Disclaimer: PG-13 for language and bloody imagery. Rating may go up in later chapters. Spoilers for…well, a lot of stuff probably, but mostly the sixth and seventh seasons. Definitely 'Blind Spot,' 'Endgame,' 'Untethered,' 'Purgatory,' 'Vanishing Act,' and 'Frame.'
Eames: So, what's with this new case?
Goren: Oh, apparently some geeky college student with no social life or the skills to obtain one has put out a hit on USA Network for delaying our Season 8 episodes until summer 2009.
Eames: How much of a threat is she?
Goren: Not much at all. She doesn't have any money to actually make the hit go through, so she'll probably just spend the next few months stewing in her own impotence and writing ridiculously angsty fanfiction.
Eames: Should we bring her in for copyright violation, just in case?
Goren: Nah. It's not like she's making any money or claiming credit for us or anything. Besides, from what I've been reading of her reactions to the show, I don't think I want her anywhere near us.
Eames: (reading over his shoulder) "The most amazingly delicious-looking Amazonian killer goddess biceps EVER"…okay, I'm officially creeped out.
Goren: Yeah, that one is worse than "smoldering dark chocolate eyes composed of sexy at a molecular level."
Eames: (still reading) "Emotion-porn?!" Our show is not emotion-porn!
Goren: You know, maybe we should carry out the hit ourselves. It might keep her from writing anything more.
Eames: Good idea.
A/N: So every time I watch the classic "It's--it's about yearning. He--he misses his partner" scene in F.P.S., I yell at the TV screen, "Aaaah! It's the Attack of the Incredibly Unsubtle Subtext!" (Also, every time I watch the beginning of Blind Spot where Goren is interrogating the first suspect and says something about how scary it is when the people you love go away, I yell "FORESHADOWING!!!" And whenever Stoat and Milago show up onscreen in Purgatory I yell, "Noooo! Not Evil Alternate Universe Goren and Eames!" Yeah, I'm pretty sure my entire dorm thinks I'm insane.) Anyway, getting back to the point, the first chapter of this story utilizes an incredibly unsubtle metaphor. Fell free to yell "Aaaah! It's the Attack of the Incredibly Unsubtle Metaphor!" at your computer screen.
When Alex was seven, she broke her mother's favorite vase.
No one else was home, and she had been bouncing a ball off the ceiling. She remembers liking the sound, ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk, how it set a rhythm for her thoughts: I-wonder if-they'll let-me play-ball with-them la-ter--
And then the ball hit the ceiling at a weird angle and instead of leaping back into her hand it slammed into the vase, a sickening crunchsmashshatter like bones snapping and ice splintering and the whole world coming to an end.
And she remembers feeling the panic the fear the oh no oh no oh no please I didn't mean to I'm sorry I'm so sorry please I'm sorry the sheer absolute freezing terror the way only little children can feel, how all the horrible little smashed pieces (so many pieces so many pieces how could there be that many pieces of anything in the whole universe) filled up her vision and her head. But she had to try to fix it anyway, and she tried, she tried so hard, and she remembers her fingers sticky with Elmer's Glue and blood because all the stupid little pieces keep cutting her fingers and they stick to her fingers but they won't stick to each other and the tape is useless and it sticks to her but not to the pieces either and she is trying to hold it all together and fit it all together, but the vase won't stick and stay together and she won't stick and stay together and her breaths are coming in and out all hitching and raggedy and she can't breathe can't breathe and there is that little tickling feeling in her nose that comes with the floods pressing against the back of her eyeballs and she is going to cry like the stupid clumsy little baby that she is and Mommy is going to be so mad and Daddy is going to be so mad and today was such a perfect day and her brothers were going to play ball with her but now everything is ruined ruined ruined--
In the hour before her family gets home, Alex does not stop trying to hold the vase together. But it is completely broken, and cannot be fixed.
They throw it away.
xxxxx
When Bobby was nine his father came home loud and angry and smelling like whiskey and cigarette smoke and something sickly sweet and wrong, and started yelling and smashing everything within reach. Bobby tried to save his mother's favorite vase, grabbed it and tucked it under his shirt and ran.
But he trips going up the stairs, lands on his chest. Smash! And pain and little pinpricks of blood coming through his shirt, and his father yanking him to his feet you stupid little shit what the hell are you doing?
And his mother, standing in front of him, her face cold and distant as the Arctic tundra. He'd only wanted to help her.
But he'd ruined everything.
xxxxx
The instant Goren's betrayal becomes clear to Eames she remembers her mother's vase, remembers it in perfect before-and-after detail, crystal-clear recall of the instant its delicate blue and white pattern crumbled into shards and dust, because she's pretty sure it's shattering all over again, only inside her this time. An explosion. All those sharp little fragments piercing straight through every internal organ, slicing up her insides into a bloody soup and punching themselves deep in the underside of the skin so that even the glare of the fluorescent lights and even--no, especially--the touch of Bobby's eyes makes her want to scream and how is she still standing with the pain stabbing again and again through every part of her that can feel? How is she still breathing with the ceramic dust clogging her lungs, mixing with the tears that she is not going to fucking cry, dammit and becoming clay that blocks up her throat and leaves a sick taste in the back of her mouth?
And some part of Eames that is very far away right now knows that Bobby is trying to make it better with his words, but the damage he's done can't be repaired with a pickaxe. And he doesn't even understand. He sees that she's angry and he sees that she's hurt but he doesn't see what he's done after all she's done for him and how tired she is after all she's had to do for him but she did it because he's her goddamn partner and that's supposed to mean something and how the fuck dare he think he can fix this with an "I'm sorry" and have everything be okay again?
She's home and washing dishes and every single cell of her already hurts so fucking much that it's not till the water turns red that she realizes her steak knife's sliced open her palm.
xxxxx
Her parents threw away the vase and her mom wiped Alex's face clean and fussed over her bloody fingers and told Alex that of course she wasn't angry, that she had liked the vase very much but not enough for Alex to get so worked up over it and most definitely not enough for Alex to go hurting herself over it. And eventually Alex's sobbing turned into wet hiccups and her mother gave her some ice cream. And even later that night when Alex lay in bed she couldn't believe, couldn't wrap her head around the fact that the world hadn't ended. That everything was going to be okay and that life was going on. But at the same time everything wasn't okay, not to her, because--because--
Because there had been something beautiful and fragile and right, and now it wouldn't be there anymore. And even if her parents weren't angry it didn't seem right that something so perfect had been destroyed.
When she was still wide awake at midnight, she tiptoed down to the trash and took out the plastic bag her father had swept the pieces into and hid it in her closet. That was a little better, at least.
But she still didn't know how to put it back together.
xxxxx
Bobby tries to put it back together.
He does it quietly, because all his words are gone. They have deserted him, abandoned him, left him alone like everything else in his life and please please please not Eames too not her. Sometimes he thinks he has them back and he tries to speak, to say the right thing (You're right. You're--you're right) but the look she gives him--it freezes the rest of them in his throat and he chokes on them, tasting their inadequacy. His inadequacy. It tastes like blood and stale air and hospital rooms and the ashes his useless words have crumbled into.
So he does it quietly, almost silently, and so much of it, of fitting the broken pieces of their partnership back together, so much of it is waiting and he was never very good at that but he has to be this time because this is the most important thing he has ever waited for. So he is quiet and he waits and holds the little pieces together, one at a time, waiting for the glue to dry and for Goren and Eames to be whole again.
xxxxx
Bobby hovers, so quiet, but still she can hear him thinking at her, broadcasting downtrodden repentance on every channel: I'm sorry I'm sorry please I didn't think please I didn't mean to hurt you I'm so sorry and she can feel him, the barely suspended weight of his body and his gaze, hopes and fears coiled and ready to pounce on the smallest sign of forgiveness. He hovers behind her and she's glad he hovers behind her because it makes it easy not to look at him and she's afraid to look at him. Partly because every time she does the shards dig themselves deeper, and partly because he might see exactly how deeply he's cut her and file it away for future use.
And partly because she's afraid that if she looks him in the eyes, and he looks back, she might forgive him.
xxxxx
Eames forgives him.
She looks him in the eye, and he looks back, and in the time it takes to process that this case has definitely unlocked his inner five-year-old, she forgives him.
They've put themselves back together, somehow, and even if the cracks show and you can trace the fault lines with the tip of your fingernail, even if in places the edges don't quite match up and the surface is uneven, even if there are chips here and there that will never be the same--despite all this, they are whole. She is still mad at him, but no matter what anyone says--and Eames privately resolves to stick Dean Holiday, the slime-ball, in a really uncomfortable holding cell for his manipulations and insinuations--they are one again, and workable.
Maybe even still beautiful.
The case ends on less of a good note than it started, quieter, more awkward. Fewer smiles. Bobby is twitchy on the ride back, but it's anxious-twitchy, not playful-twitchy like before, and even though she's watching the road she's so acutely aware of it that her joints tense and pop in sympathy.
"Hey, Eames." She glances at him, and his fingers flash forward, snap by her ear, and are suddenly holding a quarter. He smiles, a nervous little half-smile fidgetting on his lips like it's afraid to hold still. "Abra--abra cadabra."
"The Incredible Goren, Available for One Night Only," she says dryly, plucking the quarter from his hand. And she gives him one last smile for the night, just to let him know:
So we're not okay yet. So what.
We will be.
xxxxx
They will be okay. They're clicking back together, finishing each other's thoughts again, sharing thoughts without words again. And they're not all the way there yet, but they're so close Bobby can almost taste it, and it tastes like hazelnuts and mocha and Skittles and blue sky.
Eames is coming back to him and his words are coming back to him and he wants to spin in circles or dance or jump up and down, but he might just faint from the relief and from the fear that it won't last.
That night after they close the Miles Stone case he can't sleep with being so lit up with feeling the closeness of it and the terror of losing it now that it's almost his, so he stays up and does magic tricks and replays each and every time Eames smiled at him, each time she laughed, the way her hand came up to cover her mouth and the corners of her eyes crinkled, and he grins like an idiot with each replay. And he replays the bad stuff too, because he can't help it and also because he wants to keep it from happening ever again. The sudden awkwardness, the quiet that enveloped them after the perp read Eames. He's betrayed you before, hasn't he? You poor thing… And he wants to call Eames up and say that he's sorry over and over again until she says out loud that she does forgive him and he almost picks up the phone before he remembers that it's three a.m. and that even before everything went to hell in a hand-basket the early hours of the morning were not a time conducive to procuring anything from Eames besides copious amounts of profanity and sarcasm. And that thought makes him grin like an idiot too.
Basically, in fact, he's just an idiot.
Well, as long as he's an idiot with a partner again.
He'll bring her coffee the next day. He hasn't done that for awhile.
They'll fit back together. They'll make it right.
xxxxx
After Declan Gage is led away, Ross almost goes into the interrogation room but Eames stops him with a look that is not quite a glare but that plainly says: Mine. Back off.
Ross goes to his office.
Bobby is hunched over the table. He doesn't move when she enters.
Everything inside him is shattered.
Eames stands by the door for a few seconds. She almost leaves. He's pushed her away before. Maybe he doesn't want her here.
Bobby's head sinks a little lower in his hands.
She moves to stand behind him. Leans down and wraps her arms tight around his frame. Tucks her head just above his shoulder, presses the side of her face into his neck. Holds all the pieces together. He lets her.
They stay that way for a long time.