Me, I either love this chapter or hate it depending on my mood - hopefully you guys are in a better mood than me :-) Oh, and excuse Tru's language, she is a little upset y'know.
"What was his name?" Tru demanded the moment she stepped out of the bathroom, wrapped in her robe with a towel around her hair. Perhaps she should have dressed before having this conversation, but since Jack had seen pretty much all she had to offer only yesterday, there seemed little need for any false modesty.
This time when she had woken, only twenty minutes before, there was no sense of contentment, no warmth. The comfortable silence from the first time they had woken up together was gone, replaced with an awkward stillness that neither had known how to break. Eventually, unable to stand the tension she had felt running through each of them, she had stood stiffly and marched to the shower without a word.
Jack, having not been able to force himself to leave, had moved to the kitchen, looking up from his coffee at her abrupt question. "John Bostock." He answered, knowing exactly whom she had meant. "Tru," he began againas he saw her quietly digesting the information he had given her "I-"
"How did he die?" Tru interrupted brusquely.
"He was shot during a convenience store robbery in about…" he looked at his watch "…an hour and a half. Tru-" he tried again to draw her attention, but again he was cut off.
"Which convenience store?" She asked, now sounding more irritated than simply efficient.
"Masons, on Fifth Street." Jack informed her with a sigh, growing somewhat impatient himself at her continued refusal to let him finish a sentence "Tru, I really think-"
"Thanks Jack," she once again cut him short, her tone dismissive as she moved towards the bedroom to dress "you can go now."
"What?" Jack blinked; sure he must have missed something.
"I said you can go." Tru repeated, turning only briefly to glance at him as she spoke "I know enough about the victim to save him. There's no need for you to hang around anymore."
"You're kidding right?" Jack stared at her, incredulous, a sense of déjà vu sweeping over him. He swore if she told him it was 'nothing personal' he might just have to wring her pretty little neck. "That's it? After last night, after this morning…the first time anyway," he corrected himself "it's just; so long Jack, it's been a blast, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out?"
"What were you expecting?" Tru called from where she had now disappeared into the bedroom. "A nice cosy breakfast for two? Yeah, you were really decent and I appreciate it, but that was yesterday."
"So what," Jack continued, feeling his anger slowly rising at her easy dismissal of events, "today everything goes back to normal as if yesterday never happened? Well I've got news for you Tru, it did happen and your running around acting like everything is fine isn't going to change that. Yesterday you were a wreck and correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that kind of thing goes away overnight."
"Look," Tru replied tightly, sounding none too pleased by his refusal to simply leave "I have a job to do in just over an hour, and it's your job to try and stop me. Unless you've forgotten, we're mortal enemies, apparently we don't get time outs."
"I haven't forgotten anything, Tru." Jack snapped, "But I figured the last twenty four hours might at least have changed something."
"Such as?" though he couldn't see her, Jack could easily hear the sneer in her voice.
"Well I don't know," he retorted angrily. "I thought maybe you'd have gotten over your insatiable need to be such a self-righteous bitch."
Inside he was screaming in pain as he heard the venomous words he threw at her, but as with so many wounded animals, it was instinct to lash out, to hide what he was really feeling. It was tearing him apart to think that whatever had slowly been building between them, whatever it was that had been bending, changing, allowing them the chance to not constantly be at war, had been ripped away so suddenly.
Too pre-occupied with his own frustration at the coldness of fate, it didn't occur to him that perhaps she might be doing the very same thing.
"I'm self-righteous?" Tru shouted, emerging from the bedroom dressed in black jeans and a grey sweater that hid her shapely form quite effectively (Jack's first clue that everything wasn't as 'back to normal' as she claimed), her hair falling in damp tendrils around her shoulders. "That's rich coming from you! I'm not the one who killed someone's boyfriend to prove a point. I'm not the one who dropped a dying woman who genuinely liked me off a building. I'm not the one who gave up everything that made me human to do a fucking job!"
Tru knew that the words coming from her lips were borne of anger and rage that she had to answer the calling when fate chose, no matter what she was going through at the time. Fate didn't care that she was hurting, that she needed time to heal…that the one person she wanted to take comfort from was the one person she shouldn't. When he had offered to go with her to the morgue just after they had first woken in each other's arms, though he had tried to hide behind nonchalance, she had seen that despite his complete inability to admit to caring about anyone or anything, he was at least starting to feel the connection between them growing. She had seen the emergence of a sweet, caring guy, who made her feel safer than she ever had before.
And it was just too painful.
She couldn't handle loosing this, whatever it might have become, so soon after having her world shattered by a stranger – so she lashed out, hurting before she was hurt. The cruel, heartless part of Tru had taken over, insisting that this entire thing she'd started by asking for Jack's help had been nothing but a mistake from the very start, while the part of her that had been growing steadily more attached to his softer side was shoved aside, unable to do anything but watch in horror at what was happening.
"I save lives Jack," she told him, her voice cold and accusatory, "where as you, you can't even save those who ask for your help."
The pain she saw in his eyes at her words, though visible only for a nanosecond, dug deep inside of her, making her heart twist, making her wince internally, making nausea well up and giving her the intense urge to vomit at what she'd just pulled. At the stupid, stupid thing she'd just said.
There was nothing but silence for several seconds and Tru kept her eyes on him, waiting to see his reaction. He didn't look at her, instead staring at the wall behind her head, his expression gradually becoming blank and void of any emotion whatsoever – the old Jack emerging before her eyes.
He didn't slam the door when he abruptly turned and left, he just walked out without a backwards glance. He hadn't even taken his shirt with him. And suddenly, as she looked at the blue cotton that she had intended to give back still clutched in her hand, cruel and heartless-Tru dropped back, finally slapped silly for the stunt she'd pulled, and the Tru who had revelled in their tentative truce was free, not quite able to believe that she had just sent away the person she had been clinging to so tightly, that she might have just effectively killed a good man, leaving a painfully indifferent one in his place.
With no more warning than she had been given any other time over the last two days, Tru collapsed to her knees, and sobbed.
It was over.
Just when he'd been daring to think that maybe, just maybe there was some hope that he could repair some of the damage done over the last year, that he could let himself feel something…good for once, it had to be snatched away from him. It seemed fate had been trying to send him a message when he'd dreamed of the Edison tower – he wasn't meant to help people, he just wasn't capable of it. And he certainly wasn't meant to be offering comfort to his opposite. Fate knew it, Tru knew it, hell even he knew it! He had a job to do, just as she had hers and no matter what might happen to either of them, he wasn't allowed to forget that, and this was his punishment for doing so.
Jack's shoulders slumped as he walked away from Tru's apartment feeling far more dejected than he had expected. He'd known it was coming, there was no way it could have been any different – Tru had been right about that. But if that were true he wondered, why did it have to hurt so much to walk away from her?
As he was about to pass through the foyer doors out into the street, his eyes automatically flicked to that spot where he had stood the day before, looking around for Tru in the carnage that had surrounded him. It had been his first instinct to look for her he remembered. Not to go over and double check that his target was truly dead, not to go to Richard and proudly inform him of a job well done. He had looked for Tru…and he had found her.
He thought back to those first few hours – the hesitation and the nervousness as he tried to figure out what to do for the best, the relief whenever he found himself doing something right.
"Please Jack…help me."
"I don't care if we're supposed to be mortal enemies or whatever, I just…please don't leave me."
"You want someone to blame for all this, take a look in the mirror."
"Take care of her for me."
"Typical Jack, always thinking of yourself."
"I'm not the one who gave up everything that made me human"
"You can't even save those who ask for your help."
Snippets of conversation tumbled through his mind one after the other, some good, some bad, and some pleading, some teasing. They all amounted to one thing in the end; Tru had asked for his help, and he had promised to give it, he had told her he wouldn't leave her alone. But what was he doing now if not that? He was doing exactly what Harrison and Davis expected of him, as if he wasn't capable of anything better. Was that really who he wanted to be, especially now he had been reminded what it was to care for someone, to have them rely on you, to need you? Did he really want to give that up without a fight, to go back to just being an insensitive jerk twenty four-seven?
"Hey buddy!"
An irate voice from just behind him snapped Jack from his thoughts, and he turned to face a stocky built man in a cheap suit, holding a tatty briefcase glaring at him. Jack raised an eyebrow in question and the man huffed indignantly.
"Some of us have places to be, so are you going through that door or not?"
Well now, that was the million-dollar question wasn't it?
Precious seconds were ticking away as Tru sat sobbing on the hardwood floor, yet she couldn't seem to find the strength to move. It had been ten whole minutes since Jack had walked out the door, sent away by her harsh ranting, and she ached for him to come back so she could tell him that she was sorry, that it was fate that she was mad at, not him. She would promise never to argue with him…well maybe never was too strong a word…but she would at least try to be less brutal in her character assassination of him, if only he would continue to help her ease this pain.
She began to shake as the reality that she was alone sank in, just as Ashworth had told her as she screamed. But Jack had come then, and he had told her that Ashworth was gone forever – because Jack had done his job. It was because of her nemesis that she wouldn't have to live in fear of return visits, or have to worry about seeing his sneering face should their paths have happened to cross. All because Jack didn't have her whiter than white moral code telling him that everyone deserved to be saved, no matter what they had done in the past. Right now, she felt like she was paying the price for that naïveté.
Avery had come of course, once bidden by Jack, and she had provided the kind of comfort that only your best girlfriend could – by gaining sympathy pounds in the mass consumption of ice cream and chocolate. Then there had been Harrison; touching in his overwhelming concern for the sister he loved so well, yet so heartbreaking to see as he ached at not having been there to protect her. But it was Jack who had been there to hold her when that first wave of shock and shame had jolted her out of numbness.
Maybe it had been chance or a coincidence, maybe it had even been fate playing one of it's sick jokes on both of them; but whatever the reason, it had been her opposite who found her, and though Tru knew she could pick up the phone and call Harrison or Avery or Davis or a hundred other people, she wanted the one who had been there from the beginning. She wanted the person she didn't have to explain anything to, who just went along with whatever she needed and had never judged her – he was hardly in a position to anyway.
She thought that it was her imagination, or even a little wishful thinking when she felt a strong pair of arms wrap around her body, gently pulling her to rest against a solid chest, but then she caught his scent, something sweet and spicy that was uniquely him, and she knew that he was real. Without hesitation she flung her arms tightly around his neck and buried her face in his chest.
"Hush Tru," he soothed, stoking her hair and rocking her gently "I'm here, it's okay."
"I'm sorry." She told him as she had promised herself she would, her words muffled against his shirt.
"It doesn't matter," he quietly dismissed her unneeded apology – what had she said to him that hadn't been true? "None of it matters."
Tru knew that a man was going to die in an hour if she didn't pull herself together soon, but in that moment wrapped in Jack's protective embrace, she could pretend that he was right, that nothing else mattered at all.
TBC...