Title: A New Kind of Normal
Summary: Even though he knew going back to the city wouldn't flip some kind of switch and magically make her better, he wasn't prepared for just how difficult the transition would be.
Spoilers: The whole series. If you haven't seen the show in its entirety, click at your own risk.
Rating/Warning: T, mostly for angst.
Disclaimer: Harper's Island belongs to CBS. Please don't sue me. I'm not worth a whole lot and it wouldn't be worth your time.
Author's Note: Another plotbunny, and now I would very much like it if they would leave me alone, hee. Enjoy!
Style Note: The first two sections and even the conversation may read as kind of disjointed. It's intentional. You'll see why.
Los Angeles was the polar opposite of Harper's Island. The pace was faster, the colors brighter, the sounds louder, and Jimmy hated everything about it.
He felt like a little boy at sleepaway camp, missing all the comforts of home. He missed the freedom of being able to hop on his boat whenever he chose and staying out on the water for hours. He missed the smell of salt air (all he could smell now was the smog, which was every bit as bad as he'd heard). He missed being in a place where everyone knew everyone else and would think nothing of stopping to chat with people they passed in the street. Not to mention the small case of cabin fever he'd developed because moving his stuff into a studio apartment with another adult and a cat had made an already cramped space practically claustrophobic.
He dealt with all the discomforts without complaint, however, because Abby needed him. She'd never admit it, to him or to herself, but she did. That fact had become apparent in the hospital in Seattle when the doctors tried to put them in different rooms. She'd become so agitated that they moved him back because nothing else succeeded in calming her.
After twelve days in the hospital, Jimmy insisted they both be released. By then, he was only still there because the doctors didn't dare release him and not Abby, and as for Abby, the hospital was stagnating her. She needed a routine and to be away from all the questions and the reminders. She needed to start to move on with her life. Her doctors seemed to see the logic in Jimmy's position and although they were hesitant, they let her go with the name of a therapist in Los Angeles she could—and should—call.
Even though Jimmy knew going back to the city wouldn't flip some kind of switch and magically make her better, he wasn't prepared for just how difficult the transition would be. She threw away the therapist's card, saying she hated the sessions she went to after her mother was killed and the ones she'd been forced into at the hospital. "I don't understand how talking to a stranger is supposed to help me put my life back together," she'd said, officially closing the subject.
So they were left trying to deal with the fallout on their own. Unfortunately, her emotions were too erratic for Jimmy to predict. Sometimes she clung to him and didn't want him out of her sight, and other times she wanted to be left alone. Sometimes she even told him to go out somewhere because she couldn't bear company at all.
No matter which approach Jimmy tried with her, it was always the wrong one at the wrong time. If he tried to hug her because he thought she wanted comfort, she'd push him away. If he tried to talk to her, thinking she needed conversation, she'd tell him to be quiet. When he tried to just let her come to him when she was ready, she'd get mad that he hadn't reached out to her.
Whole days passed without her saying a word. Other days she chatted up a storm, almost as if she was making up for all the hours of silence. When they did talk, the conversation was superficial. Neither of them addressed the elephant in the room, him out of fear of upsetting her and her because she couldn't handle it yet.
He did try to force her hand once, after a two-day stretch of silence. He'd pulled the tough love thing and told her he was going to make her an appointment with the therapist if she didn't start talking. She'd just looked up at him, the unshed tears in her eyes betraying the harsh bite of her tone, and asked, "What amount of talking is going to make this okay?"
Never knowing when he woke up that morning if they were going to have a good day or a bad day was certainly maddening, but Jimmy tried to just go with the flow. Because he loved her and she needed him, and he could see no alternative.
The only constant in their lives were the nightmares. Every single night the events on the island rushed back to them, twisted in their subconscious to monstrous proportions. It often amazed Jimmy how his brain could make such a horrible experience so much worse as he slept, but he never mentioned his nightmares to her. She didn't need to worry about him on top of it all.
Besides, she had nightmares of her own, and her reactions to those were just as unpredictable as everything else. One night she'd want to talk about the dreams, the next she'd want to forget they ever happened. And then there were the nights when the dreams were so bad that Jimmy could only hold her until she cried herself back to sleep.
Those were the nights Jimmy allowed himself to truly feel his burning hatred for Henry Dunn. He hated Henry so much it actually frightened him. The bastard had turned a bright, vibrant, and funny woman into a ghost of herself. He'd turned her into someone who was afraid to trust and afraid to go to sleep at night. Hearing any variant of "I want to stay with you" made her muscles tense, and the one time Jimmy made the mistake of telling her he loved her, she'd had to fight to keep from vomiting.
Henry had taken so much from her. So much from both of them. Jimmy wished he could raise the dead just so he could kill Henry himself. He wished for a magic spell that would allow him to snap his fingers and make everything better for her.
He had no doubt in his mind that Abby could fight through the jungle of her own emotions. She'd done it before and she could do it again. He just wished more than anything that he knew how to help her.
-----
Abby knew that she was making an already difficult situation even harder and she hated herself for it. Jimmy was trying so hard to be supportive and she constantly threw it back in his face. She didn't mean to; before she even realized it, she'd be telling him to leave her alone. "You don't need to be here all the time. Why don't you go out and do something?"
As if he had anywhere else to go. As if he knew anyone else in this city. The one time he went down to the Santa Monica pier, he'd come back even more upset than when he left. When she asked him what the matter was, all he'd said was that the beach out here wasn't the same. He was homesick, she realized with a pang of guilt.
But even though he didn't know his way around the city, he always managed to find someplace to go for half an hour or so. She was glad he didn't like leaving her alone for much longer than that because she stared at the clock until he came back while berating herself for telling him to go. The man truly had the patience of a saint. She drove herself crazy with her behavior; she had no idea how he dealt with her all day every day without one word of complaint.
Her emotions were in a constant state of upheaval, switching from one to another and back again in a fraction of a second. Sometimes she was so angry she truly thought her head would explode. What the hell gave Henry Dunn the right to choose who lived and who died? What on earth had made him think that she wanted … this?
Then she would remember that Henry was sick and her rage would shift to John Wakefield. Had he really wanted his son or had he just wanted an apprentice? What the hell kind of twisted excuse for a human being molded his mentally ill son into a killer instead of finding some help for him? No, instead Wakefield played into Henry's fantasy, told him, "Sure, kid, if that's what you want, we'll go after it," and relished the fact that he'd turned his son into a monster.
She was even pissed at herself for never realizing Henry was sick. Her best friend was being turned into a killer and she never knew. Never even suspected. What kind of best friend was she to not have picked up on the fact that the most important person in her life had changed so much?
Yeah, she blamed Wakefield. She blamed Henry. But most of all, she blamed herself. She should have just listened to her gut and told Henry she wouldn't be able to attend the wedding. If she hadn't gone back to the island, none of this would have happened. He'd told her the wedding was just a ploy to get her back there. If she had just stayed here in L.A., everyone else would still be alive.
There were things Abby probably would never understand. Henry had tried to explain but she didn't follow it at all. God knows she had tried countless times over the last couple of months to make it make sense, replaying the conversations and the explanations in her head, and she still had no freaking clue. She'd gone back further, trying to figure out when, aside from the one day he mentioned, she'd ever given him the impression that she would have wanted a life with him in the way he thought she did.
She hated that all her memories were tainted now. Every little memory she had, she wondered, was it there in the back of his mind? Did he think about it whenever he heard her voice on the phone? What about all those summer nights spent sitting on her porch and watching fireflies and talking about nothing? How could he have held her and told her that everything was okay and that Wakefield was dead and that the nightmare was over when he'd been planning this the whole time? Which of her memories were of Henry and which were of a killer?
And even though she was so angry with him she could feel it in her bones, there was a small part of her that pitied him. There was even a part of her that still loved him, and that confused her more than anything. How could the little boy she used to play with from sunup until sundown have turned into the monster who had engineered and participated in the murders of dozens of people, people he'd known and loved and who had loved him? How could she reconcile the duplicitous son of a bitch who'd used everyone in his life with the best friend who would have walked across the country and back for her if she'd asked?
There were even times she missed him. More than once she'd picked up her cell phone, dialed in his number, and had her finger over the Send button before she remembered: he was dead. He was dead because she'd killed him.
She tried to tell herself she hadn't meant to kill him. Everything had happened so fast and she didn't know what else to do and the knife was the only thing she had to defend herself. To defend Jimmy. But there was that tiny little part of her that was sure she had done it on purpose. It was obvious by then that he was never going to let her go. He would have killed Jimmy, and she couldn't let that happen. Killing him had been the only way out for the both of them.
In the end, all the rationalizations and reasons and justifications in the world didn't matter. She'd taken a life, and now she was no better than him.
Sometimes Abby wished she could take a page out of Jimmy's book and hate Henry. Jimmy outright hated the man's guts, and she wished she could find it in her to hate him, too. Maybe it would be easier then, without this guilt and this pity and this bizarre affection for a man who had killed so many people.
She knew she'd be able to calm down if she could get her emotions down on paper, but the words refused to come. She'd always been able to write novels on any assigned topic—in school, while her classmates were playing with fonts and sizes to meet the minimum page requirements, she'd had to find ways to make her papers shorter—but when it came to this, nothing came out at all. She'd just sit there for hours, staring at the blinking cursor or with a blank pad of paper in her lap and a pen in her hand. Nothing came, and for a writer, there was nothing more frustrating.
-----
Jimmy had been standing outside the apartment building for close to ten minutes now. He'd gone for a quick walk to give Abby a little time to herself, but he was a little afraid of getting too far away from the apartment. Besides, he really freakin' hated this city. After a quick check of his watch proved an appropriate amount of time had passed (just under thirty minutes, perfect), he opened the door.
He found Abby sitting in the middle of the floor with a photo album open in her lap. "I thought I asked you to throw this away," she mumbled, the accusation apparent.
"You did." Jimmy stepped inside and eased the door shut. He crossed the room and sat down in front of her before easing the album out of her grasp. It was open to a picture of her and Henry from the summer after her sophomore year of high school. "I ignored you."
She set her jaw and looked up at him, anger burning in her eyes. "I can see that. Want to tell me why?"
He flipped further ahead to a photo of her father and her mother taken during a Mills-Dunn barbecue that same summer and handed the album back to her. "Because I would have thrown this away, too."
Tears welled in her eyes as she gently ran her finger down the page.
"I know the temptation right now is to just get rid of everything, but I also know that's not what you really want. I kept the album because I figured you could go through it once things calm down a little bit. If you still want to throw the pictures away then, we'll toss them."
Her tears spilled over when she realized just how much he'd been looking out for her. She leaned forward, the photo album sliding off her lap, and wrapped him in a tight hug. "I'm so sorry, Jimmy. I'm so sorry."
Okay, this was new. Despite his surprise, Jimmy returned the embrace. "Shh, it's all right."
She shook her head before pulling away and wiping her eyes and trying to hide the fact that her cheeks had flushed a light shade of pink. "It's not all right. You've been so wonderful to me and I've been nothing but horrible to you."
"Oh, Abby, you haven't."
"You have your own stuff going on, and I've been so wrapped up in my own stuff that I never even thought about how hard this is for you."
Jimmy took Abby's hands and helped her to her feet. "Come on. If we're going to do this, we're going to be comfortable." He led her to the sofa, where she plopped down and tucked her feet underneath herself.
She looked so lost and uncomfortable in her own skin that Jimmy felt the familiar anger turn his blood red hot. God, what he couldn't give to have Henry Dunn alone in a room this very second. He reached out to her again and gave her a small smile when she grasped his hand and held on tight. Now came the hard part: how did he want to conduct this conversation? Should he go first? Should he follow her lead?
Before he had a chance to think any more about it, she mumbled, "I can't hate him. I want to and I know I should, but I just can't."
"You've been friends with him since before you could walk," he said softly. "It's understandable that you can't hate him."
"You hate him," she pointed out. "You've known … you knew him just as long as I did."
Oh, hatred was far too tame an emotion for what he felt for Henry Dunn. Jimmy let out a breath through his nose and tightened his grip on her hand. "We were friends, Abby, but I wasn't as close with him as you were. I didn't … have the same connection with him that you did. It's easier for me."
At that, she looked him in the eye for the first time. "It's not easier for you, Jimmy. I know you have nightmares, too."
It suddenly hit him that it was time to stop babying her. She was obviously more aware of his feelings than he realized, and if he expected her to open up to him, he needed to extend her the same courtesy. "You're right. It's not easy. I miss everyone. I miss home. I'm pissed and confused and sad and numb. It's everything and nothing all at once."
She nodded in understanding.
"And yes, I hate him. I hate the both of them, but I hate him more because his betrayal is worse. Wakefield never pretended, you know?"
Again, she nodded. "Wakefield was what he was. Henry … lied about everything. Absolutely everything."
Her hand had begun trembling in his, so he squeezed more tightly. "I hate what Henry did to everyone else and I especially hate what he's done to you. I wish I had been the one to run him through with that knife—"
"No. You don't. Don't you ever wish for that." The force of her statement was unmistakable despite the shakiness of her voice.
"Do you blame yourself for that?" Her silence provided the affirmative answer. "Abby, you know you had no choice."
"That's a justification, Jimmy." She looked down again, studying the checkered pattern of the blanket on the couch. "I killed my best friend. Nothing can ever make that okay."
Jimmy took her other hand and just held them until she looked up at him. "You need to realize that nothing about this is okay. Twenty-eight people are dead, and those are only the ones we know of. Normal and okay don't exist anymore."
"So it's fine that I killed my best friend because the rules don't apply anymore and two wrongs do make a right?"
"That's not what I'm saying at all, Abby. I'm saying you were in an impossible situation that you had no control over and had to make an impossible choice. You can't keep blaming yourself for the situation he put you in."
She fell silent for a long beat before letting go of his hands to wipe her eyes. "I don't understand it, Jimmy. I've tried to make it make sense, and I just can't."
"It's never going to make sense. You're trying to make sense out of something that isn't rational. He was sick—"
"Why didn't I ever notice? All that time, he was changing, and I never noticed."
When her lower lip began to tremble, Jimmy reached out and ran his thumb down her cheek. "He didn't want you to notice. He hid it from all of us."
She nodded even though she didn't look convinced at all. "I wonder sometimes … how long was he planning this? Which of my memories are innocent? What did I ever do to make him think—"
"You did nothing, Abby. You did absolutely nothing."
Again, she didn't appear a hundred percent convinced, but she was too emotionally exhausted to argue. A fresh batch of tears welled in her eyes as she looked up at him. "Where do we go from here?"
He sighed and took her hands again. "We … find a new normal. We do what we're doing right now. We talk and we try to find a way to move forward."
She swallowed hard and blinked back the tears before they could fall. "Do you really think we can?"
"It's not going to be easy, but I do believe it's possible. I just know we can't keep avoiding the subject and talking around it. That's not working for either of us."
"But I don't know if I can."
When Jimmy tugged on her hands, she gave him the tiniest of smiles. That gesture went back to high school and she remembered exactly what he wanted her to do. She crawled forward and settled in front of him, resting her back against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and placed his chin on the top of her head. "Of course you can do this, Abby. You did it on your own before."
"No, I didn't," she said, coughing to dislodge the lump in her throat. "I had Henry then."
Though Jimmy believed Abby wasn't giving herself enough credit, he didn't argue the point. "And this time you have me." He tightened his grip on her shoulders and smiled when her hands found his. "You just have to let me in."
"I promise." Her voice had grown softer and he wasn't sure why until he heard her sniffle. She was crying again. "I'm sorry I've made this so hard for you."
"You haven't."
"I have, and I'm sorry. I'm so sorry …" She trailed off, giving into the tears she'd needed to cry for weeks.
All Jimmy could do was hold her and keep reassuring her until she finally cried herself to sleep.
-----
Jimmy had fallen asleep not long after Abby and when he woke, he found her writing furiously in her notepad. He watched her for a long while, not wanting to say anything to distract her. He knew she hadn't been able to write anything since they got back and he didn't dare interrupt her if she'd finally managed to break through her block.
Eventually she put the pen and paper down, and he said, "You were writing."
She started at the sound of his voice. "Yeah. I didn't want to wake you, so I thought I'd try to getting things out on paper again." She handed him the pad while giving him a small smile. "It needs a twice-over, but I think I want to send it in to Paul."
"Your editor?" Jimmy sat up straight as he accepted the pad from her.
She nodded. "Before I left, he was trying to get me to write something about going home again. I don't think it's exactly what he had in mind, but I'm sure he'll eat it up anyway. How many other people are going to have an insider's perspective of what happened on the island and the aftermath?"
When he read the title of the article, he smiled. She'd called it 'A New Kind of Normal.'