title: Hemophiliacs Always Bleed to Death
author: Kristin
rating: pg
disclaimer: The characters belong to Dick Wolf. If they were mine, I'd buy a farm in Portugal and herd sheep for a living. I'm sure Mr. Wolf spends his money more wisely, and that is why he owns them.
summary: An anniversary, and the loneliness that comes with walking through walls
notes: For the sake of this story, Eames's husband's name is Michael. Enjoy!

"They say I'm a story, but the legend's all wrong..."
-- Damien Jurado

She was four when she fell off her bike; a little young--younger than most, anyway--to be working towards that rite of passage already. But then, she was really, always two people. Alexandra...and Alex. Alexandra liked pigtails tied with yellow ribbons, tea parties with immaculately groomed dolls, milk, ballet, and dresses. Alex liked her hair unencumbered (free to dance with whatever wind might be blowing), playing cops and robbers, fishing, soda pop, doing the twist to dad's old records, and pants rolled up to her knees. Alexandra was dainty and refined. Alex was aware of the harshness of the world which lay beyond the uneven concrete walkway outside her front door. So there were these two girls within Alexandra Eames, and one of them, someday, was bound to find mortality. She'd started wondering about the edges of her fates in that fourth year, on the hottest day of summer, when she'd fallen off her bike. Pulling her knee to her chest, she watched blood ooze from a superficial abrasion on her knee. But she didn't know it was minor. And it was a long way home.

So on that day--the hottest day--she took her bike by the handlebars, hands slipping as rain began to fall, and made the trek home, certain she would be dead before she got there. She was going to bleed to death, after all. Because she didn't know...

She could stop the blood.

"Michael was shot," the old woman states abruptly, depositing her tea mug into the dishpan. The remaining liquid peers over the rim, oozing stray drops the color of polluted skies.

As the old woman says it, a feeling of unwelcome familiarity envelops Eames. She has been within that knowledge before. And there are times, on the edge of late hours, when she is still trying to escape that stark revelation.

"It wasn't so bad. I think he could've lived, but he was a hemophiliac. Some of them, you know, they don't bleed as bad as the others. But Michael was different. He couldn't stop bleeding. I guess he was meant to always be young," the old woman sighs now, swatting at the tea mug in the dishpan. A piece of the mug chips and she picks it up, studying it, then throws it to the floor.

"I've tried gluing it together, but it just won't stick. Have you ever heard of that? Superglue is supposed to fix everything."

And Eames suddenly thinks of this Michael, Mrs. Abele's son, the hemophiliac, and her Michael, the cop; they were both bleeding, at their ends. Maybe Michael the hemophiliac had been slowly bleeding to death his entire life. Little cuts inside, making the soul prematurely escape its hidden place behind the heart. Maybe her Michael had bled to death because he'd had too much blood; like the effect of shaking a soda bottle and immediately uncapping it.

"We're sorry for your loss, Mrs. Abele," Bobby says, behind Eames.

This was somehow such an unnecessary turn of questioning.

But it makes her think of bleeding to death from the inside out and the silence of knowing things that went and never were and may be. Maybe she had bled to death, that summer many years ago, and it was why she had no problem allowing the sun to burn her now, from the outside in, making corpses of her eyes and needles of her skin.

Mrs. Abele looks at Bobby, a scowl still on her face.

"It's supposed to fix everything. So nothing can stay broken."

"I've figured out how to achieve immortality," Alex says, ghosting her hand above the car horn. Rationally, she knows there's no need to honk it. It wouldn't fulfill its true purpose, that of getting out of the current car jam. But she likes to know it's there, just beneath the air of her fingertips.

"How?" Bobby questions, not looking up from his binder.

"Get yourself stuck in a traffic jam," she replies sardonically. She doesn't even look at Bobby as she says it. She knows he's smiling from the right corner of his mouth.

"Philosophical today?"

She looks at him now, but his head is still away from her, his pen to lined paper.

"No, I was just...thinking of this day from my childhood. I was trying to ride my bike, and I cut my knee. I thought I was going to bleed to death."

"Did you?"

"No, but I did drown. It started to rain, and I had to walk home."

"So you're just a ghost?" he jokes.

"I don't know. Do ghosts need sleep?"

"I can't see why they would," he stops writing words now, but draws a triangle on the paper.

"Then maybe you're a ghost," she banters back, smiling. "When did you die, Bobby?"

He sets down the pen on the notepad.

"October 5, 1967."

The seriousness of his tone startles her.

"What happened that day?"

He picks up the pen again, and draws a circle around the triangle.

"Eames, ghosts don't exist. If they did, we would never get any sleep."

They close the case by five that day, and an hour later, strands of hair are clinging to her cheek as rain swallows dry air and grey makes myth of blue skies. She can hear her footsteps as she walks, a squishy mud made by the wetness. She doesn't welcome the rain today, but she thinks it wouldn't be right, somehow, to stand in a cemetery on a sunny day.

It comes sideways, not straight down, and there is a meaning to that. She just hasn't figured it out yet.

Then, there is his name before her, on a stone slab. There are the years of his life, bared to all. That little dash between the birth and the death. She wonders if the dashes look different for everyone; old people have long, exact lines, middle-aged people have shorter lines whose ends come to a point, and the young have lines which seem to shake, for the unfairness inherent in their early demise. But more than likely, none of the dashes are distinguished in such ways. So in the end, everyone is reduced to simply a line between their years.

This chill wedging between her ribs is so unlike the heat--when she was four and immortal--which seemed to pull even the extra breaths from her lungs, so stifling and oppressive, in that way. The heat is darkness, which dwells in the day, and is evil because of its perpetuity. The heat will never go away, because the sun will never go away. But people bleed to death faster on the hottest days.

The collar of her coat hangs loose; she doesn't bother to button it further. This chill is a sharp, uneven edge of glass, but it reminds her more of life.

Her hands shake as she touches the top arcs of the 'M' for Michael. She goes no further, and drops her hand into the snow. There is no need to feel the other letters; they will all be cold and sunken. And they are just more lines, in various angles, distorted in such a way as to elicit joy at the names or thoughts or feelings or ideas they create.

Michael was a beloved son and husband and he died in July. It was so hot that afternoon that she'd lain in bed in only her underwear, with two fans blowing directly on her. She'd worked the night shift and hadn't even said goodbye to him before he'd left for work. When the call came, her hands were so slick with sweat that she'd initially dropped it, before even hearing the news. When she had the receiver firmly planted against her ear, it didn't slide an inch. And she held it to her skin long after the dialtone had begun slapping her in the face with the weight of what she'd heard. Michael was dead. And there was nothing but that damn dialtone and beads of sweat.

Could she have given Michael some of her blood, if she'd been there?

These are thoughts as old as the cracks in the moon. She knows now, things which had been pushed aside during her marriage, because they were young and didn't see each other. They barely had time to talk about good things, let alone the many things that were going wrong between them.

She touches the dash between the birth and death.

"I know," she sighs, under her breath.

She couldn't have given Michael her blood.

They weren't a match.

And she knows about the rain now. If it had been raining straight down, the water would've collected upon her shoulders and eventually pushed her into the mud. She would've sunk into the unnatural earth. And it wouldn't be right, somehow, for a ghost to drown in a cemetery.

He was curt and taciturn earlier. Not that he doesn't tend to spare words in their free time, anyway, but it was a different sort of silence today. And he feels even guiltier as he realizes the actual significance of today. He should've known; after all, he had noticed Eames, almost imperceptibly, freeze up when Mrs. Abele mentioned her son, Michael, being shot.

Today was the day Eames's husband had been killed.

And Bobby had been quick to dispel myth, rather than reassure the slight ache of in-betweens that Eames must have been feeling: in between immediate loss and time-eased grief; in between familiar banter with her partner, to aloofness; in between, forever, the precipice of life and death. It is a precipice with undefined edges and uneven paths. It needs to be walked with loved ones and trusted friends, because when you do slip on a rock out of place, you occasionally need someone to steady you.

He doesn't need to tell her about October 5, 1967. Though she had asked about, she already knows the answer. He has been a ghost longer than her; he knows about the false loneliness you perceive to be there. The loneliness that comes with walking through walls.

He holds two cartons of food in his hands, unable to shake the rain from his jacket before he enters as she steps aside, allowing him entry to her apartment.

"Thought you might be hungry. Maybe next time, I'll cook something."

It is almost a joke, but it makes her remember, rather than laugh.

She thinks of the time Michael cut the palm of his hand while slicing onions. She'd heard the expletive below his quick, whispered breath, and grabbed the nearest towel, pressing it against the wound. It wasn't very deep, but it kept bleeding...and bleeding...and bleeding...

And she wants to say aloud to Bobby, It's not really possible to always stop the blood from coming, is it?

But all that comes out is, "There are so many things...I don't remember about him."

His favorite song; it must be something by The Rolling Stones. But no, that is her.

His favorite food; not meatloaf...something Indian. No, that is her sister.

His favorite book; Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughter-...no, her brother.

His favorite movie; anything old and/or foreign. But that is...Bobby.

So now, Michael is just a confluence of uncertain, blurred memories and the accessibility provided by the certainties of the living.

Maybe he never really existed.

And maybe, she will never say, she's forgotten what it once was to love him.

She used to eat spaghetti with Michael; it is her favorite food, and, by default, was his as well. Though, again, she can't remember exactly what his favorite food was. So as Bobby comes to see her tonight, he brings her bottled water--which is drowning from the outside in--and Chinese food, in soggy cartons.

But Bobby has never brought her spaghetti.

He is afraid the ache of memory would make her life-filled veins nothing but...

silent blue ghosts.

Bobby remembers inconsequential things, and important things, and all the minutiae, even, that compromises her. But tonight, he is thinking of other things and has also forgotten her favorite Chinese dish. So he holds up the two cartons, not knowing what to say to her statement about the forgettings of her husband, stating, instead, "I couldn't remember if you liked the bourbon chicken or the sesame, so I got both."

She actually prefers the beef and broccoli, but tonight, she isn't even sure she would want that. She isn't sure if even the thin cardboard Chinese cartons could stop bloodflows, but she grabs one from his hand anyway.

"Maybe Italian, next time," she says.

Opening the flaps of the white carton, and dirtying the tips of her fingers with sticky sesame sauce, she pops a piece of chicken in her mouth, thinking how unlike the bitterness of time lapses it is. So different from the staleness of air between two people who had been drifting apart months before a dialtone sealed their end. The chicken, really, is like the merging of new fates. And it suddenly occurs to her that old things are allowed to touch what still breathes.

So she amends with, "Spaghetti, actually. I'm really craving spaghetti."

He stares at her for a moment, then rubs a hand down her arm before opening his own carton.

"My favorite," he mentions simply, smiling with sincerity.

And there are certain memories which gracefully step aside. Everything after is, of course, given to permanence. She doesn't worry about bleeding to death; even if she already has, or still may. She knows how to stop the blood now:

Warm hands.

Bobby's hands.

Her hands.

Together, they are steady.

fin.