Post Trapdoor... A conversation. A power struggle. And everything that never happened. Dedicated to Silversurf4, who thrills me with her words.
The Scent of Trampled Flowers
She's standing in a waiting room, performing the task assigned to such spaces. Waiting. Overwrought with posters of vital health advice and pills no one wants, the splashes of color hurt her parched eyes. In the privacy of this room, she's shed more moisture than the repetition of blinking can restore. Sitting in a starched chair, the muted sounds of a hospital in constant motion orbit around her stilled world. Failure to foresee, to protect and possibly to save. Her hands had clamped down hard to block the exodus of life but he'd been fading, one gasp and then nothing.
She'd gone there to get answers, not to wear his blood.
And then he wakes and she asks and he says there can't be nothing. Yet that's the sum of his offerings. No names. No leads. He can't remember but his memory proves sufficient enough to invoke a subtle panic when he's informed how long he's expected to remain in someone else's care. And while Reese loiters in the hall, shoes scuffing the linoleum, She of the Past pleads with him to stay as though a brown envelope hadn't removed her sway. Later, Reese will learn that She of the Redemption has indulged him, sneaking him home against the advice of those with more degrees than Reese has strung together sober days.
Five days after the routine of strange normalcy had been shattered all over his hardwood and Detective Reese is pacing a driveway the length of a landing strip. And now She of the Fury gathers her derision and storms the ramparts.
In the light of day, his evidence of wealth stands as a gleaming ode to extravagant architecture, but the ink of a heralding midnight quickly settling into her bones shows the place for what it is; a womb turned barren. Shadows snap at her feet as she ascends the grand staircase. Guarding what could be his bedroom door or the entrance to a vault, the savior of Inmate Crews is wrapped in vain defense and Prada as Reese approaches, trailing indignation behind her. The model height of Constance Griffiths makes looking down her nose at the intruder more than metaphorical.
"You've been parked out there for ten minutes. I was beginning to wonder." The tone holds no animosity, only the sweetness of an insider accepting an interloper's presence by compulsion of good breeding.
"Didn't realize the D.A.'s office came with an honorary medical degree."
The accompanying scowl is absorbed with the condescending tilt of a pretty head. The interrogation room brims with a similar smugness, pasted to the faces of perps who'd mapped out their justifications with lines of coke.
"He was leaving regardless. I wanted to be sure he made it safely."
And Reese had wanted to make sure he'd made it period. Her palms had barricaded the flood but it was her persistent, if belligerent, prayers to his portly pacifist deity that she'll credit with keeping him breathing. Her clothes are ruined, an acceptable loss.
"You took him away from medical treatment." Reese points her finger where her gun longs to nuzzle. "Did your legal books include a chapter on how to construct a morphine drip and heart monitor out of the content of an empty mansion?"
"It's not empty," the lawyer argues. "It's filled with him."
No, Dani thinks, it's overflowing with the hollow ambiance of a man who still lives in captivity.
"It'll be filled with your screams if anything happens to him."
Brushing past the woman who seems a bit too understanding of the tantrum, Reese enters a room that features a window the size of a ship yard shedding unblocked moonlight on an equally epic bed. And a man she doesn't recognize.
In the hospital, Crews had maintained a serenity that only medicinal intervention could produce. But now she finds less a sleeping man than an immobile body in desperate need of recharging. The lanky frame of her partner is swallowed by the vastness, layers from a soft, earthen palate only adding to his physical study of pale. It has taken him thirteen hours to wake from the surgery and even then he hadn't looked so fragile. But in the absence of potent, legal drugs, Crews has driven past uncomfortable to shift into a high gear of pain. Anyone else would have paid good money to float about the hurt, but not her contrary partner, who'd opted to flee a place of healing to suffer at home. Because he had to be impatient.
And she must have granted that last part an audible life.
"No," the redeemer informs. "Because it reminded him of prison."
"What doesn't?" Dani's being quarrelsome now but Crews would tell her there's a kernel of truth in every snipe.
"Prison infirmaries share the same color scheme, the same smells. His level of anxiety wasn't conducive to his recovery. He wanted out. I got him out." Just like before, is the unspoken conclusion.
Stepping up to the island of his mattress, the apparent wonder he calls Connie brushes her knuckles along his cheekbone, shakes her head in disappointment. And Dani huffs because touch is not required to verify the fever so clearly playing inside his skin. She wants to assign blame loudly but her mouth shuts as a private moment unfurls before her. Lips meant for condemning criminals press to his forehead and the sacredness tells Reese they've gone no further than this. Not physically anyway.
"Mandatory eight weeks," Constance whispers to the patient she's stolen. "Heal fast so you can go bonkers waiting out desk duty."
With a weighted hand bearing the sparkling promise to another, Constance traces elegant fingers through his hair. Reese's own fingers curl into unhelpful fists for no discernible reason. There is no jealousy to be had here, no call to protectiveness. But where her partner is one with the universe, Reese is one with her doubts, a snarling amalgamation of every fear that she's ever nurtured. And due to the insanity she's contracted from working with a man who thinks fruit is three out of five food groups, Reese quizzes the only audience available.
"He's lying, isn't he?"
The attorney pulls offense from her designer pocket. "Excuse me?"
"No one with his head for details would forget the shooter's face."
"Except that after the shooter's face came the shooter's bullet."
The woman can't see that her former client's composure is as hastily drawn as a child's crayon rendition of the sun. Too bright, one-dimensional and never the same circumference twice. But Reese knows. It's easy to distrust the cheeriness of his countenance when she can see the shadows prowling behind his smile. Constellations swing on celestial strings above the roof while Reese arranges the kernels of truth into a bitter meal.
"He remembers. He knows. And he lies."
The look of affront that earns her is suitable for framing. "Charlie's honesty is one of the reasons I believed in his innocence."
"You believed him," Dani scoffs, "because you fell in love with his mug shot."
Reese had seen that photo, had stared back at the intense gaze of burning vengeance. That look is a potent public service announcement to those he now tracks. Yet they still came after him and her presence had been no deterrent.
"My reasons don't matter." The woman's spine stiffens audibly. "And when you stop sleeping with your superior, you can lecture me on my non-sexual relationship with Charlie."
The syllables of his name lessen the impact of the words that preceded it. It's a mystery why everyone finds it so easy to toss out his first name like a T-ball pitch. Reese holds steadfast to his surname because too many people who'd called him Charlie had turned against him.
That there's no Thai langsat or boxed kumquat in his hand is as anomalous as the stubble on his jaw, the shade of newborn rust with a texture that will be forcefully banned from her later ponderings. She doesn't want to know how the sunrise-colored scruff could graze her breast or how his fingertips would burn into her thigh or how pronounced his ghost of a lisp might become when he presses words against her skin. She doesn't want to know that he likes his women to possess certain aesthetics she can't fulfill. She doesn't want to know every scar that drove him from freely dispensed drugs to a place where the thin lines straddling his mouth have become crevices. Such knowledge leads to the scorching path the minions of hell pave for the foolish.
"Should call an ambulance," Constance tells his sleeping form. "Should make you go back. But you tend to be selective about where you apply forgiveness."
"Forgiveness is the perfume the trampled flower casts back on the foot that crushed it," Dani says in his place, closing her lips around the final word like a benediction completed.
Pardon been extended to his former partner and his former wife but withheld from his own father, a man who'd had to take a bullet to deliver an invitation. And while Crews has been careful to overlook her heredity, Reese suspects it won't take much to steal his Zen-fueled acceptance.
"No point moving him again," Reese concedes as though her permission after the crime makes it palatable.
No point questioning him again. No point fighting her again. The shadows don't bother hiding now and a debate of principles is little protection against them. Once the drugs wear off Crews will dream, as Dani imagines he often does and the chaste hand and its ringed finger will offer no shield, which doesn't hinder the apparent effort. Constance's fingertips move along his jaw line to the freckles on his arm before taking up tenure on the pulse at his wrist.
For desire and for show.
The refined woman wants Dani to see the freedom that his gratitude has granted her but the need for pretense indicates that the contact would be less welcome were he conscious of its intrusion. He's hands on but only on his desperately limited terms.
That her touch doesn't wake him seems to deprive Constance of a moment. Knowing she'd fare no better, Reese wets her lips against the building dehydration. That another fall will only piss him off is no incentive to go thirsty. Constance will remain here until her husband's call forces her away. But Dani leaves now before the bitterness soaks too deeply into her tongue.
She'll raise a glass to his resilience, to his fickle luck and to a graceful woman who'll never have him. To waiting in sterile rooms, in an unending driveway and in a holding pattern.
And for the next eight weeks, the glass will not run dry.