Good things come to those who wait...and so do new chapters, eventually. As usual, my apologies for the delay. I've been busy and, umm, distracted. Thank you for your encouragement and patience, verra glad ta know you're still out there!
At least the SciFi hiatus is over...though the problem with writing fic for a show still on the air is that new eppies just have to go and introduce factors that completely compromise a story you happen to be in the middle of composing. Sigh. However, at least one leech--er, reader--told me she doesn't care about the fanfic following every canon detail, and since "For the Good..." is something of an A/U already, I'm ignoring Stage 5 madness and continuing as I planned it all along.
Which brings us to the point of this post--without further ado, the story goes on...
For the Good...
part 8
Hobbes gripped Fawkes as he shuddered, supported him while he trembled like a leaf lost in a gale. His shoulders were hunched and his bowed head was pressed against Hobbes's shoulder, while his fingers curled around his arms tight enough to hurt, though Hobbes didn't try to break free of his grasp.
Bobby felt a hand on his shoulder, glanced up into Claire's warm face. She nodded encouragement, her eyes telling him this was right, this reaction was to be expected.
Hobbes knew it already. He had witnessed this before. In the army he'd seen men stronger than him, tougher than him, lost to reaction, shattered by what they saw and did and experienced. What Fawkes had been through was enough to break any man.
But no one had ever turned to him for comfort before. Hobbes was unsure how to give it, just held on, not daring to say anything for fear it would come out wrong. He knew of this, but dealing with it was another matter entirely. And he couldn't make a mistake. Not if they were to have any hope of putting the pieces back together again.
Fawkes was calming, gradually relaxing, the tremors subsiding. His face was still buried in Bobby's shoulder, and Hobbes, somewhat hesitantly, rubbed his back, like one would soothe a crying kid.
"Darien?" Claire asked, very soft, barely louder than a whisper.
Fawkes's shoulders stiffened; then his head came up slowly. His eyes were hollow, reddened, but not the unnatural crimson cast of the madness. He blinked, focused slowly. "Claire?" he mouthed, then in a faint rasp, "What..."
She smoothed the tangled dark hair back from his forehead, cupped his cheek in her hand. "We rescued you, Darien," she said. "We developed a new counteragent and we got you out of that hospital. I only wish it could have been sooner. We're so sorry..."
"How...where?"
"You're at my house," Eberts said from his position at the foot of the bed. When Darien squinted at him in confusion, he simplified, "You're safe. Claire and Robert, with my assistance, successfully retrieved you from the, er, facility."
"Who?"
"Me and Claire." Hobbes glanced at Claire, remarked under his breath, "Well, at least he's got his questions down--all he needs is 'why' and 'when' and he can be a reporter."
Darien was fighting heavy exhaustion to assimilate what he had been told. Claire gently pushed him down against the bed. "You're not yet fully recovered," she said. "Go to sleep, and we'll explain everything when you wake up again."
His eyes started to drift shut; then he blinked rapidly in an effort to keep them open. "No," he protested, so hoarse it was only a whisper. "Can't--don't wanna..."
"You won't go mad again, I promise," Claire told him. "But you need rest to heal."
Darien's head turned restlessly against the pillow. "No...gonna wake up...somewhere else."
"You'll wake up right here," Hobbes said firmly. "We aren't moving you."
"Be alone..."
"You won't be. I'll be right here, Darien." Hobbes took his hand, gripped it hard. "We'll be here. We're not going anywhere."
"Not going?"
"You got it. I'm not budging from this spot. You sleep, Fawkes. You get better. Count on us to keep you safe. We're not gonna let you down. Not again. Trust us."
Hobbes didn't know if Darien understood much of that, fatigue blurring his comprehension, but he closed his eyes at last, his fingers going slack in Bobby's hold. Claire checked his pulse, nodded encouragingly. Hobbes sighed in relief, heard Eberts do the same. Then he settled back in the chair, shifting to find a more comfortable position on the wooden seat while he waited, however long it would take.
***
Darien awoke with a start, not realizing he had fallen asleep at all. With some disbelief realized he was still in the bed, still in the room, and when he opened his eyes, Hobbes was still right there, leaning forward with the same concern darkening his brown eyes.
"So that wasn't a dream," Darien said, in what sounded to his ears like a normal voice.
It must have been close, at least, because Hobbes's face split in a wide grin. "Feeling better, Fawkes?"
Darien made a quick internal assessment, swallowed astonishment to say, "Yes, actually."
"Great! You hungry?"
Still another surprise. "Starved."
"Claire! Get in here with that dinner!" Hobbes hollered. "Fawkes is up and wants to eat!"
"Dinner?" Darien asked. His eyes went to the window, where golden sunlight glowed through the shades. "What time is it? Uh...what day is it?"
"Guess it could be lunch," Hobbes amended. "It's a little after four, Sunday afternoon. You woke up for the first time a few hours ago but dozed off again." Brown eyes searched him questioningly. "You remember?"
"Kind of." Darien sat up in bed, not as easily as he would have liked, but there was no pain, only stiffness and a fading lassitude. "You were here...right? And I..."
"I've been right here all along. Nothing happened to me. You remember that?"
"Yeah... I thought...what happened? How long have I been here? Uh--where is here? This your pad, Bobby?"
"Actually it's mine."
Darien looked over to the door, smiled at the man hovering there. "Well, if it's your place I guess you can come in." He motioned Eberts across the threshold. "Come on, you were in here before, I remember now."
"So how much do you remember?" Claire had appeared behind Eberts and nudged him through the door in order to enter herself, bearing a tray with a cup and a steaming bowl.
Darien felt his hunger rise at the sight and smell of real food. "What's that?"
"Just soup and juice," Claire said. "You're slightly malnourished and need to take it easy."
"Mmm, is that Campbell's chicken noodle?" Hobbes inquired.
"No, Healthy Choice," Eberts informed him.
"Oh yeah, I can see the veggies. Isn't that the one in those commercials with those two skinny chicks talking--no, wait, that's for Campbell's, it must be the one with--what's wrong, Fawkes?"
At Hobbes's suddenly anxious query Darien realized he was staring at his former partner. He ducked his head, face warm. "Nothin'. Just...been a while."
"Darien, it's okay." Claire's hand on his arm was a welcome assurance, warm and solid, real. "We're all here for you." Her tone lightened. "So, are you ready for some fresh-from-the-can, widely advertised, microwave soup?"
"Bring it on!"
The first mouthful burnt his tongue. He didn't care. This was heaven. He swallowed, gasped, "Wow. They didn't have anything this good..." and trailed off, not sure what stopped him--the rush of confused memory, or their expressions of barely concealed pity. To hide his embarrassment he quickly took another spoonful, asked around it, "So how did you...get me out? You convinced them the Agency needed me?"
"Er...not exactly," Claire said."
"We went through, uh, different channels," Hobbes supplied, and proceeded with a quick recounting of their strategy.
By the time he was done, Darien had finished the soup, which was good because he had trouble keeping his jaw from dropping, the more he heard. "So you busted me out."
"It was the only way." Hobbes's voice and face were dead serious. "Only sorry it took so damn long."
Darien couldn't meet his gaze, focused on the blankets wrinkled in his lap instead. "I thought you...they told me you'd sold me out and I knew it wasn't true, but I thought you'd given up, and then, you were dead..."
"Or not," Hobbes said quickly. "And we never gave up, either. Just took a while for Claire here to come up with a better counteragent."
"Yeah." Darien rubbed the back of his neck, out of habit rather than any residual ache, feeling the lump of the gland under his skin. "Gotta say, you did a bang-up job."
"She always does," Hobbes grinned.
Claire blushed, uncharacteristically. "I wish I could've managed it sooner."
"How long was it?" Darien asked. Claire and Hobbes both turned back to him, and he tried not to duck under the focus of their concentration. God, he should be used to people staring at him--but it wasn't their observation that disturbed him; it was the emotions behind their eyes. He wasn't used to such naked sympathy, compassion--caring, even.
He shrugged off the abashed discomfort, said, "I didn't exactly have a calendar in there, and I've got a lot of...holes in my memory. Blackouts when I was totally out of my head. How long was I in there? A couple months?"
Claire and Bobby exchanged a look he easily interpreted. "Longer? How much?"
"Darien..." Claire awkwardly cleared her throat. "We're not sure ourselves when you were placed in the hospital, but you were originally assigned to the CIA twenty-one months ago."
"Twenty-one...months?" Darien blanched, even though he had thought himself prepared. "Like...almost two years?"
"We said we were sorry," Hobbes mumbled with guilty vexation.
"Two years," Darien repeated, trying to imagine losing that much time. Even with the time with the CIA, even with all the hours he could account for, he had basically been out of the loop--out of the world--for a good year. All those days lost to the madness. So this was what Rip van Winkle felt like.
Through the silence he heard a distant trill. A telephone, he was slow to identify--been a while since he had heard one. A year or so...
"I'll get it," Eberts volunteered, unnecessarily since it was his house, but he seemed grateful for the excuse to leave. Not that his presence barely registered as it were; the man still had that amazing ability to blend in with the walls. That hadn't changed in two years...
How much had changed? Could the world really be that different? He wasn't that much older, and would he be any wiser if he had lived through it? In the grand scheme of things, what had he really missed?
Darien felt his shoulders begin to shake, but it wasn't until Hobbes touched his shoulder in concern that he realized why, and began to laugh out loud.
"Fawkes?" Hobbes asked.
"Darien?" Claire seconded.
Both displayed such open worry that he made a monumental effort and reigned himself in, swallowing the wild chuckles. "Sorry," he said. "Sorry...just occurred to me...that makes three years in a row...that I missed the Superbowl."
"Fawkes?"
"And the thing is, I don't even like football...but man I wish I'd caught the commercials..."
***
When Fawkes began chortling fit to choke, Hobbes feared he might be cracking up for real. But though his laughter definitely had a tinge of hysteria, when Darien finally spit out what had set him off, Hobbes couldn't help but smile himself. Hell with it, didn't matter if it was that funny, it was a start, a step in the right direction. They were all in need of the release.
And he was sounding like Darien Fawkes, not the quicksilver-possessed psycho, not the tortured patient they had barely saved--the actual Darien Fawkes, his partner, his friend. That in itself was enough to make Hobbes laugh out loud.
Eberts's reappearance in the room quelled his humor. The man nodded apologetically, said, "Claire, it's for you."
Claire raised her eyebrows but left to take the call. Eberts remained in the doorway, watching. "Who called?" Hobbes asked him, but Eberts only shook his head, with a closed expression that as good as shouted, 'not your business.'
Hobbes looked over to see Fawkes giving him a surreptitiously puzzled glance, a silent question he instantly understood. All the familiar gesture, the pattern of their partnership, returning, just like that. Of course anyone could read Fawkes like a book, the guy always did wear his heart on his sleeve...still, somehow Hobbes had almost forgotten how much fun it could be, these covert communications.
Then it clicked who the phonecall had to be from. Only one other person knew Claire was here, and he wouldn't be calling with good news. Hobbes stood. "I, uh, gotta go to the can," he said. No need to alarm Fawkes.
Only Darien did look worried, trying to hide it but he really couldn't keep anything out of his eyes. Now there was stark fear there, a terrified loneliness. Wasn't where Hobbes might be going that disturbed Fawkes; it was him going at all, leaving him alone, even for a moment...and that fright was a fragility that Hobbes found not pitiable but downright scary to witness.
Salvation came from an unlikely source. "Darien," Eberts said cheerfully, stepping forward. "Do you want something to do? I could get the portable TV, or a radio."
Darien grabbed at the offer like a drowning man. "A radio would be good--maybe a newspaper, so I can figure out what's been going on in the world. Some magazines would be great--I bet you subscribe to Times, Newsweek, all of those, huh?"
As conversations go it was about as stimulating as turtle racing, but the mind-numbing normalcy might be just what Fawkes needed. And it meant he had company. Hobbes threw Eberts a look he hoped would be interpreted as grateful, and headed for the kitchen.
Claire's back was to the door, head canted toward the floor, holding the receiver to her ear with one hand while she wrapped her other arm around herself. Every line of her posture screamed of barely leashed tension, and her voice sounded preternaturally calm as she said, "Yes, we'll want all you have. Yes, we're being careful. We'll come to get it within a few days. I see. Thank you. Goodbye."
She hung up, folded both her arms over her chest as if to hold in her heart and stared down at the rust-hued linoleum. Under her breath she muttered, so low he could barely make it out, "Damn it. Goddamn them..."
"Claire?" Hobbes finally ventured.
With a tiny intake of breath she spun around, one hand going up to rub at her eyes. Their blue was brighter than ever with water. "Bobby."
"That was the Official, right?" Hobbes said. "What'd he have to say?"
"Charlie has been investigating," Claire said. "He just obtained reports he's been looking for, concerning Darien's activities with the CIA."
Hobbes felt his stomach tie itself into a granny knot. "Oh. Was it what we..."
Claire nodded.
"Shit," Hobbes said, with feeling. In spite of everything there had always been a part of him hoping they were wrong. Hoping that the country he had once believed in with all his heart and soul, still had some decency, some shred of morality.
When Claire had first told him why she suspected the CIA had wanted Darien, Hobbes had argued against it loud and long. "Fawkes is an American citizen," he had insisted. "He's got rights!"
And Claire had flatly denied it. "That's what you never understood," she had told him. "You never understood what he signed over to us when he joined the Agency. He's not a citizen. He's nothing. When the Agency took him, they erased his prison record--and everything else. His life is the price of the gland, and the counteragent. That's it. That's all that he's worth."
"But he pays taxes. He's got a social security number--"
"Bureaucratic leftovers, that's all. He isn't a citizen--he's got less rights than an illegal alien. The Agency owned him. Now the CIA does. As far as the government is concerned, Darien Fawkes doesn't exist, except as the receptacle of the quicksilver gland. He's nothing but a cog in their bloody machine."
She had been crying when she said that. She was crying now at the confirmation of everything she had known was happening, that they had been unable to prevent. What was Hobbes, what were any of them, but more cogs in the monstrous mechanism of the state?
Not anymore. He was the monkey wrench in the works now. If only it wasn't too late to destroy what they had wrought. Hobbes found himself fighting, not tears, but a rising rage. He forced himself to cool down, ask calmly, "How many people?"
"As far as the Official could ascertain, five," Claire reported with a cold precision to combat her own fiery emotions. "Five confirmed dead."
Five deaths. Five assassinations, at the hand of a man who in his right mind refused to kill--and who had no control the rest of the time.
"They attempted to use him four times," Claire said, her tone still ice. "Three of the missions were...successful, but with one assignment there were two casualties besides than the target. So five total."
It could have been worse. There might have been more casualties. The CIA had been playing with fire, wielding a secret weapon that easily could have blown up in their faces. They must have used Fawkes like a time bomb--set him up in the right place, the right situation, to kill who they wanted when he went off. And agents standing by, waiting to subdue him when the deed was accomplished. A dangerous game. An ill-conceived, stupid, insane stratagem.
Also one of the cruelest and most corrupt he had ever heard of.
"Who were the targets?" Hobbes asked. "And when?"
Claire shook her head. "I don't even know if Charlie has all the information. At any rate he wouldn't give it to me over the phone. But he thought it was important we knew the basic facts as soon as possible."
"Yeah." He couldn't stand still, rapidly paced the short width of the kitchen. "What are we gonna do? Do we tell Fawkes? We don't even know how he did any of it--could've been with a gun, or just as easily with his bare hands. How is he gonna deal with that?"
"I don't want to lie to him," Claire said slowly. "But I doubt he has any memory of the incidents..."
"Incidents. God." Hobbes made to slam his fist into the wall, stopped when it occurred to him that Eberts might not appreciate a dent in his plaster. Then he was annoyed that he bothered to consider what Eberts thought, even if it was the man's house... "Wish we could get our hands on the sons of bitches who used him," he said instead. "Whoever the suits higher up were who dreamed it up. I'd strangle them with their own neckties."
"Or give them a taste of their own medicine," Claire suggested, her face bloodless with white rage. "Even after all the 'projects' I did with the DoD, I still can't believe they did it. We're going to have to tell Darien eventually, and you know what it will do to him..."
"Fawkes is strong," Hobbes said with a confidence he didn't feel. Darien was strong in some ways, definitely; he was stubborn, had a lot of brains, a lot of guts. He was also unpredictably vulnerable. And his scruples could be either assets or hindrances. However unusual it was in a career criminal, his morality was a surprisingly solid thing. Didn't cover as much as some people's consciences, but when Fawkes did take an ethical stance it was for real, and he would rather break than bend. Hobbes doubted a year in a padded cell had changed that.
He only had to look at what that lie about Hobbes's fate had done to Darien--how absolutely, agonizingly relieved he had been to have it disproved. Now they would have to tell him it wasn't all a lie after all, and hope the truth didn't shatter him.
But not yet. Not until he was strong enough to take it, or else they might drive him over the edge completely. Even Claire's new improved counteragent couldn't nullify the effects of guilt.
His thoughts were hauled violently back to reality by a hoarse shout from the guest room. Hobbes pounded down the hall, Claire crowding behind him to see inside.
Fawkes was sitting straight up, Eberts at the bedside hesitantly putting a placating hand on his back. Darien paid him no heed; all his attention was focused on the back of his own hand, extended before him with the long fingers spread.
Without taking his eyes off his hand, Darien carefully addressed them. "What do you see?"
"Uh, your hand?" Hobbes said. "Five fingers, looks right--"
"What are you seeing, Darien?" asked Claire cautiously.
"The same thing. But I shouldn't." Fawkes's eyes sloughed up to them, the blank emptiness in his gaze more disturbing than the unstrung tremor in his voice. "It's not working. I can't do it. I'm trying but it's not working.
"I can't go invisible."
to be continued...
I hope even with the delays (hmm, now I sound like my commuter train service) and the uncanonical approach, the story is still entertaining y'all..?