Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Webb/Mac, Harm/Mac
Spoilers: A Tangled Webb Trilogy
Disclaimer: Not mine, not making any $ off of them, so please don't sue me DPB.
Warning: Character death
Summary: He wakes suddenly in the middle of the night. His heart is pounding in his chest, the adrenaline rushing through his veins, and he takes a moment to tell himself that none of it is real. A Webb/Mac fic. –Or maybe not…
Questioning Reality
By Lady Chal
He wakes suddenly in the middle of the night. His heart is pounding in his chest, the adrenaline rushing through his veins, and he takes a moment to tell himself that none of it is real. He waits until his breathing doesn't sound quite so ragged to his own ears and then slowly turns his head upon the pillow to look at her. She's still asleep. Thank God.
She gets so little rest these days that he doesn't wish to cost her any more. Still, his body is tense –like a charged wire—and he knows that he cannot simply lie there. Scrubbing a hand across his haggard features, he carefully draws himself up to a sitting position. Darting one more covert glance in her direction, he gently lifts the covers and slips from the bed. The night air wraps around him, cooling the fine sheen of sweat that coats his skin and he shivers uncontrollably. He desperately wants a drink. Something warm and biting, like liquid fire flowing through his veins. He craves something dark and sweet and faintly bitter like the burnt, fermented sugar cane that is its essence. Caña: the symbolic hair of the dog that bit him.
"Clay?"
His mouth tightens, and he silently curses the pale specter that meets his gaze in the reflection of her dressing table, damning him for waking her. His voice sounds dry and cracked as he finally answers.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake you. Go back to sleep."
She doesn't listen. She never does. Instead, he hears the soft protest of the box springs shifting beneath her weight as she slowly maneuvers herself out of bed. He closes his eyes tightly, knowing she will come to him, bracing himself for the gentle assault he knows he cannot withstand.
Her fingertips brush lightly at the back of his neck, teasing gently at his hair, tracing along one sweat-streaked shoulder blade and down the unyielding column of his spine.
"Talk to me." It's not a request.
He sighs heavily. "I can't."
She doesn't accept that, but then he really didn't expect her to. "You can," she says firmly, "especially when it's about me."
He shoots her a narrow glance. "How do you know?"
"You talk in your sleep."
He turns to face her suddenly, and she smiles at the blank look which she has come to recognize as his expression of abject horror.
"You called my name," she says at last.
He relaxes slightly and she runs her hand up his arm and across the smooth, muscled plane of his chest. She traces gently across his collarbone and along his neck before cupping his jaw and forcing him to look at her.
"What was it, Clay?"
Hazel eyes stare defiantly into brown. He doesn't want to answer, but he knows that she will not relent. Finally, he tells her, releasing it in a harsh exhalation.
"Sadik."
He sees the shadows of their shared memory clouding her eyes. It's quickly followed by a spark of anger at the power this ghost still holds over them.
"He's gone, Clay." She says firmly. "He can't hurt us."
He knows that she's right, but it's a half truth at best. In his mind, he knows full well that Sadik is dead –that she killed him. He's seen the photos. He's heard the tape. And, although he's never told her, he stood there in that chilly basement that houses the CIA's morgue and touched the ragged hole in the painted forehead of that cold body, needing to experience it for himself.
But in the dark corners of his soul, Sadik Fahd still lives. Rising now and then in the deep witching hours, Sadik is the demon that haunts his dreams with memories of pain and blood and fear. He hates the power the dead man still holds over him –almost as much as he hates himself for somehow granting Fahd this power. Nearly five years have passed since Paraguay. The physical scars have long since faded, but the scars of the mind and soul are deep, and he's starting to accept that they'll never completely go away.
She caresses his cheek, then drops her hand to reach for his, and he clutches at her fingers like the drowning man that he is.
"What did you dream about?" she asks, her voice insistent.
"The cellar," he says finally, "--when he stabbed you. It was the same as before, except that this time…" he trails off, glancing down and her face pales with understanding.
"It was real," she finishes.
He nods slowly, with that tremulous shake to his head and she knows how deeply the dream has affected him.
"He stabbed you," he whispers. His voice is hoarse, his eyes downcast. "He killed our baby."
"No." She says the word firmly and pulls his hand towards her, placing it where the swell of their child rises between them. "He didn't. I'm fine. She's fine. It was just a dream."
His hands move over her, gentle, reverent and questing as he tests for himself the warmth and reality of her and the baby. His fingers seek and find the tiny, mysterious, uncomfortable bulges that might be a fist, or a heel, or an elbow. He swallows hard, combating the tortured imagining of his dream with the certainty of the woman who stands before him.
"I couldn't stop him," he mumbles, at least giving voice to the visceral fear that has driven him from their bed. "I couldn't keep him away from you."
She smiles wryly at him. "I thought you did all right," she says. "It's more than a lot of men would've done."
She still remembers the way he threw himself at Sadik –like a man possessed. She can still hear the sickening crunch of his ribs as they broke and the shallow, rasping wheeze of his breath. There are nights when that sound still haunts her dreams, and she'll awaken with the sound of that wheezing breath in her ear and the faint salty taste of his blood on her lips from his parting kiss. Those are the nights when she is actually glad to awaken and discover herself alone in her own bed, or –better yet—not alone, but with him, safe and whole beside her. She'll lie awake for a long time and listen to his breathing, deep and slow and even. On those nights, she's even grateful for his snoring. Anything is better than the alternative of memory: of holding him in that filthy shack and listening to those shallow, gasping breaths, wondering if the next one might be his last.
"You were crazy to go after him like that. I've always wondered why you did it." His hands freeze upon her body, and she is almost surprised to discover she has spoken aloud.
Rarely do they talk of that time. He, as a rule, is loathe to speak of it, preferring to bury those memories deep inside and forget them. But the things that happened to them cannot be forgotten, and sooner or later, they'll boil and fester and work themselves to the surface. She doesn't always recognize the signs, but when she does, she presses him. Only then will he talk about it. Usually, it's no more than a few concisely worded sentences, explicit in their description, but so vague in their emotion that she's often left still trying to interpret them days after the fact.
But tonight, she feels the weight of it pressing upon him and she knows that she must ask. He won't sleep unless he talks about it. Frankly, neither will she.
"Why, Clay?" she asks again. "It's the one thing I've never understood. It wasn't as if he really hurt me, and you were in no shape to take him on. He almost killed you. Why did you attack him that way?"
"He stabbed you, Sarah." She can hear the tension in his voice, see the memory chasing through his eyes. "He drove that knife straight into your stomach."
She shakes her head in confusion. "It was padding, Clay. It wasn't real."
"It was to me."
The silence, swift and deafening, falls over them completely, and he can feel the weight of her eyes upon him. He feels their burning intensity and it's as if his very soul were has been left to stand stripped and naked before her. In a way, he supposes that it has. It's the one secret, the one doubt that he's never admitted to anyone. Not to the Company shrink. Not to her. Not even to himself.
"What?" Her voice is barely a whisper in the darkness, but the intensity in her tone carries strongly enough that she might have shouted it to the world.
He swallows hard, gathering his courage. His voice sounds thin and nervous even to his own ears. "I wanted it to be real."
He no longer has the nerve to meet her gaze and instead looks downward to the roundness of her belly. He is too ashamed –and perhaps too afraid—of what he might find in her eyes.
"Why?"
It's a simple question, but for him there's no simple answer. He casts about for a way to explain it and settles at last upon another question, one that she asked him long ago.
"The night we arrived in Ciudad del Este, you asked me why I made up that story –about having a pregnant wife."
She nods slowly. "You told me…"
"What I told you was a load of crap." His voice is hard and he spins away from her, angry with himself, and with the guilt that rides him. He stalks to the bedroom window and stares out into the darkness, looking not upon the serene street of suburban Alexandria, lined with its ancient oaks, but upon some black vision that only he can see.
"The truth is that I was lonely and miserable and scared. Tierra del Fuego was hell on earth, and I tried to escape it by spinning a fantasy and calling it my cover."
"That's not like you, Clay."
He smiles grimly. "They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions." He shrugs slightly. "We walk a tightrope, Sarah. It's easy enough to fall. Most of the time we don't even notice until it all comes crashing down around us."
"How did it start?"
He is silent for a moment, remembering. "Garcia," he says at last. "When I met with him in Argentina he offered me the best of his hospitality: booze …drugs…guns…women… Everything is cheap in Tierra del Fuego. He could understand my desire to refuse his drugs. Smart businessmen never sample that product themselves. He could respect that. And I was an arms dealer, so I didn't need his guns. But the women …that he didn't understand at all."
He sighs heavily and leans against the window casing. "I needed a reason to refuse the prostitutes he so generously offered me, so I invented a wife. Someone that was beautiful. Someone that I loved. And when he asked me what she was like… I realized I was describing you."
She absorbs his words slowly, but she's not entirely surprised. A part of her has always wondered if this thing between them didn't start as some idyll fantasy of that enigmatic mind. But to hear him finally admit it… that's something all together different.
"And the baby?" she asks.
He half shrugs, darting a small glance at her from the corner of his eye. "It was a convenient excuse for your absence." But she knows now that it was more than that, and he quickly folds under her watchful gaze.
"I couldn't trust anyone, Sarah. Except for Galindez. I lived every day expecting my cover would be blown. I pretty much figured I was going to die down there. Then one day I realized that if I did, no one would give damn except my mother. And someday she'd be gone, too, and no one would give a damn at all."
"No one can blame you for that, Clay."
His smile is sardonic. "I can. It was inexcusable. I allowed myself to get caught up in a dangerous fantasy and then I made it even worse by dragging you into it. I fooled myself into thinking that I could be objective …and believing that I could keep you safe."
"You did," she says, but he waves her off. He won't accept her platitudes any more than she'll accept his.
"I didn't,' he says sharply. "Rabb did. I merely delayed the inevitable."
"And went through hell to do it," she reminds him.
He inclines his head slightly. Even he cannot argue with that.
"I swear to God, Sarah, you'll never know how close I came to breaking."
"You didn't break, Clay."
He hunches his shoulders slightly, still unwilling to accept the credit of her words. "I couldn't. I knew the only reason they hadn't touched you was because they bought your cover. And I knew the only way to keep you safe was to let myself believe it, too. And even then it didn't work."
He finally turns to face her again, and she is shocked by the haunting honesty she sees in his eyes.
"It may have been padding to you, Sarah, but for me, it was real."
She feels the tears brimming in her eyes, clogging her throat, and she reaches for him, pulling his head to her shoulder just as she did in that dingy shack so long ago. He buries his face in the hollow of her neck, inhaling her scent, her warmth and vitality. She was his strength in those dark hours, just as she is tonight.
"I couldn't protect you. I couldn't keep you safe." His words are muffled against her throat, but she can hear the agony in them.
"No," she agrees, holding him tighter. "You couldn't. No more than I could protect you. But I'm a big girl, Clay. I can take care of myself."
He draws back a little. His body is tense, his face is like stone, but she can see the fear that still burns brightly in his eyes and knows that there's more to this dream than just Paraguay.
"I can't protect you now, either."
His words strike her solidly in the chest. It's a hard, painful jolt that makes it difficult for her to breathe and –damn those surging hormones—the tears finally spill over to slide unchecked down her cheeks.
She knows how badly he wants this baby, but it's only now that she truly understands how afraid he is for her to have it. After the miscarriage, the doctors told them the risks would be high, and advised against another pregnancy. It took everything she had to convince him to try again, and although he has born it with his usual stoic demeanor, she knows that deep inside he's terrified.
Framing his face between her hands, she pulls his head back to hers so that their foreheads are touching. "It's going to be all right, Clay. I'm strong. The baby is strong. We're going to be just fine."
He shakes his head slightly, his forehead rocking against hers, and she can hear the desperation in his voice.
"I can't lose you, Sarah."
"You're not going to lose me, Clay," she says firmly and then suddenly halts with a sharp intake of breath.
"What!" His face blanches as fear escalates to full panic. He's caught off guard by her unexpected smile.
"Now look what you've done," she chides, taking his hand and repositioning it to feel the flutter of movement above her hip. "You've woken her up with all your worrying."
His face registers surprise at the sudden, sharp jab against his palm and even he can't help but smile.
"Wow. No wonder you can't sleep. What have you been doing? Teaching her Judo?"
She offers him a saucy smile. "You'll thank me when she starts dating."
The feel of their child moving beneath his hand reassures him in a way that her words cannot. Tiny and fragile as the life inside her is, he has to believe that something which struggles so fiercely cannot help but survive. Their daughter is a fighter …just like her mother.
She tugs gently at his hand, pulling him away from the window and the dark thoughts that have consumed him. "Come to bed, Clay," she says softly. "You need to rest. We all do."
He allows her to lead him back to the bed and helps her settle in. Sliding beneath the covers, he opens his arms and takes her into them, curling his body around hers. His hands make gentle circles across her belly, soothing her, soothing the child …soothing himself.
The surging movements of the baby fade and still, and he hears the slight shift in her breathing as it deepens and evens out, carrying her off into sleep. He brushes a kiss into the silky strands of her hair and silently consigns Sadik Fahd's memory back to the lowest depths of the hell from whence it came. In those final moments before he allows the peaceful oblivion to take him, he clings just a bit more tightly to all that he holds dear and takes a moment to tell himself that this time, it's real.
AN: If you are one of those extremely rare Webb/Mac shippers, this is your happy ending, bail out now! But if you're not, you might want to keep reading…