Chapter 6

Heads turn as Carrie and Kara return to HQ. Both women appear gloriously refreshed and the boys in the office can't help but notice.

As Jack approaches, all heads quickly turn back to work.

"No luck with McSid, eh?"

"Look, Jack, nothing's going on with this guy, and I'm not even sure he is our guy, so, yeah, no luck with McSid." Carrie voice is clipped.

"We did hear gunshots at the last place, but, alright, I'm leaning towards trusting your instincts on this one, Carrie. Let's call it a night for now and regroup tomorrow." Jack's eyes dart from Kara to Carrie, land on Carrie, and start melting like chocolate left on a dashboard in the middle of August.

"I was headed down to the pub for a brew. You ladies care to join me?"

The women look at each other, Carrie puzzled and Kara grinning lasciviously.

Carrie says, "I don't know. I thought I'd sit somewhere and write up this surveillance detail we just pulled while it's still fresh in my mind."

"I'm up for a drink!" Kara quickly adds. Carrie can't help but snort at her new friend's impulsive obviousness.

Jack shrugs and looks disappointedly at Carrie. "Alright then, paperwork it is then for Carrie." He turns to Kara, "My car is downstairs."

Jack and Kara find a couple of spots at the bar and Jack motions to the bartender.

"Tequila Revolucion, silver, no lime, please." He turns to Kara.

"Bourbon, straight," Kara says to the bartender. Then, she smiles back at Jack. "You know you just ordered Carrie's drink?"

"Is that right? Well, it's always been clear liquor for me." Jack looks to his hands and grins. "So you're a bourbon drinker, eh? Always tasted like gasoline to me."

"Hm," Kara smiles at the fact that Jack unknowingly just mimicked Carrie's opinion on bourbon.

The drinks arrive and Kara takes a deep swig. Meanwhile, Jack swirls his glass to catch the light in the liquor. The light is reflected back into his brown eyes and he finally takes a sip.

"So I felt a little tension this morning when I introduced you two. Looks like you and Carrie worked that out?"

"Oh, yeah." Kara waves Jack's observation away. "We've got some tough history but we ironed it all out riding together today."

"Frankly, I don't know much about Carrie myself. Just what I've heard about her time in the CIA," Jack says quietly.

Kara shifts in her chair wondering when the topic of conversation will turn away from Carrie. "She's okay. A bit high-strung, but totally professional about working the job she's given."

"Hard to imagine our crepuscular little office in Los Angeles compares in excitement to the international espionage to which she's accustomed."

"Well, we all landed here from somewhere else, didn't we," Kara states flatly. Crepuscular? Not sure she can keep up with this guy, vocabulary-wise. She finishes her drink and motions to the bartender. "A shot and a beer please. Whatever microbrew you have in a bottle is fine."

Jack glances at his watch and notes that it's still early in the evening. He looks over inquisitively at Kara's empty glass and then back at her. "You want to tell me more about the history you and Carrie share? It may inform the way she works among us pencil pushers."

Kara snorts at his formality. Clearly he's here to talk about one thing: Carrie. She snaps impatiently, "No, not really. Like I said, we worked it all out."

Kara is starting to feel the effects of the bourbon she has guzzled down. Not detecting any interest from Jack, she figures she may as well get a good buzz on and enjoy the evening anyway. "Why don't we talk about your history? You came here from Chicago? What was that like?"

"What, moving from Chicago or living in Chicago?" Jack stares back at his hands and briefly fingers his bare ring finger, impulsively turning a phantom ring. He doesn't wait for Kara's answer. "Well, the weather is certainly nicer here."

"Is that a little Irish brogue I detect?"

"Yes, it is. My family landed in Chicago from Dublin when I was a kid," Jack says. He frowns and coughs. Straightening his back on the bar stool, he takes a deeper swig of his tequila.

Kara notes that Jack is not at all comfortable with her line of questions. But, since the bourbon has kicked in and the shot has also arrived and been consumed, she sees no point in diplomacy now.

She continues, "And you were orphaned and raised by that big land developer, what was his name, was in all the papers a while back."

"Wow, gossip travels fast in our little corner of the world," Jack says. He inhales deeply and his jaw tenses.

Jack continues, "Yes, his name was Thatcher Karsten. I guess you already know how that ended?"

"Yeah, a penthouse office, bullet to the brain?" Kara states flatly.

"Exactly. So, yeah, not much keeping me in Chicago after that. So here I am."

Kara is not ready to let Jack end the story there. "There was a woman, the DA's wife?"

Jack sighs and turns away from Kara to look out the window. Twilight is just beginning to descend on the city. Smog levels have been record high so the sunset promises to be spectacular. "Have you noticed how the sun takes so long to set in LA? In Chicago I remember it was light one minute and dark the next. Here the light seems to hang on forever, not wanting to die."

Kara turns her gaze to where Jack is looking and her eyes momentarily soften. "Yes, I have noticed that." She turns back to her drink and straightens up. "Or maybe it's because here we're always looking for a sunset. The same sunset we never paid much attention to back east."

"So you're from the east too?"

"Something like that," Kara says, anxious to get back to the topic Jack so deftly veered them away from. "So this woman. She was married, right? And she stayed married?"

A grin that doesn't travel to his eyes spreads across Jack's face. "Aren't you the persistent one." He shrugs. "Yeah, she stayed married as far as I know."

Man, this is like pulling hen's teeth, Kara thinks. All the bourbon in the world isn't going to give her the patience to try to get him to talk any more openly. Maybe it'd be less frustrating if she took over the talking.

So she starts. "You find it once, maybe twice, in your twenties. How easy it seems and how effortless, gliding along on a force of its own, you're so confident that you'll find it again. You are so sure! Lose this one, it'll happen again. And again. And again. Until you've finally had enough of the giddiness of that high and want the babies. Then you'll settle into life with the high of that moment. But the high will become something else so quickly and you'll wonder where it went. And why. And if you'll ever feel it again…"

Jack finishes off his drink and motions for another. "…someone who makes you feel the magnitude of it all," he says with a faraway tequila-fueled look in his eyes.

While he's waiting for his drink, he passes a hand over his arm, and for a moment, the white fabric of his shirt becomes translucent revealing the dark outline of a tattoo on his upper arm. A wing and a circle. Kara gasps, but manages to continue speaking.

"So you'll hold on to the something else it's become. For the babies. But you'll think back… how can you not?.. and you'll remember that high, that effortless floating along. And, god help you, you'll want it again. You'll think you're entitled. You in your life of privileged abandon, effortless consumption, will want that feeling of being in your twenties again. Will it come back when you search it out? Maybe for a relative second. But mostly it'll be sorted and dirty and hurt. Dirty motel rooms, quick in and out. Hurt everyone around you. So why go there?"

Jack looks over at Kara, seeming to see her for the first time. "And how do you know this? You without a wedding ring, or kids, as far as I know."

Kara takes a swig of beer, her mouth wrapped over the bottle, her eyes focused on Jack's face. "I watch a lot of TV."

They leave the bar and as they're walking to Jack's car, Kara stops. "You know what, I think I'll try to walk off this buzz."

As he's punching his car fob to open the car, Jack stops and smiles his most open smile of the night, "Seriously? No one walks in LA, you know."

Kara hasn't slowed her gate. She turns and smiles back at Jack. "I'll see you tomorrow, boss."

She starts walking towards the sunset, feeling light headed from the booze, turning her face towards the sky to soak in the last few remaining rays of sun.

She comes to an open green space, a park, with a wrought iron fence separating it from the sidewalk. Inside the park she sees a girl, maybe seven or eight years old, a tow-headed tangle of hair flying from a laughing face. She's wearing a tutu, a deep purple concoction with specks of silver and as she twirls, the specks look like stars spinning in a night sky. She's holding a dream catcher in one hand, twirling it around and around herself, letting the stones in the net catch the light and giggling every time they do. Kara presses her face against the iron gate and looks closely at the girl's face.

The girl's face is a mirror image of Kara's own.

Startled, Kara takes a step back and shakes her head to clear her eyes of the illusion. When she looks back into the park, the girl is gone.

Kara turns on her heel and quickly proceeds to walk away from the park. Her steps have gotten more wobbly as more of the alcohol has hit her brain. She decides to take a brief reprieve on a bench to catch her breath. In an attempt to bring focus back to her eyes, she closes them tightly and presses her palms to them to keep them closed. Behind her closed eyes she catches flash-like glimpses of herself in bed in a room that looks like a hospital room, but from the 50's. Wrought iron beds, painted avocado green, a radiator dripping under a large double paned window, sun glaring through the window as she blinks and tries to see the figure of a man standing above her. A man in a white coat, liquid brown eyes, his eyes so gentle but so cold, his face rigid and unsmiling.

And she remembers tubes everywhere and the feeling of trying to get up but being tied to the bed with all the tubes. Her feet in stirrups, an ultrasound screen with conical shadows, beating, reverberating with her every breath. Then, a sharp pain in her abdomen as she attempts to move. Her hand going down to her belly, her fingers tracing a gash covered by bandages. Hearing herself say, what the hell, where am I, who are you, desperate to regain control and get some answers from the brown-eyed man standing over her. Him shushing her, injecting something into her IV, shushing her again and gently trying to calm her, his hand on her arm, warm but somehow metallic. The brown of his eyes, so warm, but his face still cold, devoid of all emotion.

Kara grabs her temples and leans over to get blood flowing back to her head. She rises slowly back to seated position and is relieved to find that the visions are gone. She gets up off the bench and continues walking. As she nears the end of the block, she stops to wait for the crosswalk light. She turns to look up the intersecting street, empty but for one parked car. Something is catching the light inside the car, obscuring her full view of it. She squints and gingerly walks towards the light.

As she gets closer, the sun's reflection no longer blinds her, and she sees that the car is a total wreck, front end smashed, headlights hanging by thread-like wires, black holes all over the body of the car, with ash and smoke rising from them, as if the vehicle has been in an explosion. She looks at the plates and then closer at the make of the car.

It's her own car.

The sunlight catches something hanging behind the cracked windshield and she gets even closer. Hanging from the rearview mirror are a set of dog tags, hexagonal. As she steps even closer, she sees etched on the dog tags the name Kara Thrace.