A/N This isn't a happy fic, if you haven't noticed already, and it just gets worse and worse and worse. And worse. And did I mention it's even angstier than Long Slow Burn? Only in this one there's no nightmares. Well, none yet, there's a nightmare scene playing in my head that I don't know if I'm going to fit in here or someplace else. I'm still not all that fond of the way that it's turning out, but it seems to be going over pretty well...I think my complaint with this is that it's a lot more dialouge heavy than anything else I've written short of the script I'm working on, I usually try to avoid dialouge like the plauge, but it's hard not to tell the story through it in this case.

He stared down at the small yellow pills in front of him. Just crush one up. Not so bad. Easy. It wasn't as if he hadn't done it before. He reached for one of the two spoons and placed the pill on it. Forty dollars each. A rip off. But it was worth it. He had the money, he could afford it. He had just nestled the other spoon on top of it when there was a knock on the door. "Go away Jordan." He knew who it was. The knocking grew more persistant. "Don't want you here."

"Tough, I'm here, now let me in or I'm breaking in." He sat there and he heard her scratching at the lock.

"You meant it, didn't you?" He asked, opening the door to find her crouched at the level of the lock.

"Yeah. I did." She held up a bag of Chineese.

"Are you trying to redeem me by singlehandedly bringing every single takeout place in the city of Boston back into the black?" She laughed slightly and kicked up on the couch. He stood to the side for a minute as she looked over what was spread on the coffee table.

"Garret you weren't going to-" He gave a small snort.

"What does it matter?" She glared at him.

"What does it matter? You've spent the better part of your life trying to get away from this and here you are-"

"Here I am what? The secrets out, everyone knows what I was, it's no big surprise if I go back to it." He grabbed the spoons from the coffee table pressing down on the top one, crushing the pill into a fine powder to prove his point.

"What you were. Not who you are." He laughed slightly and tapped the powder out onto a jewel case from some CD that he had left out, pushing it around with a credit card.

"It's still a part of me. You never quite loose your taste for it. You can go without it for years and years, but it's still there in the back of your mind-the only reason why they say it gets easier by the day is because each day you get more and more used to doing without. Not because you don't want it, not because you don't crave it, you just get used to the cravings."

"So? You've gone a quarter of a century without it-"

"And I'm sick of having to wake up every morning with that nagging thought in my head that one line won't hurt. I'm sick of thinking about it. I'm sick of wanting it so badly that I can taste it, that I can feel it without quite having it. It doesn't matter any more." He formed two matching lines with the powder, looking at them as he rolled up a dollar bill.

"You don't have to do this you know, what are you trying to prove with it?" He shrugged as he toyed with the bill.

"Not trying to prove anything. Just miss the feeling. I can do it guilt free now, it's not like I have to worry about screwing up my job or anything with it. It's not like I have to worry about getting hooked again. Even if I do, it doesn't matter." He could see the pain in her eyes as she reached out for him. He half wanted to shrug off her touch.

"Garret, please, don't." He met her gaze. He'd never heard that tone from her, she sounded so hurt. He sighed and set down the dollar, careful not to disturb the powder.

"I suppose it can wait. I've gone twenty five years, what's another few hours?" She glared at him. "I told you to just leave me alone and forget about me though. Save yourself the trouble. That's all I am." She looked at him, that same sad look she had given him minutes before.

"You're a good man-"

"I pretend to be a good man. The act's up. No use in pretending any more." She glared at him. "Look, just because you believed the facade that I put up-"

"It wasn't a facade." He rolled his eyes.

"How would you know? You're not the one who lived it." She wasn't the one who hid behind a mask of stoicism, of doing the right thing. She wasn't the one who acted as if everything was perfect in his life, when in reality all the perfection was just a lie.

"You had to actually be the man you pretended to be-it was just who you became." He gave a snort of laughter.

"Every single morning I've thought about going back to this," He gestured down at the table, "First it was Maggie that kept me going, then it was Abby, then it was work, then it was the urge to prove that I was better than everyone else. Now I have no reason to prove myself, no reason to be better than anyone. Nothing to stop me now."

"I'm not a good enough reason?" He looked at her.

"Jordan-" She stared him down. He didn't know. He honestly didn't. "Look, I told you to just leave, If it's going to hurt you, best to get out now while the going's good. Save yourself and all that good crap." He reached for the dollar bill.

"If you do that I'll-"

"You'll do what? What can you do? There's nothing you can do to stop me." He could see the tears welling up in her eyes and he looked away.

"You're so damn selfish you can't see past your own gratification, can you? That's all that concerns you, yourself." He laughed, a rich full laugh, but one with no humor behind it.

"You know, I never thought you were that stupid as to have never noticed before."

"You don't give a damn about anything but what pleases you, do you? You don't care about the way it effects other people. You don't have a caring bone in your body, do you? It's no wonder that Abby hates you-" He glared at her.

"You don't need to point that out." He rolled the dollar bill between his fingers, playing with it, waiting for her to leave.

"Yeah, well I think I did. What'll it take Garret, what'll it take to stop you?" He shook his head.

"Nothing. Like I said, just leave me in peace, and forget about me, save yourself the grief."

"I'm not just going to give up on you and let you waste away."

"Why not?"

"Would you let me get away with this?" He looked at her. She had a point. He would have stopped her, he would have chained her to her bed if he needed to to stop her from going down this path. But only because he knew what lay down this path, he knew what was going to inevitably follow. But he didn't care.

"No, but you haven't already fucked up your life."

"And you know that how?"

"Because when I met you you were a burnt out med student who went straight into med school after college, and who went straight into college after high school who had a loving, if dysfunctional family, and you can actually remember your entire life. You don't have a years long void where your past should be because you were too strung out to remember it. You don't have skeletons in your closet. A few bones perhaps, but I've got an entire graveyard."

"And you changed, you put all that behind you."

"I buried it. That's what you do with skeletons, you bury them. And they all just clawed back up like some bad zombie flick."

"But this isn't the movies." He shrugged.

"No. Movies you can stop and rewind. You can't rewind a life. It's over and done, it's all come out, only thing left to do is take the edge off the pain." She sighed.

"So you're really going to do this? Just give up?"

"What's there to fight? We're running in circles with this, just give up, please. For your own sake."

"I'm not giving up on you Garret-" He shrugged. "-I'll stay here all night if I have to."

"Well then, sit and make yourself comfortable." He rerolled the bill and she just looked at him. "I told you to leave. You didn't. Therefore-" She just shook her head. Somehow that made him feel worse than if she started screaming at him.

"Therefore you're just going to throw your entire life away." He shrugged.

"I already did that. Either leave, or stop having this conversation, it's getting redundant. He leaned his head forward, it was a motion that was so easy to get reaccustomed to. He hadn't done this in years, but it came back naturally to him. He looked up to find her staring at him, slightly shocked, but he tried not to think about her, and instead focused on inhaling the line of fine powder in front of him.

He pulled away to find her still staring at him, tears in her eyes, but not crying. She was refusing to let any tears fall over this. He smiled slightly as the feeling started to wash over him, as the pure unadulterated bliss hit. "Why?" She asked as he leaned back against the couch, relaxing.

"Because it's good." He leaned back and closed his eyes, letting the nod overtake him.