TITLE: Things Behind the Sun (12/12)
AUTHOR: C. Midori
EMAIL: sockslesshotmail.com
CATEGORY: Drama (JC/AL/SL/LK).
RATING: PG-13
SPOILERS: Seasons 6, 7, 8 (except "Lockdown"), and for the prequel Through the Door.
ARCHIVE: Do not archive without permission.
DISCLAIMER: This story is based on characters and situations owned by Not Me, etc. No money is being made and no copyright infringement is intended.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: A final round of thanks to everyone who reviewed TBTS11: Lilkimi88, ceri, daburgh, not-so-dumb-blonde, mardia, enigma00, Fran, Lana, missa, ceb, heather, jakeschick, JD, and gotluka'scookies. The opening quotation is from Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese". Endnotes to come.
SUMMARY: The end, and the beginning.
;
EPILOGUE
Homecoming
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
;
He knows she is gone from the moment he wakes.
The morning has dawned cold and clear like glass, and the few clouds that linger are the fingerprints smudged against the horizon. Outside, the trees are starry with rainwater; their trunks wet and sparkling, their dark limbs sleeved in jewelry light. The shadows they cast sputter like a reel of film unwinding across her face, and across the place in his bed where she should be beside him.
He wakes with a crease on his face, a funny taste in his mouth. Outside, cars drive by (maybe they drive by her), and he hears the slice of their tires through gutter water, the staccato silence that follows. In the space of that silence he wishes for the sigh of mattress springs and the sound of her waking. He knows what it's like to fall asleep next to her, to close his eyes and to listen to her breathe. (He wonders when it became enough.) He imagines what it might be like to wake to her, their limbs splayed across the bed and each other, her hair stirring as she breathes, her eyelids fluttering as she wakes.
His cigarettes are gone. She must have taken them when she left, he thinks. In his head he can see it all too clearly: it's dark, she finds the half-empty pack by touch, and she pockets it with his lighter. She flees, not thinking, not feeling, breath coming fast, hands clenched inside her jacket pockets.
She walks quickly, because she knows she's made a terrible mistake. The wind cuts like a pair of silver shears at her lungs; she shivers. She doesn't know how to explain it to him. She doesn't even know if she can. In college she studied English--she can write tomes on the Odyssey and "To Marguerite" and James Joyce--but she can't have an honest conversation with herself to save her life (or his). How can she explain it to him, when she can't even explain it to herself?
In the bathroom he discovers that his toothbrush is still wet. (He feels faint, suddenly exhausted; it's the only part of her she's dared to leave behind.) The sink is cold and blindingly white beneath the palms of his hands; it's as if the sink is bleaching him to match as he feels the color drain from his face. Or maybe that's just the slow collapse of his heart. It's hard to tell, sometimes.
He is still holding the toothbrush when he slumps to the floor.
There are several things in her pockets: his cigarettes, her hands, a Christmas card in its envelope. The flap is undone, the seal is broken, and in a way it's Pandora's box. What's out is out; what's done cannot be undone. What's left is a word--a word she thought she buried with her mother, a word she thought she'd never live to see again.
(Of course. In college she studied English; she remembers what's left.)
He's done laughing. Or crying. Both. Finally, he raises his head (himself from the dead). He stands in front of his mirror and he stares at himself. Everything's broken, everything's gone. And he's got nothing left to hold on to but a piece of cheap plastic.
When he leaves he doesn't bother to brush his teeth. Just in case he can't find her.
She walks as fast as her legs can carry her. She fears she will collapse, she fears she hasn't much time. She fears. She veers--away from the river, down a street lined with apartments and trees. Every curtain is drawn, every shade is half-mast, like an eyelid heavy with sleep, and she sees herself mirrored in the windows. It almost surprises her. She's a heretic, a heathen who burns her books and her bridges, and she thinks that a person for whom gods are no more than rumor and faith is no more than hearsay should not cast so strong a reflection.
But she does, and she cannot help but catch glimpses of herself.
He walks with his head down. He keeps his fingers crossed the whole time.
The apartment is quiet, abandoned, stale with cigarette smoke and sleep when she enters. The door is unlocked. (She left it that way.) She walks through the door and sits at the edge of the bed. The mattress slopes under her weight, the weight of all her regrets and mistakes, dark things, things behind the sun.
But she waits with the sun on her face.
By the time he reaches her apartment the sun is strong and the sky is shot with gold. He shields his eyes but cannot see inside her window. So he pushes the buzzer--once, twice, three times in total--
He holds his breath.
He waits.
Her heart is pounding, her hands are in her lap. As is the card. Which she opens to read again; she's read it so many times she feels as if the sheer exertion of her effort has smudged the ink to fill the spaces between the lines on her skin. The way time expands to fill the space between her, and him. She watches it compress, fold in upon itself like an accordion. She tells herself this is it, and she knows they will never be the same again.
Nor would he want them to be.
One day she finds herself sitting on a bed that belongs to a man whose kindness she once repaid with cruelty, a man she once left, and she is holding a message from a man for whom kindness and cruelty have no meaning, a man who once left her. It is on that day she realizes love--a language so foreign to her, so cryptic--is a language like any other language, and can be learned.
And she hopes there is forgiveness enough for them all.
;
She does not answer the door.
How long he waits, he does not know. Eventually, he realizes that there is not enough time in the world he can wait to make her come to him. So he leaves, though he does not know where to go. Back, he supposes; it is the only way he knows.
Powerless, bereft, he walks along a river corrugated by the wind and past houses whose windows stir with the sound of children. His eyes never leave the ground--except for once. Wild geese fly overhead, their cries sharp in the cold clear air, and their wings cast shadows that race each other over the waters. He can hear them calling to each other even as he opens the door to his apartment.
He drops the keys he never used to lock his door on his coffee table, and he throws off a coat he doesn't bother to watch land. Blindly, he makes his way to the bedroom, to a room that once held him, her, everything. He realizes he never once thought of her as his, he never once let himself.
But now that she is gone he decides to let himself pretend. Just this once.
And it goes something like this.
He imagines them happy. He imagines lazy afternoons. Sundays. An old rowboat. The one that belonged to his grandfather. He imagines them flinging their arms over its weathered sides. Dangling their hands in the water, leaving trails like fireflies, love and the whir of dragonflies in their ears. He imagines the way she tilts her head, in that way of hers that borders on the defiant. He imagines the way she raises an eyebrow when she sees him. Her eyes are wide and curious, her lips slightly parted, her bones full of fear and wonder when she looks at him.
No, really, she is looking at him.
His eyes snap open, and suddenly he is looking at her back.
It seems a long time before either of them says anything. She's sitting on the bed, his bed, with a card full of creases and a lapful of stolen cigarettes. He thinks he's never seen anything more beautiful in his entire life.
Until she smiles. A real smile, with some sadness in it, but mostly happiness--and, when she speaks, not a little bit of irony.
"What took you so long?"
FIN.