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Euphoria

Chapter 16: Euphoria

Author's note: Well. A part of me thought I would never reach this point, but here it is: the final chapter of Euphoria.

I want to say thank you to every one of you who has taken the time to read, comment, favourite, or support me in any way. The drive not to let you down is what has helped me finish this fanfic over six years (!) since I started, and I'm just sorry it's taken that long. Thank you for continuing to read the adventures of Nahman I dream up in my head. You are all the sustaining life behind this story and I hope you've had as much fun as I have.

All that's left to say is - enjoy, and thank you again.

Her boss had cornered her in the one section of the long corridor with a flickering fluorescent light. She had been expecting it, but wished he could have chosen somewhere that made her feel more at ease.

"I've had the full go-ahead, Donahue," he started by way of greeting. "You're due to be posted out next week."

Melissa nodded.

"Now remember: don't let him convince you. He's delusional and confused. So no matter what he says, don't believe it. You're just there to gather information."

"Of course, sir."

"This is an important assignment, Donahue. All the way from Deputy Director Warren. I'm not saying it'll be easy. But if you do well, we won't forget it soon."

"I understand, sir."

"Excellent. Best of luck, Special Agent Donahue."

As he made to leave, she stopped him with her arm. "Actually – one more thing, sir."

He looked down at her. "Donahue?"

"I don't want to speak out of place. I wonder, if I complete my assignment satisfactorily, I could ask the Bureau for a small favour." She forced herself to maintain eye contact. "You might remember sir, some years ago my father was a Special Agent here. I've always wanted to be allowed access to his final case files, but they've always been classified. You know, for some closure about his death. He died on duty and we were never told much. Well, sir... I was hoping."

He smiled. It was a hard smile, not without kindness, but with a firm edge hidden in the eyes. "I can't promise anything. But I'll do my best, Donahue."

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She was wearing a yellow dress. The sky was so blue it made his eyes ache in a strangely pleasurable way. He couldn't stop smiling.

"Come on, slowpoke!" she yelled.

He followed the sunny sound of her voice. They were in a field full of buttercups and periwinkles and tall grass. Red Admiral butterflies wafted past him as he walked, caressing his skin with satin wings then moving on.

Everything was a perfect picture, like a snowglobe but in reverse.

As he reached the crest of a small mound he could see the landscape below them spreading out and away, lush and verdant, into hundreds more happy meadows. A small village was half-hidden in the hills to their left. Norman couldn't see a single cloud in the sky.

She was waving to him under the shade of a young sycamore tree. It was tall and wide with thin branches: it had plenty more growing to do, and plenty of space to do it in. But it had made a good effort with this year's leaves, and there was a dappled yet cool blanket of cover in which to sit and rest from the intensity of the sun.

Walking closer, Norman could see that she had nestled herself in the twisted trunk of the tree, and was sitting on a large looping root emerging from the dry soil. She gestured at him to do the same.

He joined her in the blessed shade, the sweat already cooling on his skin, and the smell of sweet summer grass filled his head.

They gazed out at the scene rolling beneath them, at sparkling streams and patchwork fields. The land seemed to stretch on to forever. At the top of the sky the sun blazed over everything like a seraph. There was a bird calling lazily from somewhere far away. It was a fantasy of a summer's day that was laid out at their feet, and all they could do was soak it in. Norman couldn't have dreamed anything more idyllic.

After some moments had passed in a pleasant cascade, he looked over at the woman sitting beside him. Etched onto her face were memories of a life very different from this one. For now she seemed at peace. She was humming and twirling a long piece of grass in her fingers. He imagined she could blend into the scenery at any moment.

Norman wondered who would speak first. Eventually he realised it would have to be him.

"I wish we could stay here forever," he confessed.

"I know," she said. She turned to look at him and her eyes were honey. In her voice was something of the inevitable autumn to come.

He reached out to take her hand. She grasped his fingers in hers and they felt warm and cool at the same time. He looked carefully over her then: took in her gentle face, her auburn hair, the promise of her body beneath the dress, and those piercing yellow eyes.

He felt his voice constrict in his throat. "It's always been you, Melissa," he said.

She smiled. "Has it? Or has it been the idea of me?"

A flash through his mind of other women, other dreams, other futures.

He grappled with an answer, but no answer came. Instead, ashamed, he looked back over the valley that rolled on below them. The heat seemed too much now, and the sun was darker but somehow brighter. Norman knew he was still holding Melissa's hand but it he could no longer sense her fingers. Everything was beginning to feel numb, like he was only a disconnected cell in a confused system. When he blinked the streams were no longer sparkling and the fields were no longer green, as if a sudden squall had swept over the hills towards them. But the sky was still clear. The bright view became flat and dull though he knew, somehow, the sun was still watching over them. He had one last moment to look into her eyes. Then it all flickered once, twice, and was wiped away into nothing.

The glasses had come off.

He was sitting on a picnic table in a wintry Pershing Park, ARI grasped in his sweaty fingers, the memory of Melissa still fading in his head.

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The real Melissa Donahue was alive and well, mere metres away, deep in the bowels of the FBI HQ.

She sat at one end of a long stainless steel table, in the centre of a room lit by shadows. Her left arm was wrapped to her chest in a sling that seemed blindingly white in the dim surroundings. Sat opposite her at the table were three figures, all wearing dark suits.

"Well, Ms Donahue. I do apologise about the injury," began a deep voice belonging to the largest suit. "Things were getting out of hand. We had to bring you in. You understand." He smiled and raised his head from the files in front of him. Even behind the hood of shadows blanketing the end of the table it was recognisably Roland Warren, Deputy Director of the FBI, and even in this situation Melissa felt an angry flush of aggravation at the idea that they had been so close, so achingly close, to the truth. "A pleasure to finally meet you, by the way."

Melissa shifted ever so slightly in her seat. "With respect, sir, I'm tired and my arm hurts." Her voice was low and gravelly. It sounded like just speaking was a great endeavour. "My assignment's over. I did everything you asked. I'd appreciate if I could have your word now on the favour I was promised."

"The assignment was a failure," Warren interjected brightly. When he spoke the men at either side of him shrunk back into their seats, like they knew something Melissa did not. She looked at them for the first time and realised that she recognised them too: Sebastian Hyde on the left and Gregory Welles on the right, both of them from Norman's secret video. "You were instructed to expose Special Agent Jayden's drug addiction and provide evidence against him, not encourage his wild fantasies. Melissa, we know you helped him. What's worse, we know you led him right to my house." The Deputy Director sighed and peered down at her with the most condescending facial expression she had ever seen. "You betrayed us, Ms Donahue. You betrayed me."

Melissa's good hand hung down at her side, balled into a quivering fist.

"I don't know what you imagined would happen," continued Warren. "Of course we cannot fulfil your request after what you've done. Why, it would be like rewarding you. You do know what we do to Special Agents who fail us."

"Me fail you!" Melissa breathed incredulously. She did not think they had heard her, or if they did they did not acknowledge it.

Welles, to the left of the table, crossed his hands and took the opportunity to speak. "I'm surprised at you, Donahue," he said. "I personally picked you out for this assignment. You promised your superior you wouldn't be swayed by Agent Jayden, no matter what he might say."

She took a deep breath to steady her shaking hand and continued to stare straight on, into the darkness above all of their heads. "I wasn't swayed, sir. I got the evidence you wanted, but like the Deputy Director said... things started getting out of hand. With respect, I did the best I could."

At the head of the table, Warren smiled. "Oh come now Melissa, enough of the games. You knew from the start that you couldn't fool us. If there's nothing you'll tell us about what Jayden thinks he knows then we have nothing left to talk about."

"Please sir, I was promised –"

"Ms Donahue, I will not bargain with those who have turned against the FBI."

Her tongue weighed heavy in her mouth, like all the lies she had swallowed in the past week. "How dare you?" she hissed. "After all you've done? Did you think I was stupid? Did you think I wouldn't work it out?"

Warren blinked once. "We didn't think you'd fall for his lunacy, no."

Hyde began to say something about poor psychoanalysis and behavioural profiling, but Melissa was already banging her good fist on the table to drown him out. "Cut the act please! I know everything. He was getting out of control, so you decided to rein him in by accusing him of possession of a drug you gave to him! How many ARI test subjects have you done this to already? It'd be ingenious if it wasn't so fucking sickening."

"Surely you understand that some things we do here are in the name of the greater good."

"There is no greater good in what you have done," Agent Donahue spat. "Only misery and lies. You bastards will do what you will, but at least tell me the truth first."

"I'm afraid," said Warren slowly, "that will not be happening."

Melissa jumped to her feet and kicked her chair backwards, steadying herself on the table with her right hand. "You can't keep him from me!" Two well-trained guards clad in FBI uniforms materialised from the shadows on either side of her, but Warren waved them away.

"Melissa, listen to yourself. You've been drawn in by the ramblings of a very confused, and very damaged, mind. There's nothing to keep."

She was shaking her head, although her eyes remained fixed on Warren's. "I can't believe it. I can't believe it goes this deep. All these years... Jesus fucking Christ!" Her eyes rolled to the ceiling and the ball of her hand hit the table in futility. "And you lied to all of us? Even when he died, we didn't deserve the truth even then? Even when his own daughter came to serve you too - even then?"

For the first time, Warren looked pained. "I knew your father, Melissa. He was an exemplary Special Agent and a very good man."

"Don't say another word!" Her throat was dry and her eyes were sore. "Don't tell me. I already know. I know what you did to him, what you made him become. I've seen it firsthand for Christ's sake. Goddamn it."

She shook her head, trying her very hardest to keep her voice from breaking. "I know - I know my father was part of the program. I just can't believe you didn't think I would join all the dots. Was he one of the first? Did he agree to any of it?"

No answer came. Suddenly two arms took a hold of her roughly from behind, and pinned her free hand to her side. Melissa yelled and tried to shake herself loose, but the grip was too firm. Instead she pulled her head upwards with all the dignity she could muster, and stared Warren straight in the eye.

"You're disgusting. Everything you do here is despicable, everything you stand for. You lied to me and you made me lie. You made me betray an innocent man, a man better than any one of you and every single one of your cronies in the fucking FBI. I want nothing to do with it anymore."

Warren watched her steadily for a moment, and then he began to laugh, a low, sombre, chilling sound.

"Oh, Melissa," he said. "I see it now. You fell for him, didn't you? Or at least, the idea of him. So similar to your father..." He shook his head and smiled. "Well, don't delude yourself. You never meant anything to him, not really. Anything you think you shared was only as real to him as the visions in his glasses. You were just an illusion, a pretty distraction, nothing more. He just wanted the idea of you too, the pure image of you. And that's all you were meant to be. After all Melissa, there was a reason we chose you for this particular task."

She was shaking. Her vision was blurred. Around her the room was a haze of grey apparitions and dark shadows, and she was aware of her arm aching where she was being held. She was trapped in this room, in this building, in this city, in this suit. She could feel her life spiralling away from her as she remained stuck here, anchored here, locked in with her regrets and her history.

And in her mind swam the ghosts of memories past, of her father getting another promotion to Lieutenant, and then joining the FBI, of all the pride she felt, and then the deep thick sadness over every waking moment as he grew sicker and sicker, seemingly inexplicably, and the doctor could do nothing, and then one day he was just gone – forever – and she thought maybe mom was lying to her when she said he wasn't dead, but she seemed to believe it so. He disappeared into the FBI like a dream. So he was never really dead, not to them, not to her and her mother and her younger brother. Her younger brother, who ran away with the pain and the silence that crept into that house like a disease, and the sister who stayed behind to look after their ailing mother who simply passed away with grief within a year or two. And the father whose absence, so great and heavy, lingered like a ghost in that family. Could she recall the bloodshot veins in his eyes, the shaking of addiction in his thin fingers? So maybe he had never really died, maybe he had lived on somewhere in these gleaming corridors, like a science project gone wrong, and that was why the phantom had been haunting them all these long years. And maybe why she had been drawn here too, to the mystery she had ached her whole life to solve. Her cheeks were wet with tears. Vaguely she heard Warren order for her to be taken away, as if from a great distance.

The worst thing was that she had seen now what her father must have become. She had seen it happen before her very eyes, and she had played her own terrible part in bringing down that poor, suffering man who had wanted only to make the world a better place one case at a time. Her father or Norman Jayden? Maybe Warren was right. Maybe they were the same in her mind.

This was her last coherent thought as she was dragged backwards through thick grey doors into the endless corridors beyond.

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Norman sat alone at a bench in the park, in the same spot where he sat with Melissa on the first day they met.

The trees were bare skeletons now, and a lining of decomposing russet leaves littered the ground. Pershing Park looked almost entirely grey. But against a backdrop of low clouds the setting sun was breaking out into an ecstasy of colour, like it had chosen this exact moment to rebel gloriously against the status quo. The promise of dusk drew close.

The lonely agent shivered. There was a chill hanging in the air. It made him draw a breath and pull his jacket closer.

He still had the black sunglasses clasped in his palm, and their summonings still encircled his mind. This was all he had now. Phantoms and memories. They had taken her somewhere, he didn't know where. And they hadn't even said a word. They'd left him languishing in this miserable silence. It was like it had never happened, she had never existed, she and Raine and all of it was just a vibrant figment of his imagination. But he didn't think so somehow. He thought he could tell now between the hallucinations in his head and those that walked the earth fully formed.

He fished into his pocket with his other hand, pulled out the small cold vial of blue and held it between his fingers. With an object in each hand resting on the surface of the wooden picnic table he looked like a second-rate Lady Justice. In fact, his arms felt shackled. He felt weighed down by heavy inevitability.

Norman looked up. The sun was splitting in half like a yolk against the land. It was an achingly beautiful sunset, a sunset to break your heart. Pinks and purples and oranges and gold. Norman had been told as a child never to look at the sun, but in this moment it was so exquisitely alluring his eyes couldn't help but stare. He could not see it moving but when he looked away then back again it had shifted in the sky and he knew it was slipping through his fingers.

"Please don't leave me," he said.

The clouds grew shadowy and bittersweet as the sun dissolved, their once vibrant colours melting to shades of grey. Conforming. Acquiescing. Giving in. At last all that remained of its blinding light was a thin sliver, and then it shimmered one last time at him and was gone behind the silhouette of the land. The world was full of blue. The sky dimmed forlornly and Norman knew he could no longer stop the night from coming.

He allowed himself to shed a farewell of shameful tears.

He remembered that he hadn't known her age, or her middle name, and had never told her how sunlight flooded into the valley of his mind when he was with her. He had treated her like a dream and a dream she had become. For a few moments he thought the misery would overcome him.

Then, slowly, like the kaleidoscope colours of the sky, it passed.

Once it was over, his head felt clearer. As his vision returned he looked from palm to palm in the growing dusk, from ARI to Triptocaine, from sweet intensity to sudden relief, from black to blue and back again. In the darkening light it became harder to tell the difference between them. He almost felt like something was happening to him, like there was an unexpected opening in the fabric of life, like something pure and good had blossomed from this terrible sadness, like he had been given a choice laid out in front of him. Pick one or both or neither.

Norman could feel the shadow of the FBI's headquarters hanging over him. He knew without having to look over his shoulder that there was a dark man in a dark suit watching over him from a secluded corner of the park. He knew he, or one of his indistinguishable brethren, had been following him ever since they took Melissa. He knew they might follow him forever now. He also knew that, somewhere deep inside, in a place the FBI could not find, was a part of himself like a hard stubborn core, like the centre of a burning star, a part of him that had shown itself this last week and had opened to Melissa in the rain and Raine in a parking lot.

He prayed he was strong enough to choose. He prayed the centre kept burning.

As the final wisp of light left the earth Norman closed both hands, like shutting the final chapter in a heavy book, and for a brief instant truly knew what it was to feel euphoria.