Inertia
by explodingduck
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INTRODUCTION (To anyone who has ever lost someone: I love you.)
This is a place with too much time on its hands. It is accompanied by love and all its opposites. The seconds become minutes, the minutes become hours and the hours turn into days and weeks and months and years. The seconds steadily run forward at a pace quicker than that of the human heart, one second killed by the birth of the next.
His is an existence of irregularity and of swift and sudden love that was so powerful, so tender, so gentle. His love became a tragedy of too much time and red smiles of guilt. His existence is long and lonely, but only because he knows of having loved and lost. His palace is a place full of objects he cannot and will never again touch.
Hers is an existence of a slower loneliness, a deeper loneliness, a loneliness that is walking next to her on the path of her life, a loneliness that has grown up with her. Loneliness is beauty, for it is loneliness that introduced her heart to empathy. Hers is an existence of patience, endless patience that weathers her very skin, patience that aches yet opens her eyes to the beauty of broken things. The skill of seeing love within hate is not an easy task, and it is the pain within love that forms the key.
But which is older, the key or the lock?
Time is random, and a second in one person's life does not look the same in the life of another. Within a moment lies the very death of it. The key formed the lock and the lock formed the key. Without the other, they are nothing but useless objects.
If only a moment weren't so swift, the man says and stares at the engraved names of two persons whose faces are forever imprinted on the back of his eyelids. It is a story of tragedy, but then… every story is. Within a life lies the very death of it, and within every moment of that life lies the death of every moment. But what one mustn't forget is that within every moment and alongside its death lies also the birth of the next.
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She does not dare believe in the man standing before her. Golden hair, even more gilded than before due to two years of exposure to a hot Mexican sun, the broadest of smiles that now seems to appear too often. Beard that, in her mind, has come to signify this new era of sunshine. She wonders if the darkness of terror yet beauty that used to color his eyes really is gone. She cannot believe it. It cannot be that easy. One cannot simply forget ten years of one's existence, he cannot just forget the years of pain and guilt and endless search for vengeance. Not remembering moments between them, the times she helped him and weathered the storms of his brilliant mind.
To her, it is the past that makes her strong. It is the pain of the past that helps her navigate through difficult and tricky situations; it is the past, the memories, the smell of opened bottles and of hospital, that gives her the patience and perspective that she needs. And maybe that's not the case with him, for his mind was brilliant from the very start, and he can function so well without his emotions. It is like he has an on and off switch inside himself, with which he can simply decide whether to see the world through the eyes of a cold mind of steel or through the fragile glass of a broken heart. Most people do not get to make that choice. But Patrick Jane is not like most people. He smiles and makes demands. She hates him a little. But maybe it's her love for him. She is not sure love and hate can be opposites when it comes to her feelings about Patrick Jane. When she looks at him so many emotions rush through her body: fear of what he might do next (it is a primal instinct from the CBI days of being his boss that will probably never fade), wonder at what the hell is going through his mind, relief at seeing him alive and breathing, because that is enough, it will always be enough to her. As long as he is breathing and seeing and thinking, she believes she might survive this. As long as he is alive.
But she does not want the Jane who pushes away his feelings like this, as if joy and pain aren't a package deal. She knows that he knows that they are. But who is she to tell him what to do? Really? Because, when it comes down to it, she is simply a woman with too much empathy for her own good, and he is a man with too heavy a baggage to carry around anymore.
She wants him to need her like he used to. It is twisted, she knows, wishing for the years of pain and guilt and suspense, the years of blood. But with pain comes beauty, and sometimes guilt forces a man to trust a woman. They are the product of their past, and their past is dark, so where has its opposite gone? Where is the light? Should it not be here with them, within them, on their crackled skin, a product, a medallion of hope and trust to wear around their necks, an evidence of their merged quests of vengeance and justice finally at peace?
She sees the light in his eyes, the brightness of his smile. Wonders silently, intensely, desperately, hopelessly who the man before her is, who the woman he sees before him is.
So... what do you think? Would you want me to continue this?