Author: Kristin
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: They're not mine, Hank owns them, and I bow before him!
A/N: Maple Street, I love you guys, you're the absolute best!!! To my mom, for living.
Summary: At night, they hear the city weep.
*
"Sometimes I forget why I even do this."
"We found him, Jack."
"Yeah, six years later."
It's a bitter laugh that escapes his throat as he fakes a smile around the shot glass. He hasn't come here in years, even when Marie was nothing but a person who happened to live in the same house with him; even when he started walking that dangerous line between lust and love and Samantha Spade ignited those passions he hadn't felt in years.
He doesn't know why he comes back here.
It just seems right.
The bar is empty, save for the occasional clink of pool tables in the back. He starts to think, as he contemplates leaving, that perhaps he'll be walking away with more baggage than he brought.
"Here's to progress," he says as he raises the shot in a half-hearted toast to the world.
"We haven't lost them all."
He wonders if the alcohol conveniently erases the memory of Anwar Samir's lifeless body crashing to the floor; Andy Deaver's broken innocence plastered upon that whiteboard where entire lives are erased in a matter of days; he wonders if she's forgotten Mrs. Miller's entire life shattering at the front door of a house where a little girl once laughed.
His hand goes to the medal of St. Jude.
Lost causes.
"Yeah, we have."
Even when we find them, he thinks, they're all gone.
The medal, cold and hard, runs smoothly between his fingers. It's his trademark now, as he feels its lifeless edge -- it's what he's become -- a person tarnished and worn and faded, much like the medal he still clasps will one day be -- when the medal itself, a symbol to remind those of what's missing, what's still capable of being saved, will become tarnished and worn and faded and no longer mean anything beyond the glint of a shiny piece of metal. Maybe, he thinks, the medal should be worn by those lost and still capable of being found. Maybe it's a lost cause to simply wear a medal representing a Saint who, in all likelihood, is currently looking down on him with disdain.
He tarnishes the medal with his fingers, his soul. It burns him.
He wants to strength to walk away; to walk away from Marie without regrets and pain. He wants to find Samantha and be free.
He wants to be found.
"Jack, do you want me to take you home?"
"I'm not sure of anything anymore, Sam."
"So where does that leave us?"
Her own mind wanders between old cases and Marie Malone, with whom Jack should most likely be with tonight, with whom Jack maybe should've never left. She thinks of how it might've started; maybe Marie would've wondered occasionally where he had been, then shoved it aside as irrational and paranoid, knowing in her heart the only explanation imaginable was the one that had always been there -- he was working late, only working late. Then, maybe months later, the truth would've come and pulled that imaginary rug out from under her. And all those scenarios she would've run through in her mind would've suddenly become the only truth.
So all the history they've built between them has lead them here tonight; not together and not apart, sharing war stories like they once did before it all fell to pieces.
"Here," he finally answers back.
"Always here," he says once more, swallowing the last empty drop as his free hand slides slowly across the smooth wood slightly marred with cigarette ash and old stains from all the weary souls of long past, awaiting those to come.
Here, he thinks, is what he's been trying to escape since this whole thing started.
Since the world ended.
He's walking dead; not fully alive, not completely gone. Just wounded and existing and waking and breathing; going through all those motions you go through to simply survive.
But he's not alive; not fully, not now.
He was once.
When a girl named Sam fell into that blissful release of fantasy and they loved each other before they started.
"The whole damn world's falling apart," his voice says in a low, hushed whisper.
At night, they hear the city weep.
"You're alive, Jack," she replies, not knowing anymore what she could say to mean what it needs to mean.
He looks at her and smiles.
He's walking dead.
*
[ end ]