Empty Shells
Author: Pharo
Disclaimer: 'Alias' belongs to ABC, Bad Robot, and JJ Abrams.
Summary: "I keep thinking that I never really knew you."
Spoilers: "Rendezvous."
Feedback: pharo@newyork.com
'I just don't understand how you can smile with all those tears in your eyes when you tell me everything is wonderful now…' – Everclear, 'Wonderful'
A flood of moments, black and white pictures like snapshots in time, and now he tries to hold onto the recollections. He tries to pick one up - as if it's a tangible thing - and memorize every little detail until it's imprinted into his mind - anything to assure him that that his memories are real.
He shuts his eyes and tries to block out the sensation that he's staring into the sun. The raw, overhead lights at the bus station threaten to elicit hot, stinging tears that burn into his flesh as they escape his eyes. His breath makes small white clouds against the cold air as he stamps his feet on the wet floor. He buries his face against the upturned collars of his coat that do nothing to shield him from the gusts of wind blowing in.
He doesn't want it to end this way. He doesn't want it to end at all, but he doesn't know who she is. All these years and now everything has changed. It feels as if, all this time, they've been working on someone else's lines – the same dialogue repeating over and over again, a little more unfeeling each time, and said for the simple sake of saying something. They said stupid things that they knew they'd regret later, but at the time, seemed to make the most sense to shout out.
They had always been complex people. He expected that a day would come when she'd say something that an apology and a smile wouldn't be able to fix. She dropped such a huge weight on him and he realized that brutal honesty hurt. She tried to teach him not to care so much about the truth. They stopped relying on the truth years ago. She had told him that the truth had no place in their world and he believed her. In the beginning, he tried to determine if any word she said to him was the truth. He had mastered the art of lying, but it took him awhile to get to the point – and he's sure that his eyes showed this – where he didn't care if she lied. She had succeeded in getting him to believe that they didn't need complete truth to survive in their world.
All the markers of truth have now vanished, to the point where he doesn't even know what baseline he's supposed to use to figure out who he is anymore. He does the only logical thing that he can think of: he runs.
————
The bus breaks lurches to a stop at the bus station on the New Mexico-Texas border. Streaks of sunshine filter in through the dirty bus windows when they jerk to a stop at the station on the New Mexico-Texas border. The driver, a middle-aged obese man with permanently greasy hands, announces that the passengers have to wait inside while they switch to a bus that won't break down in another twenty miles.
He finds a row of phone booths fast being occupied in one corner of the large building. He waits until the booth next to his is free before he punches in the familiar numbers.
He's ready to hang up after the fourth ring when he hears a click on the other line.
"Hello?" her voice asks in between heavy breaths.
He's afraid to breathe.
"Hello?" she asks, her voice more annoyed now. "Is anyone there? Listen, I don't have time for—"
He can picture the wheels in her head turning and her eyes going wide at the revelation. He knows that he should hang up, but he just leans against the glass of the booth and waits for her to say something.
"Will?" she asks and he can hear her voice catch in her throat.
He wants to say something, but his mouth feels so dry that all he can do is nod – as if she can actually see him.
"Come home, Will," she pleads, her voice so small that his ears have to strain to pick up the sound. "Please, just come back home."
It hurts him too much to hear her sound like that – to know that he's done this to her. He can feel his heart breaking with every plea and the mental insistence that she can handle it, that she's handled far worse things in her life, seems like such a lie in that moment. He quickly puts the phone back on the ringer and allows himself to let out the air that he's been holding in. He reminds himself that she'd forced him to take this path, that they would've slowly died inside – the lies and the paranoia and the questions would have eaten away at him if he didn't walk away when he did.
He walks out of the booth and back to a new bus that's just as dirty as the last. They wait a couple of minutes before the bus jerks to a start and there is no sign he was ever at the station.
————
He wanders into a little gift shop when the bus stops for the night. He fishes out enough change for a postcard and stamp, and evokes enough sympathy from the cashier to lend him a pen.
Happy Birthday.
He sends it out and remembers her last birthday party.
The ice cream cake had melted by the time she arrived and the sadness in her eyes forced him to ask her once again why she couldn't leave the bank, take control of her life. She looked so afraid and for a moment, he got the feeling that they weren't talking about the same thing. But as soon as the fear came over his eyes, it disappeared and she was happy, normal, and joking around again.
He hadn't realized then that she was breaking. Every time she lied to him with weary eyes, she broke a little more – gave a little more of herself to them. When she told him the truth, it seemed as if she was free. He had thought that maybe he could do that for her – bring her some sort of peace, give her someone to talk to – but by the time he had gotten to her, there was too much of her gone. Every time he had to lie for her, she took something away from him until there was nothing left for him to give. He had to leave before he became a hollow shell of the man he used to be.
————
He realized halfway across Texas that he couldn't run forever, but he wasn't willing to give up at that time. Now in Minnesota, he admits to himself that there are not enough states for him to remove the life in LA from his mind. He's running scared on the same path that he's trying to run away from.
A couple of weeks ago, he had written an article on human weakness and e-mailed it to Abby. He let her know that he was alive and that everything was ok – even if it wasn't. He had asked her to pay his electric and phone bills and make sure they didn't post an eviction notice on his apartment door. He wanted possibilities, a field of doors to choose from. He liked to have the option of going back to his old life. He thought that it would keep him sane when he had nowhere left to turn.
Now, he spends the last of his dollar bills buying a one-way plane ticket back home.
————
He runs into her while grocery shopping. Their carts collide at the ice cream aisle. He is about to mutter an apology when he looks up and finds her staring back at him.
"Will?" she asks, blinking a couple of times.
The image in front of him doesn't resemble the one he remembers – her eyes are bloodshot and her hand shakes as she pushes back a strand of hair that has fallen across her face.
"Hi," he says sheepishly, feeling like he's twelve again. "You—"
"When did you get back?" she asks as if he's come back from a fishing trip.
"A little while ago," he replies noncommittally.
She nods. She looks down at her knuckles and he notices they are stark white from her grip on the cart handle.
"Where are you staying?"
"My place."
"Oh," she says softly. "I, uh, didn't realize that you still had the apartment."
"Abby was keeping an eye on things while…"
Her head snaps up and she looks into his eyes. He can tell that she's hurt that someone knew what was happening with him, that he'd taken cautious measures to keep her in the dark. He knows that she's waiting for him to say something about where he's been or why he left.
"Well, you know," he finishes lamely.
"What made you decide to come back?" she asks.
"I ran out of clean underwear," he says with a forced laugh. It sounds awful even to his own ears.
"Why – why didn't you tell me that you were back?"
"I wasn't ready."
She scoffs at this.
"You weren't ready? Damn it Will, what about what I went through?" she asks angrily.
"Do we have to do this here?" he asks, looking around.
"I've got nothing to lose," she says.
He knows it won't matter if they have the conversation in the bread aisle. There is no one at the store at this hour and the sole cashier at the counter could care less about their problems. Still, he needs an excuse to walk away from her – from the conversation.
"Look—"
"Will, do you know what I went through? Do you know what it was like to stay up every night wondering if they'd gotten you or if you – God, I didn't know if you were even alive."
"I called," he says softly.
Her eyes flash with anger.
"Yeah, you called," she says, shaking her head. "Was that supposed to make things better, Will? You didn't even – I stayed up nights, waiting for you to call again, thinking that maybe I was crazy and that I'd made up the whole thing, that it was some cruel prank, that…"
"I needed space."
"Space?" she asks incredulously, her voice rising a little. "How much space did you need?"
He finally lifts his eyes to meet hers.
"I can't…I can't do this right now," he says.
He gathers the items from his cart in his arms – he needs to walk away now, can't take the time to disentangle the wheels of his metal cart from hers, can't stand the intensity of her stare any longer.
"You're running again," she calls out, her voice void of emotion now.
"I have no problem with that," he says.
He manages to make it to his car and half way down the block before the tears start to blur his vision.
————
He walks slowly to the track now. He was greeted with an unexpected blinking light on his answering machine on Friday afternoon. He was almost afraid to find out who left the message – he felt this way ever since he found out what really happened to Danny. His hand trembled and his finger shook, but he managed to steady it long enough to push the button and listen to the message.
It feels as if it's been forever since he's been at the track. He recalls the afternoons when she'd meet him and they'd run until one of them – usually him – was on the verge of collapsing. She runs just as fiercely now, only stopping when she sees him at the bench.
"I never used to understand why you would run so hard," he says as she takes the spot next to him.
"I had a lot to run from."
He nods. He hadn't known back in those days that every time the soles of her sneakers pounded against the field, she was trying to run farther away from her world of lies and deceit.
"I keep thinking that I never really knew you," he says, looking at the bleachers on the other side of the track.
"How can you say that?" she asks.
"It's the truth."
The word feels so strange in his mouth.
"So ask me. What do you want to know?"
"It's not that simple."
"My favorite color is blue, favorite song—"
"It's not that easy," he insists again.
"So make it that easy," she says.
"I can't," he replies. "The things that I thought I knew, they were lies. An entire side of you that I just didn't know existed. Parts that you made up—"
"I was a student at UCLA. I wanted to become a teacher. I—"
"You know that's not it," he says, shaking his head.
"I lied to you and I'm sorry, but it was what I had to do. I drove you away. Is that what you want to hear?"
"I don't want to hear anything."
"Every time I lied to you, every time I had to look into your eyes and – it cut me up inside. I thought I was saving the world."
"By lying to your friends?" he says, getting up.
"I messed up, ok?"
He runs his hands through his hair.
"It's not ok."
"I don't know how to make it ok then. God Will, what do you want me to do?"
He sighs. She watches him while he paces.
"I don't think there's anything you can do," he says.
"How do we get passed this?"
"We don't," he says before adding, "We can't. Our lives – they don't mesh. We're from two different worlds, Syd."
"No. I refuse to believe that."
"It's true. I can't live with the lies. I can't be happy while constantly looking over my shoulder, wondering if the next person I see going to kill me because I know something I'm not supposed to. I can't live in your world. Hell, I don't even know how you live in your world."
She looks down at the water bottle in her hand.
"I had you, Will."
"But I can't function that way. I thought I could – and I tried so hard – but I can't. Truth is a compass and I don't know which way to go without it."
"But you can go without me?"
People try to convince themselves of the little things sometimes. Things that they know aren't true, but they want to believe are just so it'll hurt a little less. They are stupid things that no amount of repetition could make them truly believe, but they chant it in their minds anyway – some futile way of thinking that it was their decision and that they wanted it to be this way all along. He tells himself now that he can live without Sydney Bristow.
"I have to try."
"This can't be the end," she insists.
"It has to be."
He forces himself to walk away from her without looking back this time.