Disclaimer: No infringement of copyright is intended. All characters originated with CSI:NY. Poetry not otherwise referenced is original.
A/N: A new season (great opening episode) and this story is finally coming to an end. But not quite yet.
Thanks as always to those who have encouraged me to keep going; I appreciate it more than I can say.
Spoiler Alert: Spoilers for Seasons 2 & 3, up to and including "Silent Night".
Letting Go
The wisps of memory curl tightly around the heart
An intricate web of tightly spun sensation:
Scent and cry, touch of breath and slap of hand,
The infinite variety of instants, big and small.
How to break that spell spun of moments too quick to distinguish?
How to separate the pant of desire from the gasp of fear,
The flaring of passion from the fire of hatred?
Can you hold only the times of peace and happiness,
And loosen the bonds enough to let all else blow away
On the winds of all-forgiving time?
If you let all the hurt go, all the darkness, grief, and misery,
It would be like shutting out the night, illuminating the sky
With the restless glare of midday, the unceasing burn of the sun.
Without the shadows, the light becomes unbearable.
Without the light, the darkness overwhelms.
What goes first?
The joy?
Or the pain?
SMT2007
Chapter 44: What I Choose to See
John Monroe stood up and stretched, then jerked his head at old man Mauser. "You want to take me on a tour of the place?" he invited. "I may have a little contribution to make to the amenities in your room." His hand hovered over his pocket suggestively.
Mauser struggled to his feet and began to shuffle his way out of the room, his eagerness speeding his pace a little. John looked back at Stella and nodded briefly, sure that she would pick up the ball.
Stella watched the old man, shrunken and tired, moving with dogged determination, followed by the tall agent. Then she turned to Ethel and said bluntly, "What gives?"
Ethel blinked and looked down at her coffee cup. "I'm sure I don't know what you are talking about, my dear."
"Ms Mergetz, you had more information about Maureen Riley than her own grandmother a moment ago. Then you suddenly go all shy on us? I'm not buying it. What happened after Lorenzo? What happened to her after she came back without the baby?" Stella was remorseless, staring into Ethel's eyes.
The old woman took in a deep breath. "You have to understand. Things were different then. This was - what? '68? '69? All that free love and letting it all hang out was still in California, not in Hell's Kitchen. Not in New York. Well, not in our neighbourhood." Ethel's slightly scatty persona had retreated, and Lindsay, watching carefully, could see even her face had sharpened to match her eyes.
"Maureen got caught. Well, it happened, no one is saying any different. Many a family tree had its start over the fence in the next-door neighbour's yard, so to speak. Truth be told, hardly a first baby was born in the neighbourhood who didn't come a little earlier than decorum would indicate." She raised her eyebrows at the two younger women, silently gauging whether or not they caught her drift.
Stella nodded, and after a moment, Lindsay did too.
"Everyone would have forgotten about it soon enough, placed most of the blame of Lorenzo anyway. But Maureen? Well, she was no shrinking violet. No sackcloth and ashes for her. The first time she went to church after coming home, she was wearing lipstick. Red lipstick."
The shock of that moment still thrilled through the woman's voice. "Well, I mean to say! Most girls in that situation at least had the decency to pretend to feel some remorse. Not Maureen." She shook her head, then laughed bleakly, "I heard tell, although of course I wasn't there to see it myself, that when the galekh, Father Antonelli, preached on loose morals and the Whore of Babylon, Maureen stood up and walked out of the church. Bold as brass, she was."
Stella and Lindsay shared a shocked look: Father Antonelli? Stella shook her head slightly – they would have to pursue that line later.
Lindsay sat forward a little, "Ms Mergetz, do you know anything about her marriage? Why Anthony Messer? Where did they meet?"
Ethel looked at her a little pityingly, "I doubt they met more than five times before the wedding day, my dear. Anthony's brother was making a name for himself by then. You know he's connected to the Luccheses?" She waited until the two detectives nodded. "Well, Gino had come here as a young boy – just in his teens. Anthony joined him a few years later, once Gino had found a place for himself. Gino married into the wise guys as much as anything – let's see, was she a Distasi? A D'Agostina?"
She pondered a moment, then shook her head. "Doesn't matter – a niece or cousin or something of one of the bosses' wives." She shrugged at the convoluted family trees of a Mob family, then held out her coffee cup to Lindsay. "Would you mind, my dear? This is thirsty work."
She waited until Lindsay had moved out of earshot, and leaned forward to say quietly to Stella, "How much should she know? I can see that none of this is going to surprise you, but she really does look like she just fell off the turnip truck. Can she handle it?"
Stella watched Lindsay steadily pour coffee, smiling at an older man who tossed some admiring comment at her.
"She's going to need to know whatever you can tell her, Ms Mergetz. This may be her future we're talking about."
-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY
Hawkes arrived at Lissa's only a few minutes after hanging up, and as she buzzed him in, he felt a sense of peace envelop him, a sense which only increased as he rode up in the elevator and arrived at her apartment door, carefully holding two cups of coffee and a couple of danishes from a small coffee shop around the corner they used to frequent in the early mornings after pulling all night shifts.
"You are a life-saver, Shel," she grinned as he handed her the steaming coffee. "I've haven't even put on the first pot yet this morning." She was dressed in an oversized t-shirt and yoga pants, hair pulled back off her face, her eyes dark and tired.
Hawkes kissed her on the cheek and presented her with the pastry bag, "Lemon for you, cream cheese for me."
She turned and led the way into the bright kitchen, now filled with the morning light. Hawkes had sat in this room all times of the day and night, but he loved it best like this – the sun shining in through bright yellow curtains, painting the white walls with a gentle wash of colour, touches of blue gleaming on every surface. He hadn't been around her place for nearly four years if she was right in her calculations, but it hadn't changed in any of the important ways.
Lissa curled up on the window-seat, cupping her coffee cup in her hand and breathing in the rich scent with a sigh.
"Oh, I needed that – how did you know?" She looked at him, big eyes laughing over the rim of the cup and he waited for the leap of his heart, vaguely disquieted when it didn't come.
"Just a guess. How are you feeling? You all over whatever it was a couple days ago?" He sat back in the kitchen chair with a sigh and put his feet up on the old box still full of vinyl records she kept by the table for that purpose.
"I'm good. Sorry about the other night – you know those headaches you get after too much?"
"Too much what?" Hawkes said, watching her.
She rubbed her forehead a little fretfully, "Oh, too much everything. Too much pain, too much misery, too much noise, too much to do." She lifted the cup to her lips again and took a deep drink, then grinned and held her cup up in a mocking salute, "Too much of this stuff!"
She drank again, looking out the window, her voice dragging a little. "Just too much. Paperwork, patients, HMOs. Administrators." The last word was hissed out through clenched teeth, and Hawkes hid a smile. Lissa had never been very good at manipulating the bean-counters, although she did well with everyone else. He had seen her talk down a patient coming off a psychotic episode; he had seen her talk her way out of a clearly-deserved traffic ticket. He had seen her talk a hysterical teenager into at least seeing her new-born baby before signing the adoption papers; he had seen her blow off an over-enthusiastic would-be suitor in three well-placed words.
He had never, in all the time he had known her, seen her at a loss. Not like now.
"Lissa, talk to me," Hawkes said gently, glad to push his own worries behind him and focus on hers.
Lissa rubbed her forehead again, and sighed. "I don't think I can, Shel. Not because I don't trust you," she said hurriedly. "You know I do. But it's not just my story to tell. And I don't know how much I can tell you without betraying someone else's confidence."
Hawkes watched her bite into the danish he had brought, licking the impossibly yellow lemon filling off her lips with a bright pink tongue. He waited until she had swallowed before saying, "Are you involved in something illegal?"
To his dismay, she didn't respond immediately, frowning at the pastry in her hand, idly running a finger through the white icing, then licking her finger before putting the rest of the pastry back in the bag and drinking from the cup again.
"It depends." Her voice was clipped, and he recognized the tone: a blow-off was in the wind.
"On what? How can it depend? Either something is legal or it's not, Lis." He tried to say it patiently.
"You see, that's why I can't talk to you about this, Shel. You are so black and white – no greys in your POV. How can you deal with your world when you see everything so simply?" She ran a hand restlessly through her braids in their bundled pony-tail. "It may not be illegal exactly. It may be, technically. I think it is the right thing to do. Does that count at all? Not all laws are good laws, Shel. You of all people should know that."
Hawkes closed his eyes. They had been here before: civil rights, abortion, the war on drugs, the war on terror. Of course he didn't defend all laws, but he had sworn to uphold them. It was an oath he took as seriously as he did the Hippocratic Oath he had quoted at Miriam only an hour or so ago, "First do no harm."
And breaking the law harmed everyone. He had to believe that, too, or everything he stood for in his life was a lie.
-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY
After spending several moments trying to calm his stepson down, Mac had finally resorted to phoning Peter Garrett and asking him to come and pick up Reed from the lab. Before Garret showed up, he put into place a few measures that he thought should have been done long ago, to hell with Miranda Garrett's preferences.
He had assigned uniforms to patrol the Garretts' neighbourhood, and then had given in to his own nerves and requested a plain-clothes officer be assigned to the family. It had taken some pretty fancy stepping to get that one past the ever-budget conscious Gerrard, but one mention that his prestigious new Organized Crime Unit may lose its biggest supporter on the city council if anything happened to a member of the Garrett family was enough to change his tune.
He would deal with Ms. Garrett later, he promised himself. He still had the crime scene photos of Reed taken after they had found him in the warehouse, and he would have no compunction this time about showing them to the boy's mother in order to convince her that the danger to Reed was real.
After a few minutes' thought, he put in a new request to have Natalie Chance watched as well. If they were watching Reed, they would know about her, and Mac was pretty sure whoever 'they' were, they would use any means necessary to get their way.
He sat back in his chair and swung around to stare out the window a moment, blinking his eyes to clear the vision of the World Trade Centre. It had stopped working – that trick he had developed to avoid seeing what was no longer there. He wondered now, as he had wondered earlier, what the departmental shrinks would say about that deliberate blindness he had somehow created years ago.
And what they would say now.
Slowly his eyes closed and he could feel himself drowning, breathing heavily as if running. He could see the collapsing Towers, smell the dust and smoke and chemicals that had filled the air as they had gone down, falling in on themselves like a house of cards, taking hundreds, thousands of people with them.
He grunted and moved his head, as if to avoid the figure he saw coming towards him: short and energetic, sun-kissed curls and blue eyes, drifting just ahead of the smoke, but those sweet features, that smile that seemed to light up just for him, glowing and concerned, hands reaching out to him.
He knew he was dreaming. He knew Claire was dead. But for a moment, he held out a hand to her anyway, longing to know it was not true.
"Mac."
He could hear her voice as if she stood beside him, could nearly feel the breath of her on his cheek, almost smell her scent wafting through the air.
He knew he was dreaming. He knew Claire was dead. But for a moment, his hand clung to hers anyway, longing to know it had not happened.
"Reed."
"I'll look after him, Claire. I'll keep him safe."
He could see her smile as she accepted his vow, feel the pressure of her hand clasping his, taste the brush of her lips on his.
He knew he was dreaming. He knew Claire was dead. But for a moment, he kissed her, knowing it was the last time.
"Mac. Mac? Darling, are you all right?"
And he opened his eyes with a gasp as if he were breaching the ocean's depths, to look into seagreen eyes that were flooded with fear and tenderness, and before he opened his mouth this time, he bit his tongue and did not say the name that lingered on his lips.
Instead, he pushed his chair back a few inches to avoid stepping on the woman kneeling in front of his chair, noticing he had swung back to the office and was no longer facing the window. He scrubbed unsteady hands over his face and walked towards the glass, staring out at the Brooklyn Bridge, and seeing nothing on the horizon.