TITLE: Dark
AUTHOR: Blaze
RATING/SPOILERS: PG, and one big fat one for Fallout.
SUMMARY: Something always gets in the way. J/S
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. Anything vaguely recognizable as something copyrighted is also not mine, just lovingly borrowed.
A/Ns: My love for Fallout expands every second. I could only begin to touch the surface of the ep with this, so…yeah. Thanks as always to Maple Street and the Wise One for being amazing people to be around and for just rocking so very hard.
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It was dark.
Dark in the room, dark with the blinds sealed shut, dark under her eyelids.
Dark in ways he knew about but hadn't experienced before.
Everything played differently in the dark. Even in a bright and frustratingly hot bookstore, or a bench outside, or the theater across the street. He wondered what would've happened if he'd believed the words Barry spoke in the dark on a dark telephone, wondered what really would've happened if he'd believed Sam's light words on that dark phone in the light bookstore on yesterday's very dark night.
She looked almost exactly the same now, in the dark, as she had in the bookstore. Better now, breathing easier, wheat-colored hair still strewn across the head support. Leg still propped up and bandaged, still hurting, still…
He'd sat at Marie's bedside a few hours ago and felt nothing. No shame, no regret, no nothing. He stared and stared and stared and tried to feel, tried to lie love into his heart and couldn't. Left when he realized that if he couldn't even lie to himself about his feelings for Marie then he probably really didn't have any for her.
Five minutes he'd been in the chair by Sam's bed and could hardly hear the beeps and hisses of the monitors she was hooked up to over the swelling hurt in his body.
Relief, too, complete relief.
She stirred slightly against the sheets and Jack's head raised. A completely unprofessional, completely AOP-wrong whisper of, "You awake?" wafted into the room and into her ears and she nodded.
"Hi," he started. It felt wrong somehow, inappropriate, not enough. "How're you feeling?"
"Hurts," she grated, throat dry. "What are you doing here?" The numbers on the clock were fuzzy, well… everything was fuzzy… between the pain and the painkillers and the leftover anesthesia, but what she could make out looked suspiciously like 6:30. In the morning.
"I told you I'd be back soon."
"You did." Her eyelids drooped and she sighed. "So tired." So groggy, really, but 'groggy' seemed like too much for her tongue to tackle when weighted down by morphine.
He immediately looked concerned. "Want me to go?"
Did she want him to go? She never wanted him to leave her again. Wanted to wrap herself up in him like he was her security blanket, wanted to drag him around like that kid from Peanuts… What was his name? Something with an L… But she was still a strong FBI agent, still tough, still Samantha, so she merely said, "No."
"Okay." If he kept that tone up, that low sweet voice, and that look in his eyes like he was really just looking at her for the first time…
No, Sam…
Something always gets in the way
.A ring, a wife, a panicky hostage-taker with a gun…
" 's not fair, Jack," she muttered, eyes closing. "Can't have you, can't not have you. I wish someone would make a decision."
"I thought we did." He didn't want to have this conversation now. Not when she was flat on her back in a hospital bed with a hole in her thigh. Not when he'd just been to his old house, not when he'd just had a gun to his head—the same gun that punched a sidelining injury into her?—not when he'd been left so thoroughly confused over where he stood in every relationship he had. Not when he wasn't sure who was more crazy, Barry or himself.
"That was before."
There was a before, now. There would be an after sooner or later. Just one more pair to add to their last four years. Before she transferred in. After she joined the unit. Before her first child case. After he wiped away tears and told her it never got better, just easier to shove aside. Before Kate was born. After she saw the pictures of the family on his desk and told him about her ex-husband. Before he knew what coffee and toothpaste tasted like on her lips. After he came to work smelling like her soap and knowing exactly where he could put his shampoo in her shower.
Every before and after made this tauntingly more desirable and devastatingly more complicated.
He pushed a stray strand of golden hair off her face and said, "Yeah, it was."
"I don't know where we stand now." It seemed pitifully obvious, a few words shy of what she wanted him to know. "I thought I had it all figured out, and then you came in and threw it away."
"I know. I'm sorry." He fell silent for a moment, watching her eyes watching his and not knowing what to say next. "I wish I could make this easier."
"There's no place for us, Jack. No easy. I love you, you love me, but there's no…" She trailed off with a rueful sigh.
He felt a burning in the back of his eyes, pushed it aside before he let it show. "Maybe we need to make a place."
"Maybe." She glanced at his left hand, the ring still glaring at her even in the dark.
Tried to fit the ring into carrying her out of the bookstore, into sweetheart and touching her face and the look in his eyes and the sound of his voice. Couldn't any more than he could make no longer loving his wife make sense.
"This is going to hurt, isn't it?" he asked.
"Everything hurts."
It was dark in the room with the blinds shut and their hearts open, sutures in her leg and an aching half-empty apathy on his mind, shaken need in every word and on every breath, and no place to go or stay.
He wanted light.