AFTERMATH
Rating: T for a few swear words, and hints of implied incest.
Pairing: Jimmy/Abby
Spoilers: Through Episode 13
Summary: They're still not okay.
Disclaimer: Not mine, owned by CBS. This is strictly for fun.
Their first fight as a reunited couple starts exactly 2 weeks, 5 days, 14 hours, 19 minutes and 37 seconds after their rescue from the island and subsequent release from the hospital for their varied injuries. When Abby, still suffering from insomnia and nightmares she won't talk about, announces that she's going back to work tomorrow, out of the blue.
"No, you're not," Jimmy counters firmly, taking in the perpetual dark circles under her eyes and the six pounds she's lost in two weeks with a shake of his head.
"I need to get on with my life Jimmy," she counters wearily, and in sheer frustration, he wants to shake some sense into her just for a second. Then the memory of Henry grabbing her by the throat makes him almost sick to his stomach for even considering that for a moment.
"Your boss said you should take as much time as you need to recover. You've been so busy making phone calls and personal visits – to Booth's mother, to Sully's parents, to Danny's parents, making funeral arrangements..." his voice trails off.
"It's my fault that they're dead okay. A visit to their parents to tell them that seemed the least I could do after inspiring my best friend to murder everyone he ever cared about or loved," she counters coldly, as the familiar refrain begins.
He's tried, over and over again, to make her understand. No one blames her. Not the Seattle police, or Shea, or any of the aforementioned parents. They all know that Henry was sick, and that the words of an 8 year old girl uttered nearly 2 decades ago, no matter how compelling, are not sufficient justification for a murder spree. But she stubbornly clings to this idea that she somehow could have stopped what happened and changed the outcome. She endlessly reviews the past, looking for the clues in her best friend's transition from man to monster, finding nothing. He understands that this is her last ditch effort to exert some control in a life that's become so out of balance, but he's more worried about her now than when she was on the island. And he thinks it's time, past time to bring up the elephant in the middle of the room that they've both been tiptoeing around. He reaches into his pocket and brings out the therapist's card that Shea gave him a few days ago, when she did her weekly check on Abby, and didn't like what she saw.
"You need to be able to talk to someone, even if that's not me," he begins gently, without judgment, laying the card on the kitchen counter as Abby looks at it in confusion.
He knows that there are things she hasn't told him. Things she probably doesn't even want to look at too closely. He's read the file, his mind swirling at the extent of Henry's depravity, the depths of his sickness, stretching back beyond Harper's Island, to include killing innocent strangers in some sort of serial killer bootcamp. All to live out an innocent childhood fantasy of a perpetual summer on the island alone with his sister? Jimmy doesn't buy that. He watched Henry, as he beat the crap out of Shane for the way he talked to her, the way he went crazy when Abby was caught in the tunnels, the obsessive way that he always kept her with him. The man that backhanded her across the room for kissing Jimmy goodbye too long was a jealous lover, not a brother or a best friend. And he'd had her trapped in that house alone, drugged and helpless, while Jimmy was locked outside in the boathouse, thinking she was already dead.
"Jimmy?" she asks questioningly, startled by the faraway look in his eyes, as he stares without seeing, lost in the past.
"He told me you were dead," he confesses finally, his voice breaking. "He enjoyed telling me that. He savored the look on my face as he described in detail how Wakefield had gutted you in the forest."
Abby gasps and looks like she wants to be sick, but he continues.
"When I saw you run into the shed, at first I thought it was a dream. Until Henry ran in right after you and dragged you out by your throat. Then I wondered if I would ever see you again," Jimmy finished, his voice hoarse.
"He told you he'd kill me, didn't he. That's why you agreed to sign the confession, isn't it?" Abby asks quietly.
"He showed me the knife, the one that he used on Trish and Sully. And he told me that either I signed the confession, or he would stab you and make me watch, then stick the knife with your blood in my hand and kill me anyway. I was going to be the second Harper's Island killer, the only question was whether you would be my real last victim or not. I chose you, I chose to save you," Jimmy admits, the events of those horrible hours seeming at once both 100 years ago, and just yesterday.
....
"I chose you," the demon that inhabited her best friend says with a sickly smile, expecting her to be pleased at the lengths he's gone to impress her, to court her, to make her his forever. All this carnage, all this death is in her honor, his version of a dozen roses and a sappy love poem as she wonders why she's the girl whose love inspired a massacre, instead of some harmless awful rhymes.
"Abby?" Jimmy's voice rouses her back to the present.
"He told me Wakefield had killed you in the church. I wanted to run back for you, but Wakefield was coming. And then he asked where we were supposed to meet the Coast Guard, and I remembered he already knew that. Wakefield was behind me and Henry stabbed him, and there was this look on Wakefield's face and I knew. I tried to run but he knocked me down and then it was dark," she says almost inaudibly, her voice haunted. "I should have put it together earlier, I might have been able to save someone, Trish or Sully. They all might be alive if I had killed Wakefield, like my dad told me to."
"You're not a killer Abby. You couldn't murder an unarmed man in cold blood, no matter what he'd done to you. That's not something to apologize for," Jimmy reminds her fiercely.
"But I love you Abby," Henry says weakly, the boarding knife protruding from his stomach, as she stares at him in shock, her best friend, her brother, her tormentor, trying to reconcile the man who held her as she sobbed for her father, with the man who helped lead her to watch his death in the first place.
Shaking her head to clear the memory, she studies Jimmy's face. Ever since their rescue, he's been her rock, her savior. Answering as many of the authorities' questions as he can, making identifications based on photographs of the bodies they found, helping her with the arrangements for her father's funeral, and accompanying her on the depressing family notifications that she has insisted upon doing personally, for the victims that she knew. And now she can see the toll it has taken on him as well, how consumed he is with worry for her. She's doing it again, she's shutting down and shutting out the one person who doesn't deserve it, and she doesn't want to repeat the mistakes of her past. She just doesn't know how to tell him things she can't understand herself. She doesn't want to add to his pain, when he already has so much of his own.
"I know Charlie traded his life for mine," he informs her finally, as her eyes widen in shock. It's one of the few details she's kept to herself, not even telling the authorities about her father's deal with the devil to save the man she's always loved.
"How?" she asks, with a sinking feeling that she already knows.
"Henry told me," he admits, as she nods silently. The unasked question hangs in the air: why didn't you?
"I didn't want you to have to carry it," she explains tightly, pausing a moment before continuing. "I guess you can be sure that he did really like you and I was the reason you didn't get along though," she jokes weakly, horrified when her eyes start filling with tears she's kept herself too busy to cry.
...
He's across the room, and pulling her into his arms within a few seconds, tucking her right next to his heart, as she recounts Charlie's last moments through hiccuppy sobs that soak his shirt.
"He told me you lo – loved me. That we could have a li - life together if we could get off the i-island," Abby's voice hitches, as Jimmy pulls her tighter, once again grateful to have known Charlie Mills, and sad, so sad, for what might have been.
"He told me he loved me, and then he was gone, hanging in a tree just like Mom," she finishes bitterly, as Jimmy again wishes that Wakefield was still alive so he could kill him.
"I wanted to go after him, but Henry insisted that we had to be smart, he kept pulling me back, if I'd have killed him..." her muffled voice trails off.
"Henry'd have found another way to kill everyone else," Jimmy assures her strongly. "This was about destroying Henry Dunn, and starting a new life as Henry Wakefield, the man he had become. You have to know that Abbs. Eventually he'd have killed you too."
Jimmy can feel her head shaking against his shoulder, as she pulls back and looks him in the eyes.
"He wouldn't have killed me. He loved me. He wanted me. It didn't matter that I was his sister," she says airlessly, misery swirling in her brown eyes as if she's confessing a shameful secret, and Jimmy swallows hard, struggling to keep his expression neutral, non-judgmental, because he knows that any hint of revulsion for everything that bastard has done, and left Abby to struggle with, will make Abby feel like it's directed at her. He takes a deep breath and waits, as she takes a step back and avoids his gaze.
"When I woke up in that house, I felt foggy, confused. I didn't know how long it had been, or what had happened. All I knew was that I was in a strange house, in a strange bed, in nothing but my underwear," she whispers, and Jimmy's hand clenches tightly into a fist.
"Did he?" Jimmy grits out, struggling to remain calm. He clenches his jaw, reminding himself that this is about Abby, about taking care of her, loving her, helping her. It's not about him. And no matter what she tells him next, they will get through it together.
She shakes her head no, and relief fills him. It's a sobering reminder of how much worse things could have been.
"I just don't understand what I did. What made him think that I wanted this, any of this?" she asks tearfully, as Jimmy reaches out and gently lifts her face to meet his eyes.
"Nothing," he tells her adamantly, studying her intently to be sure she understands. It's too important for her to know that she's just as much a victim as anyone. This was not her fault. The only one who bears responsibility for the awful things that Henry has done, is Henry.
...
"Just you and me forever, just like you wanted, remember when we were kids?" his chipper voice bounces against the locked door, juxtaposed against the hopelessness of her situation and her surroundings. The one person she's counted on through every bad thing that's ever happened to her, from Shane Pierce calling her fish face in the second grade, to her mother's death and her exile to Los Angeles, has disappeared and left a stranger in his place, a person she doesn't know and doesn't want to. Her mind rebels, countering that maybe this is some sick prank, maybe a special wedding version of Punk'd or something. But the bodies have been all too real, and she knows denial won't get her very far. Her Henry is gone, if he ever really existed.
Abby shudders at the memory of her fear, her confusion, her sense of complete betrayal. And worse, the knowledge that somewhere inside herself is the most shameful secret of all, that she still loves Henry. After everything he was and everything he did (even to her), she still longs to be able to call up her best friend and cry on his shoulder, as she's always done before. She misses him and she fears that is the one thing that Jimmy could never understand.
She's mired in what-ifs. She wonders if anything would have been different if Henry had known he was adopted from the start, if they'd grown up as brother and sister. He said he always had impulses, but would he have continued to control them if Wakefield hadn't gotten hold of him at a vulnerable moment and molded him into a killer. Or was he so consumed with revenge that this was all inevitable. If she'd just let Trish call off the wedding and leave the island, instead of convincing her to take Henry back, would more people have lived? Could she have saved JD by being 4 minutes earlier to the dock? If she'd followed her instincts and not come at all, would everyone have lived? The questions and the guilt swirl around her, clouding her mind to anything else. Seeing Henry's body with the knife in it, hearing his final words, haunting her. Remembering the utter shock she felt when the boy who had so carefully applied Scooby Doo bandaids to her scraped-up knees, raised his hand and smacked her across the face with the cold eyes of a stranger. The questions, the confusing emotions, are always there, swirling below the surface, refusing to let her rest.
Suddenly she's looking at her apartment with new eyes, the picture on the refrigerator of her and Henry from his college graduation, the wall he helped her paint when he came to visit, the matted and framed copy of her first article he gave her for her birthday, his soccer ball in the corner. Before Jimmy realizes what she's done, she's picked up the soccer ball and hurled it at the wall, where it splinters the glass on the frame of her article and knocks it down the wall. She tears the picture from the refrigerator and starts ripping it into pieces. She's winding up with the Washington State University commemorative shot glass he sent her his first semester of college, when Jimmy's hand gently stops her and takes the glass out of her hand.
She's so angry, so irrationally unbelievably angry right now. How dare he do all this, and leave her behind to pick up the pieces. She wants to destroy every reminder of him she has. She doesn't want to remember the man who hopped on a plane and brought her ice cream when she received her first rejection letter from the L.A. Times, who sent her flowers every year on her mother's birthday, and who stayed on the phone with her long-distance all night for her first night alone in her first apartment.
"Why? Why would he do this? I don't understand, I will never understand," she sobs, sinking to her knees, with Jimmy close behind, pulling her tight, no answers to offer. "I know I should hate him, I want to hate him," she keens over and over, as Jimmy rocks her on the kitchen floor.
...
"I've been thinking," Jimmy says, breaking the silence as he lays wrapped up with an exhausted Abby on her small bed, as they have most nights since their rescue.
"That you should find a girlfriend who isn't quite so crazy," Abby feebly jokes, as Jimmy brushes a kiss over her forehead.
"No," Jimmy corrects her sternly.
"That since this was our first fight we should have make-up sex? Although I guess we have to have had sex to have make-up sex," she amends ruefully, as he chuckles a little.
"We'll get there," he assures her, tracing circles on her back with his fingertips, that send a little chill down her spine. She files that spot away for future reference.
"That given tonight's meltdown, I'm not ready to go back to work and should call that lady on the card Shea gave you?" Abby sighs.
"I was thinking maybe we could go together," he suggests, and Abby nods in agreement.
Jimmy has almost drifted off to sleep, when Abby's voice wakes him again.
"I love you Jimmy," she whispers.
"I love you too," he whispers back.
Tonight there's no nightmares for either of them.