger, happy and married. All that Bruce came to know about them – his would-be hopes and her well-to-do lies – left him oddly numb, rather than upset for the sake of lifeless promises.

Only once did he see his parents, thirty-four years older than on that night and in the photographs that burned with the original Manor.

The thing about dominating his fear was that he learned to rarely look back. He’d just never expected the threat to come from looking forward. Clark, at least, knew when to turn away. They hadn’t been back to a Gotham since.

“This, Superman?” Luthor had said. “Oh, this is a Dimensional Oscillator; I like to call it DOLL, since I created it myself. Here, catch.”

Superman had caught it, as Batman tried to stop him from doing that. The resulting jump had been instantaneous.

There were weird jumps and fun jumps. Bruce saw Clark wrinkle his nose at Metropolis somehow being the same as New York City. Since that dimension clearly hadn’t been theirs, Bruce paid a whimsical sort of attention to the bag lady singing about spiders. He enjoyed himself there, for that hour when threatening Lex Luthor hadn’t been an option.

Lucius theorized and Luthor pledged that DOLL could be turned off at any time. They both also said that it wouldn’t work again; Luthor only gave that much up, all ten times Batman played Swear to Me, while five Lucius’s said he’d put money on there being more to it.

Twice, Clark took off for his Fortress; once, the Fortress hadn’t been there. The second time, it could offer nothing to get them home. For a week or so, after Metropolis’s and Gotham’s, they both stayed there, scouring the worlds for clues, until Bruce could no longer stare at white walls that came from a world that would never his, dimensions be damned.

Finally, they jumped to a world that seemed to be theirs: the Manor rebuilt, all those dead remaining dead, and neither he nor Clark could find discrepancies. “Close enough,” after six weeks, became good enough.

Clark crushed DOLL in his hand, not trusting the “off” switch.

Clark appeared at the penthouse the next morning. He slapped a newspaper on a table, but Bruce didn’t need to see the Lois Lane and Clark Kent byline underneath a Daily Globe banner. The GCN ticker outlining the Wayne-Powers Industries merger had been a decent clue.

-end

llethe / September 9, 2008

Batman Begins: Double the Flame

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:47:09 GMT

Summary: Batman has to be more than a monster.

Category: Gen
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Alfred, Bruce

Warnings: Spoilers for all of BB and at least one heavy allusion to TDK.

Author's Note: Written for "the love triangle" theme at batfic_contest.

01. Scalene: “When I found you in that jail, you were lost. But I believed in you.

Once, Alfred made the decision to burn down a forest to remove the sin. That decision was made in quite a different time, in somewhat different circumstances. Years after, Alfred resigned himself to a position – a far-reaching position but a position nonetheless – and two words to encompass an acquiescence so everlasting.

“Very well.”

For an eight-year-old, what else could he have done?

Alfred resigned himself to believing that, one day, Bruce would pull himself out of the memory of his parents’ deaths. Rather, Bruce only found inflexible anger out of muted sadness; year by year, the eight-year-old grew older (as they tend to do), and he realized new convictions. His thousand-yard stare became harder, his mind sharper but further from reach, until…

The night after Bruce disappeared, Rachel stood at the door of the Manor and clutched the loose ends of her coat tight around her chest. That night, he learned that the day before Bruce didn’t come home, Rachel had known more than Alfred had ever suspected.

“He had a gun, Alfred. He was going to kill that man. I… I just… Bruce. Bruce would have done that. And I…”

Every piece of his experience said that Alfred Pennyworth had very little to do with the choices of a twenty-three-year-old man, much less one who had stood still in Crime Alley for fourteen years. Of course, Alfred could still only blame himself; for ten years, for longer than either Thomas or Martha, he had raised Bruce.

The fault rested with his fourteen-year acquiescence: the many times he’d said “very well,” hoping for but never quite expecting Bruce to stand for himself instead of his parents. There were times, very few and far in-between, when Bruce pushed hard enough to bend the boundary between butler and guardian. Those times meant nothing. Bruce had been his responsibility to appease, and, quite obviously, Alfred failed that duty.

For seven weeks, Alfred believed he would never again have the chance to try.

The investigation into Bruce’s disappearance was long, tedious, and nothing more than lip service. Falcone was the last to see Bruce alive; so, of course, the first place to investigate was the river rock bed. Always the first place, that river: an unchanging facet of Gotham’s worst trait.

Though Bruce had been away at colleges for three years, the Manor was not the same in Bruce’s absence. Before, the Manor had stood for and been kept for something. For seven weeks, the Manor was the mausoleum of which Bruce had spoken. It was terrifying.

Then the postcard arrived: no signature, only “Why do we fall?” written in Bruce’s nearly illegible scrawl. Alfred never doubted its authenticity; he only hoped that Bruce would finally learn how to pick himself up again and absolve his restless anger.

That anger was not absolved. It transformed into a powerful stimulus, but it was still anger all the same.

02. Isosceles: I took away your fear

Alfred wants to ask, “What have you done to yourself, Master Wayne?” Though he raised the boy from age eight, took him through his teenage years and into adulthood, it’s not a question that he will ask.

After all, he’s not quite certain that he wants to fathom what is held inside those seven years. And he is absolutely certain that he doesn’t want to ask how he, Alfred himself, can justify helping Bruce become the Batman.

Though he lives with him – it – the Batman is just as much a mystery to him as it is to the people of Gotham. He hardly knows what the Batman is and barely knows the man who called, after seven years of silence.

What he knows and sees is Bruce’s obsession with Batman. His life has fallen into step with the rhythms of the night; beyond Batman, beyond the mentality Bruce carries when alone in the Manor, the rest of him exists to deflect suspicion. “I can’t chance having to go out as Batman drunk, Alfred,” he will say, as he learns new ways to fool his peers with a glass of champagne. When Alfred offered that Bruce play the part of a billionaire, he hadn’t quite intended for that part to become an additional personality.

Alfred has more and more come to be unable to see the difference between Bruce and the city’s vigilante. He doesn’t see the boy he raised in his parents’ stead, nor does he see the young man taken with a cynical rage. He fears that Bruce has burned the proverbial forest, demolished himself, and rose from the wreckage as the offender Gotham believes him to be.

The relaxed amity that has settled over Bruce is all that Alfred hoped for, before. After the postcard arrived and Alfred presumed that Bruce had finally come to apprehend his own damage, it’s all that he expected.

Only now, Bruce drives over police cars and intentionally causes others to wreck. He shoots missiles at car parks and drives atop the roofs of buildings. Bruce says that the Batman is removed from thrill-seeking and vengeance, that the Batman will shake Gotham from apathy, but all Alfred sees is Bruce rejecting the law, under the delusion that he should.

Seven years is long enough to lose sight of a person. Bruce’s anger masquerades as resolve, as something tempered into everlasting good. Bruce calls it “just a symbol”; Alfred calls it a monster.

It’s a monster that will shame them both in the eyes of those who once mattered the most. Worse, the night will come when Bruce doesn’t survive it. Alfred doesn’t want to bear the accountability of sacrificing their son for a monster.

Bruce would say that Alfred simply doesn’t understand, would assume that Alfred isn’t even trying. Quite so, perhaps, and it doesn’t very well matter. Alfred once made the decision to burn a forest to remove the sin. He won’t do it again.

03. Equilateral: and I showed you a path.”

“I didn’t save Gotham, Alfred,” Bruce said quietly. Dried blood flaked from his fingers: a mess made in the moments before Alfred could examine the abdomen wound himself.

These stitches were nothing more than shoddy field tricks he’d learned in the military; they would heal just as jagged and rough as the thread must have felt going in.

It wasn’t the first time they’d forgone a hospital in favor of keeping pretense; this time, at least, the affliction hadn’t resulted from an dreadful night on the street. From all that Alfred had gathered, Batman had barely figured into this injury one bit.

“I couldn’t have done it, Alfred. You were right. This… Batman has to be more.”

It’s enough to warrant a reassessment of Batman, of what Bruce has dedicated himself to do for Gotham. (Though dedication is just a nicer way of saying “obsession,” still.) It’s the answer to the question, one he will never ask, of what Bruce Wayne is to Batman.

Quite clearly, Bruce Wayne is the same as Batman. That flesh wound had been aimed at Bruce, not at Batman, and that, quite clearly, makes all the difference. If some insanity is there, it’s an insanity that is needed to survive this city as something more than a bystander or a criminal.

Bruce took his damned time coming up for air; twenty-two years, in fact. When he breathed again, Alfred chose to help him not because Bruce said Batman wasn’t about thrills – but because Bruce said Batman wasn’t about him. Believing that had been the trouble.

Alfred has yet to understand what Bruce did throughout his missing seven years, though those seven missing years aren’t missing at all. They are a lifetime burned and a lifetime rebuilt. For those seven years, he prepares breakfast and hardly sleeps at all.

It wasn’t until Ra’s al Ghul – the closest Alfred has come to knowing of what remade Bruce – burned the Manor to the ground and tried to put the rest of the city right there with it that the damage seemed to be finally cauterized. Almost all of the ruin can be rebuilt; the rest – the heirlooms and the memories – is unnecessary baggage for a man with no respect for limits.

Somewhere that night, Alfred saw Bruce without Batman, carrying a strength, not an insanity, which Bruce never previously possessed. He had fought for the city and let someone else save it. That’s something better than a monster.

The mask comes, and the mask goes. Kevlar armor is traded for Armani suits and back again. Every night, Bruce’s adrenaline vanishes within moments of his head hitting anything soft. The scars accumulate, excuses become harder to lie. There are limits, Alfred wants to say, that Bruce doesn’t respect. But as long as Alfred can see the human in those disregarded confines, Batman can be worth something to more than Gotham.

It’s enough to enrich the lower foundation of the southeast wing.

-end

llethe / August 25, 2008

The Dark Knight: Something Different from Either

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:35:55 GMT

Summary: "Look beyond your own pain," she said. But the man was rotting.

Category: Nolanverse. Gen.

Rating: PG-13

Characters: Bruce Wayne

Warnings: Spoilers for The Dark Knight.

Author's Note: Written for the "a city's myth" theme at batfic_contest.

There are streaks of diluted red in the shower and three single footprints of blood on the bathroom floor. Though Alfred is awake, even at this early hour, Bruce chooses this morning to spare him a bloody path from shower to bedroom.

The myth about Batman will say that he never lost, even when he lost Rachel Dawes to the Joker and Harvey Dent to his own sword. The myth about him will be wrong, the legend unjust, and only a few will live to remember the difference between myth and man.

Alfred has seen the blood, sealed the wounds, and sat through days and nights of Bruce’s failures. For the worst of it, Bruce left Alfred to bear it alone; for most of it, Bruce knows better than to argue. This night, neither is true.

Bruce cleans and covers the bleeding wound on the back of his right thigh. A lucky graze, fired by one of Gotham's finest: shoot to incapacitate, they tell each other. The cotton pads stick to the blood and stay in place; it takes only five rounds of gauze before the blood is confined behind white threads. Bruce wonders if Garcia wants the cop-killing Batman alive, or if Gordon has managed a way to spare them both.

This isn't what Bruce sought when he became Batman, though he was never so naive as to believe that these worst-case scenarios given life couldn’t happen. By far, this isn't his worst, though all the transgressions seem to add into an equation equaling “not fair to Alfred.” After everything, such a concern is mostly a relief.

The myth about him will oscillate between identities and stories: glorifying, condemning. One will have Batman an ex-cop who came to see the rules as the entrance to the underworld and so chose to neglect those rules; another, Batman a criminal who outgrew Falcone’s dominance, became caught in his own game, and so kept playing. The myths about him will never be accurate, though some will come too close – like the one that nails Batman as a man who lost something to the untouchable part of Gotham.

(“What, like Bruce Wayne?” A laugh and a scoff. “Not quite like Bruce Wayne, no.” Not even the too-rich playboy showed much grief for Rachel, his dearest friend, now did he?)

All the myths are a lie, no matter how close one or two of them may stray. The myths fail to speak of the time he needed Batman, and Batman instead took the Joker for his word. (Remove Dent from the equation, and it would have all equaled something so much better.)

Bruce cleans the bathroom, doesn't say goodnight to Alfred, and he doesn't worry about the graze that needs stitches. His bed is cool, and his eyes are heavy, even as dawn peaks through the curtains, nearly unnoticed.

He never thought he'd be too weak to stop the world from burning; he'd never asked himself if he'd be strong enough to let it.

-end

llethe / August 5, 2008

The Bourne Supremacy: The Third (Who Walks Beside You)

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:41:58 GMT

Summary: Death, he meant. Jason saw the faces of death.
Characters: Jason Bourne, Marie Kreutz
Category: Mostly gen, PG-13

Disclaimer: The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum movies are owned by Universal. The title and subtitles come from T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.”

The Third (Who Walks Beside You)
by llethe

I. Of Thunder

“I can see their faces.”

Death, he meant. Jason saw the faces of death.

It shook him. It made him human again, transformed him into a man she had met only a handful of times. He sweated and he shook and he was not in control; he was not Jason Bourne but the man left behind.
Between the cities they visited and nations they left, he tracked down the faces and found their names. He found their deaths and visited them, took their articles and stories for himself and his book of unremembered sins.

“I drowned him.” Jason didn’t lie about his past. “I stabbed this one.” Jason didn’t lie, and she could tell by the way his hands shook, by the breaks in his voice when he told her, by the shell-shocked presence he carried for days after a new discovery.

Marie didn’t know what Jason thought he would find all that time, searching for his ugly answers. She had impulsively assumed it was all or mostly guns – something clean and Hollywood-justifiable, at least more than anything else she could imagine (but then, she wasn’t the killer, so what could she imagine). Jason must have felt it, that inside of himself, like he felt his languages and physical capacities. Like he felt everything else.

“God damn it, Marie, I ruined lives. I took lives.”

She slept next to him, still. She laughed with him, still. She stayed with him, still.

II. Up the White Road

In the car, Jason looked at her, eyes wide and eyebrows raised. “I’m going to tell him. Everything. In case…”
In case they were being followed. In case this chance to see her brother and for Jason to meet a piece of her family backfired, her brother wouldn’t need to ask why.

“I used to be an assassin for the CIA,” Jason said to him. His voice was even and composure cool, as if he was over the part himself he could barely remember. “At any given time, we could be on the run again. I can’t guarantee our lives. I can’t guarantee yours.”

On the way to Barcelona, Jason looked at her again, so earnest, like he hadn’t changed into something of a new man after his would-be final encounter with Treadstone. “I don’t believe anything is going to happen to you,” he said. “If I did, I wouldn’t be here.”

Marie had lived in enough places, met enough people to spot the pitfalls of naiveté. And wasn’t what he’d said one of the worst? But with Jason… With Jason, she believed it, despite the ever-present disclaimer that came with him.

One or two or three months later, Marie often left Jason to the creation of his book, to the past and to death, without often wondering if her face and her name would someday be left to the early morning hours and Jason’s careful dedication to his mistakes and his guilt.

III. By This and Only This

“God damn it, Marie, I ruined lives. I took lives.”

Once, Marie agreed. She tried to well sincere, long-lasting disgust for the man who paid his way into her life, but what came wouldn’t stay. She relegated him to the floor and offered him no blanket, and all he said was that he wanted a life with her, away from the person he’d been.

Marie followed Jason to libraries and Internet cafes, whispered the through the bits and pieces he’d told her of the bits and pieces he’d dreamed. She helped him look for the names, hoping he’d find them, hoping he wouldn’t, and not once believing that he was trying to find the man he’d been.

“Penance,” he’d said once, voice low and uncomfortable. As if committing suicide into the Mediterranean hadn’t been enough. As if he was the same man now as he’d been then. As if she would live with that, follow that through Europe.

As if Jason wanted to hear any of that, see anything but the faces of death. Not often did Marie wonder if she would one day top them all.

---

end

September 2007
llethe / llethee (at) gmail (dot) com

The Bourne Supremacy: Come in Under the Shadow

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 23:10:37 GMT

Summary: Nothing familiar. Everything given. (Supremacy, Marie/Jason)
Rating: PG-13
Category: Supremacy. Alternate universe, character death. I want to call it gen, but it’s a dark Marie/Jason.
Characters: Jason Bourne, Marie Kreutz

Disclaimer: The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy are owned by Universal. No profit, no gain, not for me, at least.

Summary: Nothing familiar. Everything given. (Supremacy, Marie/Jason)
Rating: PG-13
Category: Supremacy. Alternate universe, character death. I want to call it gen, but it’s a dark Marie/Jason.
Characters: Jason Bourne, Marie Kreutz

Author’s Note: (1) This is only an AU in the sense that an event happens differently. I never intended the story to go AU, and I really can’t pinpoint a reason for it; once it struck me, I didn’t want to let it go, as I love the irony and weight of it. (2) This is the first fanfic I’ve finished in three years, so with or without errors, with or without perfection, it’s up. (And I’m sure I’ll reread it at some point soon and want to rewrite and add, which is exactly why I’m calling it done and published.) I’ve missed the “OMG like my fanfic!” jitters. ;) (3) It’s a sort of experiment in tenses; I’ve never used the “had done” in place of regular past tense before, so if it’s completely annoying and I did it all wrong, well, what can I say; there’s a reason I changed my major from English. ;) Enjoy!

Come In Under the Shadow
by llethe

Marie loved Jason, in spite of him.

He hadn’t liked to stay in one place for too long; paranoia and unease – maybe justified, maybe not – had driven them to different countries, different cities, every few months. Though he’d tried to stay longer, to disregard the statistics or training or whatever had urged him to run without a reason she could see.

The shop in Greece – the shop, not her shop, nothing so personal – had been the first sacrifice. The first few days of being reunited had been good: talking, enjoying each other, taking their time. His hair had been longer, and he’d smiled more. The same could have been said for her. They had been fresh and new, happy and young, it seemed.

One month later, she had been on a boat, shop sold for cash. He’d wanted to leave, worried for her safety, but he wouldn’t go without her. What could she have said to that? What could she have said to him?

They had gone to Palermo for two months, and then to Monaco, which was too close to Marseille, as it had turned out. Jason hadn’t liked Marseille, and he hadn’t liked Monaco. Only three weeks there, long enough to have launched new nightmares. Barcelona had been better, though not quite further, and they’d stayed for three months.

“I’m trying, Marie,” he’d said.

All the cities he’d chosen were by the Mediterranean Sea, but only after Monaco had he spent lengths of time staring at it. She knew that he’d been out there once, would have drowned if not for luck or the grace of god. So he would stare at the sea, had kept them near it. Looked at it more than he had looked at her. Tell her, then, what he had been trying to do.

“I’m trying, Marie,” he’d said, and she believed that he’d believed it.

Marie had never been a settler; she liked to move, to travel, not just see the world, but live it. Her dream, her ambition before a $20,000 drive to Paris was to study in the United States. Jason had heard her in the consulate, had known why she had been there, but had never mentioned it. For all that he apologized, he had never apologized for that.

If he had tried, she wouldn’t have let him. That was a dead dream, the United States a prison or a grave. There had been nothing else to do but travel and live the world, which to her meant meeting people instead of potential witnesses, making friends instead of potential victims, seeing police officers instead of would-be wardens. To Jason, living had meant staying alive.

Jason never seemed more relaxed than when they had been in transit. He would sleep better, smile more, seem worriless. She’d hated the times they left, but she’d remembered why she loved him during these times. Even when she’d hated him.

Napoli. Malta. Izmir. Four months between them all. It had been in Izmir that she had first shirked away from him. His arms around her back for one, two seconds, until she’d pulled away, “goodnight, Jason,” her explanation.

What could she have said when she had known that he was right? He’d always been right about these things. But life was not worth not living one.

Marie loved Jason, though a murderer he may have once been and though a killer he'd remained ready to become again, in spite of what it took to stand by him. In spite of what she chose to give.

It had been difficult to deflect blame from him, during the hard nights and the hard mornings when she’d missed her life. The easy nights and the easy mornings had come when she told herself that her life was not so much different than how she'd lived it, that her friends had moved on and had families, that she had Jason and Jason had her. But a life? The lack thereof filled the hard nights and hard mornings with anger for him that had coupled with distaste for herself.

The one night she wouldn’t let him touch her was all that it had taken. He had been gone in the morning – rare, as he hadn’t liked to leave her alone and asleep, just as he’d hated being left alone to sleep. He would call it defense, keeping watch even if neither of them were awake, but he just hadn’t liked being alone.

Jason had liked the sound of a voice not his own, and he had liked the sounds of living with another person. She’d known him too well, known that left alone, he wouldn’t have lived; he would have brooded, sat by himself and waited.

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” he’d said when he’d come back in the afternoon.

Nearly the entire day she’d regretted turning her back on him, waking up without him there, without a word or a note to explain away his absence. Marie loved Jason – she did. It had just been a hard life, a hard pace, too many maybe’s and what if’s. When he’d come back without so much as a hello, voice hard and cool, it hadn’t been about love or reasons why.

“Jason, I don’t want to leave again,” she had said. But she had wanted to leave; she had hated Izmir like he had hated Monaco. “Why are we living like this?”

“Marie,” and he’d looked at her, glared almost, “we’re leaving.”

She’d packed her bags, anxiety in her hands and fingers. For all of his talents and skills, for all the subtle nuances he’d seen where she had seen none, he hadn’t noticed how close she had been to leaving him. It would have destroyed her, but for the sake of herself, of her happiness, she had seen no other way.

In another car that she would never see again, she had wondered what country they would be going to. Greece? Egypt, maybe, somewhat of a change? Jason had liked the Mediterranean too much to deviate, which hadn’t left many options. Before, though, they had never taken a plane.

--

India. They had landed in Mumbai, driven to Goa. By the sea, still, but the Arabian. He’d bought a wooden condo by the coast by the end of the day they’d arrived. It wasn’t small or big, and it wasn’t shabby or luxurious.
It was good.

On the porch, he’d told her, “If you want, we’ll stay. We’ll stay, I promise. Make a real life. Whatever you want.”

She wanted. He had, too, she had seen that. If he hadn’t wanted to leave Treadstone behind, he wouldn’t have found her again. But there had been tension in his shoulders when she’d hugged him, tension in his eyes, and he’d smiled like he’d been chewing glass.

--

Marie loved Jason, even as he'd become more and more involved in his own head, even as he’d tried too hard, worried too much for her. The dismissals of his dreams - “go back to bed; I'm fine,” he'd say, clearly contained in his own head, his worry for her off-hand, a hollow reaction.

Perhaps that was too harsh. He would touch her face, her hair in those moments. The look in his eyes had scared her in those times. She had been his “all the time,” his only something good. Jason had been the killer, but all the power had been for her.

He’d said that they would stay, but his dreams had stolen him. Without them, Marie thought he could have forgotten the idea of his previous life, lived for his present, what he had. But his dreams had stuck to him, made him stick, and grounded him to a halt.

Marie loved Jason, even when she could barely stand him, even when she had wondered where she'd be at any particular moment, if he'd kept his word a year and a half ago (not two, as he’d argue). Maybe she would be dead, instead. Maybe the people he'd worked for hadn't believed his lie that he'd killed her. Maybe they would have found her a day or a week after he convinced her to leave. Maybe they weren’t even looking.

“We don't have a choice,” he'd said, eyes wild, Jason Bourne come to life.

In his dreams, at night and in the morning during his runs, her Jason had died. “Write it down,” she would tell him, sincerely believing it would help, half hoping that he would remember and call it over, and half hoping that he would never remember the killer. The more he had remembered, the more clear the glimpses of himself had become, the less she had seen of her Jason and the more she had witnessed of theirs.

He had run more, spoken less, real smiles rare. Colder eyes, harder, thicker body, and she had known. She'd known. Their time together had been finite; he had been preparing, moving toward the moment where he’d told her: “we don't have a choice.”

But he’d had a choice, and she'd told him as much. He’d had a choice.

“Yes, you do,” and he'd looked at her for too long, his taken eyes off the road for too long. Her shoulders had tensed, though she’d known who he had been and what he could have done, the man who would call a steep set of stairs a “bump.”

She had said nothing he'd not already known, nothing that should have surprised him; Marie loved Jason enough to know that when he'd said “we,” all of those times, he'd meant it. And when she'd said “you,” he hadn't known what she'd meant. Marie loved Jason, and she had not meant it in the way he feared most. Not this time.

Marie had looked at him again, ready to repeat herself because what else could she do, when glass shattered, blood came, and Jason slumped forward against the wheel.

Too fast and too late, the first time she witnessed Jason let a situation slide out of control, and the jeep no longer had a driver at its wheel. Too late she realized, too late to do anything when she looked away from Jason and saw the edge of the bridge.

Blood in the water, like powder, coming from his neck or back of his head, she couldn't be sure. Jason's eyes were open, arms floating, lips parted. Jason.

Marie loved Jason, but she didn’t touch him one last time. Just that very early morning, she had leaned on his back, rubbed his shoulders until the early hour caught up to her and she’d gone back to bed. She’d woken up and he had been gone, running shoes not by the door, clothes he wore to bed neatly put away in the dresser.

Marie loved Jason, and she left him in the river. The water was cool, his preference: cool breeze, cool sheets, cool water. Every morning, the top blanket on their bed would be pushed down to the end of the mattress; it had never woken her, never bothered her. They’d slept with the window open, cool nights and cool mornings.

Marie loved Jason, and she left him. She didn’t take his watch. Every day he would clean that watch, the only time it would come off of his wrist. Every day he had taken it apart, used the rod of an errant earring to push out the pins and remove the band. He would wipe down the face, the back, the entire band; every day had been too often to see a difference. Ten minutes a day for the watch, compulsively.

Marie swam away as far as she could, stayed under as long as she could, and pushed toward where she thought Jason would have gone, toward the cover the bridge’s foundation would provide.

She pressed her back against the concrete, breaths short and fast and desperate. Her eyes stung, her chest felt crowded and full, but she didn’t cry. No tears, even though everything else was there, waiting for them.

Jason’s body came up with the jeep. Marie had held her breath as she watched, a myth she hadn’t known she’d created for him whispering “maybe.” Jason was there, though, where she had left him: eyes open, lips parted, watch tight against his left wrist, hole in the base of his skull.

Marie still did not cry. She watched from afar, cold, numb. Just that. Nothing familiar and everything given.

--

end

August/September 2007
llethe / llethee (at) gmail (dot) com