by tahlia
dayglo_parker@yahoo.com
summary: "look at how much this job has consumed her."
| category: | jack/claire |
| rating: | PG-13 |
| spoilers: | aftershock, corruption, the LA triology
for the time being, i need you to pretend aftershock ended differently. thank-yous at the end. |
A NEW YORK MINUTE.
It's funny how things can turn out sometimes.
The doctor is stitching up the gash on her forehead where her head came to a stop on the steering wheel, and he's mumbling something about a scar. She winces, at the motion, at the dull pain, at the thought of looking at herself in the mirror everyday and remembering. She wonders if it'll be the kind of scar that a dab of foundation can hide, the kind only your morning self, and whomever you wake up with, will notice. She tries not to imagine all the times someone will run their fingers over it and ask how.
A nurse pulls back the curtain and whispers to the doctor that there's someone in the lobby, possibly intoxicated, bothering the attendant at the front desk and asking for someone in charge.
Several people tell her that she's lucky.
It's the little things, it says so in the accident report she read once and then shoved in the back of desk, out of sight and (hopefully) out of mind. How she leaned back to contemplate Lennie, and how those small inches prevented her neck from snapping in two. How it had rained the night before, how the brakes applied over just the right puddle at the exact right moment gave the other car an angle when it collided with her blue Honda, how it destroyed the front end of her car instead of her. They call it luck, and she likes to think it was.
Her mind tries to linger on her other self, the one who wasn't so lucky, who tilted her head forward.
For her, things used to be one or the another; black or white, man or woman, guilty or not guilty. This job taught her the rest of the world didn't agree; there were moral absolutes as well as legal, ones that one only thought in when it suited the case. He taught her that.
When she's finally discharged, he's gone, they're both gone, and Margot's sitting alone in the waiting room, flipping through a worn copy of Vanity Fair. Her eyes are sympathetic when she looks up, and she can't help but notice the way Margot's eyes linger on the scar. Already, a defining characteristic.
"Ready?" Margot stands and gathers her purse.
She nods, unable to speak, and her eyes are searching, hoping he's hiding in a corner or leaning against a doorframe. He's nowhere to be found, though, and she knows he's been here because after two years she's developed this strange sixth sense. She knows where he's been, what witnesses he's interviewed, what cases he's pulled for reference, what ideas he's come across and then abandoned. She hopes his name isn't splashed across the NY Post tomorrow morning, along side hers, with a sensational story about being dragged from a hospital lobby, drunk. This is not the press they need right now.
Look what she's become, she thinks to herself; look at how much this job has consumed her.
Margot took the subway here and for the moment she's glad, because she isn't sure if she can get into another car just yet.
The subway car is half-full because it's only past ten-thirty on a Tuesday night and the only people out now aren't just tourists and twenty-somethings on dates. She's a twenty-something, she thinks, but every life she touches, every family she rips apart, every vicious criminal she locks behind bars, ages her a couple of years. She wonders if she'll retire before she hits thirty, at the rate she's going now.
She runs her fingers along the seat and thinks she's burned out already.
The conductor calls the familiar stop -- his stop, she thinks, and she wonders where he went after being escorted out of the lobby -- and she thinks she must move in response. She knows, because Margot's hand is on her leg, passively restraining her. It doesn't faze her that she's never told her where he lives, never told her much about him at all. Maybe, in law school, Margot developed her own sixth sense. She pulls the sleeves of her leather jacket around her hands, to cover the cuts where the glass of her window shattered all over her, and withdraws into herself.
She hasn't said anything at all, because it's mostly just a blur, and she's not sure what she's supposed to do now.
Lennie's sad expression won't leave her mind; he is sitting next to her, morose, and in the next instant he's in the bed next to her, watching the doctor examining her forehead. When they're alone for a few minutes, he tries to speak, but he doesn't need to tell her that he feels responsible because it's plastered all over his sunken features. He looks like hell, but he's only got a small bruise to show for it. She imagines they'll have this ongoing argument after their wounds have healed, their physical ailments, where he'll blame himself and she'll disagree. After a few years they will make a pact to put the past where it belongs, in the past, but she knows that every look he casts at her will always be filled with guilt.
"I can't," she finally whispers at the steps on her building. Margot looks at the flickering porch light and thinks she can't make the journey up the stone steps. She slaps back the hand she's offered, out of spite that Margot thinks her to be impaired. "I can't remember anything."
In the end, when she sits in the courtroom and listens to his allocution, listens to him rationalize his reckless behavior away, when she realizes the near-miss is a pivotal moment in her life that she should always hang onto in her mind, she can't remember a thing.
She thinks this must be her fault somehow.
Margot doesn't stay long, she won't let her, and now she's alone. Sometime between the subway station and now, it started raining again, but she doesn't notice until there's no noise save for the drops beating against the window.
She sits in the dark, stretched out on her cramped couch so that her feet hang over one side, and her eyes are focused on the blinking red light of her answering machine. There's a digital display, too, and she glanced at it when she came in to find five messages waiting for her. The dry cleaners, she imagines; later, she listens to Adam wishing her a speedy recovery and to "take all the time you need."
She's honest with herself; she's not entirely sure there is enough time for her to recover.
She can't bring herself to turn on the news because she's not prepared to see her face and her car splashed all over the screen. She finds that she has no willpower to pick up the phone and dial his number. She knows it would dissolve into a shouting match -- lately that's all they ever do, fight and make-up -- and a part of her wouldn't mind if him leaning into the window of her car was the last conversation they ever had. Briefly, she thinks she might call Lennie.
The phone's shrill ring startles her, and in the same instant, her sixth sense kicks in. Her fingers twitch, but her brain is still angry that he gave up on her. She heavies a heavy sigh when she lets the answering machine answer it for her. Her recorded voice is much happier than she feels at the moment, and it doesn't take very long to hear the edge in her mother's voice, pleading with her to please pick up the damn phone.
She can't figure out how she got that one wrong.
She's front-page news because New York is done with Mickey Scott and its citizens are craving a healthy dose of poetic irony. There's a small (yet larger than average) gaggle of reporters outside the DA's office when she arrives at eight, and they're shouting her name and asking for comments and all she can think to do is push through the crowd and ignore them. The hounding press, crowded on the narrow courtroom steps, used to intimidate her, but she just imagines his hand on the small of her back, gently guiding her, and she suddenly finds the nerve.
Adam Schiff said, "take all the time you need," which is exactly why she's sitting at her desk; later, he pays her a visit, and insinuates that she should be relaxing, and she's amazed when she rattles off an answer to the tune of, "I just wanted to get back into the swing of things." He contemplates it for a moment, because both of them know why she's here, on this morning.
She tells him to give her a few weeks, and he tells her he's going to miss her, but she knows it's just stalling time. Today is Tuesday, and she'll be gone by Friday.
Liz takes her out for coffee because suddenly everyone feels sorry for her. "You're looking better," and her fingers graze the scar on her forehead as a reaction. "I meant the flu."
"Yeah," because she'd forgotten the lie, "must have been a 24-hour bug."
He never tells her that Liz offered him lunch and gave him the same opportunity to let it all out. For her, a bang on the forehead was enough to set everything right.
"You're leaving, aren't you?" Liz asks abruptly. Adam tapdanced around it, she had resigned herself to it, but Liz pulled it out into the open. Her silence is telling and she pushes further. "Why?"
Because she wants to live in her life in absolutes and she's seen too many people slip into life's little gray area of morals and ambiguity; most specifically, herself. "I'm tired." It's a pathetic reason.
"That's all?"
She looks startled, and wonders when it became so obvious to everyone because half the time she didn't notice it. She'd be lying if she claimed he wasn't part of this complicated equation. Yet she sips her espresso slowly and hides the truth, because she's not in the mood to hear Liz's theory about him and her father and their unhealthy relationship, she's really not.
He never shows up, barred from the office for a day by Adam's strict word, and when she returns home at four with a box of her personal affects in her hands, she realizes that she forgot to write him a note.
"Where are you going to go?"
She was insane to think he wasn't going to show up at her door, tonight, rain-soaked and, she thinks, partially drunk. Again. This is his greeting, his first words to her since yesterday. He left a message, but she doesn't think it counts because the slur in his voice was enough to suggest he didn't remember half of what spilled out of his mouth.
He's invited himself in, and keeping the door open would be a sufficient invitation to leave, but she can't help but let it shut behind him. This is the other of her brain, the part she's been denying for days on end.
"I hear Europe is the choice destination for today's burned-out prosecutors."
They are carefully chosen words. A couple of weeks ago a postcard from Ben Stone sat in her mailbox; he spent a week in the city to refuel and stayed long enough to see her name and James Smith splashed across the tabloid headlines. He rambled on about vouching for personal character but everything was scrunched onto the tiny piece of cardboard, and she suspected he fared better in his own thoughts.
"You're making a joke out of this?" Because to Jack McCoy, he was a joke.
"It's possible." It's also possible, she wants to scream, that it was a rhetorical question and I was just being sarcastic and would you please leave before I do something I might regret? She feels like she's losing control.
"You could have talked to me first."
This, she wants to put her finger on it or take a red magic marker and draw a huge circle around it, this is what angers her. This condescension of his, it never fails to send her into a rage.
"This is my life, Jack!" The rage, the anger, in her voice, it's scary. "I don't need to ask your permission for anything!"
It's hard finding decent housing in New York City, and there's a reason they always end up in his apartment. Soon they'll be yelling and soon her neighbors won't have to press their ears against the walls to hear.
He squares his jaws and she can see the disappointment in his eyes. "Fine," he shrugs, and he starts for the closed door.
This is what she wants, albeit a little messy along the edges; she needed to break the last thing tying her to this job and now he's walking out of her apartment. Given the state they're in, he might never call or speak to her again, and she hates to think how comforting that thought is. So why is she pressed flush against the door, preventing his exit?
"Wait," she whispers but she doesn't know what either of them are waiting for.
He leans in and presses his lips softly on her forehead, in the general vicinity of her scar because she'd like to believe he's afraid this gentle action might cause her pain. He's frozen for a moment, and her hands move to his chest. Her fingers grasping, she's trying to push him away, but something takes over her and she's grabbing bunches of his shirt and pulling him close. Her own desperation is frightening. She wants, she needs, more of him.
His hands cupping her face, he tastes like the scotch and bourbon he's been consuming since yesterday afternoon. Then one hand is in her hair, somehow pinning her to the door, and the other is traveling down her torso and rest of her thigh, waiting. She knows she's got hands that could push him away, but they're occupied with the task of unbuttoning his crisp white dress shirt and pulling it from his jeans.
More, nothing, she wants everything, all at the same time. This is not what she wanted, not what she planned, but it feels good because it's familiar, however unhealthy and unproductive.
On occasion he's on the local news, but lately he's been given a national profile. She suspects if the trial draws itself out he might land himself as a punch line in a bad Leno joke. He seems suspicious when he enters the coffee shop, his eyes darting to the parked cars outside.
"Newman's lawyers," he supplies, and he forgets she really doesn't follow, "I wouldn't put it past them to follow me around with a camera." In other lifetime she might have been offended that he'd boil them down into a tabloid scandal, but she knows he's right. She makes a mental note to keep everything short and to-the-point. "You, uh, you look...good."
In a year, he's aged more than five, but she seems to be shedding them. She's been growing out her hair, letting it retain some of the wavy character she used to spend too much time getting rid of. The new person she is becoming is not unfamiliar, because she had been repressed for so many years.
"Congratulations, by the way." She's embarrassed, because Steven has no idea she's doing this today. Maybe tonight, she'll tell him, and then they'll never speak of it again. Maybe. Instead, she thinks this will stay buried within her for a long time.
There was a reason I called you, she needs to tell him. "I have to apologize, for." He's about to ask why but she can't let him speak. This is her time. "The Hellman Commission, I wasn't, no, I didn't return your phone call and I'm sorry."
This was not what he was expecting, and this is something it seems he wants to forget. "It's okay. We got him off."
"That's not the point." She wishes Lennie were here, because she's never apologized to him either. "I could have gotten up there, I could have explained to them that what he did that night, hell, what we *all* did that night, was a reaction to..." She's floundering for words, despite all the rehersals in front of the bathroom mirror that morning. "If it wasn't for that accident, Lennie falling off the wagon wouldn't have been front page headlines. I could have gotten him off quicker, faster, easier. What they said--"
"Was immaterial to the actual charge and meant only to inflame him. You know that. Besides, you had to have known they would have ripped you apart." He raises his hands. "Hey, no hard feelings."
She takes a minute to process it. "This wasn't Lennie's idea."
"Claire--"
"Your assistant, on the phone, said Lennie had suggested this, but it was you, wasn't it?" He's not answering. "Did you even tell him?"
Silence is his escape, but it speaks volumes that his voice could never do. He exudes a lack of remorse for his actions. She may have changed, but he has remained the same, always.
"You son of a bitch." She leaves.
Steven is many things that Jack is not. He's Italian. He's her age, and he's not a lawyer -- he's a financial planner, and he makes a handsome salary with some brokerage that has branches all over the city. He never drinks, because his father and his grandfather were alcoholics and he doesn't want to tempt fate. He worships her, he respects her, he doesn't talk down to her. He's not her boss. Her mother loves him, and Mac likes carrying on conversations about literature because they both started out Lit majors in college.
She likes these days in September because the leaves are just starting to turn but she doesn't have to dig Emma's sweaters out of the front closet yet. Given how much she's grown since her birthday, she doubts any of them fit. Emma loves the little patch of green near Belvedere Lake, because all her friends from nursery school are there. She loves it because it's refreshing and when she sits in the grass she can almost forget that she's living in this vast metropolis.
Emma hates her stroller so they are walking down Central Park West one step at a time. She suspects she might have to hold the small girl soon, because all the noise from the passing fire engines is giving her quite a stare. One after another; there must be a fire nearby. They stroll down, unaware.
Her cell phone is shrill, but she should have expected it, eventually. Today is the first day off she could manage since the Fourth of July, and despite her adamant claim that today was for Emma, Heaven forbid her colleagues not to bother her. Yet the caller ID says the call is from Margot, which is strange, because Margot's tied up in court all day and she should be in the middle of a motion hearing right now.
"Playing hokey?" she answers cheerfully.
Margot inhales sharply. "No." She's edgy, worried, scared. "God, you don't know."
"Know?" Emma is standing on the park bench, waving to people passing by. She smiles. "Know what?"
In the street, another fire truck comes rushing past them and Emma whimpers a bit.
"I'm standing on the steps and it's." She pauses, and the sound of a crowd fills in for a moment. "Claire, you're outside right? Look south."
With one eye on Emma, she steps as close to the street as she can get and looks south, as directed. Yet all she can see is a puffy white cloud, hovering in the distance. She sees nothing.
"Come on, Margot, stop the drama. What the hell is going on?"
"Is Steven with you?"
There's this sound, like maybe a helicopter in the sky, it's so loud, but when she looks up, her view is obscured by the trees.
"No, he's at work. I took the day to be with Emma. Margot, what's wrong? Did something happen to Steven?"
She breathes and the commotion in the background seems to be growing. "I, I, I don't know. This morning-"
There's an apartment building across the street and one of the tenants sticks her head out the window, interrupting Margot. She's pointing south, which strikes her as a bit strange, and though she's speaking the unthinkable, the words don't quite process in her mind yet. She is wholly unaware.
"Sorry, Margot, I couldn't hear you. There's this deranged woman in the building across the street yelling something about the World Trade-"
There's this deafening sound in her ear, of an entire crowd screaming. Later, she finds out it was really the second hit she was hearing, and everyone's reaction, but at the moment, she's confused. Next to her, Emma is humming the Itsy Bitsy Spider, trying (unsuccessfully) to turn her fingertips into a spider.
"God, Claire, you've got to talk to Steven, you've got to-- oh my God, there was a-- it just-- oh, god."
And then suddenly it all clicked in her head: the noise above them, the dozens of fire trucks rushing south down the Manhattan island, the woman across the street. It became painfully obvious how all the pedestrians were slowing to a standstill, the way the world seemed to be slowing to a stop.
"You've got to get out of there," she demanded. City Hall wasn't too far from the Financial District, a mere stone's throw away really, and if they were on the steps. "Just, get out."
There was static on somebody's end, and Margot was beginning to break up. "Steven...work...towers...he?"
"No," because through the static she caught the gist of her friend's frantic question. Because, oh, God, her mind is going in thousands of directions. She looks at Emma, who's unable to see the desperation in her mother's voice and smiles broadly.
She hangs up because it's pointless shouting over the static and the phone lines are probably crowded with loved ones at this moment. She scoops Emma into her arms, though the girl protests that she is too old to be carried, and dashes across the street to the apartment. Inside there is terror on the television and all she can think to do is sit in silence and watch. When it starts to crumble she holds Emma tightly and covers her eyes, unwilling to let this small child see such horror.
She imagines him standing at the base of his office, staring up into the sky and watching his life change. A pang of guilt sweeps through her when she realizes the face on her grieving individual is not Steven.
The stoics say that there is a plan to life; one that is rational, unchangeable, and ultimately good. Everything happens for a reason because it's all part of the plan. Sometimes, it's monumental, like deciding to apply to law school; sometimes, it's as miniscule as tilting your head back and coming away from an accident with only a small scar on your forehead.
She took a philosophy class her freshman year, and those words clung to her agnostic soul because it disguised faith in intellectual thought, and that's how she liked it. No, she said, she was not a Catholic or a Protestant or Jew; she was a stoic. They'd either be impressed or confused.
A nurse pulls back the curtain and whispers to the doctor that there's someone in the lobby, possibly intoxicated, bothering the attendant at the front desk and asking for someone in charge. She can't remember how she got here, she's scared they're going to ask her a question about how she got here and she's not going to know the answer. She hates not knowing the answer.
Lennie is next to her and when they are alone, his voice is barely there. He's been crying, she thinks.
"I'm sorry."
"Murder 2."
This woman sitting across from her, she's trying to pull off the 'California blonde stuck in an urban summer' look, but the pastel shell of a sweater set and strand of pearls doesn't do much to cover up her Connecticut heritage.
She brushes an errant strand of long hair out of her face, countering, "Man. 2, and she serves the minimum."
"Oh, come on," and it's the first sign of real passion since this plea negotiation started, "the woman brought a loaded Colt .45 to her regular check-up, and you think she didn't intend to use it?"
It feels nice to be arguing again. "First of all, she had a license for that weapon. Second, you've already conceded that two other patients claimed Dr. Keyworth assaulted them, and that my client was aware of these allegations."
"So she gets a new gynecologist," Serena shrugs, "she didn't have to shoot him."
She knows this has been sticking in her throat, too, so she tries to change the subject. "Is Branch having a hard time seeing eye to eye with this case?" She doesn't speak names, because both women are painfully aware.
The non-sequitur of sorts seems to lighten Serena's mood, and she takes a friendly sip of her iced chai. "I swear, if I have to sit through another debate about concealed weapons and the potential social implications, I might just scream." She shakes her head. "It's like being stuck inside an episode of the West Wing."
"You've never had to sit through benefits held in his honor or listen to him pontificate on issues you couldn't disagree more with," she says with a laugh, not having a problem breezing over the memory in her mind.
With a nod of her head, Serena adds breezily, "So I've been told." It takes a moment to connect the dots in her head. "Oh, shit, I forgot. You and-- you used to--" She slaps her forehead. "I promised myself I wasn't going to do this."
"It's okay," because it really is, "we can co-exist in the same room without killing one another." It used to be different, she thinks, the very thought of him used to incite anger in her mind.
Serena is already gathering her things when she stops. "Can I ask you something?" She acquiesces. "Now, granted, most of this comes from second-hand sources, but isn't it true you were pretty burned out when you left?" She nods. "Yet here you are, back in the courtroom. Working pro bono, no less."
"Paying my debt to society?" Jokes won't answer Serena's unspoken question of why. "My husband was in the Financial District a year ago, I'm not sure if Jack ever told you that. He works in Midtown, but he was visiting a client there that morning because the man was elderly and didn't want to take the subway. By some grace of God, he was okay, but...he told me that night, as morbid as it sounded, that if something had happened, he would have died a happy man."
Late that night, when Steven was sleeping safely in their home, she closed herself out on the balcony and called him, just to ensure herself that he was still there.
"I wasn't entirely sure I could have said the same thing about my own life. I was happy, sure, but." She thinks of Emma. "I missed this, you know?"
Serena is nodding, but really, she's unaware of what it feels like to have this aching void shaped like a courtroom in your life that no husband or child could ever possibly fill. Years ago, she wasn't sure she could ever feel it either.
They're walking outside now, but really, she wishes they could have stayed inside the air-conditioned cafe because sweat has replaced her skin. The heat is unrelenting this year. Everything and nothing concerning work is a topic of conversation, and suddenly they're across the street from the courthouse.
Serena extends her hand. "This was a pleasant exercise in futility, Ms. Kincaid," because all parties concerned knew this one was going to trial.
"Please, call me Claire." She never took Steven's name when they married, neither professionally nor privately.
When Serena's cell phone starts to shriek, because really, none of these things ring anymore, she feels apprehensive for a second because at this hour of the day, only one person could be calling. She steps back, allowing a distance, but close enough to hear, "no deal." She's watching the crowds of people moving in and out of the courthouse, up and down the stairs, when she hears her name being called.
Serena's gesturing with the phone. "He wants to know if you'd like to meet for lunch." She must hesitate, or flinch, or do something, because Serena adds quickly, "He hasn't eaten, and neither have I."
Her internal Margot is yelling, kicking, screaming, but there's also this familiar tingling on the back of her neck, her sixth sense. Her intuition; her gears falling into sync with his; her mind racing at the same rate at him, in the same race, for the same prize; her ego.
"I'd love to," she accepts and she thinks this is the start of something new.
It's funny how things can turn out sometimes.
in a new york minute/everything can change -- don henley
THE END.
thank you to:
gypsum, for taking the time to beta.