Name: The Oreos are found
Rating: M?
Description: My old fic "False"… but better. Sydney becomes Kate.
Quote: A dollar fifty's worth of liquor in her mouth, seventeen in her glass and no one ever wants to quit on bad terms. As though there was any other kind, really.
Author's notes: if anyone has already read "False", read this anyways. It is a lot different and a lot better.
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You want to run sometimes. They don't tell you that part when you become an agent but Kate knows it. Now she knows that sometimes you want to run, and that sometimes when you run, the people that you were always told would find you, the ones with the silent guns who come and quietly take your life away-
Well sometimes, if you are really, really superior at what you do, even they wont find you and then you will be alone.
For good.
And really, why does anyone need a euphemism when all that means is forever?
So she occupies the inevitable hours spent over crosswords that she secretly finds easy, with reminders that she has made her choice and that it is the one she always wanted. She drinks red wine and finds ways to fill in the crossword blanks with the wrong words- remembers that she's free now and without any of the things that came before, she can begin.
Words drop into place. Life in the cross columns and Kate can lie her way through so well. She's been doing it for years.
She also has a tendency of buying wigs.
She buys them with out knowing why. Random shades- she closes her eyes and picks, picks again when ironically, the first one is candy red- is Karaoke Magenta- is a Blue Bob and all she can think is rushing water and club lights. She wears them out, the wigs. Says:
"Yeah, it's my real hair… buy me a drink?"
Says, "Chemo, thanks for asking… buy me a drink?"
Says, "Pull my hair. Hard." and pushes the boy down again, fists on the mattress, purple strands sliding to the floor from his surprised fingers. She closes her eyes a moment and it's out of sight.
Kate collects the tangled mop from the floor at 4 AM and has vanished by 4:01- heels in her hands. The air in a silent house is colder. She steals a photograph for running background checks- realizes that fundamentally, it's no longer a pre-caution if the orgasm wasn't faked and leaves it behind with a steady hand and wobbling ankles.
Oddly, she still refuses to take life for granted. It's an extra half a block to work but Kate won't J-walk. When she stops checking the wrong numbers on her answering machine for hidden messages she thinks she might reconsider.
For now she is all moral tendencies and amoral compulsions: making false conversation with the cab driver-
My name is Gina Sorenson, Dear. Art dealer- you?
The first man she dates and their relationship consists of 27 days of roses and twenty-eight nights of small angry pinpricks adorning her hands, her arms, her ankles where the socks will hide the marks.
When Michael Douglas finds the small cats claw scar between her breasts- finds it with his tongue and his hands between her legs- well then, "I suppose this isn't working?" and he's out of her bed (upsetting), out of her room (defining), out of her sight (dangerous), and out of her life.
(The unfortunate realization this may have been exactly what she wanted.)
Despite the name, Michael's watch is a Rolex. He likes it more than she would have allowed him to like her.
She takes the fresh roses from the kitchen table, Grips the serrated stems into fists and closes her eyes. When she lets them go they fall into the sink at cross-angles. Her palms are bleeding when she turns the garberator on.
She finds it is easy to date after this. Simple enough to walk into a bar and spot the pretty ones, the ones who have money, the ones who have their parent's money- who will lie and say they sold their business last year- "some production chain. You wouldn't be interested."
"Relax," she says, pushing a red haired man against an unfamiliar hallway door. "I stalk shelves- I don't care if your Oliver Twist or Andrean-fucking-Lazarey."
She doesn't realize her reference until much later, her damp hair in his mouth and when she screams they both mistake it for orgasm.
When she is drunk she will sit alone in a bar and count the men in the room with guns, shoved in under their work pants, pant legs, suit jackets. The next morning, hovering too long beside the toilet with the temptation of placing her fingers in her mouth, she swears up and down that she'll stop doing that- counting guns, not getting drunk.
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93 days in, she meets a man who visits the shooting range, brings his grandmother groceries, sings along to Sheryl Crow on the radio and when he cuts her off in the exotic foods aisle of the Save On he says, "it's October first, I'm celebrating the month with lobster and Cognac." And of course, there is no doubt as to what he is asking.
Later, the candles have burn down one by one and James Kent is kissing cold ice cream carefully up her body on the dining room table. There is silverware on the floor and she tells herself that it isn't because it's October first. A common variable means nothing.
Perhaps that's why it ends the way it does: she's already comparing their relationship to an experiment.
They date of course. Gentle kisses and almost gentle love making punctuated by a bit back climax and his lips, placed like a raindrop between her ribs.
"One day, there's going to be a baby in there."
For the first four months, he doesn't even mind when she doesn't say it back…
It is the first day of the sixth month when he comes to her front door at ten o'clock. He comes with Cognac for the second time and she knows then, with his coat half off, "Be ready."
"Six months," he says and when he pops the cork, it sounds like a gunshot. She can't help but duck minutely- blamesher nervousnesson April Fools Day, "Trick spiders at work."
"I was doing some research today," James says while pouring. She finds it ironic. A dollar fifty's worth of liquor in her mouth, seventeen in her glass and no one ever wants to quit on bad terms. As though there was any other kind, really.
"Who are you?"He asks; pouring himself the aromatic brandy with the ease he has tried to pour indefinable things into her. "You're not Kate Jones. I know you're not Kate Jones."
She over reacts- knows she over reacts- but while he's locked in his own basement with his wrists tied and his mouth full of cotton, she is in a truck stop bathroom with a bottle of red dye and fuck America, she's always liked London.
On the drive to the airport she thinks about Shakespeare. Too poetic maybe, but isn't it always when the truth comes out?
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
So there it is, she's back to roses, and God-fucking-damn-it she hates Cognac anyways.
Oddly, it's only another two weeks before she forgets the taste of Will's tongue- Tequila and cold melting ice cream and friendship in a kiss. She had thought it was unforgettable but when she's sitting on the couch she bought from a thrift store down the street and with adult cartoons on the television, she's just thinking, "Was it cookie dough or chocolate chip ice cream?"
Memories layer over top of memories with the palest ones eclipsed before the rest. Danny, like a deep wound, was most memorable in his death. But then, of course, so was he, eventually.
Lips. Eyes. Nose. Hands. Smile.
Electric blue in the storage warehouse; giving her his heart and his father's watch.
Lips parted, Eyes open, Nose broken, Hands tied. Someone was Smiling when they did it. If there was one small thing that undid her it was the idea that somewhere a mouth turned up in the corners before they pulled the trigger. She wasn't there. She didn't see.
The funeral was beautiful. Arranged by a mother who was surprisingly wealthy- surprisingly better at dealing with these things than Sydney was. "We all knew it was a risk, dear," said the mother through a black mesh veil and a tight-lipped grimace.
Sydney stopped believing in Santa Claus when she was 3, before she understood the idea of it all. After the funeral she stood outside the cemetery on the cooling sidewalk for hours, thinking. In the end, she decided that was very likely the problem: she had never believed in things she could not see.
Lucky for Kate, it is the same disbelief that will allow her to forget about a man in a basement tied to a chair. The same man who had told her the week before that the maid only came by every Friday. If she left James on a Monday then she's essentially a murderer.
Now Kate lives alone. There is no one to believe in around here. The last is Jack and his time is running out. "If he hasn't found me by September…" she thinks, and that isn't desperation. That isn't anything like hope.
Before dawn outside the cemetery, Sydney came to the conclusion that despite how much she had to lose (or maybe because of it) she was quite alone. She walked the fifteen blocks to her house, packed a bag and left.
It had occurred to her that people might come after her.
It had never occurred to her they might not.
She is Kate Jones, assistant manager of Butcher Boys Supermarket and Deli. She dreams about gun shot residue and goes to work early. Makes code names out of ingredients in cereal boxes and stays late until Ray the crate packer, takes her gently but firmly by the elbow and drives her home. This happens often enough that he knows where she lives without her having to give directions. She drops her apron by the door and cries in the shower when she realizes Ray knows where she lives, likely better than she does.
Rarely she buys a new chair for her kitchen table, rarely she watches an entire television program without turning the sound down and listening to the static. Very rarely she'll bring a man home and feed him pasta sauce from a spoon until he gets tired of waiting and takes her into the bedroom. Mostly, she doesn't do any of that and mostly she doesn't remember before. She could memorize bar codes and do her job faster but it's not like anything at Butcher Boys Supermarket and Deli is ever life and death.
At the end of a double shift, when she removes her nametag she doesn't even read it.
Kate knows the sound of Austrian heritage in an Australian accent. She also knows that they are out of Oreos in the snack aisle. Of the two she tends with the latter and goes from there.
"Have you checked in the fudge chipper's box? They get mislabeled a lot."
The Oreos are found. Kate always knows where things are hiding.
But then, isn't that what an alias is about?