The alcohol burned her throat as it flowed freely down it like a cascade, and she couldn't help but to wonder if a bullet to the mouth would taste like the light brown liquid she was suffocating the pain with. Her gun sat there on the coffee table, half indifferent and half daring, the barrel looking directly at her, resembling the black hole her life had become so similar to. Although the drapes were closed and her vision blurred, its silhouette was still distinguishable amid the darkness.
With one hand held a half-empty bottle; the other fingers were busy drawing unintelligible scribbles on the skin around the scar she had near her chest. It was similar to a love letter to, an attempt to communicate with her broken heart through incomprehensible letters written by her nails on her own abused anatomy. She hummed an unknown tune – it sounded a lot like a sad lullaby – as she lay there on the couch facing the door, lost in her thoughts, trying to write some sense into a heart that was more of a beating muscle than a beautiful piece of her with which to feel and love.
It was not the first time a shot of whiskey had led to a scene of that sort. This had been happening repeatedly, and it felt as if her soul was being mutilated in exchange of a couple of hours freedom from the horrific memories and paralyzing fears she so desperately tried to escape from. Even if this numbed state of mind would only last until the sun rose and she regained sobriety.
Her eyelids were as heavy as led, and she knew loss of consciousness was imminent, but she was fighting it with whatever little strength she still had left because it was the only form of sanity she could get. She became able to openly let out some of the poisonous ache she had been living for the last thirteen years. She willed her eyes open every time they closed without her permission, sometimes right away, sometimes after minutes had passed; she would bitterly laugh at how ironic it was: the alcohol granted her a limited amount of time to analyze and express the emotions that were always hidden behind the wall she had built to protect herself from others, but then it was cut short by collapsing her system with its effects on her body and forced her to succumb and fall asleep lulled by her own thoughts.
She wanted to stay awake, so desperately. The musings about barrels that looked like black holes and bullets that perhaps tasted like whiskey when shot inside one's mouth were starting to morph into flashes of blue eyes gazing into her green ones, a man kneeling above her on the grass pleaded with her not to abandon him, and three words that were proof she wasn't fighting the dragon alone. While drunk she allowed herself to think about death – her mother's, Coonan's, Montogmery's, and her own, among others -, to toy with the idea of putting an end to the pain by ending her existence. But, also while drunk she gave herself permission to fully remember what she struggled with on a daily basis and pretend to have forgotten it all. It was only on nights like those she had incoherent conversations with her agonizing heart about the writer that used coffee as a symbol for good morning kisses and made intense love to her with his eyes. She didn't want to fall asleep just when the fingers scraping the skin around her scar were getting to the part where they wrote to her heart about him, or when the arrhythmic tune she was humming had begun to make sense.
Her throat was hoarse and raspy. Random humming was all she could manage in her state, but to her ears it sounded like a wonderful memory, and in her mind the words were sung loud and crystal clear. The lyrics to the song that was the soundtrack to these heartbreaking nights, the song she always whispered to him in her deepest dreams, that always ended with him whispering it back to her.
"… Though I'm here in this far off place my air is not this time and space, I draw you close with every breath. You don't know it's right until it's wrong, you don't know it's yours until it's gone, I didn't know that it was home 'till you up and left…"
He was home to her; he had been for a very long time, ever since he had offered her shelter after her apartment was blown up. He allowed her to have breakfast with his family and sleep in one his old t-shirts. He was her time and space, her compass, her rhythm. He was everything that was right in her life, and he always found a way to right everything that was wrong. And he was hers – mind, soul, heart, body -, and would always be. And that scared her, so much that she could only admit those things to herself after drinking a bottle of whiskey, so much that she could only let those certainties be her comfort the minutes before passing out. Deep thoughts on human misery, love, life, death and everything in between always came easier to her if the cap of a bottle had been unscrewed first.
She hated herself every time she did that (well, she hated herself the morning after) and the aching in her soul only increased every time she mutilated it by getting drunk. She lay there humming to herself and alternating thoughts between the damage she could do to herself with her gun if she held it close and pulled the trigger, and the good that hopefully would come if she allowed him to tear the wall down. When it came to him and everything that had happened ever since the night Roy Montgomery had met his death, drowning her sorrows in liquor seemed appropriate.
The neck of the bottle slipped through her fingers the second before she finally lost conscious. Katherine Beckett didn't hear the sound it made when it shattered into a million glass splinters. She was already lost inside a typewriter dreams; reliving her mother's murder, shooting Dick Coonan, crying over Montgomery's body, being shot to the chest, gazing into his eyes as he told he loved her, waking up in a hospital bed hooked to all sorts of machines…
She fought the nightmares so hard she fell off the couch and landed on the glass splinters that covered the wooden floor. The ashes from what earlier that evening had been an unscratched bottle penetrated her, cutting the skin of her forearms, palms, cheeks and knees. She was so numbed by the alcohol the pain didn't wake her; she simply slept through it all, like she did every time she succumbed to the need of getting drunk.
She was still sleeping by dawn, but the nightmares had being replaced with images of him holding her to his chest, singing in her ear: "I keep you in a flower vase with your fatalism and your crooked face with the daisies and the violet brocades. And you keep me in a vacant lot in the ivy and forget-me-nots hoping you will come and untangle me one of these days"
One of the splinters cuts into her bottom lip when she smiled in her sleep. There inside her head she had worked up the courage to confess to the man she adored that she needed him to come and untangle her.
The sooner, the better.