A/N: This is a one-shot. I've reached a block in my newest addition to the "Rookie Series", so I thought I'd get back to my roots. For the first time in a long time, this is set in present day. Sometime in the episode "This Is Not America". There are no real spoilers to the episode, but there are some small ones to "Speed of Life". I've kept everything pretty generic. There are some references to my "Rookie Series", in particular to "Shaken Not Stirred". You don't need to read it to understand this one, but it really couldn't hurt.
Nothing Exists
Auggie Anderson's head throbbed with every breath that his aching lungs forced him to take, with every flex of the muscles in his stiff legs as he put one step in front of the other, and with every tic of the watch that was his only rope to the present as he felt the world spinning around him.
He crashed against his door, his hands shaking too hard for the cane to give him any valuable information, or if it had, he was too lost to comprehend it.
He fumbled with the lock. He didn't know how long it took him to unlock his door and budge the deadbolt, and he didn't care. He threw his cane away from his body, not even bothering to listen to where it landed. He didn't want to know. He dumped his keys and the other odds and ends the police officer had returned to him, most likely on the kitchen counter, but quite possibly just onto the floor. Again, it didn't matter.
Nothing mattered. Nothing at all.
Auggie dragged himself toward his bed, but he couldn't stomach walking up the steps onto the landing. He changed directions without a conscious thought, darkly, and hurriedly. A stray shirt, doubtlessly a remnant of his temper less than twenty-four hours ago (or was it forty? Auggie didn't know and again, didn't care), sent him sprawling to the floor.
Had the same thing happened only seventy-two hours previously, Auggie would have felt frustration course through him, but today, in the present, Auggie felt nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing existed.
He laid there, head shoved into his plush armchair, neck at an awkward angle, and legs spread apart. He didn't want to move, to feel, to be.
When had it all started? When had his life become the monster, the polluted river, the constant ache and terror it was today?
Had it all started the second he told Parker his true employer? Everything seemed to be going so well with them. She'd accepted his ring, hadn't she? She was willing to spend the rest of her life with him—the desk-jockey, crippled, useless man that he was—wasn't she? Well, he thought she was until she all but slammed the front door in his face.
But that's not when it all started, was it? He'd been a crippled desk-jockey before he'd even met his former fiancé. Maybe everything had changed the moment he accepted his mission to get the Jack of Diamonds. He'd seen his own man turn traitor. He'd seen his loyal subordinates die in a wash of blood and fire. He'd seen the world go dark in a blink that would last forever. But that wasn't when his life turned to hell, was it?
Before that moment, he'd had to abandon the woman he loved for a country and the ideals that more and more he was realizing were a stupid man's dream.
But even before that, he'd worked, punished himself, in order to become the man that he needed to be. He left behind the person he was in Illinois to become the person he was in D.C. Funny, until the present, Auggie'd never allowed himself to question if that was a good or bad thing.
So when had his life become a hell? Maybe he'd gotten it all wrong. Maybe it had always been like this. Maybe life was nothing but this—this constant fire.
No, that couldn't be. He was alone. This was his life, his hell. At some point he'd taken the road less traveled, isolated himself from the rest of the population—the naïve, happy population—and found himself at nothing. Absolute nothing. It was the only thing he saw now. The only thing that existed. The only thing that he was sure was real.
Finally, an answer! Yes, that was it. Nothing was real. Not even he was real. Nothing mattered.
He suddenly felt something: he felt cold. Freezing cold. It wasn't physical, was it? No, that was impossible. His body was immobile, frozen in time, sprawled like a badly placed rug.
It took a lifetime to determine the source of psychological liquid nitrogen, but eventually, Auggie found it. He was alone.
No! shouted a voice he might once have called his reason had he still believed in such a thing, you have friends! You have lots of friends!
Oh yeah? Another voice—once possibly called his consciousness—sneered.
Auggie thought about it. He had friends, didn't he? He had Annie, and Joan, and Mace, and all the techies he'd worked and was working with. But then he realized that all those people wanted something, used him, needed him.
Annie—she wasn't a friend, neither now nor before. When she needed him, Auggie was her go-to-guy, her backup plan, and her confident. Now she needed his advice, arm, and ear, no longer. She had no time for a worthless drunk.
Joan? Well, Joan was his boss. She might do things for him that no other boss would, but she was still her boss. She had a soft spot for him, surely, but there was no friendship in their relationship. Respect was the only thing tying them together, and after the events of last night, even that might not exist.
Mace was simply his mentor. The great Philip Mace needed a protégé, and Auggie had filled that role. But now it was too late. He was no longer Mace's protégé, his last mark in the spy world; Auggie hadn't been for a long time. Not since the bomb. After his return and reassignment, they'd tried to remain in contact. But after a while, the silent remorse he knew Mace was feeling after having had his pet "project" permanently destroyed was too much. They hadn't talked in over three years. No, Mace was no friend of his.
The techs were his underlings, his offspring, examples of what a lesser genius could accomplish. Auggie was better than them, all of them. He knew it and they knew it. No friendship could ever grow.
The friends he might once have had had proved their true colors. The friends of his childhood were long gone, as faded in his memory as the colors of the rainbow. His family too. They existed more as an idea, a dream, if you will. They hadn't seen him in years, and Auggie hadn't seen them in longer.
Auggie was cold. Freezing cold.
His mind drifted, aloft from the sorrow, regret, hate, and guilt. There was a way out, it decided. A way to insure that tomorrow would be different. The knife taped under the coffee table would do nicely. Mace had given him the set of throwing knives he'd long ago hidden around his apartment; it was only fitting that Mace's protégé would be forever changed by his gift.
At the Farm, Auggie learned ten different ways to kill a man with a knife. At Fort Bragg, he'd learned fifteen more. He only needed one.
Who would care? No one.
What did it matter? Nothing.
What would it take to go through with it? A little courage—Auggie had a silver star to prove he had enough of that.
It would be so, so easy. The darkness, the pain, the suffering, would be exchanged for light, warmth, feeling. For that one glorious second before death, Auggie would see something. His brain would fire out a signal, and for the first time in his miserable existence, Auggie's mind would decipher that signal as light. He would feel loved and welcome. To hell with what came next.
Auggie jerked with found determination. He scrambled around, searching in the nothingness for his salvation. Barely soon enough, his fingers clasped around the duct-taped knife. He scraped at the tape, pulling and tugging, but he'd done his job too well. He cried in desperation, hating that he'd not planned ahead and made the weapon easier to get out in a crisis. How had he been so stupid, so careless?!
A tear tainted his mouth with salt. Auggie stopped his mad struggle with the duct-tape, surprised by the acidic flavor. He hadn't cried in years, fifteen, to be exact. Even as he stumbled and crashed into walls in rehab, he'd never spilled a drop.
His arms dropped and his head crashed against the armchair with such force, it scooted several inches back. With a few seconds, his body was racking with sobs. The wood beneath him was soaked, the water and spit forming puddles under his eyes and mouth. His nose hurt from being pressed into the floor, and his hangover headache redoubled. But he didn't stop. He couldn't.
It didn't matter how long he lay on the cold floor; he didn't care. Auggie cried himself out, cried until there seemed to be no more liquid in his body, let alone tear ducks. He was thirsty. His arid tongue sent pinpricks coursing up and down the roof of his mouth. He had to get something to drink. Then he could go back to fighting the duct tape. Or maybe he'd just use its twin from in the kitchen. That might even be better. He could do it over the sink—help the people who would have to clean up the mess afterwards.
With his mind made, Auggie forced himself to his feet. If he could see more than just the nothingness, he knew he would have seen the room spin as he tried in vain to gather his equilibrium.
Finally he gave up. He walked with unsteady steps toward the kitchen area. He found it by ramming into the island counter. He felt his way toward the faucet, the pain radiating from his knee nothing compared to everything else.
His hand smacked into the porcelain jar by the sink. Again, the pain was nothing. But something did register.
The jar had contained his tea collection, and his hand had toppled it. The smell of chamomile permeated the room, cutting through enough of the fog.
Another voice echoed in the silence. "It doesn't get better."
Auggie tried to squash the memory. He told himself that it didn't exist, nothing existed, but for once, the memory wouldn't stay back. It was fueled by the smell of chamomile and the familiarity of loneliness.
Auggie remembered the silence that had followed Mace's statement all those years ago in that hotel room in Rome.
"So I bring my own chamomile," Mace had added.
Chamomile wasn't a cure, but it was a band-aid. It kept you through the night, and sometimes, that was all that was needed.
Auggie wished he'd asked what would happen when the band-aid really wasn't enough. What good was one night when the morning would be the same? There was no morning for him to wake up to, just endless nothingness, exactly what he saw at night.
He'd never asked the question, but somehow, someway, in the present, he knew how Mace would have replied.
"Drink your tea and shut your mouth. Getting through the night is all that matters."
Right, Auggie wanted to scoff. Nothing mattered any more. Nothing existed now.
But he'd learned that Mace was rarely, if ever, wrong. And so when he realized that his hand was folded around the handle of the already filled teakettle, he didn't stop himself.
He made a cup of chamomile, walked carefully toward the island and pulled himself onto one of the stools. He sat there, hands cupping the mug, and for the first time in too long, he remembered the color of the water as the leaves slowly infused the liquid.
He could see the colors of the tea, the greens, the yellows, and the odd streak of light brown. He could see the glow of the florescent bulb above his head. He could see his reflection in the black countertop. For a moment, he could remember what he'd lost.
Then he blinked, and the memory blurred. But the moment was enough. He'd seen the light. It was there; it existed. It had existed, and it would exist again.