Title :: The Past and Pending
Author :: Charli (promisesanddisappointments@hotmail.com)
Rating :: PG
Disclaimer :: and lo, I asked the magic cactus: "Is Wells really screwing with Carter so badly this season?" And he replied: "There are more penguins behind this conspiracy than you know. They know what's going on. Why don't you ask them?" And lo, season 10 made sense ;)
Spoilers :: the end of season 9 – up to "When Night Meets Day"
Summary :: a pensive Carter; in five parts. Late season 9.
Author's Notes :: Because I do like to be late to jump on the band-wagon - set around the end of season nine. Post "Things Change", probably pre "When Night Meets Day". Around "Foreign Affairs", but no Eric falling into graves here, for the benefit of my sanity. Also, because it's not a post-ep.
Extra big thanks to Jen, who rocks. And to Kitty, who rocks sum' more. With memories of diner pies and bakery coffees.
= = =
The Past and Pending
Held to the past, too aware of the pending,
Chill as the dawn breaks and finds us up for sale.
Enter the fog another low road descending,
Away from the cold lust, you house and summertime.
= =
It's the mornings which wake you to bright sunlight, pouring through muslin-thin curtains, that most surprise you. Not surprised that you're awake, but that you've slept at all.
You wake just the same, whether you can reach out and brush her satin skin or not. You wake from nights when she clung to you and you were absorbed by her, nights when all you could see was the darkness of her eyes, nights when you turned away, nights when a sharp gasp could shatter the crystal air suffocating you, nights filled with ebony black loneliness.
As a child, you dreamt of making the world a better place without need for struggles, of mattering and helping. It wasn't the littler victories – two years without drugs, a child immunised against measles, a gang banger saved to fight another day – you dreamed of, they were bigger, vast and eternal deeds – an African village saved from HIV, clean water and wells wiping out cholera in an Indian town.
Somewhere between the cradle and the grave you've spun off course, and in the pale, blinding light of one early dawn, you suddenly wonder if going back on course might be the solution to everything.
You remember reading once, a long time ago, that life never becomes so bad that man will cease to hope for something better. You want to see this happening, see this hope amidst that hell.
= =
i - The Burial of the Dead
=
Maybe I ain't used to maybes smashing,
In a cold room, cutting my hands,
Up, every time I touch you.
Maybe, maybe, it's time to wave goodbye now.
=
He finds that he doesn't want to look her in the eyes, for the first time he doesn't want to see the world breaking behind her irises. Thinks that maybe this is the end, the funeral, or at least the beginning of the end.
Or at least it's something. Isn't it?
Maybe they're wrong for each other after everything included in it all.
He hates that they were at times the perfect example of the "so bad for each other they're right for each other" couple; it's the sort of double negative logic that she lives by. They may be wrong for each other, but they won't let anyone else be right for them either, so he's not too sure what choice they've had. Sunshine creating falling shadows. Fate, in all of its nefarious forms, has followed them remorselessly.
"I'm not going anywhere."
One sentence he'd said so earnestly so many months ago, trying at the time to sooth her, to reassure, to convince her to see that their relationship could be as long lasting as he saw it.
Except, he hadn't gone anywhere. He'd stayed right where he was, and she was the one who'd left him standing there all alone, a cold wind buffeting him like a solitary mourner at a graveside. She'd drifted away so slowly, travelling so subtly that he didn't notice her leaving until she'd wrenched herself with such force from the tips of his clinging fingers.
The thing is, it's always so hard for us to judge distance with only eyesight to measure it by.
But he had changed. Much as he denied it to her, and much as he denied it to himself. For now he wanted to go anywhere but here; find his place that is no place once again and call out to her to pull him from its centre to see if she'll respond once again as she always did.
No one really asks for their life to change; not really. But it does.
It's hard to leave someone who isn't there; maybe never was there.
She is everywhere and nowhere all at once. Anyplace he turns to escape from her she's there in one of her chameleon forms, yet when he looks for her she's gone.
Burnt coffee, stale cigarette smoke; she lingers like half-breathed whispers of ghosts on the air, displaying her footprints all over his conscious self.
The sunlight weaved in dried-out ochre grass near the lake reminds him of her hair; the gentle autumn rain becomes her tears as she cried for her brother, all he could have been and all he would now be. He can not forget her, can not forget his memories and associations of her, his thoughts will not sleep; to him, the dusk and the dawn contain fleeting shares in her.
He's always waiting, patiently watching seconds tick past in the measureless time of their lives, but she isn't there for him to find anymore. The loss of her is as great as if she'd died, but there's no body to grieve – only hearts and minds.
He's always thought there should be some magic 'thing' – a spell, a button, a wand, he doesn't really know but believes it should exist – which somehow makes everything work when it should, when it's the right person. Something which makes everything right even when it's so wrong. It would tell him where they'd go wrong, tell them how they could fix it, tell her what their future should be like.
But there's not, and there never has been. There's no magic, and without it there's no enchanted things.
He used to pray for a belief in magic when he was younger, as if in some way a belief in magic would make it exist. Produce brothers from thin air; make his mother love him - shadows made alive by the power of his desire. And as if, if it existed, it would be there to stop brothers from dying, parents from rowing, lovers from crying; though he knows it probably would have been used for some greater good like ending world hunger or the AIDS pandemic.
She brought a new light into his world and so he followed her inevitably, a tide to the moon, forgetting that a moon merely reflects the light of the sun, has no light of its own, and while facing our moon we have our backs to the sun.
Magic and faith are dreams for little boys lost, and he is all grown up, tossed into the underworld with no Sibyl to guide him past the three-headed dog.
=
It could have been so many ways other than this; it could have been anything other than this.
=
Knowledge is perhaps the most powerful weapon to hold over someone; knowledge gained from books, people, life. It's the skill most highly sought by civilisations since forever, most dearly treasured by kings and philosophers.
Philosophy (n. pl.): a love for, including the pursuit of, knowledge; the useful things boarding school taught him. Knowledge, facts based on proof we can trust, so different to belief in ourselves and others.
So to that degree, it's always been easy - medicine, world politics, how to change a tyre on his jeep; we learn something by reading it or being told about it, then apply it. But she's always had to be different, that was inevitable: he's only been able to learn Abby by instinct, she refuses to teach him, and anyway, she'd always known him better than she knows herself. Maybe he could claim to know her better than she knows herself, he knows her better than she thinks he does: that she cries in the shower even when there's no-one in the apartment to hear, that she runs away from things by pretending to be moving on, that she whispers she loves, that she needs, when she thinks he's asleep.
He's always thought that trips to outer Mongolia or wherever for the purpose of "self-discovery" and "finding yourself" and other modern psycho-babble phrases, which really translate down to "avoidance", were self-indulgent rubbish for people with too much money and too little purpose - though that description fits him perfectly right now. But, surely, if we can't find ourselves at home, how are we going to find ourselves while trying to navigate a trek through the ancient Indian mountains on an outing masquerading as the involvement in a mystic, half-known, religion?
Sharp, attacking spasms of wracking coughs break rudely into his mind.
A smoker's cough.
His back seems to have been hurting all day and the battered leather of the lounge doesn't give him the relief he craves.
How she knows this, knew this, he doesn't know, but he feels a sudden blow of cold at the bottom of his back, carefully placed by soft and worried hands: the ice superseding the pain, the relief causing his eyes to close in sudden calm, unable to think of anything but the numbing of tension.
"Everything okay?"
"Fine."
He holds his breath, as if trying to make the world stop with his lungs; to slow everything down and grasp more firmly to what he holds in the cradled palm of his hand.
When he looks up, 3 seconds later, the room is empty, and the door is slowly swinging.
=
Everything's mixed-up, everything's wrong, and he doesn't know how to make it all alright again.
= =
ii - A Game of Chess
=
Won't you take me away from me.
Crawling through this world as disease flows through my veins,
I look into myself, but my own heart has been changed.
=
The red glare of digital figures on an old alarm clock informs him it's 4.22am with a twisted sadistic joy, a little like the euphoria he felt on first beating his grandfather at their weekly Sunday evening game of chess when he was 12.
Damn.
The darkest hour is just before dawn.
Does that mean that light - clear, bright and sharp, illuminating everything in its true colours - will show soon? He wonders in a moment of cynicism if he'll need to wear sunglasses before his eyes grow accustomed.
Another not-quite-morning; another night segueing faultlessly into another day, with himself there to watch the soft coupling once more. In another context, it would seem almost voyeuristic.
The world has become a place where he exists solely for exhaustion's purposes. He can't remember what it felt like to have any energy or enthusiasm for anything except caffeine and his bed, in solitude.
He used to be different, now he reminds himself more and more of her; proving the way in which we adopt character traits from people we spend so much time with. If we spent enough time with one person, would we become them? Or would, together, we become some mixture of a whole new person?
His body aches with a bone-deep pain of weariness; every step he takes feels like dragging a log behind his bad back, every breath seems to require too much effort, all too much effort. Deep sea diver tiredness, dragging his limbs slowly up from the sinking sands. The shadows under his eyes have become black like coal-pits; his closed eyelashes merging into the chequered shadowy skin.
There was a time before this; he can see it in his memories in the same slightly damaged but all the more perfect because of that way that classic black and white movies have.
The correct reactions for frequently recurring events of life are drilled firmly into his brain; he can see what he should do, say and feel for everything, but has no way of progressing beyond the eternal 'should' of his emotions.
A thick blanket of clear plastic cords has been placed between him and the world.
It's odd how such soul-numbing tiredness can have that effect, identical to drugs – nothing seeming quite real, nothing quite managing to touch emotions. Unfortunately, tiredness doesn't bring the accompanying compensations of drugs – an ability to forget those emotions we can no longer reach. It seems rather to have the opposite effect, of making it impossible for anything except the memories of such piercing emotions to fill your brain.
There had been a patient that day – a girl, maybe 20 or so, a young college student – a patient who he began his shift with, whose stomach he had to pump with charcoal, a girl who thought an eternal chemically induced sleep was better than facing even one more day.
He'd asked her why. Why?
He knows he shouldn't have done so, if anyone asks her that it would be one of the infinitely repeating psychiatrists she'd have on her back for the rest of her life; two words in black ink on a chart forever reminding her and everyone else that she'd known a time when she didn't see a point. Her answer had been a muttered quote, for minutes he'd thought she didn't have an answer and had thought that was perhaps the saddest part of the case - if there can be a saddest part to the attempted suicide of girl with so little behind her and so much in front.
"Death consumes all lovely things."
A truth he knows, a truth which he knows so well – that death is the only thing we can't escape - taxes can be to some extent avoided if we know how and where, but death stalks everyone, everything. No matter how good, how beautiful, how much we bring to the world, the only thing we can take from the world is death, and death takes everything. It's the same for a 15 year old with cholera in the Congo as it is for a rich old lady with a modern, western, disease in Chicago. It's an inevitability he's beginning to wander why he keeps running from, an inevitability which takes perverse pleasure in hitting him hard over the head every time he might forget.
Bobby. Gant. Lucy. His grandfather. Gamma. A memento mori indeed. Death is his art.
Apparently, we can only save the ones who don't want to be saved.
The most beautiful things in the world – love, hope, peace, truth, freedom – all die.
He wants them, he needs them, he needs something and he needs it now. It hasn't been this bad since everyone began to pretend it had never happened. He's been the perfect ex-addict, followed such a model pattern of recovery.
And now he needs them all so much, needs some escape from whateveritis his life has become, needs some form of oblivion, and that's the best type he knows.
They always warn about the dangers of cross-addiction, saying that to get into a relationship in the first year is one of the worst ideas possible. But they don't tell how to mark the borderline where a 'friendship' becomes a 'relationship', when getting coffee and pie, when talking, becomes dangerous.
He's lost everything he depended on in the past three years, and he now feels exactly as he did before then. Scared of the world he's re-emerged into because it's not the world he used to know and he has no coping structures to deal with any of the things this new world could throw at him.
Brushing his hand in front of his face, as if trying to physically push his tiredness and his thoughts away, he swings his legs off the side of the bed and pads slowly towards to kitchen.
He should talk to someone, anyone; but his sponsor's got more problems than he has, his sponsor is part of his problems, his sponsor's relapsed more recently than he has. And there was never anyone else.
She finds some unique strength in repetition and well-worn paths, paths which he's now scrambling through brambles to escape from because he can see that they're merely going round in circles, heading towards a dead end which she won't look up from her feet to see.
He can tell that they've failed themselves without anything being done.
=
It should have been something other than this; it should always have been something else, some other way.
=
"Carter."
Weaver's standing at the desk, directing a diatribe of his faults and irreparable failings at Pratt who doesn't even bother to look up from his so-vital phone call. The phones are all ringing, the computers all whirring; charts over-flowing the racks and a second board has been wheeled into place. Frank's ranting at everybody and anybody again – apparently, saving lives gets in his way – and she stands there oblivious to it all, utterly unconcerned.
Chaos, again, total and utter chaos. Chaos which makes her life normal, which lets her carry on as she knows. Yet these images reflect from his eyes making no connection to his brain - even in the midst of such a storm she draws him away from the outer turmoil, like the eye of a hurricane.
"Carter!" He drags his eyes away from the murky glass to see Susan rolling her eyes at him. Why she had to pick an expression so reminiscent of Abby he doesn't know – next thing she'll be pouting.
"What?"
"You're staring."
"At what? There's nothing out there to stare at," he replies gesturing towards the temporarily closed door, wondering why he's bothering to play this game with Susan of all people.
"Right."
She shakes her head slightly at him, but has apparently decided that whateveritis he and Abby are doing at the moment is far too full of complications she doesn't want to get into. He wishes he had that choice; though Abby seems to have managed it somehow.
He accuses her of running away every time they argue, an occurrence which is becoming a ritual. Maybe if he just once let her really run away it would stop, maybe if he ran away it would stop. Maybe, maybe, maybe…
Luka ran away from all his problems, and he certainly had a lot of them, yet he had seemed somehow less tormented on the phone…
"… and Chloe wants me to come and be mediator in one of her couple-therapy sessions with Joe, apparently family involvement was some stupid idea of her counsellors, but unfortunately she got dad onto me…"
"You said no?"
"I said 'hell no'," and at that he grins. Susan wishes he still grinned as he had done before she left; she wishes a lot of things were as they were before she left.
She offers him some of the hot muddy water the hospital calls "coffee" in the lounge, and sits on one of the new chairs, flicking pensively through a "New Yorker" from six months ago.
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
She seems worried that leaving him to his thoughts might not be the best idea and, if he's honest, he'd have to agree with her. And he's almost grateful to her for killing the silence with words, for distracting him from himself. Though he'd have chosen a slightly easier question – perhaps something about whether the Democrats have anything even approaching a chance next year.
A sigh, a creak of battered leather bending on wood, weary bones descending and a mind wandering alone through the chess board of life; solitary and graceful as a white queen.
Perfect? Good? Someone who's got-it-all-right? NotMe?
All of the above and then some more?
"Content."
More than this; there has to be something more than this.
He is no one but who he thinks he is, he is only the person he will let himself be. And that's one of the scariest things about his life lately.
Maybe he wants the life he didn't choose.
=
Everything hurts, everything aches, and he doesn't know the cure to make it all better.
= =
iii - The Fire Sermon
=
Better off as the fool,
Than the owner of that kind of heart.
They don't know you anyway,
They don't know you and they don't watch you walk away.
=
He forgets when he stopped paying attention to what they said; when whatever they uttered to each started to matter so little. Because after a time, everything began to blur into everything else, just repeating their play list of accusations, comebacks, offers, appeasements - Chamberlain got it wrong, and so did they. Churchill was right: appeasement never works.
There has to be a reason for when things collapse with a crash like this he thinks, but he can't work out what the weakness in their structure was. It almost seems like there wasn't a reason, maybe they never had any chance anyway, maybe their foundations were always too crooked and cracked to be able to support any sort of stable structure.
Reading her mind wouldn't have helped him because even she can't make sense of the tangled mass of thought threads in her brain, and she's had howevermanyyearsitis to try and learn how they work. Anyway, how does being able to read someone else's mind solve anything? Surely it just confuses things more: there's twice the number of problems, weight of baggage, unresolved issues, worries, concerns, responsibilities.
She doesn't want to be rescued; she insists that she doesn't need to be saved, that she's not broken.
Maybe she's not, but it continually surprises him every morning when he wakes to find that she's still held together by something, somehow.
All this time she's been telling him that she's not broken when in fact she's only barely held together by the emotional equivalent of old, brown sellotape, brittle and crispy.
He can't think of the words for all of it, and that's probably because there aren't any words. Failing attempts to put this into words, to describe it to someone else, to explain it to himself, to express it to her.
It's about how she is torn and bruised. How she is scared, battle-worn, and weary. How she doesn't want to love him. But she does. How she won't admit she loves him. But he knows.
It's about how she is confused. It's about how everything can mean nothing to her.
About how she is stronger than she thinks, but weaker than she pretends.
Missing something implies that in the first place it was clearly there for us to be able to miss it when it was gone. We don't always have to have liked it when it was there, but we noticed when it wasn't.
We ask questions, even if we know what the answers are, because often knowing that we're not loved, that we're not special, is better than waiting for an unfounded hope to be dashed. Because sometimes it can be better to face reality, sometimes our own little private worlds aren't better than what the rest of the world faces on a daily basis.
As if the world could be cured if we knew all the answers.
It's about the weight of their baggage and how lightly they can sometimes jump with it. About how when they want to let go gravity forces them together. About all the other times when they cling to each other and are blown away like scattered leaves on an autumn breeze.
That they care when they shouldn't, when every instinct screams at them to run. That they care because they've proved it's impossible to stop.
Maybe this is it, maybe there never was anything else, and maybe that's the point. Maybe that's what he believes, or maybe that's what he should because that's what she believes, and maybe that would be their only chance.
Nothing but more of the same, over and over. Or so it seems, like flames mirroring each other with their dissimilarities in each new flash of life. An endless déjà vu, growing worse at every turn. This is all he knows, all he has.
About how the city is deserted and every aspect of life is around them.
It almost seems like the amount of emotion bestowed upon every person at birth is finite and he's come to the end of his; has always expended too much, too often, and all he's left with is a soul which can't connect to how it should be feeling.
It's about how we can never quit all our vices, and for every one we try to drop we find new addictions, new ranges of problems.
=
It would have followed some other script; it would have worked out, it would have.
=
A gigantic bruise of iodine spreads across the sky, broken arteries reaching to cover a poisoned sky as the suns sets.
He runs his finger over the small, sharp ridges, pushing hard on the plastic and making fierce indented prints in his soft flesh.
"Abby?"
"Yes?"
It's a self-made hell he's walking through, but knowing that doesn't make the fires any colder to walk on.
He has no cigarette, but coaxes the lighter to flames again and again, as if trying to burn away the air and life around him to ashes swept away on the wind.
"We're going to be okay."
Does that scarred soul of hers even know how to be okay? Or what 'okay' is?
"What Carter?"
"If… would… uh…"
He stumbles over words; little boulders on his path, making him fall and graze his knees on his way to godknowswhere. Subtle hints that perhaps the journey's not worth the blood he is leaving behind him.
"Would you miss me if I went away?"
She stares blankly at him and he's lost, floundering, because he always used to be able to work out what he meant by her reactions. And if she doesn't know how she's supposed to react, does that mean he didn't have a meaning, that he is without meaning? So he talks to the tarmac road in the ambulance bay; telling it that he might be going on holiday, asking it where the nice and quiet beaches are, wanting to know where it sees their relationship going, if it loves like he loves.
"Like, if I went on holiday. With my dad. Or something?"
She's been missing him for months now anyway, and in fact thinks that she might miss him less if he wasn't there. Somehow. So she avoids the question and argues with the bricks behind him; soon, she'll be there soon, it's just that right now isn't a good time for her, it's all been hard, so hard, lately.
"Um… I think a holiday with your dad might be good for you. So yeah, go somewhere with him, try and get a break."
He doesn't need a break from work, he needs a break from himself he wants to yell at her, but that's slightly harder to come by, and he doesn't think a holiday with his dad will be any help.
Isn't it amazing how two people can hold conversations without communicating any idea of what they're thinking and feeling.
People write of scars healed; some loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, forgetting there is no such thing in our lives. There are shrunken open wounds, sometimes shrunk to the size of a pinprick, but they are wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, of the sight in an eye. We may not miss them either for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing we can do about it.
If someone leaves, is it really because we are better off without them anyway?
He wanted to fix her, to pick up the fallen pieces she left behind and put them together again so that the jagged edges wouldn't stab her with every breath. He wanted to do this so badly, to make everything better, to make the world work for them this time around. All he's done is turn some of the pieces the other way round, so they face outwards, so they stab him rather than her.
"We can't go on like this Carter." He'd react better if she at least appeared to feel the heart-searing pain he does, but all he can feel from her, all he has felt from her for weeks, is a flowing vast tragic apathy.
"Like what?"
"God, Carter!" Her body jerks away from him, and she turns across the ambulance bay, and he thinks he's made her run away. Again. But she turns back to him, to face the gusting wind blowing against her, trying to reach him before it's all too late.
"It would make me so happy just to be able to think of something I could do to get us, you, out of this."
"Sometimes I believe you Abby. I even believe that the smaller the thing you thought of, the greater the pleasure it would bring you."
His words are hard and sharp, like he never usually speaks, but the burning of connections through words is a trick he's learnt from her. The rancour in his heart is growing, continuously growing, thick and tough, like weeds in a carefully planned garden can take hold so easily and smother it so rapidly. He wonders if she'll ever be able to touch his core in the same way as she always used to; he's not sure he remembers what his core felt like, wonders if it was as painful as this.
She doesn't believe in "happily ever after"; he knows this, always has known it, and yet it still feels sharp and hot, like a new bee-sting, every time something happens to show her lack of faith.
They're not okay. It's not okay.
=
Everything's changed, everything's different, and he doesn't even know how it was before.
= =
iv - Death by Water
=
You, I thought I knew you,
You, I cannot judge,
You, I thought you knew me,
This one laughing quietly
Underneath my breath.
=
Life is a collection of boxes of jigsaw pieces, not even always organised into their respective pictures.
He remembers spending hours working on endless jigsaws with Bobby when he was made to stay in his bed.
This uneasiness comes over him sometimes, more often recently when he's drowning in his own mind; he sometimes feels like he's been patched together by parts from two other people.
He's one tiny piece of thousands in a missing pattern, critical pieces of the jigsaw missing; California on a US map, the honey-pot in Winnie-the-Pooh. He's never too sure how all the pieces of him can be part of the same landscape, how other people can exist so easily when they must be mixtures of incomplete scenes.
There are moments in our lives that make us, which set the course of who we are and who we will be. Sometimes these moments are little, subtle – sometimes they're not.
There are times when everything seems to fall into place, when all the pieces seem to begin to slot together of their own accord or spurred on by some minor event he can't recall, but which was obviously important.
And then, when the pieces have stopped falling and we realise that everything's joined up as much as it can, the holes are still incomplete, the edges are still broken, and perhaps that's because maybe the pieces never stop falling.
"I don't know if people ever really change."
What if she's right; what if change isn't a good, necessary, thing? If we open a chrysalis, common sense would tell us to expect to witness the birth of a butterfly, but his science tells him that what is actually there is the decay of a caterpillar.
The expectation of something beautiful, miraculous, when the event is known to be precisely the opposite. Birth and death, fire and water, remission and cancers.
He's hardened himself against her since she showed him his place in her life so clearly. It's soon going to be difficult to distinguish between his self-protective professional detachment and some new coldness enveloping his heart. As an indifference cherished, or even left to decay, becomes an emptiness, to this extent he is learning to become empty of Abby; serving her against his conscious will with negations and emotional neglect.
A world without Abby. It's flowers without petals, a tide without a current.
His face carries the expression of someone who feels the responsibility for keeping everyone else alive, even when he has no power to help them.
How easy is it to break a promise we never actually made? To shatter chains wrought in kisses in the dark, in hand brushes at dawn, in coffees shared by rivers; chains we never admitted to making. A blacksmith would say that chains joined by the quietest, most subtle and soft techniques should be the most malleable, the least binding; but he knows this isn't true, knows the stubborn-ness of the most delicate and rare of chemical bonds.
He can't see his life as a china doll, an arm broken off, merely needing some superglue to fix it back on, and then everything could be as it was before with a tiny crack to show that perhaps it's not as unnaturally perfect as it looks. He feels instead like a Ming vase, thrown against concrete, dashed into thousands of tiny pieces – the irreparable end of the art of a dynasty.
Our life is the same as tin foil: scrunch it up and we can unscrew it again, smooth it out over a hard flat surface, but the cracks, dents, faults can never be entirely erased.
She sleeps with the night sky behind her, he sees the sun rise from his bed, and thinks that maybe it's not over-reacting to see this difference as an explanation for why they're not working.
What happens when we find the last piece of the jigsaw to make us complete, and then we discover it doesn't fit?
=
It would have been different, it would have been right; it would have been how it should have been, if they could have just let it.
=
It's summer in Chicago. The only way he's ever been able to find a way to breathe in a Chicago summer is in a pure and dark room in the blackest ebony of a shining night.
The darkness is thin; so thin, so fragile, that he could reach through and break it, push it aside, if he only knew how.
Not quite beautiful clear blue skies with wisps of white and a golden sun bathing the world in illuminated joy - the sky is blue, but a dense, suffocating blue, too infused with humidity, too close, to provide any sense of escape and inner light. Clouds rarely appear, any form of white is merely a distant memory of ivory snow. Like us, any cloud has only one purpose in life, unlike us, the lonely clouds are able to recognise their purpose and follow it without being mesmerised by the woody glades of side paths; the purpose of a cloud in summer in Chicago is a furious, intense outpouring of tears and screams, rain and thunder which brings none of the emotional relief following a storm of sobs.
The darkness of the room tints her pallor with an unearthly blue shimmer; so much darker than the blue of summer lakes, lighter than midnight oceans.
"John…"
John. His name; his father's, his grandfather's; the name of thousands. But it doesn't help to make him feel like everyone else – even when everything's normal, he still can't seem to fit in anymore.
She shakes her head, water droplets falling like crystals from her hair. He doesn't think she even notices, it's too instinctive an action; like reaching for a cigarette as the ambulance doors whoosh shut behind her.
"It's my fault. I'm destroying you, I've ruined you."
"Ruined me? I'm ruined, am I?"
He might have saved her a year ago, she might owe him everything, but he's beginning to believe she can't be his salvation once again, that maybe he was merely trying to repay some of the debt which she will always hold over him, and what kind of relationship can they then have?
"No. Yes. You… you used to want to create things, now you seem to want to smash them up."
Talk is cheap they say; talk is good. He's never been much good at talking, never got much practice when he was younger, and his gratitude at finding someone who didn't want him to make spoken promises, to talk his way through their relationship, hid the knowledge deep down that maybe, just maybe, if one of them had been any good at talking, it might not have ended up like this. Words are priceless – too precious, too destructive, to be valued in any way.
Silence is easy; so easy, so attractive to them.
He wishes he could say to her "we've been going in circles", ending up at the point they'd been swimming from, that the current has swept them round to the same point again. Like drops of water in a whirlpool that are driven in smaller and smaller circles until they're sucked under the vortex of its heart.
But he can't. They haven't been going in circles.
"We're… we seem to be walking on an infinite straight line. And it's not even that we've been taking two steps forward, one step back; lately it's been two steps forward, three steps back. And I can't… I can't live like this any more Abby, neither of us can. Maybe it's everything around us right now, maybe it's something else, I don't know. I just don't know."
Isn't rain supposed to wash the dirt of the world away and make everything clean and new?
Her eyes are dark and huge, swallowing the rest of her face, translucent with exhaustion. She looks like she hasn't sleep in a month. Knowing her, he considers, she probably hasn't – and she's probably word-perfect in all those weird infomercials shown at ungodly hours.
"I'm sorry, Abby. God, I'm so sorry." Even to him his voice sounds like the heart-wrenching cry of a child from pure physical pain; he's almost crying, not quite a river.
Using words as a form of emotional morphine to fill the hole always felt inside.
They foreheads touch; him stooping a little, her rising slightly, to find their balanced medium; their eyes close and he feels a sudden jolt in his stomach where he thinks that maybe, just maybe, their connection is as strong as before, their chemistry as active, and maybe there always could be a chance. He can feel her hot breath on his paper dry skin; almost taste her scent as so many times before.
And the rain water that falls across her porcelain cheeks is like tears of pearls as he kisses her.
=
Everything's the same, nothing ever changes, and he doesn't know how he wants it to be apart from notthis.
= =
v - What the Thunder Said
=
So fade to black and white now,
Roll the movie of my life inside of my head.
'Cause like all true believers,
I am truly sceptical of all that I have said.
=
He's standing at the desk; busily ignoring Pratt and Frank while trying to decide whether he feels most like treating bloody diarrhoea or suspected crabs. From a distance, far from his emotions, if he even has any anymore, he remembers a time when making people better could make him feel better.
When we hear of depression we think of tears and sorrow and grief and an everlasting despair, such heightened emotions, we don't realise that all depression is, is nothing. Nothing, a huge void, empty spaces where we're meant to feel something, anything. A shell of a person, fragile and so easy to crack.
He's changed, how can she say people never really change; everything's changed.
Even the patients he doesn't want to treat are special, have special others. A grandson with his grandma, a loser boyfriend loved by his girlfriend, willing to travel with him to nowhere. He thinks with a bitter twist of nostalgia that it would be wonderful to be special, to matter to people.
Yet, truthfully, he's not really sure if it would be so wonderful to be special; we'd always be different, always be noticed. And that's part of the fear he thought he'd conquered, remnants of long forgotten rejections, part of what's destroying him.
Because if we're not special to someone there's no point trying. Much as he wants to reach his hand out just millimetres and brush her arm on her charts, say a single syllable and see her back turn into her face. But what would be the point; he's not sure what he'd be reaching out for.
Behind him she talks as she always did to others. Maybe she hasn't changed, maybe it was just him, and she couldn't change with him. She's Abby, and that always used to be enough.
"Interesting lady. Can I kill her?"
He misses how she used to be; sarcastic, funny, how she'd talk and laugh with him. When she could make him laugh. He misses these tiny throw away comments and moments so much, there's a hole eating away at himself inside his heart. Or maybe it's that when he's with her so much, he realises the price we pay when life's made us so bitter.
It's Susan who she cracks jokes with now. "No. You know I'd let you, but Kerry might then kill us."
When did they last make each other laugh? It used to be so natural and so easy, they didn't need to think to amuse each other, they had a different connection then.
Maybe he just wants to be special to her, because she's special to him, but there doesn't seem to be any "special person" space left inside her for another special person.
The worst feeling is suddenly realising that we don't measure up, and in the past, when we thought we did, we were fools.
Nothing hurts like a heart.
It's not possible for us to consider every single aspect and consequence of every single one of our actions upon everyone we know and everyone they know. Just the people we care about, the people we're close to. And maybe he never really got close enough, maybe he didn't actually let her in as much as he thought.
There was a time when the world was radiance and light, when all he knew was true, when the world loved him and so he loved it back.
And then, one morning, with watery pink sunlight pouring over his scrawny frame, he woke to find this world had fled from him and his when they'd turned their backs on it, trusting that it would still be there when they came back from the darkness.
But time waits for no one. Something he's only just beginning to realise the full implications of.
=
If it had been something else, would it have been right, would it have worked; or would it have failed in just such a way, and it could never have been anything else?
=
People often talk about 'borrowed time', but he's never really understood the phrase. For a start, what do we borrow this time against? Is there, can there be, any security for being given more time, a new start, yet another chance to screw up? What do we promise, and who do we promise it to? To make a better use of this fresh time, to honestly try harder this time, to succeed and make something of the world because surely somebody has to make something of it; to the fates, standing in ripped grey robes with scissors over our most fragile thread of life, laughing with amusement at it being forced to carry on for years and more years; to a god who doesn't care and won't care, whether we mess up again, whether we make the world worse this time?
He's borrowed time so many times against these emptiest of promises, and only now is he beginning to feel the hammering of the debt collectors at his door.
When he was 11 and Bobby had leukaemia and it should have been him: Bobby was the oldest son, Bobby was the son his parents loved, Bobby would have run the foundation and run it well. When he was 23 and too busy having sex with an older woman to notice that his room-mate was feeling pressured so badly by their mentor, to care that Gant was beginning to wonder why he should go on. When he was 28 and Lucy… Lucy, the best med-student he'd never paid attention to, Lucy whose death was his fault and his fault alone, Lucy whose bright grey eyes had never deserved to be extinguished, who had known what was going wrong when he'd been too busy trying to make Abby let old women die to even consider what she knew was right. And when he was 29 and he found the most beautiful of chemical oblivions…
And now he stands and looks at old couples sitting in silence beside a drifting river; old men alone with no one to care for them and no one for them to care about, trying to drink themselves away; old ladies being rolled out of trauma rooms where doctors had thought they were DNRs and nurses had argued and shown that they weren't.
They're living on borrowed time, and he's realising that he doesn't want to anymore.
Her shirt had begun the day white, white as the glare of summer sun on winter snow. If he didn't know better, if he didn't know every item, every part of her and every mask she ever wears, he could almost believe that it had been bought with the abstract modern-art pattern of red as a design feature.
She sighs while putting down used instruments, snapping off her latex gloves with that horrible crack sound of taut rubber against delicate skin. The air escaping in a haunting cry for all they've lost and her eyes desperately trying to reach him once more.
"This isn't anything like you John."
"Excuse me; I'm not much like myself anymore."
It's the changing of a second and they become awkward with no cause to latch onto; everything seeming suddenly to matter so much more, to weigh heavier in their hearts. It's strange how, without warning, the world can instantly shrink, condense itself so that all its problems are contained in the 2 metres of cluttered trauma room between them. How the silence surrounding them can obliterate the noise everywhere else so that there is nothing apart from here and now and the two of them.
And this time, he knows it's because of him.
"We shouldn't have to settle for this, Abby."
She's like a careful bunch of those old dried flowers she loves so; the soft, muted quality of her beauty and the faded oils of the crumbling petals. Dark and mysterious, soft and sad. Something indescribably tragic dragging behind the delicate façade of a life lived and loved in dusk.
"I can't help you if you won't even talk to me anymore!"
It's too late, all too late. She wants so desperately to reach him, save him from himself as she did once before, but there's no way for them to reach that safe place again.
"Copying my lines now?"
"I always told you what was wrong," she snaps, trying to defend herself even when she was the one trying to bring help.
"And then you'd walk away! Don't you get it Abby? That was almost worse than if you'd never said what was wrong. It was like… like you don't believe I'm capable of helping you in anything."
"And now you're trying to pay me back?!" she cries, not believing that the Carter she once knew, the Carter whose heart has been hers for so long, could have become this man left so torn and so bruised by his soul.
"My shift's over," he says as he leaves, wishing that he could slam the swinging doors, though why he doesn't know. He's not even sure anymore whether he has a grievance against her or the world.
They're living on borrowed time, and he wants to start paying it back.
=
Everything's broken, everything's shattered, and he doesn't have the superglue to fix it all back together again.
= =
I once had a girl,
Or should I say,
She once had me.
= = =
Credits ::
Songs, in order of use :: "Past and Pending", The Shins; "Tear In Your Hand", Tori Amos; "Away From Me", Evanescence; "Nobody's Girl", Ryan Adams; "Nightswimming", REM; "The World Can Wait", Over The Rhine; "Norwegian Wood", The Beatles
Subtitles :: "The Wasteland", T. S. Eliot
Episode quotes :: "Tell Me Where It Hurts"; "Lockdown"; "A Thousand Cranes"
Other lines :: there's a couple from "The X-Files" in there I believe, also I think I paraphrased a Fitzgerald sentence at some point (because his writing is just stunning), "Death consumes all lovely things" is Catullus, poem 3 ("orcae, quae omnia bella devoratis"), and there might be another couple of things in there that I've forgotten…
Author's Notes 2 :: Review. Please? Any and every comment welcome, including constructive criticism which will be welcomed with open arms.