Disclaimer: I don't own the WaT gang or their universe.
Title: Fallen From Grace
Summary: You can't win them all.
Rating: PG-13
A/N: This is somewhat different from my previous stories and might just be totally unreadable. Thanks to A, K, E and the MSt gang. You all rock!
Prologue
December 10, 2003
Causality – science's answer to the question why. The loyal opposing force of fate. Every effect is inevitably followed by a cause, which in turn will father a new effect. An endless cycle of causes and effects, running since the beginning of time. It was impossible to escape the clutches of causality escapable. It was cruel, blind to the destruction it might leave in its wake. But cause and effect are what gives actions meaning, because it attaches consequences to them. Actions make for responsibility because of their effects. It is what allows man to plan ahead to concoct schemes to reach his goals. It allows man to plot for gains and avoid losses, yet it also out the terrible weight of responsibility on the shoulders of man. This weight often seems to have to carry because it all is so complex and nothing ever is simple. Countless actions of countless individuals in their complex interplay make it impossible to predict any consequence that even the smallest action will have. These interactions which have shaped the course of history are impossible to navigate and everyone is flying blind. But everyone is in the game, there is no way to call a time out, our just pass for a round or two. The absence of action is subject to just the same causality as actions. Sometimes the unpredictability of what will happen because of man's actions makes it appear that he is no better of free to choose than trapped in the web of fate. No amount of planning and foresight can account or all contingencies. Even the best actions with the best intentions driving them can turn bad. The right outcome is never guaranteed and there is no insurance policy against side-effects. And in the gritty real world, intentions and actions hardly ever are pure, conflicting motives just obscure the jungle of events more, to the point where individuals can get lost. They are like the butterfly that unwillingly and unknowingly sets off a tornado affecting hundreds, if not thousands of lives in one way or another.
How so many small elements could set of events that would change lives forever? It happened every day in a small way. But this time it had happened in such a cruel and violent way, that it had left all involved stunned and hurting. They all their share of guilt to bear, they all had played their role in it, unknowingly reacting to situations while being blindly heading into disasters. None of them had had ill intentions; they had done what had seemed best at the time, what the circumstances warranted. They were all human and made human mistakes, but this time all the small mistakes, oversights and thoughtlessness seemed to have added up. From the point of justice the criminals were others, but the question remained on their minds that they should have done some things differently. On the job, they often were confronted with their own powerlessness, but this time it seemed beyond understanding.
~Samantha~
Time didn't have meaning anymore. Memories floated through her mind, like a stream running down a hill. The boundaries between dream and reality had become blurred. She was incapable of making the distinction between the two, nor did she want to. It's peaceful, the memories, good and bad, are blurred, unreal, they cannot harm her anymore, she's safe from the horrors. They are being held prisoner by the past and cannot reach her. Just occasionally the peaceful journey was interrupted by a spark of fear. It is in those moments that she became fully aware of what is going on, it is in those moments when she realized that she was going to die soon and that there was nothing she could do about it.
She didn't want to wake up, she tried to force her mind back into the dream-like state, but it had a life of its own and there was no way she could stop it. Her mind pushed towards consciousness, bringing the return of pain in it's wake. As her mind and body transitioned from blissful sleep to waking, her acing muscles accelerated to return of memory.
It were the moments between sleep and waking when sense have just barely returned and memory is blissfully absent, that have been the only moments of calm lately. But now she had been chased from that peaceful place once again. She pulled herself up, as far as her weakened arms will allow her. Pain accompanies her effort, and she has to pause several times, before she has worked herself up to a leaning position. She wonders why she keeps doing this. Tonight it'll all be over. She glances at the spot where her watch used to be, but isn't anymore. It's just a trained reaction. They had taken her watch making it impossible to know the exact time. Although it is very frustrating, it doesn't really change their situation much, if she knew the time. Insides these walls, time has taken on a whole new meaning, it has ceased to be important what time of the day, or what day of the week it is.
She has no way of telling for hiw long she has been asleep, the meals are the only way to estimate the passage of time, and as far as she can tell, her waking periods are becoming shorter. It must have something to do with whatever they put into the food, or with the blow to the head yesterday. Or maybe it wasn't yesterday. She wasn't sure. Serious head injury can lead to subdural haematoma and can manifest itself as loss of consciousness and prolonged periods of sleep as a result of pressure on the brain increasing.
She read that somewhere, it had something to do with a case. A missing scientist, something like that. The details were blurry. She could feel that the information she was looking for was right there, just beyond her reach. She gave up on trying to recall the facts. It was an exercise in futility, especially in light of her dire situation. But it didn't matter. Regardless of whether the blow to the head had resulted in more serious complications, she wasn't going to die from them. She didn't have that much time left. Something must have happened. After days of nothing happening, things had suddenly changed. Maybe they now felt that the FBI was after them. The disappearance of two agents must have give rise to a massive investigation. But in all likelihood, that wasn't going to be of any use to her. On the contrary, it might very well have been what had provoked their attackers to get rid of them for good. But it this point all speculation was pointless, unless something extremely improbably come to their advantage there was no way out. She glanced over to the other corner. Danny was lying on his idea, he didn't seem to have moved since the previous night. But his chest is till rhythmically rising and falling. Shallow, but the movement is there. He was still alive, Sam noted with relief. Part of her envied him, he was blissfully away from all this. Part of her was glad that she was awake. Not that knowing what was happening changed anything, but it left her with some remnant of control, or at least helped her uphold the illusion of it. That part of her wished that Danny was awake. She needed someone to talk to, the silence was becoming unbearable. It seemed as if the volume of her thoughts was proportional to the lack of noise from outside. Normally, in the busy and hectic daily life, complete silence is rare and usually doesn't occur unless one makes an effort to create it and even then those moments are rare. One is so used to having noise drown out part of the incessant mental banter that it become seven more unbearable when the noise suddenly stops.. To be able to escape her thoughts for a while, that's all she wanted right now. She wanted to find some peace. She wasn't so much scared, fear has long made way to resignation and acceptance. It is strange how the brain adapts to the most extreme circumstances. She had never thought that this could happen and certainly not that it would happen to her. Her own calm took her by surprise. She wasn't the passive type and never had been. As a kid, fighting back had gotten her into quite some trouble, her fighting against the world she had grown up in was the chief reason why she and her mother had not spoken in months. But now she seemed to be able to accept her fate with such passivity, which she would never have thought possible. Maybe it was whatever drugs she had been given, or maybe it was sheer self-preservation. The brain is geared towards survival. To do this, it has to adapt to the circumstances. The brain is trying to protect. Adaptivity is the key to survival. She had just learned to conserve her resources, preserving what little strength she has left. It all made sense. But she was fighting against impossible odds. A brief cynical smile crept over her face. She draws her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. The posture gives her a small measure of comfort as the waiting game begins anew. The wait for the end.
~Martin~
Right now, his statement was being read by many people, people who had the power to push careers but also to end them. It was not his career that was on the line. He was watching it all unfold from the sidelines, his only sources of information being the media, who had found a welcome meal in the debacle, and the seemingly to seldom visits from friends and colleagues. He had seen jack only once, before it all taken the final turn, heading into the downward spiral. Vivian, his father and a few agents he had occasionally worked with had been his only source of information, neither offering an untainted view. But that would be too much to expect. They all had high emotional stakes in there, not too mention their career and with that the future of their families. He only needed to make a statement about the events he had been partial to. By the point where he had been off the playing field, the real tragedy ha don't yet unfolded, although the dark shadows had been on the horizon. He had been blind to them, or had wanted to be blind to them. He had let feelings influence his judgment. He wasn't at fault, it had not been his call to make, nor did anyone cast blame in his direction. But the lingering question, whether he could have done something to prevent all this was echoing through his mind, as he shifted uncomfortable flipping the channels again in hopes if finding a newscast somewhere. His statement was as factual as possible; everything he had stated was true and had happened. It was just not all in there. Telling it all wouldn't make a difference. There was nobody to bring to justice, all it would do was cause pain and tarnish the reputation of good agents. But that was all he could do. He didn't do it to help Jack Malone, whose glaring mistakes had been what had set off the spiral of horrors. He did it to protect Sam, even though it was most probable of no use. Jack and he should have seen that she wasn't fit, they had failed. But it was too late to make amends now. He had missed his chance and so had Jack. He wasn't going to see her again; he wasn't going to be able to tell her that he didn't blame her for what had happened.
~Danny~
It was odd. It was one of those few times when he was aware that he was dreaming. He wasn't really dreaming, it was more of drifting between waking and uncertain memories. He wasn't close enough to reality to be immediately aware of his surrounding, but something told him that there was no friendly world outside waiting for him to wake up. He didn't really recall any details, but the emotion was deeply engrained his thoughts, as he sought refuge in thoughts and memories. The borderline between fantasy and memory was blurred, one fading into the other. It didn't matter where he was now, in his mind, he was again, the lonely frightened, boy sitting on his suitcase waiting to be picked up by yet another family. He had felt lost and forgotten, that was the clearest memory of that grey February day. Why he returned to that moment in his life over and over again, was not clear to him. It was just the point in time where his errant thoughts came to a rest. Time was standing still. He was sitting in his suitcase, staring out the window, seeing the mass of cars moving, the uniform hum of their engines having become habitual during days and nights. He was afraid of the unknown that was awaiting him, but he also craved release from the world he was in.
~Jack~
The sky above was the same grey as two hours ago. It was indifferent to the madness that had turned Jack Malone's world upside down. The sky was still the same as two hours ago when he had walked into the building as an FBI agent. The same clouds were still up there, chasing each other now that he was walking out, back to his car, an unemployed man. A drop of rain hit him, then another one and another. He couldn't care less. The rain was the least of his concerns right now. It was all over, a career of nearly thirty years was over. A part of what made him Jack Malone was gone. And it was his fault. He would have to live with that for the rest of his life. Technically, it was not entirely over yet. But he was suspended pending further investigation of the matter. But there had been little doubts about the outcome of this investigation. There was more than enough to put a stop to his career or pull the plug on it entirely. And influential people, including Victor Fitzgerald had an active interest in that.
But still, the bitter irony was, that he had incredibly lucky. His mistakes, oversights and misinterpretations had cost other people their lives. he had only lost his job, they had trusted him and had lost everything. As if he hadn't really noticed that heavy rain until then, he looked up at the dark grey sky, pulling his suit coat up. The world continued to turn. He would have to deal with that. There was no going back, no rewriting the past. And even of he could do, I wasn't even sure where it had all gone wrong: too many loose ends, too many cover-ups. There was still something about the bigger picture of those two cases that he was missing. He had taken too long to realize the full implications of what was in front of them. Vivian and Danny had tried to persuade him, but he had not listened to their argument.
Long after the rain stopped and night had started to fall, he made his way to the car at the far end of the parking lot. He didn't care how many people had been staring at him, he was blind to them.
~Vivian~
The office was busy as ever. Agents were going about their daily work like on any other day. She had come into the office with just that intention. It was a day like any other. That's what she had been telling herself. Yet she had the greatest difficulties concentrating on her work. She was doing a background check on a list of people involved with a disappeared car salesman. None of them were suspects, but they had to be checked out none the less. The task was tedious, but she suspected that nothing would be able to hold her attention today. No matter how hard she convinced herself that she had nothing to fo with this and that she had done everything possible to prevent the catastrophe, she still found her thoughts returning to the hearing that was about to take place in Washington D.C. Her career wasn't directly on the line and if anything her actions would be a bonus on her behalf, but that didn't chance the
Jack had made mistakes that no agents should have made, and while she agreed that there would have to be consequences, she would hate the see the career of a good agents end over this. Too many good people had already been lost over this.
