*******
Fall
september
She jerks rigid and one leg kicks out straight, tossing away the thin dust-smelling comforter in the process. She blinks, eyes coming to focus on the white ceiling, slowing her breath, chest rising and falling quickly. A bead of sweat traces down her forehead and catches on her eyebrow; she draws one hand up and through her damp hair, mixing the perspiration with the strangely textured strands, thick and rough with dye.
She closes her eyes, then snaps them back open, not wanting to slide back into whatever reality she just awoke from. She goes down the mental list, her private version of twenty questions. She plays it most nights; perhaps more nights than she can remember.
Where am I?
Moscow. No, that was last week. Ankara. Yes, that's it.
When did I arrive?
Late last night; just over 24 hours.
Where am I staying?
Cheap hotel. (ha.) Edge of the city, empty enough to be alone and crowded enough to hide.
Security measures?
Gun between mattress and headboard. Key beneath pillow. Trip wire just inside the door.
The questions go on, and her breathing relaxes. The perspiration dries on her chest and behind her knees. She has grounded herself in this reality, the only one she's willing to accept. After long minutes, her eyes slide closed, and the voices begin again.
Her mother, desperate, pleading, as she's never heard her before. (Never heard her in real life?) Sloane, his voice calm and his conversation intelligent, but his words…insane. The suspicion begins in her stomach and grows, the fear. He is crazy.
She can feel his breath as he bends down, close to her. She can feel his hands -- she squirms and fights, and his hands have not gone away. Then she feels it, the stab, the pain, the white-hot flash that burns her torso from the inside, the same pain she feels so often.
The world goes quiet, and she thinks that this, here, is the end. She squints her eyes and grits her teeth and prepares for the long slide into blackness.
Then she hears her mother's voice again, cool, calm, resolved. She feels hands, but different hands. Cool, soothing. A prick in her arm. The pain stops -- not ended, but attenuated, its progress slowing just as she was about to escape. Words -- words she concentrates on, strains to hear, words she cannot remember, in her mother's voice.
Why can't I hear them? She struggles, straining, and pulls her body up, closer, straining to hear. The pain starts, radiating from her inside in a blinding flash, pain enough to kill.
She falls back onto the flimsy mattress, and she jerks awake.
******
october
Dixon
He keeps a picture on his desk from that last night. He is smiling (does he remember that sensation?) with his arms wrapped around Diane; she is not looking at the camera but up at him, smiling back. That look used to haunt him, that glint in dark eyes, but now something else haunts him too. In one side of the picture there's a shoulder, just a part of an arm, one person standing just to the left of camera range. He knows if he could see the rest of that shot, what it would look like: Sydney standing beside them, smile stretching bright and wide across her face, dimples denting her cheeks. Agent Vaughn would be beside her, in a pose mimicking theirs: his arms around her, his cheek resting on her hair, smiling at the camera.
Back when they still had a future.
He picks the frame up off his desk, still holding it in his hands, his eyes sliding shut with his tired sigh. It does not matter -- his hands run over the rough silver filigree of the frame (a father's day gift from his daughter) and he can read it like braille. The picture always remains on his desk, in arms reach, where he keeps his ghosts.
His other hand closes around the top drawer of his desk, where he keeps his prescription. His doctor gave him (now legal) xanax, one every four hours, to dull…something. At this point, it doesn't matter any more. But he only gets one every four hours. His fingers slip off the cool steel handle, one by one, and he turns back to the desk. The figures on the computer have not changed; they still form some sort of mismatched jigsaw puzzle. A political coup in Zimbabwe. An assassination at a secret summit in Turkey. Accounts and vaults raided from the VSR. All without apparent leaks, all without any hint how or where security was breached. All tied to Sloane.
He sets the picture frame back on his desk, and begins reading the reports again, hoping for a leak or a breach or a common denominator, anything to tell him how this was accomplished; anything to give him hope that it will end.
His head begins pounding and the familiar tight sensation clutches at his heart. He sits back, sighs, and begins the long, slow process of counting to four.
******
november
She sits over what should be a Thanksgiving feast, pushing microwaved bits of turkey around in a cheap black plastic plate with a matching cheap black plastic fork. She eats only a little and dumps the rest in the trash, unable to bring herself to swallow the sticky bits of what claims to be cinnamon apple. She knows the sweet syrup would only adhere to the lump in her throat.
Later, she satisfies herself with a hot shower (the first truly warm one since she returned from Moscow) accompanied by a cheap set of peach-scented bath products she found on clearance at the drugstore. She wraps the small (white, this time) motel towel around herself and sits on the flimsy mattress, scraping a rough razor across her legs. One hand reaches for the tiny tin of peach-scented powder to clog the countless knicks. She dusts herself lavishly, messily, not caring about the tiny blood streaks on the powerderpuff or the DNA she's leaving behind. Eighteen months of too careful, too careful, will teach you some things aren't worth being careful about.
Her stomach growls as she crawls into bed, but she ignores it, focusing instead on the peach-scented lotion still moist on her skin. When that fails, she focuses on her plan, her mission, anything to push back the memories that hover at the edges of her dreams. She knows she can do it; she can destroy, but not like he did -- not with bruising flesh and crunching bones and dripping blood. She can destroy with guns and explosives and fire (the weapons she knows so well) she can strip everything away and leave him with only that empty hollow where the dream lived, a sound like footfalls in an empty room; like the shutting of her mother's door after she was gone. This will be her legacy; this will be what she leaves him with. Then he, like, her will know what it means to be empty.