A/N: Me again, bringing you another chapter of the sequel to Blood of a Stranger. What I wanted to accentuate the most in this story is the absolute helplessness Tru feels, even though she knows she has been called by a higher power to essentially "help" people. I wanted to express her downward spiral in a way that would forsake her calling completely. I have an ulterior motive for this, but will not give it away yet ;)
Anyway, thanks to the fabulous people who reviewed the first chapter and hopefully this one will have a little more substance than the last.
Disclaimer: I forgot to put up a disclaimer in the first chapter so this will have to suffice. I do not own Tru Calling, or any of its characters. Everything belongs to its respective owner.
Aftermath
Chapter Two: Reinforcement
He saw her, broken and breathing intensely. Soft tendrils of her dark hair were plastered to her sticky forehead, mattered and dripping with a sweat that she imagined was tainted red. He saw everything. He saw her pain, her denial, her numbing depression, her spiral down, deeper into that dark place he himself had found. He saw it all.
And he also watched as she persisted, drank life into her, grasping on to the edge of something she so desperately wanted to be real.
He saw, idly amused, as her hand moved along the railing, fingers lightly caressing the smooth, metal edges of a boundary that rippled with her every breath.
He knew she was slipping. Yes, soon, very soon, she may well choose to be with him again, peaceful in that place of hollow white. That place of eternal grace.
There but for the grace of Tru go I.
He remembered his own words, littered and dripping with a clarity that wandered deep inside of him, to eventually pull everything out and expose them from the outside.
He had been ripped apart; mind, body and soul, and placed in a land so far away from what he craved that it soon became apparent what would happen. He would have to be torn apart, limb from terrified limb, until nothing remained.
Until he no longer possessed those reinforcements that kept his body whole.
And now, as he looked absently down on her shaky form, he realised that she too did neither possess the qualities that kept life alive, nor her own reinforcements.
And, he knew, soon enough, she would be ripped apart, too. Limb from limb, blood from blood, until nothing remained.
Her eyes moved steadily across the metallic table. The pound of flesh lying motionless on the slab seemed to stare back at her, eyes glazed over and missing that vital gleam. That spirit. That soul.
She ran her fingers lightly over the flesh, never flinching as the cold body froze her fingertips. She noticed silently the glue that held the body together; the thread that wove around the body's many limbs, around its organs, spun together the blood from the beating heart.
Nothing in this world was indestructible; nothing could ever not be destroyed. Everything could ultimately be separated from itself.
Tru thought about how easily it had been to destroy a life.
With ease, she remembered the way she had held the gun in her shaking hands, finger gripping the trigger.
She remembered how one simple pull of a single finger had ripped open his head, exposing a wound and the blood that followed.
She remembered the seams of his makeup, the thread that had woven him together, and how they split apart, ripping open his body and tearing it apart.
Jensen had been sown together by glue; a reinforcement that had only held the body together. The soul had already been lost. There was no glue for the soul.
Jack shifted uncomfortably in the leather-coated chair. He hated confrontations. He hated feeling like a prisoner, even with the creature comforts the macabre office seemed to offer. And he hated being pampered, being groomed and fed the fear that would sober him. When he heard the door swing open, he refrained from straightening in his chair. Instead, he leaned further into the smooth back of the cool leather, hands clasped firmly on the arms of the chair.
"Jack," a man's voice echoed through the office, scathing, yet not quite scolding, "I thought you said there would be no complications. What happened?"
Even though it pained him so much, even though it was sizzling on the tip of his tongue, he knew he couldn't say it. "Richard, I'm sorry." He paused and sighed falsely. "I guess I just didn't concentrate hard enough."
The cold, grey eyes of Richard Davies glared hard into Jack's falsely earnest blue orbs. "You were sloppy. You left gaping holes in the evidence. And you involved the police."
Jack pinched his eyes closed, numbing the bridge of his nose with two fingers. "They had to find the bodies before anyone else did. I couldn't afford involving witnesses."
"If I recall correctly, Jack," Richard spoke with an even tone, though he forced an undercurrent of blame, "this was your responsibility. You told me you had everything under control, that you could handle it. So what went wrong?"
With a slight nod of his head, Jack sighed, this time out of silent frustration. He wanted to. He wanted to tell the truth. But how could he? Glancing at the hard eyes of his mentor, Jack felt a chill as he thought ironically how similar this 'meeting' was to an interrogation.
Bringing himself back to the room, Jack shook his head. "I've never killed anyone before."
The absolute truth to that quiet statement was completely lost on Richard. "It is your job to kill people, Jack. You end lives. If what you're telling me is that you hesitated because you didn't want to kill him, you should have thought about that before you agreed to this job."
Jack lowered his eyes, staring at the ground. "I didn't agree to this job; it agreed to me."
"Get used to it," Richard snapped as he glowered at Jack. "You will have to do more than simply shoot someone in this line of work."
Richard still believed that Jack had been the one to shoot Jensen. Jack had purposely failed to relay the revelation that Tru herself had been the one to fire the bullet from its cage. And Jack wanted it to stay that way.
Jack pressed his lips together, glancing up at Richard through shuttered eyes. "Trust me, I know what I signed on for."
Blinking, the hardened face of Richard Davies peered down at his littered desk, hands rifling through papers. He stopped when he found what he was looking for. He flicked his eyes over the black, printed words and cleared his throat with forced conviction. He glared at the paper, then over at Jack, who sat waiting for his sentence.
"Jack," Richard began in a patronising tone, "this is going to cost you."
Jack considered those words. Those dreaded words that he wished would never leave anyone's mouth, if only to relieve him of the crawling fear reaching out to the pit of his stomach. He wondered for a fleeting moment what exactly it was Richard was going to make him do, though that wonder dissipated when he realised there wasn't anything he wasn't willing to do.
"I don't care," Jack's still voice breeched the short silence, "just make it go away."
The morgue was quiet. It always seemed to be, these days. There was barely a sound. Not even the metallic grinding of a gurney being wheeled into the autopsy room. It was sanitary, sterile. Clean.
Davis tightened the waist of his lab coat, pulling it close to his body. It was cold, the day outside recovering from the wintry conditions that had only passed a few weeks ago, though the new season was well into motion. He held a clipboard in one hand, flimsy cup of cold coffee in the other.
Pushing the white doors open carelessly, he failed to notice just how far they swung apart. He failed to notice many things of late.
Just like he failed to notice the presence of a woman, hidden within shadow and without movement. He walked right on by, never even offering the effort to notice his surroundings.
He stopped at the stable gurney, the dull body pressed firmly against its cold surface. The body was a depressed shade of blue, with dark lines circling the rims of its eyes. Its cheeks had drawn a hollow within its face, the flesh sunken and taut around the bone.
"Complications during heart surgery," a voice sounded in the room, a deep monotone. "Doesn't seem fair. He was so young."
Davis started, suddenly sucked back into real life. "Tru, what are you doing here?"
Tru stepped from the shadows of the room, her face a mask of living death. Her eyes were swollen, red-rimmed and oddly hollow, and her lips were parched, dry from the constant attention she was giving them with her moist tongue. She licked her lips again, fleetingly painting life into them, before they died again.
She shrugged, her shoulders barely lifting. "I work here."
Swallowing at the harsh light Tru shed on herself by wallowing in the darkness, Davis frowned slightly. "You're on sick leave. Indefinitely. Remember?"
Tru dropped her eyes to the ground, shame hiding itself between guilt and desperation. "Couldn't stay away."
Davis sighed, lunging breath deep into his chest. He smeared a hand across his temples. "Tru, you need to. For everyone's sake. You need to take some time off."
She frowned, a painful stab of remembrance piercing into her mind. "Davis, I-"
…she laid a pale hand over the painted wood, white fingers paling black pine. Her other hand felt heavy, like something were holding it down. She looked at it absently, barely noting his fingers laced with hers.
She looked to his face, hope fluttering within her. Her heart fell when she found herself staring into the tender blue eyes of Jack Harper.
He squeezed her hand supportively, then glanced at the coffin.
Jensen's lifeless body lay buried in there, behind the shine of the lid and the stains of the white rose petals.
Tru let a single tear fall from her face and splash onto the black pine…
…Davis' eye mirrored concern as he peered at Tru, his voice clearly worried. "Tru, is everything okay?"
Her eyes flicked to his. Everything around her faded, her surroundings drowning beneath her. She shook her head, eyes deathly void. "Nothing's okay."
The music was enough to lull her into a soothing stupor, if not for the clear voice in her head that reminded her again and again of her job. She was to watch him, apparently. Not that she didn't understand Richard's clear, decisive point to reinforce Jack, to make sure he was playing the game; she just never imagined stalking would cross her path. No, it wasn't stalking. It was watching. There was a clear distinction.
Or so Carrie thought.
She sat heavily in shadow, in one of the far corners of the bar, every once and a while sucking down her beer. And she watched. She watched the way he sunk into the stool while hunching over the wooden counter. She watched as his fingers never unfurled around the glass; he kept them curled tightly against the faceted crystal of ember liquid. She watched his eyes burn through until they could no longer recognise their surroundings. She watched him mourn the loss of something he never had.
She watched into the early hours of the morning.
The music seduced her into a trance. Its soft beats and haunting melody pounded softly, like the patter of rain on a windowpane, against her pulse. It didn't make any sense to her, but she didn't care. She didn't care why the music continued to seduce her.
She just watched.
Her eyes barely widened in surprise when she found him staring at someone. His face was turned, shadows casting a glare onto his cheek, and his eyes were settled intensely on someone. He didn't move as he watched. He did not need to blink. He just watched.
Carrie followed his gaze, moving her eyes across the room tentatively as she searched. Then she stopped searching. The pulse of the softly pounding music ceased as her ears became deaf.
Jack Harper moved from his stool, feet stumbling beneath him as he attempted to place them steadily on the ground.
Tru Davies never moved. She just stood there, across the room from her destined opposite, and stared at him. It wasn't that she saw him, however. But rather, she saw through him. She saw through the stumbling, drunken fool, through the hardened killer that tasted blood, through the caged animal forced to do unwilling bidding. She saw through to the broken man that despised the loneliness of his life and craved nothing more than a chance at life.
She saw through to the man that hated his death-stained life.
The music breathed into Tru as she hesitated, eyes returning to life as she recognised reality.
Jack fumbled with his jacket as he tried to pry it from the back of his stool, panicking as he watched Tru collide with the crowd and escape hastily.
All the while Carrie watched. She watched with certainty as Jack placed a weary hand over his face and collapsed back onto the wooden stool that neither she, nor Richard, knew the complete story.
Something had happened, something traumatic and haunting, for both Jack and Tru that they would never quite recover from.
And this concerned Carrie. She knew it would also concern Richard, when she later reported all that she had seen.
The steaming coffee streamed steadily from the burning pot as Tru watched with lazy eyes. Any sign of life had long disappeared from her dappled brown orbs, and as they stated ahead of her, she found herself wondering if it were possible to be living death.
She had always felt an ironic sense of security in her father's office. Even with the displayed katana swords crossing paths on a wooden pedestal, placing a foreboding sense of war into her blood, she still felt safe. She still felt like her father would wrap his arms tightly around her and whisper words of comfort.
Even if he hadn't done that since forever. She couldn't remember a time when he had.
Richard watched as his daughter wrapped her fingers around the steaming mug of bitter coffee. He lowered himself down onto the suede couch, leaving only a small gap between their bodies.
She looked battered, like she had not slept for weeks. Her eyes were rimmed with dark circles, not unlike deep bruising, and her face was long and withered. He worried about her.
Even if his problem had gone away if only to sacrifice her sanity.
Her lips pressed against the rounded rim of the ceramic mug, her mouth stinging with singeing heat as the hot liquid slid down her throat.
Richard lifted a careful hand to her face, stroking the side of her forehead as he lifted disobedient curls of dark hair from her eyes.
He cleared his voice, the hesitation fading away within an instant. "Tru, your friend Jack came to see me a couple of days ago. He told me what happened with that boy, Jensen."
There was no recognition in Tru's face. No reaction, not even a lift of her eyes. She just stared forward.
"Tru," Richard's voice of hardened silk breeched through to her again, "Jack told me how he killed Jensen. He said the two of you found Jensen with a gun, standing over his father. Jack said Jensen had threatened you so he took the gun and shot him."
That wasn't what happened. It didn't go like that. Jack did not kill Jensen. I did.
The words didn't come, no matter how many times Tru thought them.
Richard moved his hand to squeeze her shoulder supportively. "I want you to know, Tru, that no matter how bad this gets, I'm here for you. Both of you."
Tru finally found her voice, but what eventually escaped her was not what she wanted to say. "What will happen to Jack?"
Her father was silent, though he didn't need to be. He paused dramatically, feeding Tru the lie he needed her to believe. "Nothing. There is not enough evidence against him for a conviction. His lies are very convincing, especially to the police. If he finds himself in any trouble, I'll be there to pull him out of it."
And what about me? Will you pull me out of it, as well? No. I'm already in too deep.
Tru leaned in to her father's embracing arms, his tightly secure hug that tugged at her memory, her mind begging her to remember a time when he had done this before. But no memory came.
As his hand stroked her hair, as his lips moved in a whisper of comforting words, she closed her eyes and was still. The secure embrace shrouded her with a sweet lie that lulled her into sleep.
She would always feel secure in her father's office.
A/N: Just a quick note, remember that last line.
Reviews are appreciated, as always.
Until next time, peace :)