A ranch and horses

by scasfra

You know this day would come. You know it from the very beginning when you joined this team of loonies. One can't play this game for so long and not lose; the flame has gone out of your candle... Please Read and Review

This is a story I wrote some time ago and it' was revised by Orisoun, thank you so much for your support :)

You know this day would come. You know it from the very beginning when you joined this team of loonies. One can't play this game for so long and not lose; the flame has gone out of your candle.

After Alec and the tiny box, after Parker and Olivia, Maggie dies. After...

It's an aneurysm; it happens at work and she's immediately taken to the Hospital, but it's already too late. They call Nate because he still is her emergency contact. You and Sophie are there with him when he lazily gets up from his armchair, bottle of Scotch in hand, and drags his sore old body to the phone. He's voice is rough when he answers because he hasn't been giving much use to it lately. He takes one more swallow, completely uninterested as the person on the other side speaks; you glance at Sophie and see her nod in disappointment, just for a second, before looking away and biting her nails. She bites her nails now.

You are still thinking of Sophie when you both are startled by the sound of the crashing bottle and phone. Nate is frozen on his feet, he's all scruff and dark circles around his eyes and his clothes are too large for his skinny body. When did he get so skinny? Probably somewhere between Alec and the tiny box and Parker and Olivia... Meanwhile there are shatters of glass scattered around the floor, floating in amber liquid along with the miraculously still working phone.

"Mr. Ford? Mr. Ford, are you there?" a man's voice asks from the other side.

You spend an entire day driving to LA, only stopping at cheap gas stations to pee and eat. Nathan drinks the entire way and Sophie stares and judges, but doesn't take the bottle away from him, she's too broken to mend him. She's too broken to mend herself.

After Nate identifies the body, he locks himself in his hotel room - which is Sophie's hotel room too, but it doesn't really matter because she's been sleeping, just sleeping, a lot more with you than with him by now - and stays there. You and Sophie are the ones organizing the funeral, calling Maggie's family and friends, listening to pained cries and shocked reactions. You are the ones picking her casket and clothes, you are the ones calling Father Paul so he can attend the ceremony and on the day you are supposed to bury her you and Sophie take Nathan out of bed, out of the bottle he is sucking on and wash his body and hair. You try to convince him to wear a suit, an appropriate suit for Maggie's last goodbye, but the stubborn bastard refuses. He walks in there with sweatpants and a baseball cap. He cries as they bury her, as they put her body to rest next to Sam's. He never sheds a tear after that day. His heart, you figure, is buried with Maggie's and his mind will disappear soon enough.

It's too much for him to handle. Hardison and Parker stepped so much out of the line he can't bring them back, there isn't a letter on any alphabet on the known universe that could save those two. When he lost Sam, long ago he had none, but him to blame (that was how he thought and as destructive as it seemed, it helped him.) and now Maggie followed and the worst thing is he has no one to blame and it frets him. He could blame God; he could, however, he doesn't believe in God anymore. The card castle crumbles, all the way from the base to the top, every card falls to the floor, including the Black Kings and the Scarlet Queens and he can't pick them up and rebuild the castle because everything's burning and soon it will be just ashes, running from between his fingers, blowing in the wind.

He doesn't have a heart, but his mind still haunts him, prevents him from having peace so he dissolves in the booze. But the booze isn't enough because he drinks and drinks, passes out, wakes up and drinks more and it still isn't enough. He still dreams. He still sees all their faces, the faces of the people he could not save, people that, one way or another, were harmed because of him. Sam, Alec, Parker and Maggie, they all haunt him so he screams and wakes up shaking and sweating. He aches all over, from the inside out so he starts doing methadone pills. Vicodin, Valium, Ambien, name it, Nate takes it.

Sophie watches as her husband vanishes day after day, when the man that used to dry her tears starts causing them, when his hugs turn ice-cold and eventually he stops making her feel safe on his hold; she feels insecure instead, lost and adrift. Finally, she goes to you.

It has been a long time since someone saw her as a woman, since someone desired her as such and wanted her as much as you do so when you kiss her, (you never meant to yet you still did), she kisses back and one thing leads to another. You both regret it after, you know it just by her actions, when she dresses in a rush and leaves your room without a word or a look back, when she sometimes flinches away from your touch yet you know she will be back, you know you both will regret it yet you still do it. It feels like you are drinking to prevent both your throats from going dry.

One day she walks home and Nate's buzzin', forehead is sweating as well as his palms, he's wearing the clothes from the day before and they're stained with his puke, his drool and his booze. He looks like a zombie. He is a zombie. She walks towards him, asks him once again to stop destroying himself like that, destroying them; he doesn't even listen to her. He says Maggie's name, calls out to her and that is the moment Sophie decides she has had enough.

Parker and Hardison are gone and she's done. It's not that she has given up on you two, it's just that she'd done putting herself last.

You know she will leave maybe even before she does; you see it on her eyes, the way they avoid your gaze, you feel it on the cold bed you wake up to in the morning and in her desperate kisses. You don't blame her because ever since the beginning you know she is not yours, not yours to judge, to take, and certainly not yours to keep.

She isn't your wife. She is Nate's. But Nathan isn't acting like a husband so she searches for some heat in someone else's arms, your arms, and you wrap yourself around her, holding tight enough for her to tolerate one more night, stay one more night. And, although you have all those nights, although you have the hugs and the kisses and the moans, although you have her faint smile and a glimpse of something in her big eyes, you know this is not real so you never tell her how you feel for her.

On day, you get home and feel something is different. The air. The air is filled with her absence and Nathan is just sitting there, his head buzzing, red eyes, messy curls, grown beard, a ghost of the man you once knew. You run the rooms, screaming her name. It's vain. Her clothes are still there, the bathroom is still full of her shampoos, conditioners, gels and creams, it still smells like her, but then you find it. On top of the bed that once was their love nest, where they slept in a mess of tangled limbs and shared dreams, her passport, ID and driver's license lay. The pictures with her smile, back from when she was young and happy and believed she could take over the world, smile at you as if saying good-bye. She doesn't simply leaves, no; she undresses the persona of Sophie Deveraux and abandons her.

You go to Nate, grab him by the collar and ask him what the fuck happened, the man stares at you and not a word leaves his mouth. He's too damn high.

You can see the shatters of the mug Nathan sent spinning in her direction against the wall and you suddenly understand. This Nathan Ford is not the man she fell in love with, in fact, the Nathan Ford that led this team never was the one she fell in love with. The good, generous one; the one that saw good in people died with Sam yet she conned herself, believed he could change, even believed he loved her at one point, but all of that is gone now. She knows the drunk, pill addict she's married to is not the man she loved, however she still loves him so she abandons Deveraux and leaves to be someone else, someone that doesn't fall in love with Black Kings or White Knights.

You go after her because you aren't ready to give up fighting, ready to empty your hands of her, the only person that still has a slight resemblance with those whom you once called family. She's been to places, she's been names, has married men, has robbed them blind and when you finally find her there isn't a part of her being that could ever be called Sophie Deveraux.

She pretends not to recognize you, pretends so damn well you never see the pain hiding behind the mask. The mask has cracks; the mask will fall, but not in front of you. She's too damn proud to allow it and she has already committed the mistake of letting people see through her once, she won't do it again. Can't afford do it again. She tells you she has no idea who you are, she's never met a Sophie Devereaux before in her life and she certainly has never met you.

Her name is Magdalene and her accent is far from being British. When you approach her, she shouts at you to leave, throws a Chinese vessel from the Ming dynasty at you. Shouts she doesn't know what you want. The minute she calls security, stating a stranger broke into her hotel room you realise Sophie Devereaux is dead, Nathan killed her.

You leave. Tired. Worn out. Bleeding from the inside out, your bones finally give in.

You have no place to go. Not Oklahoma, dad took you the right of feeling good there; not Kentucky, Aimee is still there and you are still not. Not any place snowy; Parker loved the snow and it hurts too much to be in a place she would have been thrilled about because she can't ever be there. But you can't go back to Portland either, Nate is still there and you don't want to be around to father Nate. If he wants to drown whatever is left of his mind in pain killers, he might as well do it. He spooked Soph away and that you can't forgive.

You have nowhere to go. If people knew you, people might say you still have the restaurant waiting for you in Portland, but the restaurant was really Alec's thing. Not yours.

Alec. Alec was your boy, your friend, your geek, your brother; that was until the tiny box happened.

It was your first job against Sterling, the first job without Nate and Sophie that was.

They caught you, caught your boy, your geek, your friend and sent him to Sterling's secret prison where they kept him inside a tiny box. Alec must have thought he was going to die, seeing himself alone like that, closed like that. It was the death of him. By the time he left jail he wasn't Alec anymore; all his goodness was gone and the anger was there to stay.

But it is okay because by the time Alec left jail, by the time they finally let him out, Parker was gone too. They caught her shortly after Alec and took her to the same jail, a similar tiny box that she managed to escape from. The fact she couldn't get Alec out distraught her and after six months of trying, after six months of breaking in and out of that jail there was nothing not wrong with her.

It was a Wednesday, the day she fatally stabbed Olivia.

Sterling buried his daughter, mourned her and then got back to his job with full force, his only goal being hunting Parker down and making her pay. They broke into her warehouse and stole Bunny, leaving her a note to meet James at his house. When she did, they caught her, immobilized her, dragged her in arms to their secret psychiatric institution. A place where they kept people that were too "dangerous" to have a mind of their own. They left her in a windowless room with grey walls and fed her so many drugs she wouldn't have recognized herself if she saw her reflection on a mirror.

You spent six months searching for Bunny, you found it on an old Interpol archive room, and then you wore one of the Government Aliases Alec had long created for you (And to think you used to provoke him about spending his weekends doing stuff like that. You wish you could have him back to bicker and tease, don't you? You do...) and went to visit her.

They lead you to the common room where everything is white and bright, undressed of life and the grids on the windows are only there to remind you of how grim this all is. Parker is sitting on a corner, wrapped inside a straitjacket. She isn't even fighting it, all the fighting in her burnt to ashes the day she killed an innocent out of anger and desperation. You can see she is not being taken care of, she is too skinny, bones showing up in places where you used to see soft skin or attractive curves and her hair hasn't seen a wash in days. Her eyes are meaningless as she stares at some empty spot on the wall not really watching anything. You softly call her, not to startle her, and although you are not surprised when she doesn't react your heart wanes a little more. You stand in front of her, blocking her vision. She doesn't blink, where there was once joy and quick reflexes is now inertia and blankness. You wave Bunny in front of her as if trying to pull her out of the water, pulling her out of the dark pond she's drowning in, but when she doesn't recognize her first and most loyal friend you know there's nothing you can do for her. You leave.

You sleep with Bunny that night. You sleep with it every night that follows until you bury it one night, next to Archie. Seventeen years later when Parker dies of malnutrition you claim her body, you wash her, somehow managing to revive the glow of her hair, even though she's dead, and you carefully wash every inch of her too pale skin. You dress her in one of the shirts that once belonged to Alec (you still had a box of them forgotten in your attic.), no bra, and a pair of black pants you buy just for her. She's so skinny when you hold her and her body has so many scars...

You kiss her tenderly on the forehead and softly whisper "There's nothing wrong with ya, darlin'." on her ear as your vision blurs with tears. You unbury Bunny before her funeral so you can give it back to her. Your heart sinks to the bottom of your stomach as you see her coffin swallowed by earth. It feels wrong; she lived so free, she was so pure... There's nothing else you can so, once again, you walk away.

Alec walks out a few weeks after you visit the used-to-be-thief; there are rumours and whispers and you find out the boy gave those people some information about Tara and Quinn that Interpol needed; of course, by the time they search both of the criminals they had disappeared in thin air.

Alec isn't your boy anymore. He isn't your friend, nor your geek, much less your brother. Alec is the cold hearted son of a bitch that makes Sterling lose. Lose his life.

He doesn't go for Parker, he probably knows there's no one to go for. Parker was once a girl with whom there was something wrong with, she now is an empty soul with whom there is nothing right with. They can't get Parker back, ever. They can go and rescue her, take the drugs away from her, but then she will remind herself of how she killed Olivia, of how she took an innocent's life and she will go back to hollow again.

Instead of trying to save her, Alec focuses on his loss, on his mourning and on his anger. He starts spreading pain in no particular direction just because he sees it as not fair, for people to be happy when he can't. Some big sharks notice him and talk him into dirty businesses that would make his Nana ashamed if she ever knew.

Alec always aspired of greatness, even though he was a hacker; he wanted to be a mastermind. Something to do with his secret desire of making dada proud, a dad that wasn't even there for him. Because of that, being the big shot's right arm just isn't enough so he searches and finds all the skeletons, all the lies, all the nights spent in hotel rooms with lovers, all the felonies that are hidden; he uncovers it all. He manipulates and cheats his way through until he takes all of the big boys down. He fights his way until there is none left up in the big league but him. He is at the top, but he is alone.

He goes back to spreading pain in every direction just because he is deeply hurt too, a crack on his heart so big if you fall over the edge you'll never reach the soil. It is infinite.

He keeps hurting and taking, he takes and takes and when he is done taking he takes a little more. He becomes sadistic, feeling pleasure on watching people squirm in his hands, twitch and twirl, cry and beg. He isn't undervalued anymore, he is feared and recognized and people murmur his name when they think he isn't listening and he enjoys every single second of his new life; or does he really?

Given the choice he would go back to be a simple boy, a friend, a geek, Parker's lover, your brother, but he doesn't have that chance any more. The one thing he ought to be, he can't have so he inspires pain and fear and legends around his name and he doesn't visit Parker or calls his Nana so he doesn't have to hear the tears in her voice. He's Alec Hardison now and in twenty seven years from today, he will be taken by a twenty four year old genius with a smartphone and a problem against authority and he will die with a smile on his lips.

You still think of them, you still think of going for them; you want to believe, oh so hard, you can reach them. You follow Nate closely as he wanders around the States, drawing a random, abstract pattern on your GPS, as he skips from town to town when he runs out of money. He lives out of cheap motels, whiskey bottles and little pills that he now buys from young boys in bad neighbourhoods because doctors don't give him prescriptions anymore. His eyes are always streaked red and unfocused as they wander around in the shadows, as he seeks the ghosts of those he failed. You don't approach him, you don't talk to him, but you pay his debts and leave him some money so he can have a hot meal and pay for one more night in his crappy motel room.

You think of searching for Sophie, but she doesn't exist anymore so you give up. You start sleeping around, fucking every legal, single brunette that slightly resembles her. You will lock them in your arms and feel their scent, you will roam your hands through their curves; you'll kiss their necks and shoulders and caress their arms and back as they sleep next to you, but they won't be her and it will hurt. By morning you will be gone.

Like bad alcohol it tastes worse and worse as you taste it again and again so you change strategy. Sleeping with women that look like the amazing person you were in love with only makes you feel lonelier so you start sleeping with blondes or redheaded ones. You start sleeping with dark skinned women, with Asian women. It doesn't work so after a while you start sleeping alone and that is all.

You wonder your way in life until you stop one night on a small village of Colorado and see a house that is as ruined as you are. You find the owner and buy it. You spend the entire summer rebuilding it and you buy yourself some horses. By the time fall comes with its naked trees and its wind and its rain the horses will already be safe in the large barn you built them.

You could have opened a restaurant, but that was Alec's thing, instead you placed a swing bench on your back porch. Parker would have liked it.

It's a warm September afternoon when you sit on it, beer in hand, and you look at your horses run wild and free on the land that is now yours. You simply stare at them, you don't think at all. Thinking hurts.

You once had something to fight for, you loved, you laughed and cried, you had a family and a place you were wanted in; a place you belonged in. But you don't belong with people anymore; your place is here in your empty house, watching your horses.

Alec Hardison, your brother, is the new Damien Moreau and you don't have the strength to fight him. Nathan Ford, the man you once admired so much is now a common alcoholic/pills addict. Parker ceased to exist and Sophie is dead.

You have your ranch and your horses and the hope one day soon life will come for you...