a/n This was written because I love Jackson and Louise so much. I also love the books a lot too, and the show, and I do wish there was more Case Histories fanfiction, but hey, what can we do? I hope you like this because I really enjoyed writing it.
...
Say Something
It was a cold evening, Louise Munroe noted as she took the six chilly steps from her car to the front door. It hadn't been cold earlier, when she'd stood by the banks of the Leith and watched with calm detachment as the body of a twenty-seven year old beautician, who had gone missing four days ago, was dragged from the water. No, then it had been warm and she hadn't even had to wear her coat. She slipped her keys into the lock and clicked the door open.
She could hear him, loud and clear, as she took her first step into the house. She didn't think of it as home and she never lingered on quite why that was. "Louise, is that you?" Patrick called from some unseen place.
"No, it's a stranger who just walked in off the street." Patrick's head appeared in the doorway, bobbing up and down, and the only thing Louise managed to notice was the in his left hand he was clutching an egg whisk as if his life depended on it. As if an egg whisk could save him if someone tried to kill him.
It was not a good thing to be thinking just moments after getting home, but images of Patrick valiantly battling with the egg whisk as a masked stranger came at him with a knife, or a gun, or a baseball bat, or any other object that could inflict pain and death, – and Louise knew there were quite a few - wouldn't leave her alone.
"That's not funny, Louise." He said, his voice sullen, before his head disappeared back into the kitchen, and presumably, the rest of him followed. Louise sighed and shrugged off her coat, hanging it up and heading into the living room. She had no idea what Patrick was doing in the kitchen and, if she was being honest, she didn't really care. All she wanted to do was curl up on the sofa with a glass of wine, next to Archie and Jellybean, but that couldn't happen because there was no wine in the house that she knew of, Archie was at boarding school and Jellybean was dead. And Patrick was here. Of course.
Louise kicked off her shoes, leaving them in the middle of the hall just because she knew it annoyed Patrick. She entered the living room and sat down on the sofa. She knew she shouldn't delight quite so much in annoying him, that she should tidy her shoes away for the exact same reason she had left them there in the first place, and yet she didn't, leaving them in the hall like a breadcrumb trail. To what, she wasn't sure. Anywhere but here.
For a while now, things had been strained in their marriage, but still fixable, but recently, things had taken a bleak, rather large pitch face first down a cliff. Into a deep hole. A very deep hole that Louise couldn't see them successfully climbing out of, relationship intact.
In fact, over the last few weeks, Patrick and Louise had simply stopped talking to each other. Right, that might be a little exaggeration, but they had stopped talking not just about the important things - not that they talked about that sort of stuff a lot anyway – but the little things too. Patrick's greeting when she had entered the house and her sarcastic reply was usually as far as they got most days.
Louise wasn't sure why the death in communications between them had occurred, but she did have a very good idea what had caused it.
It was two words. No, she corrected herself - three words:
Jackson Sodding Brodie.
The phone had rung in the middle of the night. Louise had been asleep – like a sane person – as had Patrick, but the incessant ringing of the phone next to their heads had woken them. In a sleep-induced haze, neither of them had thought to actually pick up the phone, instead letting it run to voicemail – that was what it was there for, after all.
"Louise?" She'd almost audibly groaned when she had heard Jackson's voice on the answer phone, but she hadn't, well aware that Patrick was lying next to her. "Louise?" He had asked again, and she'd nearly reached out and picked the phone up and shouted at him to piss off. She didn't and instead closed her eyes and tried to fall back to sleep. Jackson had made that impossible, however. "Answer the phone, Louise. I know you're there." Only because it was midnight and normal people were home and bed at this time of the night. It was a lucky guess, that was all. "Answer the phone!" Jackson yelled, and Louise had realised he was drunk. She sighed, quietly, because it meant that he wasn't going to shut up any time soon. And still, neither of them reached out and picked up the phone, seemingly frozen, lying in their bed, listening to a drunk man's ravings. "It's Jackson, Louise. Answer the phone." He slurred, and she wondered why he was so drunk at midnight on a random Tuesday in March. If she was being honest, and she didn't like being honest when it came to Jackson, she was grateful for his drunk call. It meant she wasn't the only one who sent drunken messages.
"Answer the bloody phone, Louise!" Louise closed her eyes again, wondering where this call was going, if it was going anywhere, and wondering why neither of them picked up the phone and told him where to go. She knew why she didn't, she wanted to know what Jackson wanted to say, but didn't necessarily want him to know she knew. But Patrick, Patrick definitely didn't want or need to know about the drunken ramblings of Jackson.
Patrick was awake, wasn't he? Louise shifted her head slightly to look at her husband. His eyes were open and he was staring at the ceiling. Not answering the phone. Patrick always answered the phone promptly. Louise hardly ever did.
She heard Jackson sigh on the end of the line and wondered whether he was going to ask her to come get him. Louise would, in a heartbeat, go and get him, except from the fact she had a husband warming her bed. Which had been his bed, originally. "Louise?" He was much quieter now, and she got the sense that something big was about to happen, but the moment dragged out to minutes and Jackson didn't continue. She thought he'd hung up and had turned over to try and sleep again, when his voice rang out in the bedroom. "God, Louise, when did you stop being mine?" His words confused her, because she was never his – though she should have been, at least once, really. Why it had never happened was a mystery to both of them. "Why'd you get married, Louise? Why did you do that, 'ey?" Louise knew he was drunk and that the anger in his voice was just the drink talking, that he didn't mean it - and anyway she wasn't the only one, he'd got married too. His wife just wasn't very nice, next to Patrick. She was about to pick up the phone and tell him just that, when he spoke again. Words that took her breath away.
"God," He said again. No, that didn't take her breath away. What he said next did, however, and it really shouldn't have, not whilst she was lying in bed with her husband in the middle of the night as it rained outside. "I love you, Louise."
It was not the first time he'd said those three little words to her. Jackson had said them when he'd been in a drug-induced haze and she'd just thought he meant his wife. His wife she didn't bloody know about.
Jackson hung up then and Louise and Patrick lay in silence for a long few minutes afterwards, not saying a word. Then he'd turned over and gone to sleep. So, a few minutes later, had she, as if Jackson hadn't just told her loved her. He actually meant her this time, not somebody else. But he was still drunk. Ah, it didn't matter anyway. She was married. As was he, technically.
When they'd woken up that morning, three weeks ago now, it was the first day they stopped talking to each other.
So as she said; all Jackson Sodding Brodie's fault.
The next day, Louise had received several texts and voicemails from Jackson telling her there was a message on her home answer machine from him and that she should just delete it because he had been drunk when he left it and it didn't make sense. Oh, it had made perfect sense. It was just a shame he'd been drunk. Though, if he hadn't been drunk he wouldn't have left the message in the first place.
Anyway, it didn't matter what Jackson wanted her to do. She had deleted the message, the morning after, but she already knew what it said, as did her husband but, as she gathered from his frantic messages, not Jackson. He didn't seem to know what he'd said. Maybe it was better that way.
Louise hadn't seen him since the answer machine message. She'd been avoiding him, not that she'd admit it. He had been trying to talk to her – probably to ask what he'd told her.
He wasn't to know that he'd made her heart flip, stupidly, in a way that Patrick had never made her heart flip. In fact, the only person who had ever made her heart flip was Jackson.
Stupid Jackson.
Stupid Louise, really.
She sighed, leaning back on the sofa. Patrick was still in the kitchen, probably still clutching the egg whisk. He was probably making soufflé, or maybe a cake. Whichever it was, Louise didn't really care. Her marriage was falling apart as she watched, but she couldn't find it in her heart to care.
She never should have married him. Kind, calm, brilliant Patrick would have been her dream man years ago – in the years before she first was hurtled in the acquaintance of Jackson Brodie. Since then her dream man only had one face and she never dwelled on that fact very long.
The doorbell rang and Louise was up like a shot, crossing the room to the door as quick as possible. "I'll get it." She yelled and heard Patrick mumble something in response. Wow, he'd said more than two sentences to her today. It made a pleasant change.
She swung the door open and stood in the doorway, a frown on her face, as she saw who their visitor was.
Jackson Sodding Brodie.
He smiled at her and she considered either punching him or slamming the door in his face. Louise did neither because she was polite, civilised human being and her husband was in the kitchen.
So instead she told him to piss off.
He just smiled again. "Nice to see you too, Louise."
"I'm not kidding, Jackson, piss off." She repeated, realising there was still time for her to lose her composure and either to slam the door in his smug face or to punch that same smug face.
He frowned like a wounded puppy and Louise softened slightly, leaning against the door frame and finally giving him a smile in return. Husband in kitchen. Do not smile at men who come to the door, Louise thought to herself. "What d'you want, Jackson? I just got home from work and I'm tired."
"I wanted to know what I said." Louise felt her mouth go dry. She had avoided him, his calls and his texts, because she didn't want to talk about his message.
"Shouldn't you be back in England by now? Why are you hanging around Edinburgh so long, Jackson? Thought you couldn't abide Scotland."
"Some things here are nice. Very nice, actually." Louise had almost blushed apart from the fact the logical part of her brain knew that Jackson was not talking about her. He was probably talking about Edinburgh Castle or the highlands. Husband in the kitchen, Louise.
"So," Louise replied, feeling awkward, because she knew what Jackson had said that night and also knew that he would be mortified if he found out. When, really, wasn't it? Not if, because she was going to tell him, get it out into the open and then forget about it, get Patrick to forget about it and then fix her marriage. Or at least the was the plan. "you want to know what you said?" He nodded, as she raised an eyebrow. "First you need to tell me why you were so drunk."
"Why?"
"I want to know." Louise realised, as she spoke, that neither of them were finding it strange that they were conducting this conversation on the doorstep. She hadn't invited him and he hadn't asked. It was mainly due to the fact that she had no clue how Patrick might react if she walked in to the kitchen and said, Patrick, I'd like to meet the man who professed his love for me over the phone the other night. If she was Patrick, which she wasn't, she would hit Jackson and Louise wasn't in the mood for breaking up a fight. She'd done too much of that at work.
"Josie's staying in New Zealand. With Marlee." Louise smiled sadly. She knew how much Jackson had been looking forward to having his daughter back in Britain and not halfway across the world. Louise also had the strange feeling of being disappointed, like when you wait up all night just to get to the end of a film and then it ends on a whimper not a bang. She knew it was because she liked to think it was her that had driven him to the drink, not his first ex-wife.
"I'm sorry." And she meant it. She knew what it was like to love a child more than anything in the whole world, and to have said child half way around the world must be heartbreaking.
"What did I say, Louise?" He looked tired standing in her doorway, and Louise wanted to give him a big hug to cheer him up. Remember, Louise, husband in kitchen. "Oh, don't say I cried. Please don't tell me I cried." The desperation in his tone was enough to make her laugh, but she didn't, because she suddenly couldn't breathe, because Jackson was standing in front of her and she could just reach out and touch him. There was a tightness in her chest, like she couldn't get enough air to her lungs and she was drowning on land.
"It was worse." She replied, softly.
"God," Jackson breathed out, sighing heavily. "what did I say?"
She wanted to say, "You told me you loved me" but the words would form on her tongue and then disappear before she could say them.
"Nothing. It was nothing, Jackson." She felt like a naughty school child, lying to him like this, but it was better than facing the truth. Confronting things that had simmered under the surface the entire time they had know each other. Say something, Louise. Tell him how you feel.
But what did she feel, exactly? She thought she might love him, love him more than anyone in her entire life, except maybe Archie and Jellybean. That was saying everything, really. She was comparing Jackson to a cat. She nearly laughed again, but she didn't. Louise didn't know how to love, had just sort of dived in headfirst when she'd had Archie and then stumbled upon it with Jackson.
She didn't want to love him.
Husband in kitchen. Stop putting Jackson and love in the same sentence, Louise, you idiot. She sighed and looked back at Jackson, who was still standing on her doorstep. Her husband might be in their kitchen, but he wasn't written on the scars on her heart, like Archie was, like Jellybean and like, god dammit, Jackson Sodding Brodie.
He was always going to be Jackson Sodding Brodie to her from now on. Jackson Sodding Brodie who stole her heart and wouldn't give it back. Jackson Sodding Brodie who was ruining her marriage because she loved him and not Patrick, even when Patrick was the better choice. Jackson Sodding Brodie who she'd die to protect.
"It was nothing, Jackson, really. You just rambled for a bit about sheep and the highlands and New Zealand." It was a lie, but a good one and she saw Jackson breathe a sigh of relief. "Why, what did you think you said?"
"I thought I remembered...I thought I said I loved you." He muttered, embarrassed, and Louise just smiled sadly.
"Nope. Nothing like that." He smiled at her again.
"I'd better be going then." Jackson said, and a moment later he was gone, leaving Louise in the doorway, straining her eyes to get a last glimpse of him.
Then she shut the door and went inside.
...
Please review.