Title: You Pretend
Summary: Jarod thinks about his next act of justice. Vignette.
A/N: This is in second person. In this case, 'you' are Jarod. Inspired by another second-person fic and a future tense challenge. Also my first in this fandom; be kind. ;) It just seemed to work best this way.
Feedback is, as always, adored and reread. :)
You will lock him in a room.
You know he is afraid of the dark. He always has been, since as a small child his father would lock him in the basement as punishment – for grabbing a candy bar before dinner, for mouthing off, for all the little rebellions of a child. You know this because you have seen him avoid shadows on the sidewalk, and it was easy, so easy, to slip into his personality and know he always wants to walk in the light.
You will lock him in a room, and it will be dark.
The darkness frightens him, and this is only just. You know this to be the case. You are not normal, and your knowledge is greater than others. You see into his mind, and you see into hers, and who but you can do this? Who but you can see the truth of his crime with such clarity? Who but you can dispense justice so well?
Of course, this is not the only reason you will be locking him in a dark room.
There will be a video camera.
You love technology. The freedom of it appeals to you, its power so easy to wield. Its use was something you never had in totality, until you ran away from your own dark rooms. It is useful in ways you never imagined, and you realized this was purposely so, because your pretends were to be perfect and untainted. Even those glimpses of the outside world, in simulations and home videos of a murdered girl, you never thought to take these things for yourself; they were not in your reality, and you could only pretend.
But no one can pretend like you.
It is how you escaped; your escape was mental before it was physical. In the understanding of the Center's motives, things became clear. In the rush of tearing away your own self-blindness, you felt rage, and that emotion drove you to escape. A desire to find out the truth was newly awakened. In the pretend of those you had never pretended to be before, your captors, you escaped; the mental walls they so carefully laid in your mind were swept away in the freedom of who they were. You were them, and you were free. And so you learned, and escaped.
In this same way, you understand completely why the man did what he did to the girl. Aaron. Why he murdered her in the dark, and left her there. It is his own freedom, to take the power away from the darkness, and to leave in it a girl that looks like his mother, young and beautiful, blond hair and blue eyes. His mother, who never stopped his father from locking him in the basement. He feels safe, after he has killed, but it never lasts, and so he kills again. He craves safety, as any human being does.
But you understand the girl, too. Sarah. You can feel her terror, her confusion, her determination. You can even imagine the glimpses of memory she has before she dies, advice from friends long drifted away, flashes of movies and newspapers, and she knows at this point she has to fight, because if she doesn't she will die, and she has to hope she won't. She, too, craves safety.
She, unlike her killer, receives none.
You know and understand this, too. The terrifying realization before death that there is no safety. You have felt it, known you were about to die, and it is even easier to pretend. It is easy to be her, as she was in those last moments.
You wonder, briefly, if this is a flaw. To not see both murderer and victim equally; because if you cannot, then you are not objective in your judgment. A mistake could be made. Justice would not be truly dispensed.
No.
You can still be them both; you can be killer and victim.
You will ask him questions from outside the room. He must have the illusion of being alone, to be as terrified as you wish him to be; for him to be as terrified as Sarah was. You know this is just, that he feels that terror, because even though he sought merely his own safety, he hurt her, and that is selfish. Wrong. His terror does not justify hers; nor the pain of his life justify her death.
You are secure in this knowledge.
Aaron was a teacher. Sarah was his student. This is another abuse, a trust that he has forsaken. This makes you angry, but you distance yourself from it, because you realize the betrayal of a teacher is too close to you. You love Sydney, even as you know the wrongness of his actions and it hurts. The rightness of them now, that he does not truly chase you. Aaron and Sydney are different. You and Sarah are different. You will be objective; you can be objective. You will pretend, and pretending is what you do best. They will be separate. You can be them both.
Empathizing with Sarah is easier, yes, and even now you feel a strange protectiveness of her – strange, because she is beyond that now. You see her grieving parents, and it seems confirmed that your actions against Aaron are just. But you wonder, you cannot help but wonder, why it is in the beginning that you felt so protective of her, when she was merely missing and not dead. You see her red-haired mother, her aged father, and it is all so clear. But Sydney trained you, and you wonder.
You will lock him in a dark room, with a video camera, and ask him questions. Then he will confess, as he did to his father, when he came to let him out of the basement.
But for now, you look up from the newspaper article so carefully clipped into the red notebook. You look away from the photo of Sarah, coming out of the simulation as smoothly as you entered it. People walk by you, past the café you sit in. You put down your ice cream cone.
And for a moment, you allow yourself to grieve for Sarah.
[fin]