NOTES: Written for the halfamoon celebration of female characters - I was going to write a dozen of these, for various characters in and around my favourite fandoms. As it turned out, this and Regina Glorianna were the only two I managed. Alas! I hope Renee-fans enjoy, whatever happens to the character during Day 8.
no place for a lady
The damp of the boat ramp seeps into Reneé's knees, chilling flesh and bone as she looks up at Vladimir.
"You might as well kill me now, because this deal is the only thing I have."
She doesn't flinch from the muzzle, from the bullet lying snug in the chamber, waiting to be expelled, waiting to expel her from the world. What would be the point?
It's not as though she hasn't been here before.
Occasionally in the cold and the damp - like now - the scars on her wrist ache. But not as much as the knowledge that she failed.
She failed to get the information out of Alan Wilson in her unauthorised interrogation. She failed to hunt down the cabal responsible for the madness of that day that started and ended it all. She failed to end her life as she could have, caught in the nadir of her life's choices - her mind's questions.
And when the trigger pulls and the bullet unchambers, she'll have failed once more.
With her thighs growing stiff from holding herself so still, it's something of a surprise for Reneé Walker to discover she has space for regret.
She regrets living so much of her life alone, cut off from her fellow agents, from people who might have been her friends if she'd let them.
She regrets not crossing the line with Larry, who'd made it clear enough that he was interested in his own way. That he'd accepted her friendship rather than pushing for anything more was the starting seed of her respect for him him - a respect and friendship that might have been more, once upon a time.
She regrets the horror in Jack's expression as he looked at the blood on the floor, at the thumb lying discarded on the floor. The Agent Walker he knew was a different woman, one who'd carefully forgotten what she'd become while undercover, one who'd learned to walk with a badge on her sleeve.
In a way, Agent Walker as Jack Bauer met her at the Senate investigation never really existed. She was the costume Reneé had put on, adopted, grown accustomed to in the years since the end of her time undercover.
And she's speaking the truth: this deal is all she has.
"Do it! Pull the trigger!"
There's no place in the world for a field agent who's lost it - too reckless to trust with secrets, too dangerous to leave lying about. Life beyond the agencies is beyond her, too.
Better to die with a bullet in her skull than to live between worlds.
But Vladimir's weapon drops.
"I had to be sure."
Her breath is harsh in her ears, in her lungs. Her hands prickle, and her feet are numb.
As 'Reneé Zadan' stands up on the cement ramp, unsteady after the shocks of the night, she feels the breeze on her tears.
They're not tears of relief.
- fin -