Title: Unaccountable Effect
Author: labyrinthine
Email: elabyrinthine@yahoo.com
Rating/Classification: PG/Will POV, spoilers up to The Telling
Summary: People don't just disappear.
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me.
A/N: Title from a CD by Liz Story, who is a kick ass pianist and totally brilliant. I've wanted to write a fic with this title for years, and now I have. I rule! (sorry, obligatory American Beauty moment, couldn't help myself). October 2003 CM challengefic. Thanks to Aire for the read-over, Pharo for the reminder and Hil, just because.
I'm willing to break myself
To shake this hell from everything I touch
-Something Corporate
*
Early morning light diffracts through cheap vinyl blinds, casting shadows of prison bars over your still form. You always forget to shut the blinds all the way to keep the light out; your mind is too preoccupied controlling the essential hand-eye coordination necessary to beat the alarm clock into submission during your first moments of semi-lucidity to actually retain the knowledge that the blinds need to be closed. Every night you forget, and every morning you are reminded again, a circadian cycle of everything you can't hold on to. The light is relentless, intruding on what moments before had been a cocoon of silence and darkness. No dreams tonight, at least that you can recall, and for that you are grateful. You turn your head away from the window and face the center of the room, which is still, for the most part, cast in shadow. Closing your eyes in obvious relief, resisting the urge to physically pull the covers over your head, you shut out the insistence of a new day. You will not go to work today, you think to yourself as you drift towards twilight, the thought an ephemeral strand diffusing through the welcome cloudiness of your mind. Consequences are inconsequential in the dark; softened edges and muted punishments. There's no shame in hiding if you can't be found.
You go to work, after all; you have discovered you have very few choices when anything is concerned. The office has called, twice, leaving messages on your answering machine when you didn't bother getting out of bed to pick up yourself, threatening to come over and drag you out of the apartment if need be. This is the only threat that works - your boss knows as well as you do how little you actually care for the job. It wouldn't matter if they fired you, or cut your salary, or any of the scare tactics that keep the rest of the employees in line. What scares you is the possibility of a breech, a lack of containment: your coworkers knocking on your door demanding entry as insistently as light so callously entering your bedroom. You get up in reluctant assent, habitual routine taking over in the absence of any conscious thought, making the bed, brushing your teeth, grabbing the first thing you can reach in the closet to wear.
The machine goes off again, the shrill beep proceeding the default mechanical message. You screen your calls now, and rarely return them. Messages on a machine are safe and predictable; they are endlessly static, and you find you prefer this stability compared to the unpredictable nature of spontaneous human contact. This has not gone unnoticed by those who interact with you. You think you hear, recluse, tossed around like forbidden fruit on the tongues of gossips that fill the break room at lunch. You couldn't care less, if that's what it takes to not be disturbed.
On your way out, your fingers reach towards the wall-mounted keypad next to the front door automatically, enabling the alarm in your absence. You recognize the utter futility of this action - by the time the alarm went off it would be too late and it's not like it would *stop* anyone - but you do it anyway, because that's what normal people do.
You think you used to be normal, once. You don't know what you are now.
*
You have improved, you think. There was a point when you wouldn't get out of bed at all, let alone leave the apartment.
You had spent weeks in the hospital, after the incident. That's what Jack called it, the only time he appeared in front of your bed in recovery. The man could compartmentalize like no one else - how he managed to group the events that caused Syd's disappearance, Francie's death and his stint in the ICU as an "incident" was beyond your powers of deduction. You remember his visit, your perspective skewed from lying prone on a thin mattress, looking upwards past the maze of nutrient IVs and heart monitor electrodes to recognize his profile. From your vantage point, he looked larger than life; but he always looked that way. You realized, then, that you had never seen the man outside of the shadow of a life-threatening situation, and you realized that you probably never would. It was a sobering understanding.
It's hard to recall, now, what he had said to you then - you had been doped up on the good drugs and recall little of your stay in the hospital as a whole. But you remember his eyes, distant and guarded, and his too-stiff posture that alluded to uncomfortable chairs and not enough rest. You remember the clipped tones, the abrupt cadence of sounds with a running undercurrent of restrained fury. He had answered your inane questions, what happened and why and how and you can't be serious, but you think you had never seen someone who was as serious as this man. When he left, you had moved the automatic morphine drip dispenser from the trap of your fist to the sterile-looking table to your right, and let it sit. Your body had ached, your head was throbbing and you had thoughts of complete self- castigation running through your brain. And you embraced it all, succumbing to the inevitable grasp of giving up, the mirrored enticement of acceptance, and the stark realization that you had failed, somehow, and there was absolutely nothing you could do to make it better.
*
You spend your days between when you punch in and punch out over the stark fluorescent lighting that is ubiquitous, permeating into every crevice of the floor. The women who gossip in the cubicles down the row complain, audibly, about the harsh light that casts their skin in a sallow light, that scientific studies have shown that there are harmful rays emitted by fluorescent fixtures and that they are all at risk, soaking them up at work. When asked, they said they read it on Yahoo, or The Smoking Gun, they can't remember, that it is a vast conspiracy perpetrated by the government and one day the truth will come out. You restrain the urge to offer your two cents on government conspiracies.
You prefer the artificial light, truthfully. It shows everything for what it really is, with no ambiguity or room for interpretation. What you see is what you get, a truism you have seldom elsewhere in your life. You wonder, not for the first time, if you can assuage your guilt over Francie's death because you never saw her in anything but shadows: the mood lighting of the restaurant, the soft afternoon light spilling through her living room, the darkness of night. This never works, of course; it only compounds your guilt over not knowing what happened until it was too late.
This is why you don't think, much. It's just so much easier for everyone involved if you stay out of everything.
Hence, the job. You're writing again, or perhaps you never stopped. This time it's for an insurance company; the higher-ups can't write press releases with complete sentences to save their lives. It's utterly mindless, a waste of any talent you ever had. But there's no travel, no research, no risk. Just using big words to make unimportant things sound groundbreaking and new. You don't much care, anymore. You stopped caring a long time ago.
*
You spent three days in debrief after you got out of the hospital. You could tell the agents didn't know any more than you, though they liked to pretend they did. You had lost count of how many times you had been asked, in an infinite number of variations, of when exactly did Francie start behaving differently. As if they wanted you to give them an actual date and time in response and nothing less would be acceptable. Once of the agents in particular had gotten furious at you, once, almost losing it completely, something along the lines of, she couldn't have meant very much to you if you couldn't even tell. You had turned your head away, then, because you hadn't known. How could you resolve the image of Francie chopping beef chunks in the kitchen, cooking dinner like nothing was amiss and the same Francie, stabbing you in the chest with the same knife. You had no idea when the "real" Francie, as the agents liked to say, had stopped being. There was no way you could pinpoint at what point in your friendship, in your relationship, things had irrefutably changed, and it killed you every time you tried to reason it out. You wanted to shout to the whole CIA how you had no clue, how everything had been perfect until it wasn't, and if they kept intonating "real" Francie in a sarcastic tone you were going to slug someone. But you didn't have the energy, or the conviction that it would make a difference anyway. You just stopped responding, using your eyes as ammunition, and they gave up shortly after, releasing you from custody.
You think the CIA was afraid you were going to go vigilante, try to track down Syd and avenge Fran's death, play the part of the quintessential wronged man. You never did - you realized the futility of it the moment Jack walked out of that hospital room. You wish Syd had been there, so she could appreciate it. See, you think you would say, all it took was some freak impersonating Francie and for you to mysteriously disappear to keep me in line. Aren't you proud of me? You think she would appreciate the humor in it. As for yourself, you can't really bring yourself to find much of anything worth a laugh these days.
*
Lunch is a sandwich, four slices of deli on white bread. You bought wheat once, because it was on sale at the store that week, before you realized the aftertaste of the bread was reminiscent of the crust of the croissant you ate in a café when you were in Paris, way back when. Before. You had gagged, spitting up the mouthful of turkey-on-wheat, causing the rest of the lunch gang to stare at you unabashedly. So now you only buy white bread, and as an extra precaution, you also eat alone. It just makes things easier. You hate when people stare at you; it always means you've somehow done something wrong.
You get back from the break room to see the message indicator flashing on your voicemail. Happy you were away for the call, you hit 'play' to hear Amy's voice filter tinny through cheap plastic speakers. She's sorry you were working late the weekend before, when she had invited you over for dinner and, you know without hearing her say it, her chance to set you up with her new neighbor across the street. But, and the message is interrupted by the sound of what could only be your sister snapping gum, there is a street carnival coming up next weekend and, apparently, you just have to come. Her voice picks up again but is abruptly cut off - the machine mercifully terminates messages over two minutes in length. The weekend - it is only Tuesday - plenty of time to come up with an excuse.
You wonder, idly, about those warnings on cinnamon gum packs, how This Product Contains Saccharine, a Potential Carcinogen. Death by chewing gum. Not too bad, you think, settling into your chair and pulling up the next document to doctor up. There were worse ways to go.
*
They had wanted to put you in protective custody. As the case was still unexplained, they had explained, the motives and targets and assailants unclear, it had been decided to protect those still possibly close to the case, which included one Mr. Will Tippin. You think you had never heard so many shady half-truths in your life, personally. As it had been pretty clear they weren't going to accept no for an answer, and you were still in little state to object, you went along with their scheme, to an extent. You had signed about fifty nondisclosure forms for their behalf, but balked at creating a new identity. It didn't make the agents especially happy, but you had managed to convince them that it was in everyone's best interests for you to be a willing participant in this little decoy, and you'd break cover the minute you had the opportunity if you were placed in the federal WPP. You'd had quite, quite enough of false identities by that point. Besides, your name was already in countless government search engines - the last thing you wanted was to place it in another, let alone WITSEC.
So, a compromise. You were still Will Tippin, at least in name. You were still allowed to write by trade, if it was out of the public eye. The CIA helped you move from LA to a suburb near the mountains, far enough from the scandal and publicity of high-profile journalistic endeavors or rehab stints. You could still keep in touch with immediate family, and would be subject only to occasional, routine surveillance to ensure you stayed out of trouble. The first hint of deviant behavior, researching anything related to the incident, breaking sanction in any way, would result in your placement in forced protective custody, which you had been told offered far fewer creature comforts. Having no friends you cared to keep informed of your new whereabouts helped matters some, along with not the least desire to draw attention to yourself.
Almost two years later, your life is essentially as nondescript as it was the moment you first started this new charade. Your apartment is white walls and minimal cheap furniture - you had brought very little in terms of mementos or reminders of your life up to the incident with you and never really saw the point to accumulate more. You sleep, eat, go to work, wash rinse repeat. Wary of duplicity, you've kept to yourself and have made no lasting friendships since your arrival. You exist, as banal as that might sound to your ears. It makes little difference if you're still in shock, some residual post traumatic stress from such an irrevocable split in what you thought was your life. You know one of these days the walls will come crashing down again, that what you are in now is just a holding pattern, and it's up in the air if what will result will be any better than the life you have now or not.
You have conversations with Syd, sometimes. Not so often anymore, which you assume is a good development from a psychological standpoint, but occasionally. You wish you could conjure up Francie, talk with her instead, but are still incapable of thinking of her without remembering her double, and as much as you miss her, you feel as if you're tainting every good memory you have of your time together with her, because what if it was never her at all. It all becomes too metaphysical and confusing - Syd is simpler. So you talk with her instead. She's supposed to be dead, of course, but you know she's not. You don't know if she's hiding, or on an extended undercover mission, or in the same holding pattern as you are now, but you know for sure she's out there somewhere. Dying in a fire would be too easy, there's no way you buy that. Not that you'd ever voice that aloud.
You don't know if you would even want to see her again - you don't think she would want to see you, at least not the person you've become now. There's no temptation to look for her; you know it'd be futile anyway. You're not entirely sure you'd even recognize the new Sydney Bristow, just as she probably wouldn't recognize you. You think Will Tippin died in that bathtub two years ago, and this new facsimile you play isn't up to snuff.
*
Your commute home is remarkable only its brevity - there are a lot of things you tend to miss from your previous life but LA gridlock isn't one of them. You reset the alarm as soon as you open the door to your apartment, out of sheer force of habit. Make your way to the fridge before realizing that it's empty as usual. Grabbing a can of soup from an upper cupboard, your eye catches the flashing red indicator on the answering machine. You have a hard time remembering the last time you actually picked up the phone and called anyone under your own volition. Maybe you are a recluse, after all; you'll have to look the word up, sometime, find all the corollary definitions. You talk to people, because you have to but you still communicate, it's not as if you're a total hermit. You just don't see the point of offering too much of yourself anymore. You're mute in your dreams, and have little desire to contemplate what that signifies. A lesson learned from not keeping your mouth shut for too many years, like you've used up all your words and now you have nothing left to say. Or perhaps you're just thinking in metaphors. You attempt to muster the energy to care, and fail. You walk over to the machine, hit play, half-listening. And stop.
You'd recognize Jack's voice anywhere, even on a cheap answering machine, even two years out of context from the rest of your life. She's back, you hear, along with a number to call if you have questions. She thinks you're in witness protection until you choose to break cover. You don't have the first idea where she's back *from*, and have a strong feeling that you'd rather not know. You are no longer at risk, apparently, is the take-home message you get. You wonder why Jack was the one who called - a green agent could have relayed the information just as readily. Maybe he felt some sort of obligation, maybe he's not calling on company time, maybe letting you know what's going on is a favor from him to you, outside the sanctions and regulations of your relocation terms. You scrawl down the number as Jack's voice is replaced by the shrill end-of-messages tone, and stare at what you've written down, uncomprehending.
It's too soon. You've become a master at not rushing things, of ruminating and weighing your options to avoid compromising situations. Those survival instincts you never thought you had, finally kicking in. You leave the scrap of paper with the number by the machine, and walk back to the kitchen, absently reaching for the can opener. You don't know what you'd say, not the first clue. You want to know she's alright, that she's safe enough. But that's it - you don't want to know the details, the complications. You *were* one of those complications, once. It's not a role you care to reprise.
You heat the soup on autopilot, trying to remember if there's anything decent worth watching tonight. Your eyes keep drifting over to the phone, the bit of paper and ink that essentially constitutes the end of your two years of convenient ignorance. Later, soon, just not right now, you tell yourself as you settle down in front of the tv for an evening of mindless occupation. You know you'll call, eventually. After years of jumping the gun, you've learned the strength of lying in wait. And you think you'll need all the strength you can get.
*
Early morning light diffracts through cheap vinyl blinds. You wake up two minutes before the alarm is set to go off, and you reach over to reset it in unfamiliar silence. Stretching out your left hand, you roll the adjustment bar for the blinds counterclockwise, the feel of hexagonical plastic unfamiliar to your touch. The room explodes with light, and you stare out the window, the irises of your eyes open, immersing yourself in the foreign view. No shadow, no room to hide. You reach over to the phone, dialing the number perched on the side of the table, take a breath, and speak.
*
Unaccountable Effect
elabyrinthine@yahoo.com
Author: labyrinthine
Email: elabyrinthine@yahoo.com
Rating/Classification: PG/Will POV, spoilers up to The Telling
Summary: People don't just disappear.
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me.
A/N: Title from a CD by Liz Story, who is a kick ass pianist and totally brilliant. I've wanted to write a fic with this title for years, and now I have. I rule! (sorry, obligatory American Beauty moment, couldn't help myself). October 2003 CM challengefic. Thanks to Aire for the read-over, Pharo for the reminder and Hil, just because.
I'm willing to break myself
To shake this hell from everything I touch
-Something Corporate
*
Early morning light diffracts through cheap vinyl blinds, casting shadows of prison bars over your still form. You always forget to shut the blinds all the way to keep the light out; your mind is too preoccupied controlling the essential hand-eye coordination necessary to beat the alarm clock into submission during your first moments of semi-lucidity to actually retain the knowledge that the blinds need to be closed. Every night you forget, and every morning you are reminded again, a circadian cycle of everything you can't hold on to. The light is relentless, intruding on what moments before had been a cocoon of silence and darkness. No dreams tonight, at least that you can recall, and for that you are grateful. You turn your head away from the window and face the center of the room, which is still, for the most part, cast in shadow. Closing your eyes in obvious relief, resisting the urge to physically pull the covers over your head, you shut out the insistence of a new day. You will not go to work today, you think to yourself as you drift towards twilight, the thought an ephemeral strand diffusing through the welcome cloudiness of your mind. Consequences are inconsequential in the dark; softened edges and muted punishments. There's no shame in hiding if you can't be found.
You go to work, after all; you have discovered you have very few choices when anything is concerned. The office has called, twice, leaving messages on your answering machine when you didn't bother getting out of bed to pick up yourself, threatening to come over and drag you out of the apartment if need be. This is the only threat that works - your boss knows as well as you do how little you actually care for the job. It wouldn't matter if they fired you, or cut your salary, or any of the scare tactics that keep the rest of the employees in line. What scares you is the possibility of a breech, a lack of containment: your coworkers knocking on your door demanding entry as insistently as light so callously entering your bedroom. You get up in reluctant assent, habitual routine taking over in the absence of any conscious thought, making the bed, brushing your teeth, grabbing the first thing you can reach in the closet to wear.
The machine goes off again, the shrill beep proceeding the default mechanical message. You screen your calls now, and rarely return them. Messages on a machine are safe and predictable; they are endlessly static, and you find you prefer this stability compared to the unpredictable nature of spontaneous human contact. This has not gone unnoticed by those who interact with you. You think you hear, recluse, tossed around like forbidden fruit on the tongues of gossips that fill the break room at lunch. You couldn't care less, if that's what it takes to not be disturbed.
On your way out, your fingers reach towards the wall-mounted keypad next to the front door automatically, enabling the alarm in your absence. You recognize the utter futility of this action - by the time the alarm went off it would be too late and it's not like it would *stop* anyone - but you do it anyway, because that's what normal people do.
You think you used to be normal, once. You don't know what you are now.
*
You have improved, you think. There was a point when you wouldn't get out of bed at all, let alone leave the apartment.
You had spent weeks in the hospital, after the incident. That's what Jack called it, the only time he appeared in front of your bed in recovery. The man could compartmentalize like no one else - how he managed to group the events that caused Syd's disappearance, Francie's death and his stint in the ICU as an "incident" was beyond your powers of deduction. You remember his visit, your perspective skewed from lying prone on a thin mattress, looking upwards past the maze of nutrient IVs and heart monitor electrodes to recognize his profile. From your vantage point, he looked larger than life; but he always looked that way. You realized, then, that you had never seen the man outside of the shadow of a life-threatening situation, and you realized that you probably never would. It was a sobering understanding.
It's hard to recall, now, what he had said to you then - you had been doped up on the good drugs and recall little of your stay in the hospital as a whole. But you remember his eyes, distant and guarded, and his too-stiff posture that alluded to uncomfortable chairs and not enough rest. You remember the clipped tones, the abrupt cadence of sounds with a running undercurrent of restrained fury. He had answered your inane questions, what happened and why and how and you can't be serious, but you think you had never seen someone who was as serious as this man. When he left, you had moved the automatic morphine drip dispenser from the trap of your fist to the sterile-looking table to your right, and let it sit. Your body had ached, your head was throbbing and you had thoughts of complete self- castigation running through your brain. And you embraced it all, succumbing to the inevitable grasp of giving up, the mirrored enticement of acceptance, and the stark realization that you had failed, somehow, and there was absolutely nothing you could do to make it better.
*
You spend your days between when you punch in and punch out over the stark fluorescent lighting that is ubiquitous, permeating into every crevice of the floor. The women who gossip in the cubicles down the row complain, audibly, about the harsh light that casts their skin in a sallow light, that scientific studies have shown that there are harmful rays emitted by fluorescent fixtures and that they are all at risk, soaking them up at work. When asked, they said they read it on Yahoo, or The Smoking Gun, they can't remember, that it is a vast conspiracy perpetrated by the government and one day the truth will come out. You restrain the urge to offer your two cents on government conspiracies.
You prefer the artificial light, truthfully. It shows everything for what it really is, with no ambiguity or room for interpretation. What you see is what you get, a truism you have seldom elsewhere in your life. You wonder, not for the first time, if you can assuage your guilt over Francie's death because you never saw her in anything but shadows: the mood lighting of the restaurant, the soft afternoon light spilling through her living room, the darkness of night. This never works, of course; it only compounds your guilt over not knowing what happened until it was too late.
This is why you don't think, much. It's just so much easier for everyone involved if you stay out of everything.
Hence, the job. You're writing again, or perhaps you never stopped. This time it's for an insurance company; the higher-ups can't write press releases with complete sentences to save their lives. It's utterly mindless, a waste of any talent you ever had. But there's no travel, no research, no risk. Just using big words to make unimportant things sound groundbreaking and new. You don't much care, anymore. You stopped caring a long time ago.
*
You spent three days in debrief after you got out of the hospital. You could tell the agents didn't know any more than you, though they liked to pretend they did. You had lost count of how many times you had been asked, in an infinite number of variations, of when exactly did Francie start behaving differently. As if they wanted you to give them an actual date and time in response and nothing less would be acceptable. Once of the agents in particular had gotten furious at you, once, almost losing it completely, something along the lines of, she couldn't have meant very much to you if you couldn't even tell. You had turned your head away, then, because you hadn't known. How could you resolve the image of Francie chopping beef chunks in the kitchen, cooking dinner like nothing was amiss and the same Francie, stabbing you in the chest with the same knife. You had no idea when the "real" Francie, as the agents liked to say, had stopped being. There was no way you could pinpoint at what point in your friendship, in your relationship, things had irrefutably changed, and it killed you every time you tried to reason it out. You wanted to shout to the whole CIA how you had no clue, how everything had been perfect until it wasn't, and if they kept intonating "real" Francie in a sarcastic tone you were going to slug someone. But you didn't have the energy, or the conviction that it would make a difference anyway. You just stopped responding, using your eyes as ammunition, and they gave up shortly after, releasing you from custody.
You think the CIA was afraid you were going to go vigilante, try to track down Syd and avenge Fran's death, play the part of the quintessential wronged man. You never did - you realized the futility of it the moment Jack walked out of that hospital room. You wish Syd had been there, so she could appreciate it. See, you think you would say, all it took was some freak impersonating Francie and for you to mysteriously disappear to keep me in line. Aren't you proud of me? You think she would appreciate the humor in it. As for yourself, you can't really bring yourself to find much of anything worth a laugh these days.
*
Lunch is a sandwich, four slices of deli on white bread. You bought wheat once, because it was on sale at the store that week, before you realized the aftertaste of the bread was reminiscent of the crust of the croissant you ate in a café when you were in Paris, way back when. Before. You had gagged, spitting up the mouthful of turkey-on-wheat, causing the rest of the lunch gang to stare at you unabashedly. So now you only buy white bread, and as an extra precaution, you also eat alone. It just makes things easier. You hate when people stare at you; it always means you've somehow done something wrong.
You get back from the break room to see the message indicator flashing on your voicemail. Happy you were away for the call, you hit 'play' to hear Amy's voice filter tinny through cheap plastic speakers. She's sorry you were working late the weekend before, when she had invited you over for dinner and, you know without hearing her say it, her chance to set you up with her new neighbor across the street. But, and the message is interrupted by the sound of what could only be your sister snapping gum, there is a street carnival coming up next weekend and, apparently, you just have to come. Her voice picks up again but is abruptly cut off - the machine mercifully terminates messages over two minutes in length. The weekend - it is only Tuesday - plenty of time to come up with an excuse.
You wonder, idly, about those warnings on cinnamon gum packs, how This Product Contains Saccharine, a Potential Carcinogen. Death by chewing gum. Not too bad, you think, settling into your chair and pulling up the next document to doctor up. There were worse ways to go.
*
They had wanted to put you in protective custody. As the case was still unexplained, they had explained, the motives and targets and assailants unclear, it had been decided to protect those still possibly close to the case, which included one Mr. Will Tippin. You think you had never heard so many shady half-truths in your life, personally. As it had been pretty clear they weren't going to accept no for an answer, and you were still in little state to object, you went along with their scheme, to an extent. You had signed about fifty nondisclosure forms for their behalf, but balked at creating a new identity. It didn't make the agents especially happy, but you had managed to convince them that it was in everyone's best interests for you to be a willing participant in this little decoy, and you'd break cover the minute you had the opportunity if you were placed in the federal WPP. You'd had quite, quite enough of false identities by that point. Besides, your name was already in countless government search engines - the last thing you wanted was to place it in another, let alone WITSEC.
So, a compromise. You were still Will Tippin, at least in name. You were still allowed to write by trade, if it was out of the public eye. The CIA helped you move from LA to a suburb near the mountains, far enough from the scandal and publicity of high-profile journalistic endeavors or rehab stints. You could still keep in touch with immediate family, and would be subject only to occasional, routine surveillance to ensure you stayed out of trouble. The first hint of deviant behavior, researching anything related to the incident, breaking sanction in any way, would result in your placement in forced protective custody, which you had been told offered far fewer creature comforts. Having no friends you cared to keep informed of your new whereabouts helped matters some, along with not the least desire to draw attention to yourself.
Almost two years later, your life is essentially as nondescript as it was the moment you first started this new charade. Your apartment is white walls and minimal cheap furniture - you had brought very little in terms of mementos or reminders of your life up to the incident with you and never really saw the point to accumulate more. You sleep, eat, go to work, wash rinse repeat. Wary of duplicity, you've kept to yourself and have made no lasting friendships since your arrival. You exist, as banal as that might sound to your ears. It makes little difference if you're still in shock, some residual post traumatic stress from such an irrevocable split in what you thought was your life. You know one of these days the walls will come crashing down again, that what you are in now is just a holding pattern, and it's up in the air if what will result will be any better than the life you have now or not.
You have conversations with Syd, sometimes. Not so often anymore, which you assume is a good development from a psychological standpoint, but occasionally. You wish you could conjure up Francie, talk with her instead, but are still incapable of thinking of her without remembering her double, and as much as you miss her, you feel as if you're tainting every good memory you have of your time together with her, because what if it was never her at all. It all becomes too metaphysical and confusing - Syd is simpler. So you talk with her instead. She's supposed to be dead, of course, but you know she's not. You don't know if she's hiding, or on an extended undercover mission, or in the same holding pattern as you are now, but you know for sure she's out there somewhere. Dying in a fire would be too easy, there's no way you buy that. Not that you'd ever voice that aloud.
You don't know if you would even want to see her again - you don't think she would want to see you, at least not the person you've become now. There's no temptation to look for her; you know it'd be futile anyway. You're not entirely sure you'd even recognize the new Sydney Bristow, just as she probably wouldn't recognize you. You think Will Tippin died in that bathtub two years ago, and this new facsimile you play isn't up to snuff.
*
Your commute home is remarkable only its brevity - there are a lot of things you tend to miss from your previous life but LA gridlock isn't one of them. You reset the alarm as soon as you open the door to your apartment, out of sheer force of habit. Make your way to the fridge before realizing that it's empty as usual. Grabbing a can of soup from an upper cupboard, your eye catches the flashing red indicator on the answering machine. You have a hard time remembering the last time you actually picked up the phone and called anyone under your own volition. Maybe you are a recluse, after all; you'll have to look the word up, sometime, find all the corollary definitions. You talk to people, because you have to but you still communicate, it's not as if you're a total hermit. You just don't see the point of offering too much of yourself anymore. You're mute in your dreams, and have little desire to contemplate what that signifies. A lesson learned from not keeping your mouth shut for too many years, like you've used up all your words and now you have nothing left to say. Or perhaps you're just thinking in metaphors. You attempt to muster the energy to care, and fail. You walk over to the machine, hit play, half-listening. And stop.
You'd recognize Jack's voice anywhere, even on a cheap answering machine, even two years out of context from the rest of your life. She's back, you hear, along with a number to call if you have questions. She thinks you're in witness protection until you choose to break cover. You don't have the first idea where she's back *from*, and have a strong feeling that you'd rather not know. You are no longer at risk, apparently, is the take-home message you get. You wonder why Jack was the one who called - a green agent could have relayed the information just as readily. Maybe he felt some sort of obligation, maybe he's not calling on company time, maybe letting you know what's going on is a favor from him to you, outside the sanctions and regulations of your relocation terms. You scrawl down the number as Jack's voice is replaced by the shrill end-of-messages tone, and stare at what you've written down, uncomprehending.
It's too soon. You've become a master at not rushing things, of ruminating and weighing your options to avoid compromising situations. Those survival instincts you never thought you had, finally kicking in. You leave the scrap of paper with the number by the machine, and walk back to the kitchen, absently reaching for the can opener. You don't know what you'd say, not the first clue. You want to know she's alright, that she's safe enough. But that's it - you don't want to know the details, the complications. You *were* one of those complications, once. It's not a role you care to reprise.
You heat the soup on autopilot, trying to remember if there's anything decent worth watching tonight. Your eyes keep drifting over to the phone, the bit of paper and ink that essentially constitutes the end of your two years of convenient ignorance. Later, soon, just not right now, you tell yourself as you settle down in front of the tv for an evening of mindless occupation. You know you'll call, eventually. After years of jumping the gun, you've learned the strength of lying in wait. And you think you'll need all the strength you can get.
*
Early morning light diffracts through cheap vinyl blinds. You wake up two minutes before the alarm is set to go off, and you reach over to reset it in unfamiliar silence. Stretching out your left hand, you roll the adjustment bar for the blinds counterclockwise, the feel of hexagonical plastic unfamiliar to your touch. The room explodes with light, and you stare out the window, the irises of your eyes open, immersing yourself in the foreign view. No shadow, no room to hide. You reach over to the phone, dialing the number perched on the side of the table, take a breath, and speak.
*
Unaccountable Effect
elabyrinthine@yahoo.com