Title: Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Genre: Cold Case
Rating: PG (just to be safe)
Spoilers: "The Woods" (Episode 2.23)
Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I do not own any of the characters that appear in this fanfic, no matter how much I would like to. They all belong to Meredith Stiehm and Jerry Bruckheimer.
A/N: The idea for this fic was thought up while watching "The Woods" for the second time. However, partial credit should be given to the author of "Analysis of a Heartbeat," Tifereth Kantrishakrim, for it was after reading her fic, and subsequently watching "The Woods," that I realized that I could write a fic about Lilly's thought processes for the last 15-20 minutes of the episode. Kathryn Morris really has nice facial expressions to work off of. In addition, I'd like to thank whoever put the transcript of "The Woods" up onto so that I had something to work off of other than the actually episode. Thank you! Now, on to business: Anything in italics is Lilly's thought process. Enjoy! R&R, if you please.
As her pale hands tore yards of white paper off of the wall, revealing the drawn-on whitewash underneath, things became clearer. Is that a tree? Wait…there's another…and another…
She backed towards the center of the attic. "That's why the woods." She whispered, looking around her. "This is the woods."
As soon as the words slipped from her mouth, a breathy whistling reached her ears. George. Police training taking over, Lilly reached for her gun, but stopped, staring down the barrel of the .22 Colt automatic, Woodsman series, that George had trained at her, focused right between her eyes.
"I told you long ago," he said with a slight smile "…we would go hunting in the woods." He stepped close to where Lilly remained. "They papered over the walls. What a shame."
Derision lay thick in Lilly's voice as she replied. "To hide the blood?"
He laughed, a cold laugh. "But the past never quite goes away, does it Lilly?"
She paused a moment, weighing her options of answers, finally deciding on, "No, it doesn't." As she spoke, her cell phone rang, a high, tinny sound to her ears. Scotty, she thought, reaching for it. Probably called PPD already and found I'm not there.
George stopped her; moving towards her, palm face up, he spoke softly." Phone. Uh-uh." Reaching for the phone in its holster on her belt, his fingers reached it…
…and passed it, grabbing her gun from its holster instead, backing away from her. Shit. "Oops. Weapon, I meant." Bastard. He moved back towards her. "Now the phone…and no Lilly tricks." She handed it to him without a word.
He inflated his chest to its fullest capacity. "Welcome to my past. An empty room with nothing but your mind splashed on the walls."
Time to dive in. "Your mother faked her blindness." Lilly took the first opportunity she had to speak. "Is that why you killed her?"
He gave an ironic grin. "Hysterical blindness is the term. One needs only to believe to become."
Lilly pressed on. "But you didn't understand that then. You were just a lonely twelve-year-old…in a lonely world."
George's voice and eyes hardened. "Loneliness is for the weak…and for those who desire love." Moving with surprising swiftness, he kicked a crate lying about the attic, the noise startling Lilly into jumping slightly, faint echoes coming back from the corners of the mostly empty room. The wooden box rolled towards Lilly, and George motioned her to it, indicating she should sit. Damn, that scared me. Stay calm, Lil. Don't let him get to you. "Neither apply."
"Then why did you bring me here, George?"
"To kill you." He motioned again to the crate. She sat.
"Why now?"
He moved across the room as he spoke. "Oh, hunting has become a tedious game." He picked up a chair, carrying it back with him and placing it across from her, weapon still trained on her head. Her eyes noted her own gun lying on the floor before staring up into his. "Even Atalanta lost her charm."
Shit. "The one who survived." She stared up into that smugly smiling face. "What did you do to her?" His smile widened. No…
Dee Dee…"Poor Dee Dee. How she begged. In the woods. Like you will." The serial killer sat down across from Lilly.
Attempting a swift psychoanalysis, the words tumbled from Lilly's mouth. "Because, in the woods, you're God, right?"
"God's a sociopath." The words were spat from his mouth like poison. "Free from all pretense of love and loyalty."
"Like you."
"And you. Disposing of those you purport to care for, like your dirty little sis. Sticky fingers on Lilly's hubby-to-be. A real bitch-in-heat, that one."
Even as Lilly laughed, she knew his statement to be true. "Even I don't think that about her."
"You have." He knows me too well. I can't let him control the conversation.
"Your mother was stripped…shot in the chest…"
"But in the end, you would have found another reason to leave him, hmm?" Shut UP about him.
"Just like Tina, Jane, all of them." Lilly hoped her persistence on this tangent would draw the conversation away from her, from memories too painful to bear. "You replicate her murder over and over. But why the running? Your mother didn't run."
George eyed her coldly. "Your junior college degree equips you for pop psychology and a low-level, five-figure income…not much else."
Attempting to take control of the situation, Lilly made her voice harder, firmer. "Why do you make them run? Why?"
The sociopath's smile faded. The beginnings of remembered terror crept into his eyes, making him seem much younger than his chronological age.
Lilly pressed on. Almost got him…"You were running, weren't you? Why? Trying to find help? Stop him from hurting your mother?"
George chuckled, the smug confidence returned by her misled guesses. "Her granny panties all in a bunch. Who could resist that?" his voice dripped with sarcasm. He took a deep breath and stood. "Your turn now….to tell me."
Lilly's heart stopped for a moment. Tell him what? "Tell you what?"
The coldness returned to his voice. "How little Lilly ran…long ago."
Lilly froze in fear, trapped within layers of her mind, memories of long ago. Somewhere in the distance, a cell phone rang.
George picked up the phone, calmly checking the caller ID. "Detective Valens, how nice of you to come."
Scotty? Lilly looked up in hope. He's here? Unable to hear Scotty's reply, she listened to George talk to her partner, a one-sided conversation, staring straight ahead, face emotionless.
"I never sent you my condolences, did I, about your pretty fiancé? Oh, the river can do terrible things to a girl's complexion." What the hell does he mean by that? After a pause for Scotty's reply, George put the gun next to the mouthpiece and cocked the weapon; it let forth a threatening click. "A gentle reminder to mind your manners. Now put your boss on the phone." As he spoke, George extended his arm as Lilly watched, pointing the gun at her once more. "One courtesy call. Its purpose: to disable you of storming the Alamo, guns blazing. If you call again, if I see a cop within one hundred yards of this house…I put a bullet in her head." Shit. There goes any chance of the cavalry. Another pause. "Too bad you couldn't save her." Save whom? "Your daughter. From the big bad wolf. His sharp, wet teeth." His daughter? What happened to her? "A real father would have eviscerated the thug who soiled his little girl. But you…you just talked." A longer pause for Stillman's reply. "I know all about your help. It comes eighteen years too late. And, true to form, you're too late for Lilly, too." With that, George snapped the cell phone shut, casting it carelessly aside. It clattered faintly in the dark. "So…where were we?"
Though her hope had all but flared out, Lilly's voice was confident as she dredged up the remains of her shattered courage. "Game's over. It's only a matter of time now."
George smiled ironically, ignoring her statement. "You were telling me how you ran."
Ice-blue eyes stared back at him. "You're gonna die in here, too."
"Tell me how you ran."
"No." a spark of defiance.
He laughed. "You never told anyone what happened to little Lilly long ago, but you want to tell. Mm-hmm."
"Not you."
"Well, I'm the only one left." He aimed the gun at her again. "So tell me."
Lilly took a deep breath, tears appearing in her eyes with remembered pain. " I was ten. On my way to the store. It was ... dark out, late."
"And that's when the bad man came for you?"
She nodded. "I ran." She took a deep breath, gathering her fragmented pride as she spilled her darkest secret to a murderer. "But he caught me."
"Did he touch you? In your secret place?" He motioned the gun barrel down at her. She looked away, trying to hold back the tears the wouldn't stop. A sniffle. A sign of weakness.
"He wanted my money. That's why he followed me. I gave him what I had."
"And then he went his merry way." George taunted.
She glared at him, unshed tears bright in her eyes. "You know he didn't."
"Tell me what he did." George was enjoying this far too much, his face appearing devilish in the half-light.
"He hit me." Lilly's voice sounded small even to her, like that of the child whose memories she had tried so hard to repress. "I don't remember much after that." She looked away. George seized his moment to torture her more.
"Fractured jaw, five broken teeth. Pretty little face not so pretty when he was through with you." He recited, almost gleefully.
Lilly kept her eyes averted. "I fought, but he wouldn't stop. But he just…" Tears rolled down her cheeks. "He kept hitting me, and-and hitting me…and laughing." Struggling, Lilly managed to rein her emotions in. She looked back up at George. "I didn't want to die, so I fought." George's face echoed his feelings of triumph at her admission. Lilly pressed on. "We're alike, you and I."
George almost looked interested. "How so?"
"You fought, too." He swallowed convulsively. "That's why you were bleeding. Jacob found you in the closet." The killer shook his head, though the look of panic on his face gave him away. "Cornered you."
"No." Desperation closed his throat over.
"And you fought, like me." She could almost see the scene in her head: Jacob pulling him from the closet, a struggle, and then… "Then you ran. But the doors were locked, the windows nailed shut. He hunted you down in that house like an animal." Everyone has a weakness. He knew mine. Now I know his.
"I am not an animal." The denial spoke much to the veracity of Lilly's theory. She cut him off. "That's why you pick fighters." She said. "How'd he know you were in that closet, George?" She motioned to the closet at her back.
George interrupted her in a desperate attempt to regain control of the situation. "Want to know what I'm wondering? I'm wondering who would send a ten-year-old girl to the store late at night all alone? That's what I'm wondering." He aimed the gun at Lilly again. "Who sent you to the store, Lilly?"
No, no. Not again. I don't want to go back there again. "I'd go there all the time. The owner knew me." She was avoiding the question, and he knew it.
"Answer the question, Lilly."
Tears spilled onto her cheeks. "My mother."
"Why?"
"She needed a drink."
George smiled smugly in triumph. "Sold out…by the person who loved you most. Uh, uh, uh." He rose to his feet, looming over Lilly threateningly. "No wonder little Lilly likes to play with the dead."
Lilly looked up at him, resolve evident in her eyes. "Who sold you out, George?" She also rose to her feet, though she didn't quite make his height. "Because what I'm wondering is, how did Jacob know you were hiding in that closet?" Taste of your own medicine. She motioned again to the closet.
"You stop talking." Tables have turned, George. You're not in control anymore. And I'm not ten anymore.
" 'Forgive me,'" your mother said. "For what?"
"Shut up."
"She told Jacob where to find you, didn't she?"
George was losing it, shouting now. "You shut up!" But now, Lilly had figured it out.
"Your mother wasn't raped in this attic."
He had completely lost it, screaming at her. "You shut up! You shut up! You shut up! You shut up! You shut up! You shut up!" Lilly could almost see the young George shouting at her. "Shut UP!" She finished her thought.
"You were."
George's eyes glazed over slightly as he stared at her, caught up in the memory.
"He brought you up here and raped you, and she just watched." Suddenly, the gun was back to pointing at her.
"I am God in these woods." His voice rose as he spoke, as if the mere volume of it could drown out his nightmarish past.
"No, George." She corrected gently. "You're a little boy…whose mother didn't love him…who sold him out." He nodded as she spoke before uttering softly, "Like you." She took a step toward him, but he retreated, reaching into his jacket pocket.
"It's time you learned…" Lilly's gun appeared from the pocket. He tossed on the floor between them. She glanced down, and he turned his back on her, making his way over to the window. Seizing her moment, Lilly grabbed her weapon. Suddenly feeling much more confident, though tears still lingered in her eyes, she pointed it at George.
"Down on the ground, George!" She ordered. He turned to face her.
"…about freedom."
Lilly's voice rose firmly above his. "On the ground!"
George shook his head. "When you kill me, the only thing that separates you and I is who pulls the trigger."
No. He's wrong, he's wrong, he's wrong, he's… She held the gun up, desperate now, shaking slightly. "Don't make me do that. I don't want to kill you."
George spoke patronizingly to her, like a father would an errant child. "Yes, you do. That's why you came. We are alike, you and I."
"I'm nothing like you."
"You sleep with the dead. You're already halfway there. And when you kill me, even those photos you cling to will fade away. Like everyone fades away for you. And you will be alone. Like me."
Lilly kept the gun pointed at him, her voice shaking with defiance. "You're wrong. I'll never be like you."
George raised his gun. "Want to bet?" The muzzle was pointed straight at her.
Three shots rang out. At first, Lilly wasn't sure where they had come from, her or George. Then she realized that George was on the floor by the window, blood pooling around him. Her aim was good, even in a state of shock. At that moment, Stillman burst into the attic, in time to see Lilly holding a smoking gun…and George lying dead on the floor. As her boss made his way toward her, Lilly's arms lowered, though her eyes still stared straight ahead. Barely realizing what she was doing, Lilly turned to go, passing the still-warm firearm off to Stillman as she did so. Her mind was blank, her memories of the past 5 minutes fuzzy, though everything up until then was, unfortunately, perfectly clear. Walking down the stairs and into the back yard, she stood there. After an indefinite period of time, she looked up at the window where George had been before he was shot: before she had shot him. Looking closely, she could almost see the faint outlines of a boy and a woman, as though the shades of George and Simone Marks were staring down at her even as she was staring up at them.
From her peripheral vision, she saw movement. Turning her head, she saw the whole unit emerge from behind some bushes. They are my family now. Not Chris. Not mom. Them. Scotty, Vera, Jeffries, Stillman…no matter what, they're always there for me. Wordlessly, Lilly turned to go, walking past them in silence until the Marks' house was out of sight, but not quite out of mind.