A/N: Written for the Thursday100 'Backwards' challenge on LJ. Memento style.
Disclaimer: Not mine, no infringement intended.
--Lighting Down--
-
The days keep rolling into each other, but he is thankful for a friend.
"'Lo?"
"I just wanted to say thank you, Ea-Alex."
"Bobby, it's three am."
He rolls over, tucking the phone beside his head to look at the clock. Damn.
She sighs.
"Crisis over?" she asks softly.
"For the most part," he says. He feels peaceful again.
"Good. Tell me about it sometime. When I'm not trying to sleep."
He gets the dial tone.
He steps back in his mind, one foot behind the other, back through the years to the seven-year-old who wanted to fix the world.
He smiles.
"You having an existential crisis?" she asks. He's having a beer, but she's gone for a margarita. Probably just for the assault on his wallet.
He shrugs.
"A little one."
"What brought this on?"
He pauses to think, and then lets a hand drift through the air.
"You ever think… if we get too good at what we do, we'll lose the ability to care?"
Eames shrugs. "Sure. You've just got to find the care. No matter what. You lose that, it doesn't matter how good you are. You're broken."
The role is fluid, practiced, because they are the moral to this story. The bust goes down smooth, and he used to savour it like old whiskey but he's well past that now.
The husband, supposedly dead. The insurance money he funnelled. The penthouse he couldn't get his hands on. The greed. The manipulation. The boyfriend killed the girl in a jealous rage, but the not-so-dead husband drove him to it.
Carver and Deakins started a pool on how long it would take them to break, and Eames insists that Carver give her a cut.
Bobby goes to sit at his desk, quietly gathering papers.
"Come on," Eames says, suddenly in front of him, "I'll let you buy me a drink."
He and Eames sit at his coffee table, a glass of wine each and papers spread between them. It's getting late, but she doesn't seem inclined to leave and he isn't inclined to ask her to. She's studying LUDs, he's studying her, and the silence between them is comfortable.
"Why did you join the force?" he asks finally, and breaks her concentration. She shrugs.
"Dad, amongst other reasons. Why did you?"
He thinks on this. He thinks of the years, lighting down the numbers of his life. Could he count down to that point where it became important to serve justice?
Perhaps when he was seven, and realised that nothing would be right unless he made it right.
They take lunch between chasing witnesses, and the plot of this tale is falling into expected parameters. Every so often they get one that is a surprise, that makes them twist their minds in frustration and confusion, but they are becoming few and far between.
Bobby is becoming a cynic. Eames may have already been one.
The boyfriend is crying innocent but he didn't know about the baby in the victim's womb. There's a hint of another lover, and a past she tried to hide. It should seem perverse, but it's just human nature.
He watches two children with their mother, a couple of tables over. He can hear snatches of their conversation. Everything they're saying is wrong, reversed. They laugh gleefully. Opposites day, one of them says, opposites day!
In the office, in the dull early light, for just a moment he sees Eames as though she had died a horrible death.
He eats heated spaghetti at his kitchen table with the case file spread in front of him, and the similarities between congealing blood and a thick napoli sauce no longer bother him.
Her name is Angela, but even though he's seen happy snaps, he can't remember what she'd be like without all the blood. Without the death on her face.
Sometimes he wonders about his own swan song, how he will look, caught eternally in the moment when his life leaves his body.
It is too easy to picture.
A girl dead at the top of a hotel, a penthouse she owns outright but no funds in the bank. The moment he leaves the apartment, shucking bloody gloves, he can't remember what she looks like.
Eames presses the button for the elevator. She's talking, he's responding, but he's on autopilot.
The numbers light up above them, counting up. It reaches 24, and then starts going back down again. It leaves him in silence, with Eames staring at him, but he's so intrigued he can't keep talking.
Each number lights slowly back down to the ground floor, as though they never pushed a button at all.
Eames is waiting for him with a bagel and a case file.
"Why didn't you answer your cell?" she asks, brittle and stressed by waiting. He pats his pockets, and winces as she hustles him out the door.
"Still on my kitchen table," he says. She shoves the file to his chest, and he reads as the elevator counts down.
The day begins normally, with the warm smell of coffee and the cold rattle of the subway train. Bobby is lost in the faceless surge of passengers, just one more average Joe on his way to a meal ticket.
He wonders what horrors he will face today.
--fin.