A/N: Nothing to say here except for this: for the best Taken fanfiction on the internet, as well as Taken message boards, visit www. angel-allison. com
"It gave him a strange feeling to see the wrist and leg sliced open, the chest exposed - but no bleeding. There was something wild and inhuman about that. As if bleeding were a sign of humanity. Well, he thought, perhaps it is. Perhaps the fact that we bleed to death makes us human."
-"The Andromeda Strain", Michael Crichton
"Do you mind telling me exactly what's going on?" He demanded, twisting the stiff, cold metal cord of the pay phone around his fingers nervously. It was sometime early in the morning, his view of the clock obscured by a cloud of smoke from a group of men closer to the bar's entrance. He had pulled in only one or two minutes ago, making a beeline for the phone in the back, ignoring the bartender's insistence that he buy a drink.
Jesse had to place one finger firmly in his right ear to block the solid thwacking sounds the pool balls made when they hit the sides of the table to hear Elizabeth's answer. "Jesse," Her voice crackled amidst the static, "Relax. I promise I'll be there as soon as I can, then we can talk things over." A glass shattered suddenly in the background, prompting her to ask, "Where are you?"
He gave her the name of the place and hung up, making his way into the bathroom next to the phone. He turned on the faucet and ran his hands under the water, resting his elbows on the sides of the sink. Eventually he lifted his head and stared at himself in the mirror for a minute, staring himself in the eye long and hard.
Breaking his gaze and shutting off the water, he returned to the front of the building, sitting down in the booth in the far corner of the room. His energy was beginning to subside now, his eyes starting to droop. Just as he was about to succumb to the temptation of sleep he heard the jingling of a bell somewhere, distantly, and looked up to see Dr. Goodman walking towards him.
"Of all the places you could've chosen." She said, looking around in a bemused manner before sliding into the bench across from Jesse.
"I, uh, tried to pick somewhere out of the way." He replied sheepishly, noting the change in Elizabeth upon leaving the office. She seemed more relaxed here, even calling for a beer from the bartender. Picking up the bottle the portly man placed before her, she took a sip, prompting Jesse to blurt out in disbelief, "You drink?"
Elizabeth smiled. "Just because I'm a doctor doesn't mean I don't know how to have a good time." Her grin disappeared as she remembered the reason she was there and her mood turned somber. "A man named Eric Crawford was asking about you."
At first the name had no effect on Jesse, but then, suddenly, something triggered a memory of that day back when he was sixteen, when he had gone to the government looking for help and they had killed his father, locking him in that bomb shelter. The man's name was Crawford. Owen Crawford. Enough time had passed - if he had had a son . . .
"Jesse?" She asked, leaning over the table. "Crawford was that man who was in charge of the UFO project, wasn't he?" He remembered telling her, on their second session, everything that had happened with the aliens and the government.
He nodded. "Yeah."
Taking another sip of her beer, Liz said, "He didn't look sure of himself, like he knew what he was getting into but didn't want to take the risk." Reaching an arm across the sticky, ring-covered tabletop, she patted Jesse's arm comfortingly. "I'm sure you'll be fine if you went home in a day or two."
"Thanks." He replied gratefully. "But these Crawfords . . . they've ruined my life before. They're going to win again this time, I know that." They sat in silence for a few moments longer, Elizabeth taking in her surroundings, Jesse tapping the table aimlessly. Then she sighed, picking up her purse and standing.
"Jesse," she began, "You don't know how lucky you are to have Amelia and Charlie and all those other people who love you. People like this Eric Crawford are the kind of people who like to take away those people from us, to take away everything that matters to us. They try to destroy our reason to be by taking away life's meaning, because what life means to you is measured by how much you can love someone."
She sat down again, this time on the edge of the bench rather than next to the wall. Her voice took became shakier as she continued, "For some reason, when people take away our meaning we grieve, but we keep fighting and keep loving. Why we do that" she shook her head sadly "we'll never know, but that urge to keep going is what keeps us alive. And if you give in and lose that urge, then the Crawfords have won. If you see it as a contest, that is."
He followed her with his eyes as she stood again, this time slinging the purse over her shoulder. "Take care, Jesse."
"I'll, uh, call you in a few days about the baptism." Jesse said after a moment of silence, remembering she was to be Charlie's godmother. Her face twisted into an expression of pain for a moment before changing back into her original expressionless, smooth countenance.
"OK." Elizabeth said somewhat sadly before disappearing into the dense cloud of smoke obscuring the front of the bar. Eventually the outline of her body faded and he was left staring at nothing but the last fading tendrils of smoke.
He spent the next two nights at the motel with Amelia and Charlie, not daring to go back to work yet. Amelia was concerned, fearing for the safety of Charlie as well as herself. When she had asked what was going on he had simply told her it was "complicated" and he would explain everything "someday". For the first few hours she had briefly entertained the thought of leaving him, but the thought of life without Jesse was unbearable to her after all the time they had spent together.
When they returned to the house, she was thankful to see Jesse resume working, glad he was getting his mind off of things, even it were only for a few hours during the day. Charlie was her priority now, spending her days changing and feeding him. Jesse was overjoyed upon being a father, and she would often stop by Charlie's room to find him cradling him in his arms, walking around the room in circles and talking softly to him.
She was feeding Charlie when Jesse exited the house in a hurry, stopping to kiss her quickly, murmuring something about a car accident he had to be at. Amelia admired his optimistic attitude towards his job, how he saw the ability to help in an otherwise helpless situation. How someone so paranoid could be so optimistic at the same time was a mystery to her.
Jesse waved as he pulled out of the driveway, watching Amelia through the kitchen window, gently feeding Charlie. There had a car accident on Miller Street, and, as he saw as he pulled up to the scene of the accident, he it was big. A mangled red Chevrolet was lying on its side against a tree, a group of attendants trying to turn it over carefully and place it on the ground. The car must have flipped and hit the tree, he realized. Not much of a chance of survival if you were the driver there.
As he approached it he saw another car nearby, it's front smashed badly. The driver was leaning against it, handcuffed, as one of the cops holding him came up to Jesse. "Drunk driver." He said. "He was going the wrong way on a one-way street."
Nodding, Jesse approached the now upside-down car, lying on the ground next to the tree. He lay down next to where the windshield was now nothing but a black frame, the ground around it littered with broken shards of glass, and peered into the car. "Hello?" He called.
The body appeared to be a woman, judging by their long blond hair, and he called for a gurney as he confirmed his suspicion that she wasn't alive. Gently he opened the car door and crawled into the overturned vehicle, firmly pulling the woman out of the car and laying her on the ground.
A pair of brown eyes gazed blankly towards the sky, and Jesse instantly backed into a standing position, startled. It was Dr. Goodman, dressed ready for work, looking placid and unusually still. Whenever Jesse saw her, she was always writing on her notepad, gesturing with her hands, drumming her fingers on the desk. But she was never lying still like this.
The paramedic brushed past Jesse, standing a few feet away from her, shocked. "Yup." He said, motioning for the gurney. "Hey, man, you all right?" The man asked, looking at Jesse, then at Elizabeth. "You know her?"
"No." Jesse replied reflexively.
The paramedic nodded. "You wanna give me a hand?"
"No." He repeated, backing away. His feet carried him to his car, where he found himself driving towards the bar they had talked at only a few nights ago. When he realized he was only a mile away from the bar he pulled over and switched off the ignition, breathing heavily. She was someone he could trust to talk to about everything that had happened and she had believed him, something he would have found impossible to do if he were the doctor.
He recalled what she had said in the bar and remembered that he had to keep fighting. He had to find someone else he could share things with. His eyes clear and free of tears, he turned the keys back in the ignition and turned around, heading back home.
The man who had was holding the funeral was a tall, lean man named Jason Robinson, who was supposedly one of Elizabeth's closest friends. Jesse entered cautiously, feeling out of place amidst her family and friends - which judging by the crowd wasn't a large group. Most of the people were patients of hers - a couple of large women were clustered around the refreshments table, and a few other men and women were casually strolling about. Only Jason appeared truly distressed, wringing his hands nervously as he stayed as far away from the coffin as he could, as if repelled by some invisible force.
"Hi." Jesse said, shaking Jason's hand. "I'm very sorry."
"Were you one of her patients?" The man asked, his eyes locking onto Jesse's.
He nodded. "Yes, I was. She didn't have a very large family, did she?" He asked, noticing the lack of true grief in the room, other than the man in front of him. Then, after a slight pause, he added, "You two weren't - married, were you?"
Jason shook his head slowly. "We were divorced about, uh, a month or two ago. After everything that happened, we just couldn't really bear to be with each other." Noticing a familiar face entering the parlor, he excused himself hastily and rushed to meet them.
Again feeling much out of place, he boldly ventured over to the table of food, feeling somewhat guilty for eating at a time like this, but knowing fully that it would help him get his mind off of things for a while.
"So they were married for a while." Began one of the women gathered around the opposite end of the table, gossiping loudly among her friends. "And she got pregnant, too. But after a week - " she broke off, leaning closer into the circle of women but still maintaining the same volume as before. "They had a robbery. The guy kidnapped the baby."
Jesse edged closer in order to hear the rest of the story. "They found him a couple of days later," the woman continued, pleased to be at the center of attention, "and he was dead."
The women murmured their shock, pausing only to cram more food in their mouths. Jesse glanced over at Jason, talking to a particularly grief-stricken woman in the corner while looking weary himself, wringing his hands as if he was about to suddenly have a breakdown right then and there. For a moment Jesse thought he would, realizing what must have been the reason for Elizabeth and Jason not being able to stand each other after an incident like that.
Uncomfortable, Jesse looked around the room, moving towards the table that held the casket. He cautiously approached it, peering inside, noting how much more peaceful Elizabeth looked when she was lying inside the padded coffin, her scars and cuts from the accident masked by the craftsmanship of the embalmer.
There was an unexplainable unnerving quality about standing near her body. He was expecting her to sit up any minute now, as if she had been asleep the entire time, but her chest ceased to move and her eyes stayed closed. With bodies at the scene of the accident it was easier to see them as dead because of their wounds and visible injuries. When they were in caskets it just looked like they were resting.
Without saying anything, he walked out of the funeral home.
As soon as he walked in the door Amelia was there, gazing at him sadly. "I'm sorry, Jesse." She said, enveloping him in a hug. His eyes stared forward, blank and dry, but feeling an odd sensation of loss. He could talk to Amelia about anything, he knew, anything but what he had told Elizabeth. That was something that had been helpful for him to tell someone he trusted but didn't love, so that if they left him he wouldn't be heartbroken. Like if he had told Amelia - he knew she would have walked out on him right then and there.
"Thanks." He said dully, and she recognized his need for space. Heading back towards the bedroom, she left him with a final encouraging smile.
She stopped in her tracks when she heard his voice behind her. "Amelia?"
"Yeah?" She responded, turning to face him.
"Listen," he said, swallowing hard. "I really need to talk to you." It had only taken him a moment to decide that if she was going to run out on him, if she was going to leave him because of this, she didn't love him. And if she didn't love him, she didn't deserve his love in return.
She nodded. "All right."
Later that night he stayed up, after she fell asleep. She had taken the news quite well, considering it was a lot to handle. But now as he watched her sleep, he realized that this whole time he hadn't bothered to put himself in the shoes of the other person - the person on the receiving end of his story. All along he had been expecting people to understand immediately, but he had never thought about the other people who considered aliens make-believe creatures who existed only in the minds of lunatic madmen desperate for attention.
During his story she had said nothing, sitting and patiently hearing everything out - almost, he thought with a cringe, like Elizabeth did. He only saw one tear slide down her cheek silently, but he still kept talking.
And how she was asleep and he wondered if that had been the right thing to do, to blurt out everything that had happened so quickly. He propped himself up against the headboard, sitting up straight and staring straight ahead, looking at his reflection in the mirror and gazing at himself in the eye. It was just like what he had done in the bar, that night he had been with Elizabeth. The last time he had seen her, he realized, and once again wondered why he was feeling this. She was only his psychiatrist, but losing her made him feel like he had lost something much more.
"Honey?" Amelia asked drowsily, rolling over. "Is everything all right?"
"Yeah." He responded quietly. "Are you . . . " He trailed off, knowing she understood what he meant.
She began to nod, then stopped. "I don't know what to think, Jesse. But I love you and we're going to make it through this together. You can see someone else - "
"I don't need to see someone else." He interrupted angrily. "I'm not crazy. I don't need anyone else. I'm fine."
"Jesse." She said firmly. "If we could just . . . ignore this for now, that would be better. If we could just forget about it, maybe we could just pretend it never happened or something, OK?"
He almost laughed at her assumption that if they pretended it wasn't there it would go away, like a bad dream, before understanding that might be the only way to deal with the situation. "Jesse," she continued, "Just do it for Charlie. I don't want him to grow up believing his dad's crazy when I know you're not."
"OK." He said, and watched her roll her again, her breathing patterns indicating she was sleeping.
He must have fallen asleep sitting up, because he didn't remember lying back down.
"Hey, honey." Amelia greeted him with a plainly strained grin as he woke up later that morning. She was at the dresser, pushing in her earring, glancing back at him in the mirror.
"You really are trying to ignore it, aren't you?" He asked, his voice containing a hint of incredulousness. "Amelia, it's not something that's going to go away just because you want it to."
She nodded. "I know. I'm going to make some calls today, though, and see if there's someone available we can get to help you. Dr. Goodman" - Jesse flinched upon hearing her name - "helped you, and if we find someone else that can help you that much I think we can deal with this."
"Fine." He said, yawning as he stretched his way out of bed, "Did you check out that daycare for Charlie?"
"I'm dropping him off on my way to work." Amelia said, finally getting the earring to stay and turning to face him. "Jesse, I just want it to be like it was when we were first together, when we were happy." Noticing the look on his face she added quickly, "I mean, when we didn't have this hanging over our heads."
He shrugged, unsure of what else to do, and watched her rush out of the room. "I'll be back by five. Give me a call if you'll be late."
When he heard the door click shut he wondered if telling her had really been the smartest thing to do.
He called into work sick later that morning. He didn't feel he could handle more torment right now, and having to break the news of the loss of a loved one to a deceased's family member was always emotionally trying.
He had been thinking about that second session a lot nowadays, probably because it had been the first time in his life he had confided something like that to someone he hardly knew in such a short time. It was also the day he had seen Chad die, he remembered, and that brought back memories he had preferred to stay buried. Memories of not being able to pay for drugs, of having to come as close as one could with selling his soul in order to pay for them. Not to mention living alone, wherever he could, buying food with whatever money he could scrounge up at the moment. But that was before he had met Amelia, and he preferred to live in the present rather than the past.
She felt unnerved about leaving her child's safety in the hands of complete strangers, even if those complete strangers were authorized to watch her child by some obscure federal agency she had never heard of. Amelia smiled to herself as she wondered how she was going to handle letting Charlie go on a date by himself if she couldn't drop him off at daycare without having second thoughts.
When she had grown up her parents had fought more often that not, and she would sit in her room, her fingers firmly planted in her ears as she huddled under the blankets. Eventually, though, she learned to deal with it by ignoring it, trying to block out the shouting and the screaming by reading a book or writing in a journal.
She didn't want Charlie to have to grow up like that, living with two miserable people who were too busy bickering to have any time to love their child. So when Jesse had talked to her, she had gone with her old method of defense - ignorance. She realized fully how childish it was of her to believe in solving a problem by avoiding it, but she couldn't help it.
Her job was the way she got out from under the covers and stopped ignoring her problems. Being a nurse let her help others as well as herself, providing her with the satisfaction of saving another person from a fate like hers.
Mechanically, she walked up the stairs that Jesse had stumbled up so long ago in, to her, a comfortable routine. She made a vow to herself that when she got home she wouldn't try to avoid the problem, and she wouldn't make it someone else's by sending him to a psychiatrist. She would talk to him herself and sort this whole thing out.
Somewhere inside of her told her he wasn't lying. But somewhere else there was a voice telling her she didn't want to believe that, because she wouldn't let herself believe that.
