A/N: a sincere thank you to everyone who's left a comment on this here thing. honestly, if i'd known how gruelling writing it would be, i probably wouldn't have begun, so extra special thanks go to the inestimable ziparumpazoo, who's had to read three versions of this particular section and never fails to help.


A horse kicked him once when he was a boy. It had been a hard, hind-leg kick to his solar plexus that folded him in half and hurled him backwards into the dirt. In the endless seconds before he was swallowed by the hot agony of the blow, the world had been nothing but silence, and he'd lain paralyzed in that silence, curled on his side like a question mark, suffocating.

The memory is alive in Walt as he stares at Travis, mouth open, with an engagement ring and something like an ultimatum on the desk between them.

Either you give it to her or I will.

He can't breathe.

The word suffocation comes originally from the Latin suffocat-, meaning stifled, which in turn comes from the verb suffocare, derived from sub-, meaning below, and fauces, meaning throat.

"Did you know she was pregnant?" Travis demands.

Her and this baby.

Walt closes the ring box and slides it back across the desk. "It's really none of my business."

To suffocate is to be stifled below the throat.

Travis makes a frustrated sound. "Do you even care?"

Below the throat sit the lungs.

"When Vic wants me to know, she'll tell me."

Below the throat sits the heart.

"So it doesn't matter to you that she's out there getting kicked in the stomach and delivering search warrants when she's supposed to be having an ultrasound?"

Restrain is another synonym for stifle. Appropriate irony for a man who's always prided himself on his restraint.

There's a fist in Walt's gut with a stranglehold on his viscera. "She knows how to do her job. She knows how to ask for help if she needs it."

Travis flings his arms wide. "She doesn't know what she needs!"

The explosion fizzles quickly, like a damp ignition fuse, but it jolts Walt fully into the moment.

All at once he's reminded of Sean.

Standing on the other side of the desk, Travis seems less like a man than a child radiating impotent defiance, a sulky toddler who's not getting his own way. The performance feels keenly familiar. Like Travis, Sean had tried to exercise petty measures of control over Vic. Like Sean, Travis will be the architect of his own disappointment.

Walt gets to his feet slowly. Whatever he says now will go unheeded, he knows, but for Vic's sake he has to try.

"It doesn't matter what I think, or what you think, Travis. Vic is an adult. She's entitled to make her own choices, and we have to respect them."

Travis bristles as though the words are some sort of challenge. "All I know is that she's not taking care of herself right and somebody's got to do something about it before she gets herself and the baby hurt."

Walt thinks of muscling a stranger's car off the road in a blind rage to get to Malachi, and of Vic holding back his bulk with her own body. He always forgets how much smaller than him she is. Strong and tough and with a presence that fills the room, but physically smaller, very nearly delicate.

Even so, she doesn't need anyone to take care of her; she wouldn't let anyone who tried. But someone to watch her back, the way she's always watched his, that's something she needs. That's something Walt hasn't done very well for far too long.

"It's not your place to decide how Vic should live her life. Just like it wasn't your place to tell me about her being pregnant." He holds up one hand when Travis opens his mouth to interrupt. "You had no right to do that."

Travis shifts back and forth on his feet, jaw working. His resentment is almost palpable as he goes on the attack. "So you're not gonna do anything? You're just gonna let her keep risking herself and the baby?"

"What I'm going to do is respect her right to make her own decisions," Walt says firmly, refusing to be baited. "And I suggest you do the same." He walks over to the door and holds it open. "Go home, Travis."

Snatching up the ring box, Travis strides out with a sullen look on his face. His heavy, booted footfalls echo loudly down the stairs until a final slam and clatter fades into silence.

The low flame of anger that had briefly sustained Walt flickers out and leaves him cold. He sinks down into his chair, the demand of gravity feeling stronger than it did a few minutes ago.

All around him the office, the building, is still and serene; he'd been about to go home when Travis arrived. Now he studies the room and its shadows, trying to recall how it had looked before Victoria Moretti strode in and filled up the space, before she remade it just by being here.

He can't.

The clanking rattle of a car with a broken muffler blunders through the quiet. Walt gets up and walks to the window, presses his palm to the cool glass. A gibbous moon hangs low in the sky, just visible above the trees in the square. They stand motionless in the absence of wind. Scattered across the darkness overhead burn the tiny fires of millions of far-flung suns. Their immense distances reduce the massive bodies to flecks of shattered glass on asphalt. Just bits of broken, useless things.

You just want me to let you crash and burn? Save myself?

Walt turns from the window as memory pierces him with a sharp, sweet pain.

Vic had been what steadied him after Sawyer's talk of suspension. Her voice had lead him from the tangled wilderness where he'd been lost and into mid-morning sunlight that poured over them like honey. Her eyes had been so earnest and clear. Her faith in him had been so certain, so unsullied, in spite of everything.

Even if you were guilty... I couldn't do that.

He'd thought it meant she still loved him.

Now his chest feels cavernous and it hurts to breathe, to swallow. Clarity slices through him with all its brilliant cutting edges, unerring as a knife between two ribs. Why would she, asks a vicious part of himself, when you threw her love back in her face like a self-righteous prick?

Wisdom is a bitter harvest to reap.

Walt takes the bottle of Lagavulin from his bottom drawer and sets it on the desk. The night he'd walked out of his office, bottle in hand, hoping to talk to her, to really talk — she must have been pregnant then. The signs are so obvious now: her illness, the tea that's replaced coffee in her mug, the wistfulness in her voice when she'd asked him about living a safe, simple life. He'd just been too self-absorbed to see how the pieces fit together.

Leaning back in his chair, he studies the way the darkened windows reflect the glow of the lights hanging from the ceiling. They seem suspended in mid-air, amorphous golden blobs in a sea of black. From here they cloak the view beyond the glass. From here it appears that nothing else exists.

It's such a simple deception, this literal trick of the light, but it awakens in him a sudden and painful understanding. For months he's been dwelling in a room just like this one, surrounded by windows showing him only his own reflection. He's accepted it as all there was to see and never bothered to look farther.

The depth of his own arrogance is breathtaking.

All these months he's been presuming the wrong mythology. Orpheus and Eurydice is not their metaphor. It's Echo and Narcissus.

Walt pours himself two fingers of scotch and returns the bottle to its drawer. His throat aches. The glass warms as he holds it between his palms, studying the way light glints and refracts from its surface. The scotch itself is tawny, the same yellow-brown of Vic's eyes on evenings when nothing much is happening and she sprawls in the chair across from him with her booted feet propped on his desk. Those evenings when she used to.

Almost since the day she came to work for him, Vic has been his most unwavering support. His constant amidst chaos. And what has he done but take her for granted and push her away? What has he ever done but demand more and offer less?

He's never imagined himself capable of the kind of jealousy that roared to life the moment Eamonn O'Neill rolled into the room with Vic's coffee mug in hand. At times it seemed to erupt across his skin like electricity, as though with the slightest contact he'd give off sparks. Brutal and huge, it took up all the space inside him until it was compressing his organs and straining at the bones of his skull.

Vic had betrayed their tacit understanding. That's what Walt told himself at the time. The one that said she would wait as long as he needed; the one that said she was his. Never mind how unfair it was to her; never mind how unbelievably selfish it was of him. That's how he'd justified his anger and resentment. That's how he'd justified everything.

So when she'd called him on his behavior, the way she always used to, the way she doesn't anymore, he responded with indifference. He hurt her knowingly, callously, and with a kind of bitter triumph.

Because he really is that much of an asshole.

But instead of backing down, she'd come at him with all the wild courage inside her.

Whether you like it or not, your life, it impacts mine.

She'd tried to make him see and he'd refused. She'd walked away and he had let her go.

It was easy enough later on to pretend that the ashes he tasted were only the remains of a burned-out car. It was easy enough to pretend he could wash them away in another woman's mouth.

Here in the hot white glare of hindsight Walt feels flushed and clammy with shame.

He sets his glass down on the desk and gets up, possessed by a restless need to do something. It spurs him through his inner door and along the short, dim hallway, until he finds the urgent sense of purpose stalling out beside Vic's desk.

How many times, he wonders, has he stood in just this spot? How many hundreds of times?

Something glints from the stack of manila folders in front of him and he reaches out to free a long blonde strand of hair. For years he's been finding them stuck to his coat, drifting through the Bronco, caught between papers on his desk, like little banners proclaiming Vic was here. This one is almost the length of his arm; they'd been shorter when she first arrived. Even then he'd been glad to see them, these silent, friendly reminders of her presence all through his life.

Walt's gaze wanders over the few personal items on her desk: the rinsed and upturned Eagles mug, the hockey puck she plays with when she's thinking, sunglasses she may want come morning. Does she have more than one pair? He imagines himself slipping them into his pocket and driving to her place. He sees her surprise and her slightly baffled smile. She might invite him in, might even offer him a beer. They'll sit opposite one another the way they did last time, leaning in so close they'll be breathing each other's breath.

"So what's up?" she'll say and he'll take the sunglasses out of his pocket, passing them to her.

"Thought you might want these," he'll say.

"You drove all the way here just to bring me my sunglasses?" she'll ask and her expression will tell him she thinks he's finally gone crazy.

"It's not that far," he'll say with a shrug because he can't say I needed an excuse to see you.

And she'll look at him the way she used to; she'll see all the way to the truth. And her face will soften. She'll smile her beautiful smile and she'll say his name. Walt. Just that. Then she'll kiss him the way she kissed him once before.

And when it's over, when their eyes are open and their lips are their own again, she'll very gently, very kindly, tell him she's sorry, but her feelings have changed.

And hearing those words from her lovely mouth will make them true.

Walt rubs at his stinging eyes. He tries to catch his breath. Something's knotted and tearing inside him; some vital piece is ripping itself apart. He walks back to his office with his body feeling leaden. As though it's collapsing under the force of its own gravity, as though a small black hole is forming in his chest.

It's a fitting image: the heart as a dying star.

Either you give it to her or I will.

He lowers himself heavily into his chair.

Does Vic even want to get married again? Walt realizes he doesn't know. Her divorce is something they've never talked about, not really, just like so many other things. My rules, he thinks with regret. Not hers. Nothing between them has been on her terms.

Right there in the center of his desk is the spot where Travis set down a box with an engagement ring inside it. To Walt, the tiny diamond in its setting, just so much compressed carbon, had looked no different than a fragment of crushed glass.

Vic's birthstone is diamond.

How has he ever thought himself worthy of her? He's judged other men in her life as unworthy so easily: Sean, Eamonn, Travis. And yet they've had the courage to declare themselves, to act, while he's spent years so afraid and ashamed of his feelings that he's tried to convince himself he doesn't have them at all.

But there are times when his longing for her feels like the Nile in flood season, bursting its banks and spilling across the plains. There are times when just a glimpse of the arch of her neck as she turns her head or the curve of her hip as she walks past his door will disrupt something deep in his central nervous system. And there are times, there are so many times, when he can't move at all because any motion will be catalytic, will be what propels him to her from any direction, like a compass needle to the north.

And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.

The words adamant and diamond come originally from the Greek adamas, meaning untameable, which in turn comes from a-, meaning not, and daman, meaning to tame.

Walt reaches out and picks up his drink. The scotch is still rich with color, though the rest of the room seems faded now. He takes the first swallow to feel the warmth and the burn. It spreads down his throat and into his stomach, relieving some of the emptiness there. What he's seeking tonight is not the foggy numbness he'd cocooned himself in after Martha's murder. This time he wants to feel the bite; he wants to be reminded that this suffering is what he's earned.

Even the most delicate diamond is hard enough to cut. Its danger and its beauty are the same.

What was it Vic had told him once? He'd been driving somewhere — they were always driving somewhere — and she'd been next to him with her elbow propped against the door. The sky had been silver that day, Walt remembers, with a low layer of cloud pressing down on the landscape. Sounds had seemed muffled, the way they did when it snowed, and even the morning's brightness had looked somehow flat. They'd traveled in soft light, without shadows, through an unreal and perpetual noon.

The Bronco had been lit up with Vic's laughter as she recounted the story of Omar, disgruntled to discover she was married, telling her that she didn't seem domesticated. As if a wedding ring were some sort of bridle. Walt had glanced over at her sharp grin and her golden glow and thought that no one who really loved her could want to smother that wildness. No one who really loved her could want her tame.

A half-remembered phrase leads him to the bookshelf, where he pulls a thin volume from its place. Its title had appealed to him when he found it sitting in the discount pile at a bookstore in Sheridan last year. This Clumsy Living seemed such an apt description for the way he was stumbling through his days. For several minutes the only sound is the soft susurration of pages turning as he searches for the elusive lines. The poem ends with wolves, that much he knows, so his eyes glide over each page from the bottom up. And there it is, page 68. The New Math. Walt reads the whole thing through once, in silence, and then the phrase he'd been thinking of aloud.

"'What we think of as wild I think of as honest. Doing, not what you think, but what you are.'"

Its resonance is absorbed by the room and reflected back, as if the sounds are swallowed and transformed by the wood. Sound transforms the wood and wood transforms the sound in a reciprocal metamorphosis. And isn't that what people do to each other? Isn't that what Vic has done to him?

What she is in essence is honest: so purely and proudly what she is.

And what am I? he wonders. What is a man who's been doing what he thinks for so long that he no longer knows his own substance?

Walt takes the book with him back to his chair, idly rifling the pages. Little eddies of wind stir around his hands. He picks up his glass and downs the rest of the scotch in a single swallow. Rivulets of heat flow from his belly to trickle outward along his limbs, doing nothing to ease the source of the chill inside him. He feels excoriated and worn thin enough to fray. He yearns for sleep, but the thought of going home to his empty cabin is miserable.

There's nothing of Vic for him there.

At least here in the office she feels closer; he can picture her everywhere. For all the hours he's spent trying not to notice how very beautiful she is, there is so much of her he's memorized. He knows the exact measure of her stride and the sound of her footfalls; he could find her by scent in the dark.

For a while she'd had a photo of the two of them sitting on her desk. It's the only photograph she's ever kept there, before or since. The department had finally bought a new camera and Ferg had been finding excuses to take 'test shots' for days. Walt can't remember how the three of them ended up at the playground in the first place. But he remembers Vic goading and teasing him onto the merry-go-round; the way the wind had whipped her hair around her laughing face as they spun; and how, for those few minutes, he'd been holding on tight to the first happiness he'd felt for a long, long time.

Why the hell had he let it go?

He wants to be part of her happiness and share in it with her, if not as her husband, or lover, then as her friend. And this time he chooses to be better; this time her needs will come first.

He'll learn to do what he is. He'll be honest.

This time he won't fail her again.


notes: 'the new math' and the anthology 'this clumsy living' are by bob hicok. "And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart" is from Holy Sonnet I by john donne. etymology is from the OED. dialogue from various episodes is strewn about willy-nilly and isn't mine, either. to the best of my knowledge, we never learn when vic's birthday is, so i've decided it's in april because she is absolutely an aries.