Next chapter- I promise this story will be happy at the end (it has a nice fluffy ending)- but this chapter and the next one won't be-sorry.
Tony wasn't aware of how much he'd had to drink, but it wasn't helping. She was everywhere, she had been ever since that day. Jack had taken him home. It had broken his heart, everything was the same, nothing had been moved or changed. The only thing that was different was the spare room now served as her bedroom, he guessed she couldn't bear to sleep in their bed alone. What made it worse was that the only thing she'd left out of place was a picture of him. He'd found it amongst a pile of empty bottles that were littered on her bed. What had he done to her?
Jack was still here, sat on the sofa, had been ever since. Something in Tony guessed he might be grieving, but only a very small part. That overpowering hatred was still there, it had just been somehow disguised.
Jack was copying Tony, drinking copious amounts of alcohol and drowning himself in memories. He could measure his life by the funerals he attended, although Michelle's had been the worst, even worse than Teri's.
The memorial had been that morning, not a funeral as the explosion destroyed all the bodies. So she had a memorial. Except it wasn't. To everybody there, she had died years ago, even Tony didn't know the woman that Michelle had become. There were no friends, she'd cut them out of her life when they'd taken Tony away. And family was sparse, Michelle hadn't had the patience or tolerance to deal with her family. So it was just Jack, Tony, and a bunch of people who didn't really know her. At least at Teri's funeral, people had been sad to lose her, at least people had cared.
Even her gravestone had been empty, it had simply said her name and dates. Tony had wanted so much to be able to write, "Loving wife and mother," but hadn't been able to. They had never gotten around to starting a family, that was why the job at Langley had been so important, a chance to have a stable job with fixed working hours. He was going to have a little girl with long dark hair and Michelle's temper and a son who he would teach to swear in Spanish, just to wind her up. But they had wanted to wait, and now she was dead. So he was never going to be able to write, "Loving mother."
And as much as he had wanted to be able to write, "Loving wife," he just couldn't bring himself to. They had only been married for a matter of months when he was arrested, and in the last 6 years he had only seen her a handful of times, it would be a lie if he were to write that, and she wouldn't want him to say it. So instead it her grave was marked with a plain black stone bearing only her name and dates, hiding all she had done for the country that she had died for.
Jack had come back to her house with Tony, that building which made him feel so ill. Not that it made any difference. He felt ill continuously. Michelle was dead. His only link to the world was gone, and he missed her. He missed her so very much.
And being near Tony made it worse. Tony would repeat over and over, "She wasn't a field agent, she wasn't supposed to be in the field." Jack knew this, and he knew that Tony needed to say it, but it was so irritating. Michelle had done the same, her motto had been, "He should have let me die." He had got annoyed at that too, and so had turned around to her and asked her what she would have done if the situation was reversed. That devastated look in her eyes answered for him. She would have let him die, she would have chosen her duty, and it was killing her. So he let Tony have his rant, no matter how irritating it was.
He wondered why he was still here. He should have gone home days ago, but couldn't. He owed something to Tony, he couldn't leave him the way he was. There was something not right in the way that he looked at people.
Plus there was still the matter of the pardon. He needed to be there to protect Tony. At first he had thought that it was just some legal loophole, but then he realised, Tony's pardon was only valid if Michelle completed her mission alive. And she hadn't, so his pardon wasn't valid. They could take him back to prison. He was just waiting for the phone call.
It came, several drinks later.