Category: Carby
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: takes place after 10.2 "The lost"...but no accurate
spoilers for episodes after that. Just my imagination.
Summary: Carter stays in Africa after saving Luka, and Abby is having
a hard time to deal with his absence. At an AA meeting,
she can't get him out of her mind. Some weird feelings
tell her he is not that far.
Disclaimer: I don't own anybody, or anything...I'm just a poor girl...
Feedback: would be appreciated...use jconeg@yahoo.fr or the review link.
Author's note: The title of the fic and of each chapter is from the song
"When the ship comes in" by Bob Dylan. It's just about
hurricanes and butterflies, and if you saw "Chaos Theory"
you can understand it's Carby...
Chapter 1
Before the hurricane begins
---------------------------
What was this with this smell ? Whether she went to St Michael, Mercy or whatever AA meetings that existed in Chicago - and she could have bet her soul it was the same all over the States - it was always the same smell: a mixed crappy coffee, cold tobacco, and overwhelming perfumes. She could understand the coffee and cigarette scents, both were compulsory in order to stand these meetings, but over all those years of assisted sobriety, she never figured out why the scent was so strong. She had heard of drunks who needed alcohol so badly that they ended up drinking Chanel #5 when there was no more beer in the fridge. But that was definitely beyond her means. That thought brought a light smile to her face, but it faded away as fast as it had come when the thought that Carter could have afforded it grew in her mind. She could have understood that smell at the former place where she used to go, with mainly persons with a drinking problem, but not here, not at St Michael. Eighty percent of the people attending this meeting were junkies. Why would they drink their cologne ? So she guessed, it must have been on their skin, on their clothes...Why the hell did they smell so strong ?
With all the rules already established in these groups, they could at least have added this one: the name of a mandatory scent to wear. This one or nothing, and that would have been it ! And with a strict control at the entrance of the room. Someone smelling your neck to check whether or not you had failed the fragrance rule ! She knew it sounded ridiculous but she could have accepted anything that could avoid this nauseating mix of scents.
But this morning something was different. Among all those scents, there was one that felt comforting, that made her feel okay, feel like home. She couldn't really point out what it was, but she knew that for the first time in a long time, she was happy to be here.
She didn't really know why she had switched to St Michael for her meetings. Maybe it was all about her new life, back to med school, new appartment, a large bunch of new furniture and clothes, new love life - which could have been expressed as "absent love life" -, new meetings. It all made sense. Just one thing bothered her here at St Michael. People kept changing. It seemed that junkies didn't attend these meetings very long. The faces she saw the most regularly belonged to alcoholics. She knew it because of their speeches. She knew it because after nearly 7 years of this routine, she had learned to recognize who was like her and who was like him, John. Wooof... Once again, the thought of him had just passed through her mind without letting any mark. He had disappeared as fast as he had appeared.
Among all the unimportant questions going through her mind this morning - she had even tried to remember the recipe she once got to make a good carrot-cheese cake, anything that would keep her mind away from this lady speaking on the stage, who kept babbling that her son had got her into that hell - she wondered why it was that alcoholics kept going to meetings for years while junkies seemed to disappear after a few months. Did they all relapse and overdose that fast ? Or were they all okay just after a few meetings and only needed to come for a year.
It seemed it was this way for Carter. Maybe junkies were the lucky ones. If they really wanted to get away from drugs, they just had to stay away from certain people. But for alcohol it was another matter. It was impossible not to meet anybody who would offer you a drink or draw you to a bar. So that was her excuse. And it was the reason why she kept attending those meetings. But she also knew it was a lame excuse. Carter lived among pills, pushed narcotics into patients' veins everyday, and he didn't seem to mind. She had practically been living with him for over a year, and he hadn't attended one meeting, she was almost certain about it.
"Oh god" Abby thought "get off of me Carter !" She instantly turned her attention back to the lady on the stage.
"and it was then that he made me take this crap, after twenty-two years of pure love to my son, he made me do it. And I will never forgive him for what he did..."
How long had she been going this way ? More than half an hour, that was for sure. Geez...was she boring ! The only thing that prevented Abby from standing up and leaving the room was that she wanted to know what this lady's son actually did to make this woman that frantic and incoherent.
She knew the routine by heart now. For each thought about Carter that entered her mind through one ear, she had found a way to blow it away through the other ear... And so after ten weeks of this exercise, she knew exactly how to cast Carter away from her mind. For drunks and addicts, they called it "diversion meetings". Here, she had found a way to transform Carter into wind. Wooof... for one Carter thought, there were a thousand possible diverting thoughts to push him away. Well, Abby knew she could have found better than this annoying lady, but it seemed harder today to transform John into wind. He seemed to be resisting harder than usual, to find a way to stay a little bit longer than a simple breath in her brain. Maybe she just had to watch more closely to her ears hygienic status. Once again the idea made her smile.
It was that smell. This smell was intoxicating because she wanted to name it. It was bothering because it made her feel good without any obvious reason. Abby knew deep down that it was that smell that made John be more than a simple breeze this morning. This smell reminded her of a warm bed, the sound of someone taking a shower next to her room, and the smell of warm coffee in the background. It reminded her of the sound of a Jeep engine, and of Kristen Hersh's voice.
"Oh my god, I miss you John" Abby couldn't figure out whether she had said it loud or kept it to her. And that lady on the stage kept going.
"I trusted him, he was to become someone, and he blew it !" Go to the point, please, go to the point, Abby was pleading the lady with all her mind to stop beating around the bush with her damn son. And she was pretty sure that the lady had said "Hello, I'm Carol and I'm an heroin-addict" when she had begun her speech. Now she sounded like it was her son the addict. "Oh that junkie could just go to hell" Abby thought as she began examining all the other persons in the audience. If that lady hadn't finished with her son in the next five minutes, Abby would be out of it...
Right next to her was a fat man, around fifty, who had eaten 3 packs of twinkies since the beginning of the meeting, and still had a large part of them stuck in his mustache. Maybe he just saved that for later. If it wasn't for the twinkies, Abby would definitely have put him in the "drunk" category, but she wasn't sure...maybe just a twinkies-addict. The woman two seats on her left was to be put in the "junkie" category. Her hands were shaking and she was so thin that she almost seemed transparent.
All of a sudden, Abby wondered when she had started to make a difference between them. It didn't make any sense. She knew that the thin woman could as well have been an alcoholic and would have looked exactly the same. When she had attended her first meetings, she didn't see any difference. It was all the same problem. The speeches were basically the same, the stories all so pathetic, and the lives equally screwed up. Was it when Carter had joined the fun of it all that she had started considering the two categories ? Was it when she had been his sponsor and realized that she couldn't get to him the way she wanted to ?
Actually, she knew exactly when she had started with this game of "who's what" at each meeting. It was just a few months ago. It was a day she'd been to a meeting and been totally absorbed by the story of a guy who was an everything-you-can -imagine-addict. He had tasted and named it all, crack, heroin, demerol, LSD, morphin, and was now proud of being only on "green tobacco and oreo cookies-addict". The guy seemed to make fun of it all, and even though she knew she was supposed to feel sick at this guy's speech, she had found the all story rather funny. She had been in an even lighter mood when she had come home that night to find Carter at her place and a little dinner all set up for them. It wasn't exactly a candle-light- romantic-dinner. Just fish and chips, and Carter wasn't exactly dressed up for the event. Hair all messy, partially torn T-Shirt and plain jogging pants, bare feet. A simple evening like they had a hundred of, eating their dinner on the couch watching TV. And all of a sudden, remembering the guy at the meeting before, she had out of nowhere asked this stupid question: "John, have you ever considered taking hard stuffs ?" At first, he had just gulped and looked at her bewildered. "You know, heroin, crack..." she had insisted. And he had just opened his mouth, looked confused, and nothing had come out. He had leant his head back to his plate, stabbed a piece of fish with his fork and brought it to his mouth, with his eyes stuck on the TV. And he hadn't looked at her for the next fifteen minutes. The silence was only broken when he had made a smart comment on the show on TV, and that was it about this question.
Abby never had her answer. And the way he had reacted, she couldn't tell whether he had "considered" going to real illegal drugs, or if he had actually done it. She knew that if he had, it could only have been a one-time thing. He couldn't have kept on working efficiently or managed as well as he had to keep a facade of normal behavior if he had been a real junkie. But he was a real addict, Abby thought. And what did she know really about drug addiction ?
Did it really make a big difference whether it was stuff he could find at the hospital or on the street ? The thought made her shiver. She couldn't picture him facing a drug dealer. He could have afforded it though...and she knew he had taken cocain. Only once, but he had. He had confessed it on one of the rare times when he had spoken on the stage at an AA meeting she had attended. She still didn't know how he had gotten his hand on that junk. She wanted to believe it was possible that he had just found it at the hospital among the personal belongings of a patient. Any other possibilities made her sick to her stomach. At the meeting, he had just admitted that he hadn't slept for weeks, had a rough shift and couldn't afford to fall asleep on duty. So she had figured that he had found the cocain at the hospital and taken it right away. And deep down, she couldn't understand why his admission had bothered her so much. Cocain wasn't any worse than the stuff he had injected.
But after the "incident" at home and her very tactful question about the "hard stuff", she had begun to classify people. "Drunk" or "junkie". Real junkie or "prescribed" one. She had created this last category for Carter only. In all the meetings she had attended, he was the only one to enter this category. She knew he wasn't the only one on Earth, but he was the only one she knew. And she also knew that the cocain incident and his absence of answer on the other drugs were what was bothering her the most, because that would put him in the real junkie category, and she couldn't admit it. She was aware of the fact that Carter didn't make that distinction and considered himself as an addict, period.
Well, he had considered himself as an addict... But for the past year, since they've been together, he was just a very sober clean guy, and if she had just met him at that time, she didn't think she could have guessed about his past. As far as she knew, he didn't attend any meeting over this year. And she didn't remember any time when the word "addict" came out of his mouth. It had been only three years, and he seemed totally out of danger on this side. While she was still fighting her drinking problem seven years after it all started... It didn't seem fair.
"What the hell ? Carter, get out of my mind !!" Abby now knew she hadn't said it loud, but she had however slapped the side of her head with her palm. Why couldn't he let her alone this morning. The more she was trying to get him out of her mind, the more he seemed to be willing to come back.
She had created a very diversified group of distractions to get him out of her mind as soon as he had turned his back on her and left her to go back to Africa to claim for Luka's body. By the time Luka had come back alive, this group had been elevated to a pretty big wall, and when she had read the letter he had written to explain why he was staying in Congo, it had already become an unbreakable castle. Carter was out of her system, and when he dared approach her, she was able to push him away with just a little snap. Carter was just a tiny blow of wind to her ears.
She just couldn't figure why this morning he seemed more like a hurricane preparing in her head. Aside from that delightful smell, there was no reason to think of him this morning more than any others. Carter was miles away from her, and yet he still seemed to rush in uncontrollable waves in her brain.
Abby got back to her examining the audience, very firm in not letting anyone bothering her in the process. The guy next to her had just finished his fourth pack of twinkies. Two rows right in front of her, a guy was doing some crosswords. Carter used to do crosswords too at AA meetings, but she didn't let this thought in her head more than a split second, and was very proud of it. In the all audience, she could count 5 persons doing crosswords. Didn't the lady on the stage notice that ? Couldn't she see she was annoying every single person in the room ? The guy with the crosswords two row right before Abby must have been around his thirties. She couldn't tell much about him for he hadn't lifted his head from his newspaper for ages, nor turned his head in the slightest way. His hair was brown, exactly the same color as John's...
"Oh shit" Abby thought "not again... Carter, I told you, out of here !"
He couldn't be John. His hair was way too long, and he seems thinner than Carter. He was only wearing a thin blue T-Shirt, and the way he was leaning over his crosswords, Abby could see his ribs through the fabric of his T-shirt. She laughed slightly at the view of his hair, which was really a mess.
As if he had heard her, the blue T-shirt guy started scratching the back of his head. Abby froze up instantly. The big wall she had built up to protect herself from Carter was suddenly broken down to pieces. A hurricane couldn't have done a better job.
But actually, it was really nothing, not even a little breeze... just the way he had scratched his hair with his left hand, and the way the watch band on his wrist was turned on the wrong side...
To be continued...
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: takes place after 10.2 "The lost"...but no accurate
spoilers for episodes after that. Just my imagination.
Summary: Carter stays in Africa after saving Luka, and Abby is having
a hard time to deal with his absence. At an AA meeting,
she can't get him out of her mind. Some weird feelings
tell her he is not that far.
Disclaimer: I don't own anybody, or anything...I'm just a poor girl...
Feedback: would be appreciated...use jconeg@yahoo.fr or the review link.
Author's note: The title of the fic and of each chapter is from the song
"When the ship comes in" by Bob Dylan. It's just about
hurricanes and butterflies, and if you saw "Chaos Theory"
you can understand it's Carby...
Chapter 1
Before the hurricane begins
---------------------------
What was this with this smell ? Whether she went to St Michael, Mercy or whatever AA meetings that existed in Chicago - and she could have bet her soul it was the same all over the States - it was always the same smell: a mixed crappy coffee, cold tobacco, and overwhelming perfumes. She could understand the coffee and cigarette scents, both were compulsory in order to stand these meetings, but over all those years of assisted sobriety, she never figured out why the scent was so strong. She had heard of drunks who needed alcohol so badly that they ended up drinking Chanel #5 when there was no more beer in the fridge. But that was definitely beyond her means. That thought brought a light smile to her face, but it faded away as fast as it had come when the thought that Carter could have afforded it grew in her mind. She could have understood that smell at the former place where she used to go, with mainly persons with a drinking problem, but not here, not at St Michael. Eighty percent of the people attending this meeting were junkies. Why would they drink their cologne ? So she guessed, it must have been on their skin, on their clothes...Why the hell did they smell so strong ?
With all the rules already established in these groups, they could at least have added this one: the name of a mandatory scent to wear. This one or nothing, and that would have been it ! And with a strict control at the entrance of the room. Someone smelling your neck to check whether or not you had failed the fragrance rule ! She knew it sounded ridiculous but she could have accepted anything that could avoid this nauseating mix of scents.
But this morning something was different. Among all those scents, there was one that felt comforting, that made her feel okay, feel like home. She couldn't really point out what it was, but she knew that for the first time in a long time, she was happy to be here.
She didn't really know why she had switched to St Michael for her meetings. Maybe it was all about her new life, back to med school, new appartment, a large bunch of new furniture and clothes, new love life - which could have been expressed as "absent love life" -, new meetings. It all made sense. Just one thing bothered her here at St Michael. People kept changing. It seemed that junkies didn't attend these meetings very long. The faces she saw the most regularly belonged to alcoholics. She knew it because of their speeches. She knew it because after nearly 7 years of this routine, she had learned to recognize who was like her and who was like him, John. Wooof... Once again, the thought of him had just passed through her mind without letting any mark. He had disappeared as fast as he had appeared.
Among all the unimportant questions going through her mind this morning - she had even tried to remember the recipe she once got to make a good carrot-cheese cake, anything that would keep her mind away from this lady speaking on the stage, who kept babbling that her son had got her into that hell - she wondered why it was that alcoholics kept going to meetings for years while junkies seemed to disappear after a few months. Did they all relapse and overdose that fast ? Or were they all okay just after a few meetings and only needed to come for a year.
It seemed it was this way for Carter. Maybe junkies were the lucky ones. If they really wanted to get away from drugs, they just had to stay away from certain people. But for alcohol it was another matter. It was impossible not to meet anybody who would offer you a drink or draw you to a bar. So that was her excuse. And it was the reason why she kept attending those meetings. But she also knew it was a lame excuse. Carter lived among pills, pushed narcotics into patients' veins everyday, and he didn't seem to mind. She had practically been living with him for over a year, and he hadn't attended one meeting, she was almost certain about it.
"Oh god" Abby thought "get off of me Carter !" She instantly turned her attention back to the lady on the stage.
"and it was then that he made me take this crap, after twenty-two years of pure love to my son, he made me do it. And I will never forgive him for what he did..."
How long had she been going this way ? More than half an hour, that was for sure. Geez...was she boring ! The only thing that prevented Abby from standing up and leaving the room was that she wanted to know what this lady's son actually did to make this woman that frantic and incoherent.
She knew the routine by heart now. For each thought about Carter that entered her mind through one ear, she had found a way to blow it away through the other ear... And so after ten weeks of this exercise, she knew exactly how to cast Carter away from her mind. For drunks and addicts, they called it "diversion meetings". Here, she had found a way to transform Carter into wind. Wooof... for one Carter thought, there were a thousand possible diverting thoughts to push him away. Well, Abby knew she could have found better than this annoying lady, but it seemed harder today to transform John into wind. He seemed to be resisting harder than usual, to find a way to stay a little bit longer than a simple breath in her brain. Maybe she just had to watch more closely to her ears hygienic status. Once again the idea made her smile.
It was that smell. This smell was intoxicating because she wanted to name it. It was bothering because it made her feel good without any obvious reason. Abby knew deep down that it was that smell that made John be more than a simple breeze this morning. This smell reminded her of a warm bed, the sound of someone taking a shower next to her room, and the smell of warm coffee in the background. It reminded her of the sound of a Jeep engine, and of Kristen Hersh's voice.
"Oh my god, I miss you John" Abby couldn't figure out whether she had said it loud or kept it to her. And that lady on the stage kept going.
"I trusted him, he was to become someone, and he blew it !" Go to the point, please, go to the point, Abby was pleading the lady with all her mind to stop beating around the bush with her damn son. And she was pretty sure that the lady had said "Hello, I'm Carol and I'm an heroin-addict" when she had begun her speech. Now she sounded like it was her son the addict. "Oh that junkie could just go to hell" Abby thought as she began examining all the other persons in the audience. If that lady hadn't finished with her son in the next five minutes, Abby would be out of it...
Right next to her was a fat man, around fifty, who had eaten 3 packs of twinkies since the beginning of the meeting, and still had a large part of them stuck in his mustache. Maybe he just saved that for later. If it wasn't for the twinkies, Abby would definitely have put him in the "drunk" category, but she wasn't sure...maybe just a twinkies-addict. The woman two seats on her left was to be put in the "junkie" category. Her hands were shaking and she was so thin that she almost seemed transparent.
All of a sudden, Abby wondered when she had started to make a difference between them. It didn't make any sense. She knew that the thin woman could as well have been an alcoholic and would have looked exactly the same. When she had attended her first meetings, she didn't see any difference. It was all the same problem. The speeches were basically the same, the stories all so pathetic, and the lives equally screwed up. Was it when Carter had joined the fun of it all that she had started considering the two categories ? Was it when she had been his sponsor and realized that she couldn't get to him the way she wanted to ?
Actually, she knew exactly when she had started with this game of "who's what" at each meeting. It was just a few months ago. It was a day she'd been to a meeting and been totally absorbed by the story of a guy who was an everything-you-can -imagine-addict. He had tasted and named it all, crack, heroin, demerol, LSD, morphin, and was now proud of being only on "green tobacco and oreo cookies-addict". The guy seemed to make fun of it all, and even though she knew she was supposed to feel sick at this guy's speech, she had found the all story rather funny. She had been in an even lighter mood when she had come home that night to find Carter at her place and a little dinner all set up for them. It wasn't exactly a candle-light- romantic-dinner. Just fish and chips, and Carter wasn't exactly dressed up for the event. Hair all messy, partially torn T-Shirt and plain jogging pants, bare feet. A simple evening like they had a hundred of, eating their dinner on the couch watching TV. And all of a sudden, remembering the guy at the meeting before, she had out of nowhere asked this stupid question: "John, have you ever considered taking hard stuffs ?" At first, he had just gulped and looked at her bewildered. "You know, heroin, crack..." she had insisted. And he had just opened his mouth, looked confused, and nothing had come out. He had leant his head back to his plate, stabbed a piece of fish with his fork and brought it to his mouth, with his eyes stuck on the TV. And he hadn't looked at her for the next fifteen minutes. The silence was only broken when he had made a smart comment on the show on TV, and that was it about this question.
Abby never had her answer. And the way he had reacted, she couldn't tell whether he had "considered" going to real illegal drugs, or if he had actually done it. She knew that if he had, it could only have been a one-time thing. He couldn't have kept on working efficiently or managed as well as he had to keep a facade of normal behavior if he had been a real junkie. But he was a real addict, Abby thought. And what did she know really about drug addiction ?
Did it really make a big difference whether it was stuff he could find at the hospital or on the street ? The thought made her shiver. She couldn't picture him facing a drug dealer. He could have afforded it though...and she knew he had taken cocain. Only once, but he had. He had confessed it on one of the rare times when he had spoken on the stage at an AA meeting she had attended. She still didn't know how he had gotten his hand on that junk. She wanted to believe it was possible that he had just found it at the hospital among the personal belongings of a patient. Any other possibilities made her sick to her stomach. At the meeting, he had just admitted that he hadn't slept for weeks, had a rough shift and couldn't afford to fall asleep on duty. So she had figured that he had found the cocain at the hospital and taken it right away. And deep down, she couldn't understand why his admission had bothered her so much. Cocain wasn't any worse than the stuff he had injected.
But after the "incident" at home and her very tactful question about the "hard stuff", she had begun to classify people. "Drunk" or "junkie". Real junkie or "prescribed" one. She had created this last category for Carter only. In all the meetings she had attended, he was the only one to enter this category. She knew he wasn't the only one on Earth, but he was the only one she knew. And she also knew that the cocain incident and his absence of answer on the other drugs were what was bothering her the most, because that would put him in the real junkie category, and she couldn't admit it. She was aware of the fact that Carter didn't make that distinction and considered himself as an addict, period.
Well, he had considered himself as an addict... But for the past year, since they've been together, he was just a very sober clean guy, and if she had just met him at that time, she didn't think she could have guessed about his past. As far as she knew, he didn't attend any meeting over this year. And she didn't remember any time when the word "addict" came out of his mouth. It had been only three years, and he seemed totally out of danger on this side. While she was still fighting her drinking problem seven years after it all started... It didn't seem fair.
"What the hell ? Carter, get out of my mind !!" Abby now knew she hadn't said it loud, but she had however slapped the side of her head with her palm. Why couldn't he let her alone this morning. The more she was trying to get him out of her mind, the more he seemed to be willing to come back.
She had created a very diversified group of distractions to get him out of her mind as soon as he had turned his back on her and left her to go back to Africa to claim for Luka's body. By the time Luka had come back alive, this group had been elevated to a pretty big wall, and when she had read the letter he had written to explain why he was staying in Congo, it had already become an unbreakable castle. Carter was out of her system, and when he dared approach her, she was able to push him away with just a little snap. Carter was just a tiny blow of wind to her ears.
She just couldn't figure why this morning he seemed more like a hurricane preparing in her head. Aside from that delightful smell, there was no reason to think of him this morning more than any others. Carter was miles away from her, and yet he still seemed to rush in uncontrollable waves in her brain.
Abby got back to her examining the audience, very firm in not letting anyone bothering her in the process. The guy next to her had just finished his fourth pack of twinkies. Two rows right in front of her, a guy was doing some crosswords. Carter used to do crosswords too at AA meetings, but she didn't let this thought in her head more than a split second, and was very proud of it. In the all audience, she could count 5 persons doing crosswords. Didn't the lady on the stage notice that ? Couldn't she see she was annoying every single person in the room ? The guy with the crosswords two row right before Abby must have been around his thirties. She couldn't tell much about him for he hadn't lifted his head from his newspaper for ages, nor turned his head in the slightest way. His hair was brown, exactly the same color as John's...
"Oh shit" Abby thought "not again... Carter, I told you, out of here !"
He couldn't be John. His hair was way too long, and he seems thinner than Carter. He was only wearing a thin blue T-Shirt, and the way he was leaning over his crosswords, Abby could see his ribs through the fabric of his T-shirt. She laughed slightly at the view of his hair, which was really a mess.
As if he had heard her, the blue T-shirt guy started scratching the back of his head. Abby froze up instantly. The big wall she had built up to protect herself from Carter was suddenly broken down to pieces. A hurricane couldn't have done a better job.
But actually, it was really nothing, not even a little breeze... just the way he had scratched his hair with his left hand, and the way the watch band on his wrist was turned on the wrong side...
To be continued...