Somewhat Damaged
Rating: T for swear words
Spoilers: Pre-Series through 1x03 from Jamie's POV chronicling her obsession with Reiden and unexpected bond with Mitch. Takes a few liberties with pre-canon details, but I am using the show's timeline for Jamie, including her pre-credits dossier in S1 which gives a death year of 2004 for her unnamed father.
Summary: How Jamie got her groove back.
Disclaimer: Are Mitch and Jamie happily making blueberry pancakes together in a kitchen in Maine? No, because CBS owns them, not me. I would be much nicer to them though.
Somewhat Damaged
Jamie Campbell has been raised to be strong, independent and resilient. Armstrongs and Campbells soldier on. They do not whine. They do not whimper. They find something to hold onto, even in the midst of tragedy.
Her mother embraces hope. Hope that she might beat the swift-progressing cancer. And once that hope proves hopeless, hope that she can somehow ease the coming loss by graciously accepting her fate. She buries her fear, her sorrow, her anger that she will not live to see her little girl grow up, trying to impart a lifetime's worth of love and wisdom with her last breaths. She hopes (sadly in vain) that this can give her family, especially her heart-broken daughter, comfort in the dark coming days.
Her father latches onto denial. Denial that the farm girl with the sparkling eyes and ready smile will soon be gone. Denial that the family he loves so much but finds it so hard to tell in words has been torn apart forever, a crucial part missing. And after 26 more deaths, denial that those responsible forit all will never be held accountable. Ultimately, like her mother's hope, her father's denial provides no protection from a world cruel enough to rob his child of another parent far too soon.
Jamie clenches anger in both fists. Caught in a swirling blackhole of grief that threatens to swallow her whole, the recently-exonerated Reiden Global provides both a convenient target and a lifeline to the girl - incentive to get up in the morning, to finish school, to become an adult who will finally make those bastards pay. When former friends stop reaching out with useless platitudes and empty comfort, she refuses to count it as a loss. When they start mocking her, calling her "Crazy Campbell" behind her back, she forces herself to ignore the sting of their words. She finds her place among her fellow outcasts, criminals and hackers, learning useful skills for the coming war. Weekends are spent creating a blog of Reiden's many crimes and hacking classified government reports. Instead of shopping for a prom dress, she figures out how to crash her first server. The rage sustains her. She feeds it, nurtures it like a newborn, and wraps herself in it like her father's worn flannel shirt. Relationships are kept casual and temporary as she divides everyone she meets into two sides - Allies (far too few) and Potential Foes (everyone else). She relies on that fire to help her bounce back after every blow, relishing the dream of making the hated corporation burn.
Even the most-dedicated fellow journalism students can't match the tunnel-visioned intensity with which she goes after any potential environmental disaster, any hint of corporate malfeasance or cover-up. She learns the hard way that passion alone is not enough. It also takes luck, tenacity, and an ability to play to one's strengths. Confrontation produces mixed results, but subtle manipulation - being able to read people, figure out what they expect from her, and deliver it (or at least pretend to) - is the real goldmine. Her mother's old adage about catching more flies with honey proves true, so she banks the anger, still boiling but carefully masked behind guileless blue eyes. Each person she meets proves a puzzle to solve as she practices her skills, finding just the right smile to crack a frat boy willing to sell his secrets for presumed female adoration, pouring on the small town girl in the big city charm with a motherly potential landlady. Through trial and error she teaches herself to recognize when someone needs a push, and when to stand back and let them hang themselves; when to dangle the carrot, and where to threaten the stick.
When she is first hired on at the Telegraph, she is excited. It feels like an important milestone, her first real newspaper job, even if she is celebrating it alone. Finally she has a legitimate press credential, a way to get answers to hard questions on the record, evidence that cannot be retracted or discounted. As months go by and every painfully-researched and documented Reiden story gets pulled from final copy for "lack of evidence," she channels her frustration into her blog, her 24,000 unique eyeballs just inspiring her to fight harder. When told she has to make a choice between them, there's no choice at all. That Ethan can't see that is just one of many reasons this last year was a mistake. That a smug, dismissive veterinary pathologist she just met seems to get it – get what drives her - only reinforces that fact.
Dr. Mitch Morgan is cranky, irritating, and doesn't pull his punches. Still, Jamie finds his up-front skepticism of her claims refreshing compared to the verbal head-patting followed by behind-her-back patronization she usually gets. His willingness to listen, to experiment, to test theories and entertain possibilities while also pointing out holes in her logic, making her go back to check her facts, round out her research and re-evaluate her conclusions, both frustrate and encourage her, as she tries without success to read him. She finds herself wishing that she had told him the whole truth from the beginning, her own niggling conscience reminding her that his honesty deserves hers in return. But by the time she recognizes his willingness to help her, buried under ten layers of sarcasm and protests to the contrary, it's too late. If she can just get him to New Orleans and the Senator before it blows up in her face, everything will be worth it. History reminds her that this fight always ends up in Reiden's favor, of all the prior setbacks and mounting casualties, but she still bets on Senator Vaughn - and Mitch - to come through.
When her rapidly-greying ethics won't allow her to actually lie to him outright, everything starts to unravel and Jamie reels. She can't lose Mitch now, not when she might finally be nearing a win. She confesses her firing and can't argue when he snarks that her "good reason barometer is on the fritz." She knows she is broken, she has been for years. She worries for just a second that he can see it, before jumping to follow as he storms away from the rental counter without her. Her apology is swift and sincere, and while he does seem to understand that, it does not sway him. She has tried every trick she knows - implying rewards that have worked on previous sources, employing words that paired with her killer charm have certainly worked on other men - but remains at a loss how to motivate him. Both disappointed and perversely impressed when appeals to both ego and avarice prove unsuccessful, she is left only one card to play. It petrifies her to reveal so much of herself to a near-stranger but she has run out of options.
She buys flowers from a vendor on the street, purposely keeping herself a few steps ahead of Mitch. His legs are longer so he could easily catch up to her, but he seems to recognize her need to put distance between them, even as she bids him to follow her. Stopping at the familiar iron gate, she takes a deep shuddering breath and reminds herself that nothing is more important than finally bringing down Reiden. As he catches up and registers their destination, his eyes soften and Jamie turns away, afraid to see anything that might resemble pity. She neither needs nor wants his sympathy. She just needs him to see why this fight - her fight - is so important. Nancy Armstrong Campbell should have had 40 more years that Reiden Global stole from her, but he can help her right that wrong and make sure it won't ever happen again. She needs him to see that she may be a lot of the things people have called her - damaged, angry, obsessed, even a liar, but the one thing she's not is crazy.
The flowers blur the name etched in marble as she tries to treat this like any other story, laying out the facts as dispassionately as possible, trying (and failing) to pretend that this is not her tale, she is merely the narrator. She explains the cancer clusters, the 26 friends and neighbors who also left grieving families behind, a community that will never be whole. As she parrots back the excuses used to shield those responsible from any sort of justice, tears welling in her eyes, the soft "I'm sorry" cuts into her soliloquy, nearly startling her. For the first time she looks at Mitch as someone more than just a possible resource or ally against Reiden. She sees a man who understands loneliness far better than she thought as he explains his own family estrangement, capped off with a poor joke about being an acquired taste. She thinks of all he has done for her already - looking for the cats, cutting his lecture short to help her get more evidence, standing with her now even after her lies - and tells him sincerely that in the end he comes through. It is the closest she can come to "thank you."
The senator's denouncement of her as "pathetic" echoing in her ears, she barely registers the fleeting warmth of his hand on her back as Mitch guides her out of the office (trying to preserve the little dignity she has left) or the brilliance of his parting shot. Functioning on auto pilot, she leads him to her bar, retreating to the one place where she is not the only person still bound to the past, then tries not to flinch when his Miss Havisham reference hits a little too close to the mark. As Jamie downs shots of vodka to silence the taunt still reverberating in her head, Mitch makes an uncharacteristic attempt at a pep talk, unable to grasp that she has already lost everything in this fight, there's nothing left. She tries to make him understand through slurred words that it's not just her job, her apartment, her latest setback with an unreliable politician. Jamie is exhausted, defeated, and for the first time forced to accept that even with all the evidence and allies in the world, she probably still won't win. That angry fire she depended on for so long did not touch her enemy, it just burned her life to ashes. She sincerely thanks him once more, then confirms the war is over, fighting the urge to squirm under that too-perceptive gaze. She heads off to call the only relative she has left, to salvage a place to rest, even just for the night, and dreads having to explain to her uncle that once again she failed, once again she let her family - her mother - down. Simultaneously attempting to sound not-drunk, arrange a bed on her uncle's couch and hide her latest disaster, she spots Mitch next to a strange man in a suit, gesturing to her frantically, and hastily ends her call. An hour later as he sits in the aisle seat next to her headed for Tokyo, droning on while she understands about every fourth word, Jamie admits, just to herself, that this sarcastic scientist who claims to hate people may be the first real friend she has ever had. The combination of vodka and his science babble soon lulls her to sleep on that sobering thought.
Several hours later, she jolts awake from a hard pillow that turns out to be Mitch's shoulder. His slightly amused brown eyes regard her behind glasses with an expression she does not quite understand. She finally settles on exasperation tinged with grudging fondness, like she is a stray puppy that followed him home and he is trying hard to resist giving her a name.
"How's the hangover?" he asks.
Jamie just groans in response, absolutely sure that she has felt her skull expand and retract in the last thirty seconds, before she notices the cup thrust into her hand. "Thanks, but I don't really want coffee," she mumbles, trying to push it back at him.
Mitch shakes his head. "It's a hangover cure I developed in med school. Don't ask what's in it, just drink it."
She almost refuses on general principle. Jamie has never been much for following orders, and she wants to make damned clear that she has no intentions to start now. The person mining for gold in her head with a rather sharp pickaxe makes her reconsider. She peers skeptically into the cup with a frown, then glances back over at Mitch again, reasoning that he probably would not try to poison her, at least on a plane full of witnesses. Closing her eyes and gulping down the vile liquid, she tries not to taste it, or gag, or think too much about what she may have just willingly ingested on the say-so of a man she has known less than a week.
"Ugh, what was in that?! Boiled skunk parts?" she complains with a shudder, slamming the cup down onto the open tray table. The sour look on her face morphs into a glare at Mitch's snort of laughter.
"Remind yourself of that taste the next time you're tempted to get drunk before air travel," he lectures with a smug grin in what she has dubbed his professor voice. She continues to glare at him.
"Okay one - at the time I wasn't planning to travel any farther than my uncle's couch and two - I am never drinking that stuff again, even if death is my only alternative," Jamie swears, before turning her attention to the dark airplane window, taking a moment to get her bearings. She is amazed to find her headache already abating, but wonders where she'll be able to find the six gallons of mouthwash needed to kill that lingering aftertaste.
"So are we feeling better after our nap?" he asks a few minutes later, as though addressing a high-strung toddler. She resists a brief temptation to hit him, clenching her fist in her lap before relaxing it. If she wants him to treat her like an adult, it's time she starts to act like one, especially in light of the cringe-worthy breakdown to which he recently had a front row seat.
"A little," she confirms warily, gathering her admittedly minimal self-control to ignore his obvious bait. She turns back to him with a sarcastic half-smile, a dozen comebacks stilled on the tip of her tongue and his expression turns serious.
"I know the headache's better because my cure never fails," he brags, then hesitates, searching her face for something. "You don't seem like someone who just gives up, even when everyone around you is begging you to stop. So if we're going to do this - figure out what's wrong with the animals and stop it..."
"... and destroy Reiden Global," she interjects firmly, meeting his expression with a challenging one of her own. He sighs and turns his head, removing his glasses with one hand and scrubbing at his eyes with the other, before he puts them back on. When he turns back to her, he appears to have inherited her headache. Maybe she is the headache, heaven knows she's been called worse.
"If - and it's a big if - we can find proof that they are responsible," he concedes, still sounding far from convinced. Team Jamie from the bar is now officially gone, replaced once again by Team Science.
"Oh, they are. And I will prove it if it's the last thing I do," she vows hotly, feeling the all-consuming passion return, warming her from inside as it erases the numbness that briefly replaced it. She smiles to herself. This is familiar. Comfortable. This is what she knows how to do. Senator Vaughn was wrong, and a coward, and Jamie is ashamed to have briefly followed in his footsteps. Fights are not about sense. Courage isn't fighting because you can win. It's fighting for the things that matter, even when you know you won't. It's going down fighting with your last breath. She's grateful that Mitch didn't let her give up before she could remember that.
"So the annoying girl who won't take no for an answer, at least every time I say it, is back? No more meltdowns in Christmas bars?" he asks, giving her a speculative look.
She can hear the concern beneath his gentle mocking which makes her fidget uncomfortably in her seat. She also notes the hint of respect which she decides she much prefers.
"I'm not planning any but I can't speak for you now, can I?" Jamie flippantly retorts as Mitch continues to stare at her, undeterred. She can't joke her way around this.
"I've got this. You can count on me," she assures him seriously, meeting his stare head on. She will never tell him that he kind of saved her today, but she definitely won't forget.
Apparently satisfied with her response, he gives her a quick nod and the merest hint of a smile in return. "Okay then, while you were busy drooling on me in a vodka-induced coma, I was actually doing something useful, thinking about the species identified so far in the attacks..." Mitch teasingly explains, his eyes lighting up when hers flare in indignation, before lapsing into more rapid-fire science gibberish that she'll have to Google later.
Jamie Campbell has been raised to be strong, independent and resilient. Armstrongs and Campbells soldier on. They do not whine. They do not whimper. They find something to hold onto, even in the midst of adversity. Now she has two - saving the world by defeating Reiden Global and her partner in this mission, Mitch Morgan.