The first shot of tequila he's tasted in months slides down his throat easily, bleaching his brain like the cleansing of a palate, and he welcomes the accompanying warmth that saturates his body. With the second shot, he still desperately clings to blissful indifference, but by the third, the alcohol betrays him, and the images begin to return, filtering past his careful defenses as effortlessly as wisps of vapor. They slowly solidify, and by the fourth shot, she's whole again, as vibrant as she was in life, and he either cannot or will not banish her.
The first thing he sees are her hands. He physically reels with the force of the memory, and gestures to Lincoln for the bottle, gulping the tequila like a lifeline, but neither the first swallow nor the second change the fact that the feel of her palm is sliding over the inside of his wrist and her fingers are tangling with his. They're graceful and lithe, and his mind is a traitor he cannot expel, reminding him without a trace of sympathy of the sensual heat of her touch.
He squeezes his eyes shut, but the images are flashing against the back of his eyelids like a technicolor slide show, and his brain is washed in the pale mint shades of the infirmary, the white of her coat and the rich copper of her hair popping out against the muted tones like the glare of the sun slanting through her window. emThe /emwindow. He moans, his head in his hands, and he wants to cry out to her for mercy, but it's too late. The still frames of their shared experience assault him with a vengeance, and for once, she does not soothe, and she does not heal.
He feels her eyes on him from his perch on the exam table, calm hazel pools that work tirelessly to put together the puzzle that is his placement in Fox River. They widen with genuine terror as she grips his bloodied foot, then study him with deliberate calm as she dabs gently at the gash to his forehead. While she tends to him, her face is only inches from his own, and his world is suddenly narrowed along with his vision—for the span of time he is here, in this room, his only plan involves him and her and he is consumed with hope instead of anxious dread.
She comes to him in the yard, and his view of her face is spliced by the interlocking diamonds of the wire fence. He prefers the infirmary, where the lack of a visual reminder lets him believe there is no boundary. She's not to blame, but suddenly she's a vessel of his helplessness, and he treats her as such. He clings to whatever vestige of the upper hand remains to him, whatever pride he can muster, and won't let her help.
He drinks more and more, and Lincoln lets him, but he still feels the abject horror that sluices through his gut when he sees her grainy image on the guard monitor, when he reaches down for her and she stares up at him, so very afraid. The countenance of her fear is etched forever in his memory directly alongside her smile, and he hates what it says about him that the two images are slotted side-by-side in the depths of his recall.
He wants to make her smile. He makes her the flower, and it's not because he wants to win her over. It's not because he feels the force of magnetic desire whenever they share the same space, and sometimes when they don't. It's because it's her birthday, and he wants to see her happy. He wants to see the rounded apples above her cheekbones scrunch up cheerfully and the fine lines about her eyes crinkle in simple mirth. Because she's so often serious. She's so often all business, listening to the beat of his heart with a determination on her face that lets him know she will not admit to hearing more in those silent moments than the steady pulsing of his blood. That being privy to the cadence of his aortic artery does not give her access to the power of his suggestion or the nature of his thoughts.
Nor will she acknowledge her own. Not while they huddle together on the cold concrete floor of Ad Seg, his hand cradled in hers while she comforts with a soothing purr that positively vibrates against his body and resonates from the tips of his wasted fingers to the soles of his feet. Not when she accepts his gift of clay and mindless labor with an amused chuckle and something more that she quickly conceals under the guise of professional distance. He doesn't see the mirror of his longing in her eyes until the day it all falls apart. The day everything catches up to him, snowballing without warning and casting him so very far off his original course. He scrambles. He acts. He kisses her, fighting his way upstream against a current of misgiving.
Afterward, despite the blinding anger she uses as camouflage, he can see her feelings plainly, her thoughts as opaque as glass. Her face is flushed with a righteousness he knows he forced upon her, and regret, thick and black as night, covers his chest like a blanket that threatens to smother.
It remains upon him to this day, this day that he drinks and drinks and she will not go away. His memory marches forward, and she's lying there, unconscious and dying, and even though this image has only ever been pieced together from hearsay, he can practically hear the sound of the sirens that finally rescue her when he cannot. While he's not even aware. He folds paper cranes in his mind, sending them through the third party of the postal system when all he desires is to slip them into her palm himself, face to face. Skin to skin. He's forced to pound his head against a wall as he hears her voice for the first time since he's tasted freedom. There's no triumph. There's nothing to celebrate.
The next time he lays eyes on her, the sunlight is so bright she squints. She shields her eyes and her face and walks around from the side of her car to circle him cautiously. Her trust in him has been stripped away and he finds that it's he himself who is left bare. He bends double with the sheer weight of the pain and the hurt that she's dumped in his lap, but she'sem here,/em and that must count for something. And it does count, until she's gone, without warning, and he's left with nothing more than a scribbled note and a haphazardly interlocking past.
But he tries again, and so does she, because this is something worth doing, and together, they board a train that will carry them toward a potential future. It sways and shakes underneath them, but fear and perhaps her own mortality nip at her heels and she becomes emboldened. She whispers her secrets and he kisses her again. She kisses him back, and smiles at him in a new way he didn't realize he'd been craving until she offers it and he is sated. Later, they joke because it's what they know how to do, and he clasps her hand in his because it's what he can give.
And there's more, but even in this inebriated state, what he knows of the rest remains tightly locked in the far recesses of his mind. Freighters and arrests and Panama are nothing more than a muddled and indiscernible carnage of nightmares that when he sleeps, bash upon the rocks of his dreams, over and over and over. This is where he must end it, because he will not mar his eulogy with the reality that is the rest of her story. He knows he's reeking of tequila, but only a dull sense of pointlessness remains on the back of his tongue. It leaves a bitter aftertaste that he cannot swallow. He had not known grief was physical. He had not foreseen that the depth of his pain would bring a pallor to his face that has nothing to do with his time in Sona. That his despair would turn to the color of chalk washed away by a driving, gray rain. And he knows he will martyr her. He will elevate her to sainthood, and it will most likely ruin the splintered fragments that masquerade as what's left of his life, but it's no more than she deserves and probably a lot less. His hands, clutching at his sides, are warm, tingling from what he's sure is the ghost of her touch, and he wonders how to mourn someone who won't leave. He drops his head, and he weeps.