A/N: Some people wanted more of Aftereffect , others thought it should be left as it was. For the former, this follows on from Aftereffect. Many thanks to Mccoylover for comments on earlier drafts.
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The Ones After
When his wife tells him that her mother has asked her to come and stay, just until Lucy gets back on her feet with the baby, Jack pretends to take it at face value. He carries her suitcases down to the taxi, three bulging bags that surely hold all the clothes she'll need for a year.
He won't argue with her.
They never argue. There are too many unsayable things that might accidentally be said.
Claire was never afraid to fight with him, even when it got messy and ugly and they hurt each other and it seemed like there was no going back. Sometimes there wasn't, but there was always going forward – until that night when there was no more going forward, when the future became somewhere she'd never go and somewhere he didn't want to be.
But she's not Claire, and they never argue.
Jack calls her, every day, because that's what husbands are supposed to do. After a while, she's always out when he calls.
After a while, he stops calling.
Two weeks later Liz Olivet turns up at his office. Jack knows why she's there – he couldn't get out of the bar association dinner and the rumor mill started the second he walked in the door alone.
He doesn't want to talk about it. Not to Adam. Certainly not to Liz.
She comes back a week later, and the week after that, and it's around then he realizes she's scheduled him in.
Liz is someone he can fight with, if only because there's nothing at stake, and Jack doesn't hesitate to give her a piece of his mind. After all, it was her advice that got him into this. Move on. Accept that she's gone. Stop looking for her in the women you meet. She won't be there, and you won't see what is. Which iswhat hedid, and look where it got him.
Liz lets him rant.
She lets him rant until he asks her if she thinks he's stupid enough to still be waiting for what's gone, forever gone. And then she tells him, no, she's quite sure he's stopped waiting, that he's decided to settle for what he can get. When he asks her what the fuck she means by that, Liz's voice becomes unbearably gentle. She could have been anyone, Jack, and you wouldn't have cared, she says.
She tells him to remember that there's a difference between moving on and giving up and he snaps back that he's never given up on anything in his life.
Liz shakes her head. She doesn't need to say a word.
Liz Olivet is wrong. Wrong.
I'll prove it.
He loved plenty of women before Claire – and there are beautiful women all around him, every day.
He'll prove Liz wrong. He'll love them all.
He loves seeing himself reflected in their admiring eyes, Jack McCoy, alpha lawyer, charming, cynical SOB.
He loves Toni Ricci's relentlessness, her utter lack of self-doubt, so different to … just so different. When they find her, lying on the bloody carpet in the un-safe safehouse, he expects to mourn a life cut short, a brilliant young woman whose promise is wasted. But there's no grief, only anger and determination. It's like her gift to him, the fuel for his fight to make her killers pay. Their conviction is his gift to her. It's a gift he can give, this time.
He loves the way that Abbie makes him look like a bleeding-heart liberal. He loves her reflexive urge to go for the throat, seek the maximum, every time, nothing like … Even after her move to the Southern District puts distance between them he loves her unwavering conviction that everyone she prosecutes is guilty. When he watches her walk down the aisle to Tom he sees luminous tenderness in her eyes, so different from the admiration he saw when she looked at him. He can't remember when he last saw that look in a woman's eyes. Then he can, and he urgently needs to be blind, stinking drunk. Not at the reception, because that would mar Abbie's day. Not in his empty apartment. Not at a bar, because that's too much like – He wakes on his office couch the next morning, head pounding, too nauseous to think of anything but the 50-50 chance he'll make it to the men's room before heaving his guts up. Splashing water on his face, he remembers Liz Olivet telling him that alcohol is not an optimal coping strategy. He chalks up one more thing Liz is wrong about.
He loves Erica Gardner's easy ability to separate her work from her life, her disinterest in discussing the law – even in the abstract – outside office hours. She likes to go to the opera, the movies, she reads a novel a week. He can't talk to her about any of those things. She won't talk to him about the latest Supreme Court ruling on discovery. He rejoices in the fact that they have nothing in common outside the bedroom and the courtroom, even though he knows before it happens that it will mean they inevitably drift out of each other's lives, without argument, without pain.
He loves Danielle Melnick's blind idealism, her dedication to her clients the flip-side of Abbie's prosecutorial zeal. He loves the way she never doubts her clients, never doubts herself either, even though it causes them both difficulties over the years. She loves to argue with him, a purely intellectual exercise, not an attempt to persuade, to find some common ground. It isn't like when … She isn't going to change her mind and she doesn't care if he does. He loves that she cares so little about his opinion that no disagreement – however deep – can hurt her.
He loves the way Mary Firienze plays her dumb-blonde persona right up until the defense walks into her trap, exploiting her beauty and her youth rather than fighting to be taken seriously the way … the way some other young female ADAs do. He loves the way she widens her eyes and says the most cynical things he's ever heard in a squeaky little-girl voice. He's not the first in the DA's Office she's slept with and when she breaks it off after less than a month because she 'doesn't want to be tied down' he wonders aloud if she's working her way through the internal directory. She widens her eyes and asks him how he knew and he's never able to be quite sure she's joking.
He loves Anne Paulsen's complete amorality when it comes to a case, her disinterest in the rights and wrongs of it, her single-minded focus on winning. It's all about the contest for her, not about the people involved the way it was for …. He hates to lose to her, he hates to lose to anyone, but with Paulsen, there are compensations to defeat. She has a single-minded focus on winning in the bedroom as well and she's as good there as she is in a courtroom.
He loves Alex Cabot's brittle melancholy, the way she never once cracks a smile, even in bed. He can't comfort her when a case gets too much, can't distract her from the human misery that their working lives drown them in, not like … When she's shot, he walks for hours, waiting for the grief to hit him, but all he can summon up is sadness and anger.
He loves Carla Tyrell's cool poise, that doesn't ever slip. She's completely self-possessed, even naked and spread-eagled in a hotel bed. There's never a point where she gives in to his caresses, lets him see how his touch affects her, unlike … He can't find a way to break through that iron self-possession no matter how expertly he teases and torments her, although once he thinks he almost does, hears a sob behind the hand she's pressed over her mouth as she tightens around him. She ends it the next day, with a phone call. He realizes he's relieved. He broke the rules – but so did she.
He loves Vanessa Galliano's crudeness, the way she's as loud and uninhibited in bed as out, her complete disinterest in his satisfaction, her complete preoccupation with her own. He loves the weight of her as she straddles him, the sight of her voluptuous body, how firmly she gives him orders – touch me there, no, like that. She calls him or not, depending on her mood, and he answers or not, depending on his. They never officially break things off, but the gap between phone calls gets longer and longer until finally he realizes he can't remember the last time he saw her.
He loves Casey Novak's combative fierceness, even though she firmly shuts him down whenever he makes a move on her, the way she never backs down or backs away from a fight, even one she's having with herself. He loves the fact that she never lets anybody see her cry.
He loves Tracey Kibre's detachment, the absolute impossibility that she'll attach emotional complications to a little stress release, the way she's already talking about plea bargains and sentencing recommendations as she finds her panties and adjusts her skirt. There's no chance Tracey is going to want more than a quick fifteen minutes on his office couch with the door locked, and after a while she lets him know she's no longer interested in that.
He loves Christine Danielson's no-nonsense unromantic approach, the way she sets out ground-rules the first time they're together, no hotels, no phone calls. She insists on having the keys to his apartment, asking him if he expects her to wait in the hall? He gives her the keys from the top of the fridge, the spare set, not the ones with the Yamaha key-ring that still sit in the bowl in the hall. She lets him know they're through by sending them back to him in the internal mail.
He loves Alex Borgia's gentleness. He loves the way she defers to him, looks up to him, follows his lead, in and out of the office. When she disagrees, it's always hesitant, almost meek. He loves the way she takes his advice to heart, right up until taking it to heart leads her to the trunk of an abandoned car. It's his fault, directly his fault, and that's new. The guilt is crippling, but he's felt worse.
He loves them all, all of them – he finds something in each of them, one thing he can point to and say – see, Liz? See how wrong you were?
I'm not waiting for anything.
Late at night, sometimes, with a glass in his hand and a photograph of a beautiful woman laughing at the camera in front of him, he lets himself suspect that he's not waiting for anything because there's no longer anything to wait for.
On the nights when that thought worms its way into his head, and he knows he won't sleep until morning no matter how much he drinks, he picks up the phone, ponders which number to call. He's Jack McCoy, star prosecutor, charming when he remembers to be. He need never be alone, not on any night of the year.
That's a lie, and he knows it, even as he dials.
He's always alone.
fin