The Greatest of These
A short epilogue to 'John Doe'.
She was never supposed to be in Mexico at all, and now she has to drive the car back to the San Antonio office. She tries to get Doggett to stay with Skinner, who is sticking around to sort out the paper work and will fly back to D.C. tomorrow, but her partner flat refuses. He won't let the Policia Federal Ministerial medics check him over, either. He doesn't even want to stop somewhere so he can shower and change.
"Just get me the hell out of this place," he mutters, voice rasping like a dropped exhaust trailing in the desert dust. He slides into her passenger seat, grime and injuries and newly re-broken heart and all, as if the discussion is over. As if there has been a discussion at all.
For a moment or two she considers ignoring his request and driving him to the nearest hospital, but well intentioned or not that feels like a betrayal. So she buckles up and heads straight for the border at a speed she'd never get away with once they're on the other side of it. She churns through the dusty heat of her homeland as if leaving it behind will remove the past two weeks from her memory, and from his.
Most of their journey north is conducted in silence. She doesn't put the radio on and she doesn't speak, because she knows he will want neither of these things. Doggett spends most of the time staring out of the window, flickers of what she thinks must be him replaying memories adding spasms of new lines to his already creased face.
Luke.
Reyes swallows, hard, as a memory surfaces in her own mind – a horribly fresh one. Luke is nine years gone but the pain in Doggett's voice when he'd understood the reality of what she couldn't bear to say aloud was as fresh and bottomless as if those years had never happened. Yet now what pierces her even more than did the sight of him crumbling before her eyes is the memory of his voice in the seconds before he read the truth in her face. His voice in those seconds had been suffused with a quality of light and joy she'd never heard in it, spoken by the man he'd been before the source of that light and joy had been extinguished. Monica Reyes has always been aware that there is a distinct before and after in John Doggett's life, but in that moment she was made to understand, with an absolute and brutal clarity, that she has only ever known and will only ever know the after. Her Doggett is formed of the surviving, glued-together remnants of a man broken by a loss of such magnitude that her heart aches just to contemplate it, and aches even more to know she'll never truly see him otherwise.
Glancing at him now, at the pale flat planes of his face turned away from her, she thinks, I will never know what he was then. I may one day know him healed, but I will never know him whole.
They cross the border and somewhere not far north of it she decides she's not going via the San Antonio office. They can wait for the car until another agent needs to take a trip down from D.C. She cuts east on the 59 as the sun finally begins to dip lower in the sky.
She keeps driving, gripping the wheel so hard that her knuckles turn white.
A little ways south of New Orleans she glances over to see he's asleep. Doggett's head lolls at an awkward angle that cannot possibly be comfortable. The bruise over his eye shines with a sick black petroleum gleam in the reflected orange lights from the highway, now in darkness.
Reyes pulls to stop outside the booking office of the Happy Avenues motel. By the time she's got the keys for two rooms, Doggett is awake. She walks out to find him standing beside the open door of the car, his filthy shirt hanging limply off him like a skin he should have shed long ago.
"We don't need to stop," he says, the familiar roughness of his voice strange after so much silence. "I can take over the driving. Let's just go right on through."
She holds out a key. The yellow fob has a large number nine on it. "Go take a shower, John. I'll head over there and find you a change of clothes." She nods to a strip mall a block's walk back down the highway.
For a second he looks as if he might argue, but she's got the car keys and she knows there's not enough left in him for a fight. He snags the room key as he passes her. She watches until he's through the door, notices the slight stagger he tries to hide, the stiffness in his movements.
Thirty minutes later she's back at his door, pushing it open to the sound of his rasped, "Yeah, it's open."
Reyes steps inside to find him sitting on the edge of the bed, his hair damp and a white towel wrapped around his waist. His naked torso is a testament to the beatings he's suffered, his skin mottled and in places raw. His movements in the shower have reopened one of the cuts. It seeps blood onto his clean skin with the laziness of a glacier, so slowly he appears not to notice.
Doggett stands up, holding a hand out for the bags she's carrying. "Thanks. I'll just-"
"Sit down," she tells him.
"Monica-"
"Sit down."
He does as he's told and she puts down the bags to shrug off her jacket before reaching inside for the medical supplies she's bought. When she kneels in front of him, Doggett tries to shy away.
"Agent Reyes, thanks for the concern, but-."
"Agent Doggett, either you let me do this, or I put you in the car right now and drive you to the nearest hospital."
He blinks. "I was going to say, I can do this myself."
"Sure you can," she agrees, as she rips open a pack of sterile wipes. "But you won't. This might sting a little-"
Doggett sucks in a sharp breath as she goes to work on the abrasions littering his skin, but he doesn't say another word. She can feel his eyes on her face as she slowly cleans each cut, tapes the largest one shut and covers it with gauze, pastes arnica onto his bruises. Reyes wonders, briefly and with the full knowledge that her wondering is inappropriate, how long it has been since he's had a woman's fingers touch him. Has there been anyone since Barbara? Surely there must have been, but somehow she can't imagine it. Perhaps it's only that she does not want to. His skin is warm, but she brushes it only lightly, afraid to hurt more where too much hurt has already been given.
"You know what I don't get?" he mutters. "How I managed to remember at all. All those others – the disappeared ones – how come none of them even had a flash of memory the way I did?" Doggett pauses, lets the silence linger, and when he speaks next his voice is even lower, "It must have been the pain, right? Even when my mind wasn't my own any more, it just couldn't forget Luke. Because it hurts so damn much that it's cut right down into me, so deep there's no getting rid of it, no matter what mental mumbo-jumbo anyone tries. What kind of universe makes that kind of pain the only thing that can pull us back from a brink that steep? What kind of universe is cruel enough to make that the one thing that endures?"
Reyes finishes her task as the flow of his words washes over her. She's missed his voice, she realises, as fractured and rough as it is. She has missed his voice as much as she's missed his face, as much as she's missed him. She turns her hand over, strokes his chest lightly with the backs of her fingers, and looks up at him.
"I don't think it was the pain," she tells him, softly, watching the ebb and flow of grief in his blue eyes. "You didn't remember Luke's death first. You remembered his life. You remembered him. It was the love of him you recalled, not the loss of him. It wasn't pain that saved you, John. It was love."
He glances away, looking around the room. "I don't know this place," he says, after a few moments. "Might sound stupid, but… I don't want to wake up somewhere I don't recognise. Not again."
She pushes herself to her feet. "We can't drive through the night. We're both too tired."
Doggett nods. "I know, but-"
"What about me?" she says, quietly.
He looks up at her. "What?"
"What if you woke up to me? Would I be familiar enough?"
They stare at each other for a few moments. She sees a million questions flit through his eyes, but knows they're both too exhausted in too many different ways to explore a single one. Instead she toes off her shoes and pulls off her sweater and slacks, leaving everything else in place. She walks around the bed and slides beneath the coverlet, lying on her side. Doggett turns to look at her for a moment, then picks up the bag she brought and disappears into the bathroom. He reappears a few minutes later wearing a T-shirt and a pair of boxers.
He slides into the bed and mirrors her pose, facing her with one hand resting beneath the pillow under his cheek, the other flat on the bed between them. They look at each other, 12 inches and an ocean between them.
"Sometimes I dream," he tells her. "Bad dreams, I mean. About-" Doggett stops. "You should just be warned, because now I remember everything… Sometimes I wake up. Shouting, screaming…"
"It's all right," she tells him, laying a hand over his.
"Okay," he says, and she sees his Adam's apple bobbing up and down as he swallows.
"Shut your eyes. Go to sleep. I'll be here."
She watches him drift away from her. His fingers twitch under her hand. His legs move, tensing as if he's back in the corps, running towards something she can't see.
[TBC]