Author: Angela Evans
Email: Angel33296@aol.com
Feedback: Always welcome
Rating: PG-13 (language, violence)
Distribution: FF.net, Cover Me. All others please ask.
Spoilers: Double Agent - S2.14
Summary: There's a wise man in every fool. Will, a gas station bathroom, and some retrospection. Cover Me March Challenge entry.
Disclaimer: I don't own them.
Classification: AU, Futurefic, 2nd person, slight W/F
There's a wise man in every fool.
You think you're going to be sick. And you are. You're sick all over the passenger seat. You don't even care that the hand you use to wipe your mouth is caked with dirt. Dirt and blood. You don't even remember where the blood came from. Oh, certainly, some of it is yours. You are reminded of this as you arm bangs painfully into the gearshift as you slump against the steering wheel. You examine the wound, the nasty slash the bullet made as it grazed your arm.
You've been shot before. This isn't anything new. It shouldn't be anything new. You hiss as a probing finger hits a tender spot. You've probably just given yourself some sort of flesh-eating disease, getting that germy grime into the wound like that. But you start to think that maybe being eaten alive wouldn't be such a bad thing. You're already dead anyway, where it really counts.
You've killed. That line you swore you'd never cross. The one you never imagined you'd cross. You remember that day, the day you told your philosophy professor he was an asshole because he'd insisted you would, you could kill if it came down to it.
"Would you ever kill someone?" his eyes bore into yours, paralyzing your poor freshman self.
"Wh-what?" you stammer.
"Could you kill if you had to?" there's a weighty pause.
"No." You're pretty sure this is the answer he wants. It is the only one you have.
"No?" His mirth at your naiveté angers you. "You are telling me that you know, beyond any doubt, that you will never take another human life?"
"I will never kill." You stare back at him, daring him to contradict you.
"Then, you," he says, "are a fool."
"I'd rather be a fool than an asshole," you retort.
"I would hope you'd rather be a wise man," he answers before moving on to the next victim.
"Asshole," you mutter, cursing him again in the present. Gingerly you shift yourself in the driver's seat, careful of your aching, bruised and battered body. You should contact someone, let them now you're okay, but all you want to do is drive as far away from here as you can. But that would be like leaving the scene of the accident. Another mark against you. You wonder who's keeping score, but you know there's a few marks next to your name under the 'bad' column.
But it is painfully clear you can't stay here. Someone will come and find you here, and it won't be anyone you want to see. So you start the car with it's broken back window and bullet holes in the fenders and pull the wheel in a tight circle. Bad shocks and a dirt road are beating out a cruel rhythm on your bones. It's an eternity until you reach CA 62, the main road outside Joshua Tree National Park. Once you get on that road, you start to feel better. A dinging begs for your attention and you realize it means you're running out of gas. In what seems to be your second lucky break of the day (the first was not getting killed, but you're wondering if that really was lucky, or if it was a curse) there is a rest stop not too far from your current location. The turn off comes up and you put on your blinker to signal for the turn.
This rest stop you're at consists of a shabby gas station and an even shabbier Qwik Mart. You pull up to a gas pump and get out of the car, stretching your weary legs. As you're placing the nozzle into the car's tank, you arrive at the realization that you were once again lucky that a bullet didn't hit the gas tank and blow the car - and perhaps you in it - sky high. The spattering of gas on the pavement jolts you out of your reverie. Your tank is full and the display on the pump is showing $25.47 and flashing Please pay cashier inside at you. Fishing your wallet out of your back pocket, you peer inside and discover only a twenty-dollar bill. You hope they take credit cards.
You get suspicious stares from the cashier and the kid washing the floor the minute you walk in the door, setting off the chimes that sound off-key to your ear. You can't be sure that they really are, since every sound is still overshadowed by the gunfire in your head. You grab a first aid kit and a package of tissues and a bottle of water and bring them to the counter to purchase along with the gas. The cashier takes your card without comment and you sign the little receipt, thankful that it was your other arm that was wounded.
"Where's your bathroom?" you ask, and your voice sounds raspy and weak and all together wrong. These are the first words you've said since … since this all began.
"Around the corner," the cashier replies, handing you a key on a large bucket cover with the words BATHROOM KEY scrawled on it in sloppy handwriting. You take the key and your purchases and head for the bathroom, aware of the curious stares following your retreating back.
The bathroom is like all other gas station bathrooms. You find an odd comfort in its dirt and grunge. Before you would have been disgusted, now you feel at home. You deposit your purchases on the little shelf over the sink. The faucet squeaks as you turn the water on, but soon the sink's basin fills with the life giving liquid. Both hands dive into the cool water and you bend down to splash some onto your face. Your split lip and abrasions on your cheek provide you with interesting sensations when the water hits them. There's some liquid soap in a dispenser and you lather up with that, trying to clean away the stubborn grime.
When you reach the point where further scrubbing will not have any real effect, you turn your attention to your wounded arm. The first step, you decide, upon assessing the situation, is to remove your shirt. You do so carefully, too aware of all your pulled muscles and bruised bones. When you peel it away from the gash, it hurts like the mother of all band-aids and, of course, this causes it to start bleeding again. Using half the pack of tissues, you clean the area around it, wiping the blood away. From the first aid kit you take some antiseptic wipes and clean the wound, ignoring the stinging. The rest of the tissues, combined with some band-aids from the kit, fashion a makeshift bandage.
That task completed, you dunk your shirt in the sink, not caring that the water you're washing it in is dirty. Once it's wrung out to the best of your ability, you put it back on, your damp shirt cold against your skin. You run a hand through your hair - it will have to do, you don't have a comb - and then decide you are ready to face yourself in the mirror.
You don't recognize the man looking back at you.
He's older than you are, more tired, and his eyes are sad. But he has stolen your features, your face, your appearance. Or rather, you have taken his, for he is who you are now. This is who you have become. A murderer.
You think back to how it all started. The picnic had been her idea. She decided on Joshua Tree National Park as the spot, even though it was a 163 mile drive from LA. Now you know why she wanted you in an isolated spot that was a good two and a half hours from LA and help.
You and she were sitting under some Joshua trees, eating and talking. She wanted to know how you liked her bizcocho dominicano. It was a new recipe and she hoped that it came out right. You assured her it did, and her smile made you feel like you were walking on clouds as fluffy as the meringue frosting. You asked what inspired her to try making the Dominican cake and she replied that her cousin had just been in Cayo Cancho and written her about all the amazing food.
You don't know how, but it all flew together in your brain. Names of places you'd never been were making associations in your brain and you didn't like where they were going. Cayo Cancho. Serena del Sol. Agent Lennox. Project Helix. You didn't like this one bit.
"Fran," you begin, but you don't know what to ask that will prove to you that you're just getting paranoid now that you're with the Agency.
She turns her face to yours and there's a flash of something that isn't Francie. And then you know. She knows it too, because you find yourself in a very uncomfortable position, one arm pinned under your body while she straddles your legs. She reaches for the gun she had hidden in the picnic basket with one hand while the other pins your free arm with surprising strength.
"I had orders to bring you in," she's saying. "But they didn't say you had to be alive."
You have never hit a girl, not since Margie Patterson in the second grade (but she didn't really count as a girl, anyway) yet you know you will have to in order to survive. You remind yourself that this…this is not your Fran, this is something else, something evil and you strike.
Your punch catches her in the chin and she rocks backwards, off of you. You grapple with her in the dusty ground and for a moment you gain the upper hand. It comes at a price of a split lip and a fair amount of bruises, but you take it. You smash her head against a handy tree trunk. She goes out and you run like hell for the car.
You get there, but realize she drove and you don't have keys. This is bad. You rummage around and find the spare set in the little compartment in the seat divider. It never made sense to you, keeping the spare set inside the car, but right now you're blessing the real Francie's idiosyncrasies and your lucky stars.
The key goes to the ignition and that's when the first bullet hits the car, shattering the back window. You panic, your need to escape heightened by the fact that Evil Fran is awake. She continues shooting at you. You fumble and drop the keys. It takes a minute to realize that it's because a bullet has grazed your arm. The sound of the shots gets closer and you hurriedly feel around the floor of the front seat for the keys. You can't find them and she's almost to the car. You dive out the passenger side and duck behind the car.
Think, you instruct your addled brain. While you're trying to plan, you realize she's stopped shooting. She's reloading, you realize. You decide to be brave (or stupid, depending upon how it turns out) and come out of hiding. Her gun only half loaded, she curses and charges at you. Once again you're struggling in the dirt, fighting for control of the gun. You manage to wrest it from her grip, but she hits your wrist and the gun skitters away. You reach for it, until pain explodes again in your arm. She's pressing on your wound, her fingers constricting tightly. You wrench your arm free, despite the explicit pain this causes. You keep reaching with your other arm until your fingers make contact with metal. The gun is yours. You bring it around and fire. Right into her chest.
You've taken a life. Your first kill. And as you look into the grimy gas station bathroom mirror you don't feel like a wise man. Instead, you, Will Tippin, feel like you always have. A fool.
A/n: This started out as something completely different. I was going to work on "Perfect Place" (which I hope to update soon) or another of my many projects, but I was listening to "Feels Like Fire" by Santana feat. Dido and the line 'There's a wise man in every fool' got me thinking about Will and Fran (or Fauxlio, if you go to Television Without Pity). And when I found the challenge, it was all over. I stayed up till I finished it.
Joshua Tree National Park is a real place in California, near the Nevada border. I've never been, but it looks pretty, and it would be a good place to have a picnic… ()
Bizcocho dominicano is a traditional cake in the Dominican Republic. There's a recipe at
Thanks to DOKChairman for entertaining me while I struggled with this beast and providing me with the word for 'that handle thingie on the steering wheel you use to shift gears with'. He has been immensely helpful for more than just this fic, little does he know, so I'm going to put in a shameless plug for him and tell you all to go read his fics, they're awesome.