Three Broken Promises
PG. Carter/Abby. Alternate ending to season 9. I wish. Yadda. Yadda.
Well, howdy.
This was written for a coffeeandpie Christmas challenge over two years ago and I've realized that I haven't posted it here… so here I am, posting it here! I'm trying to inspire myself to finish a couple of other stories I have (growing all kinds of mould and fungi) laying around on my hard drive and I'm hoping this ritual exorcism of oldfic will help push me over the edge into finishing them.
For Crazed Energizer Bunny;
Elements:
Softly playing jazz music
A turtleneck sweater
a ring (interpret at will)
We shall not
cease from exploration
And the end of all our
exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And
know the place for the first time.
-- Little Gidding V, T. S. Elliot
i. he would always leave his turtleneck on her floor
She had known of course.
The only reason most things are made is in order that we can break them – and once it has been broken into two pieces, there's always the compulsion to press your heel down harder and watch as it crumbles into many hundreds and thousands more. Children will break telephones apart to see how they are put together – and when the bits of wire and chord are scattered around them, these unintelligible pieces that don't have any relation to the disembodied voices they hear, they will shrug and go off to break other things, stamp on their brothers Lego sandcastles.
The bible teaches us that a jealous God created this world so he could watch Eve take a bite out of that damned apple, so he could grow tired of the choices we, His people, made and would save us all from ourselves by drowning us all in a forty day flood - and yet He still expects us to have the ability to forgive and forget, when we were only made in His image after all, and He had been the first to break His promises.
We know that the universe was created in some grand explosion, and to this day parts of the universe are still exploding, are still shaken by the violence of that first one.
And she, of anybody, knows this.
But like throwing stones from a cliff top only so that she could watch them fall, listen as they met the ground beneath her, testing the depth of this height, she let the promise be made and made and made, and decided that so long as she failed to acknowledge it had, they could both pretend he had never said anything, that neither of them had any intention of holding him to it.
She told him to run and was always, always surprised when he stayed the night, her eyes dark questions in the morning, begging him why. He would never respond but would kiss her on the tip of her shoulder and make coffee, share jam and toast with her at six in the morning. And she would be confused and surprised and disappointed: not that he had made this promise, but that she had let herself believe he would stay.
That was how he made the promise so devastating.
He made the promise between her sheets, mouth to her red elbows while she slept. The promise was made with his turtleneck found crumpled on her floor the next morning (she liked it on him, she would say, but preferred him out of it. The promise was then made when he would wear the sweater the next day, knowing where it would only end up by nightfall). The promise was one made with her tee shirt and his jeans found on top of the microwave one morning, entwined together, like teenage lovers stealing a last kiss, not surprised that they had gotten there (they were always the first things to go), but surprised that his jeans hadn't slipped away during the night.
Always surprised.
He didn't need roses, chocolates, or softly playing jazz music, but she had let him use them anyway. In the same way that Lois Lane never really let on to Superman that the red cape and visible underwear were unnecessary, that he could fly without them, she didn't let him know that he already had her, he didn't need anything else. And maybe Lois had liked him in the underwear.
And she had wanted to believe in his super powers of staying, she had.
Had wanted to believe that because he hadn't thus far broken a promise he'd made to her with his eyes, he wouldn't.
After all, she had long since stopped believing in fairytales, knew full well that she wasn't one. And he was certainly no Prince. A Prince Charming for the modern day, maybe, who rode into scenes in an old black jeep, revoked his title, his wealth, untied all strings to his Royal family who could never understand him, never love him for himself, a Prince Charming who was addicted to painkillers and voted Green because he couldn't stand the cynicism of patriotic Reds and Blues and politicians who couldn't look you in the eye as they broke all their promises to you. A Prince Charming who could possibly fall in love with the cynical, chain smoking Cinderella, the Cinderella with the crazy family, an ex-husband and bottles of tequila lying in her cinders.
She doesn't think that kind of fairytale would let children sleep easily at night. You might as well let them watch the news.
He had made his promise to her and she had almost believed him.
She had almost forgotten the inevitability – that he was merely throwing stones from cliff tops. That promises are made so that they can be broken, that turtlenecks tossed onto a bedroom floor can be retrieved and that Prince Charming and happy endings don't exist and never have, other than in children's books.
The end.
ii. she would not let herself
It's a law of emotional gravity that she knows holds true: What goes up must go down.
It was Newton, or Galileo, or someone who had been burnt alive to the stake that had once said that, she was sure.
Even when she had found the ring – especially when she had found the ring – she would not let herself.
She would not let herself do a lot of things. She wouldn't let herself believe that her mother would be okay, for real this time. She wouldn't let herself believe she ever deserved children. She wouldn't let herself have that last cookie, not when she'd had the three before it.
Even in her despair, even when there was nothing left for her anymore, she knew how many glasses of wine she needed. She knew how to hide the bottles. How to hide it at work; cover it up to her friends. She knew all the tricks and lies to cover up her track marks – she wouldn't let herself be caught. By herself, mostly.
When her mother had lain in hospital, for what she believed was the final time, she hadn't let herself.
Because she was sick and tired of being sick and tired and because there was never any point and she wasn't sure that if once she started she could ever stop.
So, she told herself that it would almost be a relief, in a way.
What else could she believe?
After all, her life had trained her that from the moment of hello there would be goodbye.
When he kissed her and touched her there, there and in-between, or when he would sneak up behind her and kiss her shamelessly in public – so that everyone could see this promise being made, right there, and when she would cry to him, in the dark, entirely broken, entirely his, the next morning she would carefully remind herself: she would not.
Always be prepared. Memorize the emergency exits and the oxygen masks. Always ensure his hands are out there in front of him and that his eyes conceal no hidden weapons, any hidden feelings. Even when hers did.
But in the end, in spite of knowing the curtain call, of having the epilogue notes folded into her jacket pocket, in spite of having rehearsed this swan song every night in her head, when the door slams shut behind him, a stone hitting the Earth after being dropped from a height of years; it's already too late.
It is dark outside. Darker inside. This is not the release she had wanted.
And in spite of it all, in spite of knowing how this would end as soon as it had begun, she lets herself cry.
iii. no looking back
He keeps checking the rear view mirror earnestly, trying to imprint these things into his mind as though he has never seen them before this day – and maybe he hasn't.
Because what goes down must in turn go up.
Or go somewhere. Anywhere.
Just so long as it isn't behind him.
Behind him he had imagined a wake of desolation, isolation.
There was this now, another country, another home; another war to fight.
Children break things to learn how they are put together and maybe we grow up believing that the only way to know something entirely is to have broken it first.
In the Congo promises are broken by gunfire each morning. Stones crashing back down to earth every second of every day of the last thirty years, gravity having no mercy for anyone or anything. Not even those who had defended its existence.
Like butterflies flapping their wings in Africa and causing tornados in America, he was colliding with every stone he ever threw.
Before he had believed that the past could be undone, that baggage could always be checked at the counter and that looking back was for learning from past mistakes, not trying to find new ways to evade the same ones.
He would never have believed he would have been the kind of person to leave his entire life packed and sitting abandoned at an airport security counter (it would never fit on board anyway) as he tried to find a new home and a new everything. His entire life on the counter, but he forgot all the things that he carried upon himself; the scars, the still bleeding wounds, his name.
There are bits of her interwoven into him now. Like returning home from the beach and discovering sand at the bottom of your shoes weeks later, he keeps finding pieces of herself on him, keeps waking up to the smell of the ocean when he hasn't seen the shore for years.
In the end this wasn't his war, his battle to fight, he didn't belong there.
But he found his home there.
He found his home in the things that he remembered, that he misses.
He found his home in the laughter of the children there in the Congo, sounding so familiar and so different, his home was discovered in the tears he cried at night, in the whole heat of the Congo and how he longed for a snow storm to break into it.
Forgetting all the doubts, the fears; the wrongs of the first home.
His home is where his family are, not in blood but created through friendship, truth and love. The place he was born. Not on any certificate, but it is.
He knows now that your country is the place you can argue against but will fight for with your life.
It is a home full of dead ends and dark alleyways, has broken his heart. A city that has broken its promises with him time and time again. Not all of these streets have led him home, but he has followed them all.
His Mecca, Jerusalem, due North.
He isn't coming home wanting to build new promises but to let go of them all. To realize that the only promise he needs to keep is one for himself, to find his home wherever he is.
If she is there too, then it will not be his home. It will be his country.
And he knows he belongs to her because he has never belonged to anything, or anyone else.