Home Base

San Marcos

          I silently walked out to the living room and stood there in the kitchen, taking long drinks of caffeine and trying not to shatter in a million pieces on my floor.

          For all the screaming, fighting and not speaking Michael and I had done over the last few days it didn't change what I felt when I met him. I always felt that he understood me on some base level, the way that only people with the same sacrifices can ever understand what it means to live like that. I always believed in his wounded charisma, his vulnerable sympathy, in the way that he swapped parts of the self with the person he was in touch with, giving up a piece of his life while getting into their very soul. At least, he'd gotten into mine. I could recall his words of encouragement, the feeling that the pressure of a lifetime lived twice but passed once was off my shoulders.

          Why would it all end like this? I wanted to demand an answer, but I knew there wouldn't be one. Maybe it wasn't over; maybe we would reconcile at some point beyond the end of the vision. But I knew certain truths about our relationship. Though we felt for each other, we'd both been hurt. We both had our own complex problems to solve and demons to exorcise, not to mention the other person's battles and conflicts. My solution to this was to lose myself in someone else, to find my happiness in their happiness and let go of myself. His solution was to make sure nobody else had to feel what he felt. Constantly those approaches conflicted. That's why we'd fought days ago, and I assumed why he would leave me now.

          He had to know that the choice was drastic. He had left me be in the wake of London and I had resented him for it a lot. We'd barely spoken on the day that he arrived and only defrosted when we were looking death in the face and we both acted like adults and admitted we'd made mistakes. But initially his presence had been like a stake to me, like a poison, like a punishment. Like he felt he could just walk in and out of my life because I was somehow junior to him in something other than age. That wasn't so, but he had to know that repeating the same action would lead to the same cycle of pain and suffering and miscues and mistrust.

          I put my head on my forearms and quietly let myself cry the tears.

Into you so far the words go
So much clearer then you hear
Into you goes everything I know
No one else knows how I feel

          I could call him, but what would be the point? Maybe I would, later, but it would just be admitting that it was all wrong, and then we would have to talk about it and it would be painful to discuss. Heart-wrenchingly, earth-shatteringly hard. So this is what it was like to lose yourself to someone and be hurt for it. This was what it was like to die for love. The silence spoke the words I'd never quite be able to form as I felt the wounds opening already.

          The temperature around me had dropped at least a dozen degrees, probably due to some odd combination of the weather, the cold soda I was knocking back, and the fact that I had gone numb somewhere inside. Michael had always taught me it was okay to feel something in our line of work, that stoicism was just a defense mechanism. All I felt was emptiness. He had gotten me to commit to this career, he had gotten me involved in CIB and the fight against the Code Fives, singlehandedly altering my destiny. Either he was the catalyst I needed or I was incredibly stupid for going so far in the name of love that now wasn't much of love at all.

          I put the soda back in the fridge and just stood there. If I went back to bed I'd have dreams or memories or something. If I stayed awake, I'd torment myself about mistakes and miscues and shortcomings. I was in a lose-lose situation, except this wasn't a loyalty test: this was life. Loyalty gives back what you put into it. Which said what about the loyalty I'd given Michael, and that he had shown me? I let myself cry and I honestly didn't know when it would stop.


Farther down I'm desperate for you
Where you never have to know
Farther down I'm still without a clue
Till something, something takes my pain away

          Ten minutes or so went by where I wondered what the hell I was doing with my life.

          "You okay?"

          I wiped mist out of my eyes, couldn't form words, and I think Derek figured that out. "You don't look okay," he answered his own question. "Was it another…"

          My nod cut him off, and I swallowed hard, struggling for the sentence. "Yeah, it was."

          "What happened?" His voice was soft and I know he was thinking of the e-mail that he'd gotten with the file from his supposedly dead brother. It changed his life and I bet on nights like this he wishes he'd never opened it. I think we all face those choices and that's why he didn't call me just lost.

          "Michael … the guy I'm in this relationship with … it's over between us. He's leaving me." I sucked in a deep breath and tried not to lose it in front of a CIB candidate, especially one that had decided to risk his life and his friends' lives only on rumors about the pending problems. He deserved better.

          "I'm sorry." He put his hand on my shoulder and I nearly jumped out of habit. "Is there anything I can do?"

          "I don't know. Right this moment I don't feel like I know anything."

          Derek nodded sympathetically. When his brother died he'd been engaged to a girl named Chloe. Chloe had been horribly distraught and was now a member of Derek's team, largely because she too wanted to know what happened to his brother and her fiance. I expected he'd done a lot of grief counseling in his life. "You want to talk about it?" he offered.

          "I don't know how coherent I'm going to be."

          "It doesn't matter."

          Why I believed him, I don't know. I just needed someone to believe.


Only chance can change my fortune
So I'm not sure why I try
As if I could swim the ocean
As if you could start to fly

          "Tell me the story," Derek said when we'd sat down on the couch together and I'd been able to pull enough of my emotions back together to remain generally focused although disturbingly unsettled.

          "It's a long story."

          He shrugged. "So is mine."

          In that, he had a point. Resignedly now, each word feeling painful because it dredged up a memory that hurt like hell, I told him all of it in the shortest version possible: how I had met Michael in London, how he hadn't bothered to contact me at all (although part of it was due to deception), and how he had shown up in my life with his ambiguous situation. How I had taken him back, how I had understood we would be tried but happy, except it hadn't turned out that way; how the fight we had gotten into seemed to tell us both that this was a different kind of thing that maybe we weren't ready for. The whole complex, angst-filled, moment-to-moment existence.

          I searched his face for a reaction. "Those things happen," he said after a moment. "Not because of one person or the other … just because there's too much else in the world pushing down on both of them to make them be able to let go." Sensing my initial reaction, he continued, "That doesn't mean you're doomed for life. It just means maybe you're not ready yet."

          "I just … I can't stand being alone. It terrifies me."

          "You're not that alone, if you think about it."

          "That's what he used to tell me."

          "Because he was right. You're fighting two wars at once and it's like living two lives. But that means you've got a lot of people on your side, right?"

          "It's right … but somehow it doesn't make a difference."

          "It will. In time."


Farther down I'm desperate for you
Where you never have to know
Farther down I'm still without a clue
Till something, something takes my pain away
Something takes my pain away
Something takes my pain away

          I looked over at Derek. "Is this where you tell me time heals all the wounds?"

          "No." He chuckled. "It doesn't."

          "I didn't think so."

          "But you've still got to go on living anyway."

          I nodded, more to myself. Everything he was saying was something I could probably have said to myself in a few days, a week, a few weeks, given time and sanity. But I had neither and I needed to hear it from someone else. I needed to be validated again, to know that my relationship with Michael wasn't the only reason I ended up here and the only reason I was still standing. Derek and I looked at each other a long moment, then he suggested I head back to bed. And I listened to him. For once I needed not to be the leader. Maybe tomorrow would be different, but not tonight.


Farther down I'm desperate for you
Where you never have to know
Farther down I'm still without a clue
Till something, something takes my pain away

          I went back to looking at the ceiling.

          Tomorrow the Fisher homicide would close, and Detective Smith and Sergeant Friday would no longer need to fear for my life or worry about me. Alberta Green or at least her lieutenant would be brought to justice for a murder committed for basically no reason at all.

          Tomorrow Derek's team – Jason, Lan and Chloe – would arrive to back him up in case of a Code Five invasion. I would probably recruit some old friends into the mix, and there would be training and preparedness and anal-retentive behavior.

          Tomorrow I would be able to look at my work with a clear conscience and know I could go back to doing what I was meant to do, which was my job and a healthy dose of idealism.

          That was tomorrow, but this … this was tonight.