Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.
The Man who Died Twice Part 2
It had been a rollercoaster of a day. He had started it so excited about beginning a new life together, fairly bursting with ideas and getting so far ahead of himself that Amanda — who had usually been the one to make him see that sometimes love was more important than common sense — had brought him back down to earth with a thud. He finished the day absolutely terrified of the thought that someday he might be in Khai's place: leaving behind not only a grieving widow, but two stepsons who had been abandoned yet again by a man who should have been there for them.
She clung to his shoulder as he drove them away, away from Chinatown and Khai's devastated family, tightening and loosening her hand as her thoughts clearly wandered around the day they had just spent so strangely. It was a bitter irony that now that their thoughts seemed to be running on the same track, they were almost exclusively about how impossible their future really was.
Somehow in all the excitement of loving Amanda and being loved back for perhaps the first time in his life, he had lost sight of one of the principal reasons he had never married: life was too dangerous for a spy family.
He looked over at her, and finally said the things that had been plaguing him ever since they left Khai's family.
"That could be you, one day — talking to strangers about your dead husband, trying to unravel the truth about his death, knowing you'll never find it."
"I know," she said, dully.
"Not your typical two-career family, huh?" he asked, reverting back to the bitter sarcasm that shielded his deepest desires from his own better judgment. He dropped that tone just as suddenly, as the doubts and fears he had about a marriage with her rose to his lips like a tidal wave. "One of us may not come home for dinner, ever. They've got Khai's little boy, Amanda. That could be Phillip or Jamie."
"I know," she repeated, her voice tinny with the strain of trying not to cry.
He thought of them and the round little faces he had seen, shaded by blue baseball caps, when he went to one of their games in order to talk to Amanda. He thought of the fear he'd seen when the EAO sent its henchman to kidnap them at school. He thought of himself as a boy of five, losing his parents and bouncing between relatives until he went to live with his uncle on an Air Force base.
It was no way for children to live.
He opened the back door, hearing Phillip and Jamie bickering ceaselessly. They didn't know how close D.C. had come to utter disaster. All they knew was that dinner had been less than wonderful. It was comforting, somehow, that their most pressing worry was that Phillip's cooking tested the limits of a teenager's iron stomach.
She joined him in the little gazebo, as he told her about their success in stopping Diem's attacks. She was relieved, he thought, at hearing that Khai's family was reunited and relatively safe in California.
"No one's ever completely safe in this job; you know that," he said, his voice so gravelly he felt as if he would never be able to speak normally again. "That's what I want to talk to you about. Amanda, uh, the horses and the softball games in the backyard are gonna have to wait."
He knew it wasn't breaking her heart the way it broke his — she was allergic to horses and she'd been to plenty of softball games. Somehow he'd set his heart on it, though. For a brief space of time, he had given himself over completely to the allure of a tantalizing vision of home and family and children and staying outside with them as dusk deepened to night and the fireflies began their twinkling dance under the light of countless stars.
"I know that," she said, and her voice was very kind.
"But I am going to marry you, Amanda King," he went on. "Except it's gonna have to be a … a mystery marriage. Because if it isn't, one day our family might get in trouble, just like Khai's."
He hung his head, saying a silent but regretful goodbye to the life he had pictured so vividly.
"We'll make the best of it," she said, a little haltingly, almost as if she knew the painful struggle he had been experiencing.
"I've got you," he said, but for once it wasn't enough. He didn't want just her. He wanted a life with her.
He was lost in self-pity when he felt her finger under his chin. He turned to her, and he saw the determination etched right across her face.
"And I've got you," she said, bracingly.
It wasn't enough, but it was more than he had ever allowed himself to hope for.
