Author's note: This is a filler scene for the last series of Mad Dogs, so it probably won't make much sense if you haven't seen it. If that's the case, what are you waiting for?!
Disclaimer: Not mine – not now, not ever. Really wish I had thought them up, though.
Summary: Rushing back into the train, he looked at his three friends in turn, men – partners, brothers – it seemed he could live neither with nor without, and for once in his life, purposefully took one bold step into the unknown.
Bridges. Burned. Check.
What a typically lousy turn of events, thought Quinn as he sat sprawled on the Tube, the motion of the train barely registering. He was surprised to realize, though, that he didn't really feel that angry at the way things had turned out at the wedding. No, more like… resigned.
Resigned – that seemed to be his regular setting nowadays. Nothing really made an impression on him anymore: work (such as it was), family (such as it used to be), anything. And he had to admit that it made him uneasy. He was man enough to acknowledge that his passion, for life and career, had pretty much shriveled up and died years ago, when things had failed to turn out as gloriously right as he would have wanted. And that was his own fault, really; he had only coasted through life rather than grab it with both hands and run with it. When he thought about it, psychology, rather than being an actual passion, had been nothing more than a fallback position, something he was slightly more curious about than the other programs he had tried and that agreed with him on some level. To be fair, he had learned to love the field over time, enough so to go back for a second degree. But the mundane reality of first teaching, then lecturing had quickly drained what real interest he had developed for the profession. Years of bored, resigned young faces and smugly derisive old ones had seen to that.
There was that word again – resigned.
The same could be said, to some extent, for his marriage. Oh, he had genuinely loved his wife, and they had had some truly wonderful, beautiful years, especially when the girls had come into their lives. Even the acrimony of their final few months couldn't erase the joy and the perfection of that time. Which made his current estrangement from his daughters that much harder to understand and to bear. They had closed the gap considerably after his return from Africa, but, true to his nature, he had fallen back into his indolent ways and indifference had begun to colour his increasingly stilted and sporadic contacts with his precious girls, lovely young women who, unlike him, had a firm course set and a solid hand on the tiller.
He couldn't, for the life of him, figure out who they got that from… Not him, obviously, and certainly not his ex, who could flit and fly between ideas, concepts and wants for days, only to drop the whole matter and go off in a completely different direction in her next breath. Except for the "ballet slipper" pink kitchen business; that, she'd had no intention of giving a single inch on.
No, his girls were like Baxter's: intelligent, with solid smarts and a good set of wits about them. Maybe that was why he felt so close to his friend's daughters; they had become surrogates of sorts when his own had started drifting away from him, or he from them, he wasn't sure anymore. Whatever the case, he could always count on those two to raise his spirits when he felt a bit blue, especially Lindsay. While he dearly loved Emma, who had always been an ebullient, chatty little thing who could talk your ear off at the slightest opening – and often did – Lindsay was the one he was constantly drawn to. For some reason, she got him from day one, crowding him and teasing him when it was called for, or sitting quietly next to him and nudging him out of his shell with questions and discussions that no girl her age had any right to come up with. Like him, she needed her space, time to observe and assimilate the world around her so she could pick it apart later and try to understand it. That commonality had only brought them closer over the years, and as she had grown older, many an evening and weekend afternoon had been spent reshaping the world over coffee or, occasionally, something stronger.
His heart squeezed sharply as he realized that this was likely never going to happen again after yesterday's fiasco. The look of utter disappointment on Lindsay's face, not just at the incident he and his cohorts had caused, but at him, specifically, pretty much sentenced their special bond to a bitter, unspectacular end. And that was one failure he simply could not stomach.
As he spotted his stop coming up and felt the train slow its headlong rush into the station, Quinn got up quickly, needing to get away from his three partners in crime, men that, at that precise moment, he wanted to get as far away from as possible, so he could go back to… what? Work that wasn't really materializing; a relationship that may or may not resume in his lifetime, the way things were going; a life that still wouldn't be much of one, because, once again, he had resigned himself to the fact that he couldn't do much to turn it around.
Stepping out of the train, he started for the exit, then stopped, considering.
Wife gone, daughters all but strangers – check.
Father tucked away in a nursing home, happy as a clam, finally – check.
Career in tatters, with no hope of resurrection – check.
A life just floating along, waiting for the next wreck to happen – check.
Rushing back into the train, he looked at his three friends in turn, men – partners, brothers – it seemed he could live neither with nor without, and for once in his life, purposefully took one bold step into the unknown.
"Selling the villa – not such a stupid idea, you know."
Followed by the nonplussed expressions on the other men's faces, Quinn walked toward the exit, his gait more confident than it had been in ages.
Bridges.
Burned.
Check.
The end