A/N: That's it, folks, the last chapter. I enjoyed writing this fic too much, I already terribly miss it.
Thank you for reading it, and even more to those who took the trouble to leave a comment, every single one of them made my day:)
Chapter 10: The last chords - rerun
-Now-
After all those numberless painkiller-tasting days he still looked haggard, weakness from his injuries and maybe something else too still clinging on his form. Something was slowly, steadily and stealthily draining him, there was a leak on him, or so it felt, maybe the very symbolic leak in his throat, and through it he was losing energy, rationality, himself. A new man was being born from the ashes, ruins, but it was a cripple. A ghoul. It had a name and nothing else. He was almost translucent.
"Look what you did to me, Leese" he croaked at his own reflection in the mirror of his more and more casket-like flat, voice hoarse by the lack of usage, and he didn't see it was more of his doing than hers. He had yet to realize that along the line he'd done more damage to himself than she had. He had yet to realize that the process of planning his little revenge on her slowly and gradually was destroying him, too. His old confident self was of the past. It was now a skeleton, or like shredded rags hanging off of his shoulders. Smugness turned into lip-chewing, nail-digging irresolution topped with self-corrosive bitterness. His eyes were haunted, skin parchment-like. The contrast nearly toppled him.
He was slowly chiseling off the last bits of sanity, normality and humanity, even professionalism. He was sinking into an unhealthy state of mind, shredding the cold logic he'd always been so proud of, now it - its remnants rather - got tinted with obsessive, self-destructive mania. His logic, his shrewdness didn't drive him farther than her apartment. If he'd ever had his own life, it was gone now. He didn't exist outside the half-heartedly completed assignments and stalking her. Everything now pivoted on her.
Sometimes he felt he could live like that for eternity, being a spy, an outsider, a spectator of her life and still being a part of it, being a part of her fear, her nightmares, part of her anxiety when she glanced behind her for any sign of tails, the part of her that never ordered a Sea Breeze again. He felt no one knew her more than him, and he was indulging in this thought, sucking every dubious sip of pleasure out of it, no matter if it was irrational or even untrue, for that matter. It was a bond he wanted to exist between them, and he willed it to life with all he was worth.
It had to be over though, this chase, danse macabre, one way or another.
He was more of a maverick now, out for an unknown revenge. He wanted to take away from her what had been taken away from him but he couldn't name what it was. Killing her was an option but he realized it wasn't satisfying enough. Actually, revenge wasn't probably the best choice of words anymore: maybe he was seeking release.
When he forced himself to analyze the map of his emotions, the masochist he secretly was sometimes, the result was more than disturbing. He didn't hate her anymore, it wasn't as simple as one single emotion, something else, something complex was now channeled to her (something very close to fondness and admiration, twisted and grim at that; old hatred and blame had fermented and resulted in this mixture), and instead he hated their differences, he hated everything she was and he wasn't, and even what he was and she wasn't. He hated the rope pulling him to her and hated the uncrossable distance separating them, all in past acts, words and lifestyles, morals and ideas they believed in. He hated the impotence that tied him more firmly than any physical binding.
He hated he couldn't hate her, cheesy as it sounded. Sometimes black-and-white was easy. Simple. Good-bad, forgiveness-revenge, love-hate. Love. Hate. He was somewhere in between. Or worse, touching both extremities.
There seemed to be a barrier in his mind he couldn't crash through. Couldn't see beyond, either. Fog, chilly, thick and throttling, gnawed itself into the very recesses of his mind and ate up something crucial there. A safety bolt, probably: the border between the very primal inner self and what could be called human was disappearing. There were days, periods when he rarely acted consciously (he was still alive because functions were kept up solely by instinct – he actually couldn't name the last time when he caught himself eating or sleeping), he was moving around with the confusion and franticness of a half-tamed, loose animal. Restless and uneasy, like someone always on the run, he couldn't tell if he was the hunter or the hunted. Dissolving in reality, in sanity: he was in fear of disappearing somewhere beyond these, somewhere where nothing made any sense. Perhaps he was already there.
When she had thrashed him, maybe with that she had also pulled him apart. He very much suspected it.
So the fog, the chilly and thick and throttling, obscured his intentions even in his own eyes.
What he was trying to find an answer for, ridiculously and in a grotesque way, sounded like those cheap personality tests in women's magazines. Wedged in between the daily horoscope and celebrity gossip, right next to a lingerie ad, it might run under the title 'How much of a psychopath are you?'. So he had to answer the question: 'What shall I do to her?'. A: Kill her. B: Wound her. C: Leave her alone and ride into the sunset.
No, C, in fact, was not an option.
He had to meet her so she would know, he needed her to know (the wish was now a new addition for his daily sustenance) he was out there, coming for her, thinking of her and there was no way in hell he would let her walk away with it. She had to know it wasn't over yet (he felt, suddenly, it wouldn't ever be over, and maybe he didn't really mind it at the moment). Lisa, living her life in his shadow, every morning waking with the thought that it might be the day when he came again - he craved for accomplishing this. He imagined them living one life, a half of the same life that through their meetings would link. You are mine, he muttered with clinging-clawing conviction, and didn't suspect this belief ascended from a lopsided, one-sided addiction: he was dependent of her, but his personality, his tattered, beaten but still very much fierce ego couldn't accept such a concept.
Marking her - a mutual noble gesture, it was a likely way. He had contemplated it for long, bouncing between the very extremities. Maybe he could do it gradually, in parts, showing up on a regular basis and grating her until she looked just as chopped up as him: a constant reminder, the recurrence of a primal séance, he liked the idea (he told himself it wasn't because so he would see her regularly). No, he wouldn't mutilate her, no. Only giving her a memory album of scars and fears, something to remember him by - not too original, he knew it. Maybe it was a subconscious desire to model, to shape her in his own likeness, at least from outside because he, somewhere deep, knew she'd never break, never surrender.
It was the exact day of the flight from months back, that night. No one could tell he had no knack for irony. Or style, for that matter. He thought of fetching a bottle of expensive wine - sleeping pill-free this time. Women were known to love all kinds of anniversaries, he was nothing but being considerate here.
He looked up at her windows, room alight behind the curtains. Old Lisa would be sitting on her couch, tangled up in a blanket with a cup of mint-cinnamon tea (no sugar, no honey), old movie soundtrack collections filtering from the stereo. New Lisa was most probably ironing to the same music. Not that he was anxious to confront her with a hot iron at hand but he stepped closer anyway (not even belatedly did he realize she would have been on home turf again – he had other concerns to chew on).
Maybe he wouldn't engage in a fight with her this time, he mused, suddenly unsure - this hesitation was, in fact, one of those very concerns. The image of his combat knife against her skin, velvety and warm, he remembered it, was now less appealing – actually, it was disturbing, confusing. Not because of the blood, pain, no, he had seen - and committed, too – his share of gore in his life to be indifferent toward it. He wasn't sure he had the strength in his arm to apply pressure on the handle, the sharp edge, to pull it along her skin, imperfection gushing forth on its trail. He fingered the wounds through his shirt and the scar just above the suprasternal notch on his neck – his own set of imperfection. They all cast a mental shadow, wounds on his soul, so to say. Somehow he imagined, or rather it felt that way, that the nick he was to draw on her skin would cast its shadow on him.
Up to that moment he hadn't realized the horrible fact that he couldn't hurt her without hurting himself: that if it was over for her, it was over for him too; that after he was done with her in any form and way, there was no going on for him anymore.
It was a horrible recognition. For a minute he felt suspended in the air, light-headed, shocked, even losing heart.
Maybe he would just show himself and walk away, he decided, suddenly lacking the link between the conscious part of his brain and his irrational, deeply embedded craving (actually, it was nothing else but the postponement of the moment of making a final decision). Just to see the shock on her face.
His stomach fluttered, flip-flopped. Meeting Lisa, with her actually seeing him and him seeing her, up that close; his vision tipped, discharging on the peripheries with yellow flickers. More than anything, he wanted to see his own reflection, this battered, pathetic reflection, in her eyes and she'd see her own in his; he needed it so he could be- what? He stared ahead blankly. Complete, perhaps. That, complete.
He smiled crookedly to himself, and stepped towards the door to her building.
The End
A/N:
Anyway, thank you for reading and commenting and faving this story. I sure as hell will write more Red Eye, next time trying to come up with a plot for a change, and actually bring Lisa in:D