A/N: Consequences and (partial) explanations. More of our fourth arc.

Pride, Prejudice, and Pretense

Chapter 23: Vitamin T

When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.

— Anais Nin

Freedom is the harmony of the inner life with truth.

— Walter Jackson Bate

White. A blinding white, whiter than any fuller could white it.

A hospital room — for that is what it was, a hospital room — all white.

Blinding white.

White: less a color than a placeholder for color, and at the same time the most concrete of all the colors.

Her room was white. Her blankets white. The ceiling. The whirring, blinking, beeping machines colluded around her bed, crowding the bedside, blank of bedside manner but linked to her by wires — all white.

The whiteness was all.

And then Lizzy gasped, arched in the bed, and memory, black, returned, the present, in all its whiteness, faded. Dark. She was beneath Wickham, he was about to enter her, claim her, violate her. His hands squeezed her throat. And then he was on top of her, dead. A shot to the head. Her name in Darcy's voice.

All in the dark.

She shuddered head to toe, the shudder less a reaction than a mode of being. She was a shudder. Escaped. At the last moment, she had escaped Wickham's threat. He had not done what he promised. Wickham's promise. Not a promise of a promise, a promise of humiliation and death. He had seen what she never intended him to see, touched her where she never intended him to touch her, and…like that…but he had not kept his promise.

And now he was dead. She was sure of it. She touched her hair, expecting it to be matted by blood, Wickham's blood, red but black in the moonlight, but her hair was clean.

She was clean.

Slowly, she untensed. That memory retreated, jagged and raw, and it was replaced by another.

Darcy, standing surrounded by white, his handsome face enshadowed by regret and self-loathing, talking to her, repeating a whispered Sorry.

Finally, he spoke in sentences. "He's dead, Lizzy. Wickham. I killed him. Damn it, we should have given you a sat phone, but we worried about hiding it from Wickham, especially at the security gate. And we did not know the CIA plane from Chicago would register a mechanical problem before take-off, delaying us. Agent McDougal was outnumbered and outflanked…

"I failed you, Lizzy. Failed you. I should have stopped this as soon as I knew that I…That you…That we…I should have stopped this. Even before that, when I saw how much it was taking out of you."

She remembered tears but was unsure if they were hers or his or both.

Sad. It had all been so sad. Darcy had been so sad. So sorry. But so was she. So sorry.

She tried to tell him that she should never have accepted the mission, that she should have quit, that she should have walked away when she knew what she wanted, when she knew she no longer wanted to be Agent Bennet. When she knew she wanted him. Wanted another life.

But she had been afraid to tell him the truth, afraid he would not want what she wanted, to share that new life with her. She had chosen to stay, to stay undercover, to continue the seduction of Wickham until that seduction had taken her to the breaking point.

The habits of her CIA life had been hard to break, harder than she realized. Deeply instilled, installed by training, and reinforced by dangerous after dangerous. Welded by stress. In Chicago, with Darcy, she had decided against her habits but had still been trapped by them.

The only way to break a habit is to acquire a new one. Changing a habit is not as simple as changing your mind, and that's not always simple. Habits are more complicated.

Someone had told her that at the Farm, when she was being trained to abandon normal, civilian life behind and acquire the habits of an intelligence agent when the Farm was dishabituating her from that normal, civilian life. Returning to it was going to take more from her than a change of heart. But her heart had changed — and her habits would change, were changing.

She tried to tell Darcy all that — but she could not manage to get it out, to say the first few words that would summon all the others. Words are deeds, and sometimes words can be hard to say, deeds daunting.

Darcy had started again before Lizzy could start. "When you got here, they used…a rape kit. I told them…what happened…I haven't been told the test results but the doctor did tell me that Wickham…hadn't…" He stared at her, agony and shame deep in his eyes.

"No," she finally said, thickly, his self-recrimination making her heart hurt. "No, he hadn't, didn't. He dragged me into the moonlight, my…lingerie bunched up…either he did that or the dragging did it. He saw me…and he…it…touched me…there…but you stopped him…"

She had endured humiliation but not the ones Wickham most wanted.

She lifted a weak hand from beneath the white blankets and touched Darcy's arm as if she could palm the words she could not say, deliver them by touch.

He acknowledged her touch but did not seem to hear the palmed words, and he nodded, grim and defeated, as if her gesture of thanks made him feel worse, hate himself more.

"My fault. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong — almost. It could have been worse but that doesn't mean it wasn't awful. The doctor told me — so I could report to Kellynch. I did, and I told him it was all my fault. What Wickham did to you, to Karen.

"No," Lizzy said again, "it wasn't, I…Wait, how's Karen? Agent McDougal?"

"Alive — but in ICU. She was shot twice and lost a lot of blood, but she's tough. In the firefight, she killed one of the men who shot her, and badly wounded the other; he died…later." Darcy paused, and blinked, as if blinking away a memory. "She's not in a coma but they're keeping her under sedation."

There was a quiet moment between them. Darcy reached out, stopping her perhaps without intending to, and moved a lock of her hair off her forehead. She stopped talking. He did it with infinite care, a devoted gentleness.

Leavetaking.

No!

"This mission's done, Lizzy. But the fact that Wickham's dead doesn't mean the Wicker Man is. I'm going to finish them, whoever they are; they did this to you as much as he did…My new mission. Go back to sleep; you need sleep"

He leaned forward and kissed her lips as gently as he had moved the lock of her hair. Reverse Snow White.

"Goodbye, Lizzy. I have to go."

Her weakness and her surprise combined to keep her silent.

Tears streamed from eyes. Her tears. She could feel them hot on her cheeks. He turned away and left the room, leaving her alone in the whiteness, she did not know if he had shed tears.

Lizzy blinked away fresh tears at the memory. When did that happen? How long ago?

Everything was white; everything was jumbled. She was estranged from herself.

The door to her room opened and a doctor walked in.

White lab coat, a woman, older, gray hair, half glasses, full smile.

"Agent Bennet, you're awake, and looking better. You've been in and out the last three days, but mostly out." The woman smiled, her smile kind and warm. "I'm Dr. Williams. I've been briefed on who you are and what you were doing. Director Kellynch called me personally. And I talked with both Agent Darcy and Agent Bingley. He's outside."

"Agent Darcy?" Lizzy asked, her voice sounding raspy, brittle. Fall leaves crushed under slow feet.

"No, sorry, Agent Bingley. Agent Darcy had to leave yesterday."

The doctor gave Lizzy a moment, looking at her chart through her reading glasses as Lizzy absorbed the news. Lizzy stared straight ahead, recalling his lips on hers in the white room.

"How are you feeling?" The doctor asked finally, looking up from the chart.

"Tired. No, I'm exhausted. Enervated. — How do you say I am?"

The doctor smiled. "You are exhausted. You needed sleep. You still need sleep. What you've been doing…" She paused. "I take it, after talking with Kellynch and with Darcy and Bingley, that you have been under enormous stress. They were talking about the last couple of weeks, but my guess is that you've been under enormous stress for months, probably years. That a part of you has been in revolt against the life you're leading, and that that part has grown, or asserted itself more and more. Doesn't the CIA require periodic psychological evaluations, don't they allow agents time off?" The doctor paused and then spoke again before Lizzy could answer. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound like I'm accusing you of something. I should have asked Kellynch these questions, but I was so…shocked…to be on the phone with the Director of the CIA. My outrage didn't grip me until the call ended."

Lizzy looked at her. "It's okay. I was usually given time, a short time, off between missions, and, yes, there were periodic evaluations at Langley, but I've…always been good at test-taking." Lizzy shrugged, understanding herself, the game she had played with Langley and with herself.

"Meaning you were undercover even at Langley, pretending among the pretenders. Pretending to be a whole-hearted pretender. You gave the evaluator what the evaluator needed to release you for the next mission, instead of giving the evaluator the truth?"

Lizzy sat for a moment then nodded in concession. "You're right, yes. The truth isn't easy for me, not as easy as it should be."

"I don't wonder. You've lived a lineup of lies for a long time.

"All the lies that are my life," Lizzy said bitterly, and through a frown of self-mockery.

The doctor stared at her for a moment, thinking.

"What is it?" Lizzy asked.

Dr. William shook her head, downplaying what she was about to say. "Just a pet theory of mine. I'm convinced human beings need the truth like they need the sun. Call it Vitamin T. Without it, we shrink, shrivel, die. The heart naturally loves truth. And I don't mean what people call 'my truth', I mean the truth, the genuine article. It's why we crave knowledge in a way we don't crave mere belief. You can only know what's true — but you can believe what's false. And falsity enslaves. The heart naturally loves the truth." She stopped and pursed her lips, smirked, but kindly. "Anyway, my ultimate but unofficial diagnosis is that you are suffering from a serious Vitamin T deficiency.

"But that's just my pet theory; ignore it if you want. I don't offer it as your doctor, but as one woman to another, one human being to another.." She looked down at the chart self-consciously and cleared her throat. "Officially, I'm here to tell you that so far all the tests we've run," she glanced up, eyes above her half glasses, then back down at the chart, "including the tests that are part of the sexual assault evidence collection kit," she paused, "have come back negative. No penetration, no discharge of semen. Given that, any risk of pregnancy is very, very slim, but we will test you before we release you.

"I want to keep you for a few more days. Physically, you'll be fine. Head trauma, mild concussion, some stitches but no skull fracture. You were in and out for a while; you may or may not remember the conscious moments. Your back was bruised and badly scraped. You have two cracked ribs. Bad blisters on both feet. But everything's healing well.

"You need to rest, sleep as much as you can. As my dad would've said, you've been burning the candle at both ends. Serious burnout. Stress, mountainous stress. People used to call it a nervous breakdown; now, it's called a mental health crisis. You're uncomfortably close to one, whichever term you use."

Lizzy nodded, listening, processing while staring up at the white ceiling.

For how long have I been operating under this level of stress? Denial? How have I coped?

She knew the answer. Since the Farm.

It had been an unspoken part of the training there, the overarching class they were all taking but no one acknowledged, that never appeared on a syllabus. Inhumanity 101. Lizzy shook her head at the knowledge, never before entertained. At college, she had been a student of the humanities. At the Farm, she graduated to the inhumanities.

"A mental health crisis? Am I crazy?"

Dr. Williams laughed indulgently. "No, but that's your problem. You've managed to stay sane, to cling to sanity somehow in what I'm guessing is and has been a gonzo world, and that's created the mountainous stress. If you were crazy, gonzo in your gonzo world, there'd be no stress — but of course, there'd be other problems, like, well, your psychopathology. They put you through school, right?" Lizzy nodded. "The CIA? What's it called, The Farm?" Lizzy nodded again. "They must be teaching crazy there, and excusing themselves for doing it because, for all the damage they do to you agents, they claim the good you do for others justifies it. The tool doesn't matter, beat it to death, foul it beyond recognition, strip it of integrity and self-respect — only the job matters. Assholes."

The doctor's voice was quiet, angry, and exasperated. She stomped her foot on her final word.

Lizzy did not respond to any of what Dr. Williams said. Mention of the Farm brought Agent McDougal to Lizzy's mind. Karen's words: "I hated those classes at the Farm."

How could I have forgotten to ask about her? Maybe I am crazy?

"What about Karen? Agent McDougal? What can you tell me?"

Dr. William shrugged. "I really can't say much, in fact, I shouldn't say anything, HIPAA and all, but I will say that I believe she'll pull through."

"Can I see her?"

"Yes, but wait until tomorrow; let's see how she's doing then. We'll get you up today and let you walk around some in your room, but we'll put off any hallway travel until tomorrow.

"Besides, Agent Bingley is outside and wants to talk to you. Sorry if I was making long speeches. I don't care for Director Kellynch, as I guess you can tell. Agent Darcy and Bingley I like, even if Darcy's a little stiff, a little hard, — but I'll be glad when my hospital exorcizes all its spooks."

"Wait," Lizzy protested, shifting in her bed. "Where am I?" Lizzy only then realized she didn't know.

She was a mess, her thoughts swampy, her emotions distant, numb. She could remember how she felt when Darcy left her hospital room but she could not feel it. The sadness was there but far away, funereal velvet she had touched, crushed in her hand, but now could only see in the distance.

"You're at Banner Wyoming Medical Center," Dr. Williams said. "In a section of the hospital that's been very remodeled and is not yet open for use or to the public. Director Kellynch demanded it. By the way, there are guards outside your room and Agent McDougal's room, just down the hall. A precaution, Kellynch called it, but he didn't explain beyond that. It seems obvious, though, that he worries the two of you are still in danger. But I suspect Agent Bingley can tell you more about that. Shall I get him?"

"Please," Lizzy said. She wanted to know about what had happened on the mountain, what had happened since. What happened in Rapid City?

Dr. Williams left the room.

A moment later, Bingley walked in, eager and sheepish. He gave her his best boyish smile as he reached the bed, his eagerness winning out. "Hey, Lizzy! So good to see you awake!"

"Charlie, what happened in Rapid City, the Pow Wow?" There was so much she needed to know, no time for greetings.

He put his hand on her forearm and gazed into her eyes. "Thanks to you, nothing happened. You came to for a minute up on the mountain and you kept telling Darcy to check your phone. Over and over. We did and we found the pictures. The plan. A bomb squad found the explosive the next morning and disabled it. No one was hurt; the event went on that night as planned but with extra security. Who knows what would have happened, chaos and injury and death, if you hadn't found those plans and told Darcy."

"I told him?"

"You don't remember?" His voice was soft, as he removed his hand from her arm. "You were upset, badly upset. Blood all over you."

Lizzy tried not to remember Wickham dead on top of her, the blood on her face and in her hair. "And Karen? She's in the ICU, the doctor said."

"Yes, down the hall, and stable. She was shot twice, once in the stomach, and once in the thigh. Lost a lot of blood before the paramedics arrived, although I did my best, and Darcy helped after he covered you with his coat and he made sure you were okay. She was in surgery for a long time."

"She's stable?"

"Yes."

"What happened up there, Charlie, on the mountain? How did Wickham find us?"

"The man Karen didn't kill told us what happened. Interrogation at the hospital later, before he died. Wickham and another man were in the cabin and stayed there. They never came down the mountain after you. Not on foot. You had Wickham's sat phone on, and he tracked it using the other man's sat phone."

"Goddamn it! A rookie mistake," Lizzy said through her teeth, her emotions now awake enough for her to feel fury at herself.

Bingley nodded but patted her arm. "It wouldn't have mattered if you turned it off. There was a backup tracker in the guts of the phone. Evidently, the Wicker Man likes to keep tabs. It could have been tracked either way, on or off.

"The man who followed you down the mountain used a walkie-talkie to tell them you'd taken another walkie-talkie. That's how Wickham knew he could contact you on it. Wickham didn't want to use the phone for fear you might toss it afterward. The walkie-talkie had no tracker. The man who followed you went across the mountain to the road, and Wickham and the other man picked him up in a car, above you and Karen.

"They figured out roughly where you were heading when you turned to go across the mountain, and they beat you down there. Wickham left the two men near Karen's car and went to wait for you. He let Karen go by when she showed up first. Even in the dark, he knew the difference. He only cared about you — that's what the survivor said, the man who stayed in the cabin with Wickham. Wickham knew you were nearby because of the phone. When the shooting started, you came to the rescue, as he expected."

"But there was another man. The second team. Karen killed two of them but a third ran away. She shot at him but I thought she missed."

Bingley's sheepishness returned and he made a face. "Never caught him, never found him. We think he got away, although it's possible she hit him and he died on the mountain somewhere. But no one's found any remains, no blood trail."

Lizzy nodded slowly, trying to imagine how all the events on the mountain had unfolded, how wrong her understanding of them had been at the time. She'd never performed so poorly on a mission.

"Why are there guards for Karen and me?"

"Kellynch. We don't know how, but your cover was compromised. Someone sent those teams after you. Not Wickham. The man we interrogated did not know who it was, but there's someone in the Wicker Man who's more powerful than Wickham. He didn't run the show."

"But didn't he meet with them when he left the cabin?"

Bingley looked at her. "We don't actually know what happened in the cabin, beyond Wickham's being tranqed and…what you were wearing. If you're up to it, could you tell me? Kellynch wants your report."

Lizzy did not want to revisit the little red cabin, but she did. She started with their arrival in Casper, the bathroom meeting with Karen. She ended with Wickham hitting her from the dark. Bingley listened closely, sympathetically.

"Huh," he said when she finished, "we didn't know Wickham left the cabin. But he didn't meet with the teams. They were sent by someone else; Wickham wasn't in that loop. Evidently, there was dissension in the upper ranks of the Wicker Man."

They were both quiet, then Lizzy asked: "And Darcy's gone after whoever sent them, the more powerful person? He's still chasing the Wicker Man?"

Bingley's face saddened. "I'm sorry, Lizzy. I tried to get him to stay. But he was so angry…inconsolable." Bingley shook his head slowly. "He told you about the plane?" She nodded. "I thought he would tear the Chicago airport apart before we left, got airborne. And when we found you, after Darcy killed Wickham, — he was raging.

"Kellynch ordered him to stay here, to wait, and for the three of us to travel back to DC together, but he refused. 'I'm MI-6,' he said, 'not CIA'. He refused Kellynch's order. Kellynch tried to get MI-6 to give the same orders, but they refused." Bingley had lost focus on Lizzy as he spoke; he looked at her again. "Yes, he's gone after them, alone. I asked him to let me know where he was so that I could see if Kellynch would let me join him later, but he told me no. He told me to go home to Jane. He told me to find another life."

Lizzy looked up at Bingley, catching his eyes and holding them. "I'm done, Charlie. I'm going to talk to Kellynch and resign. Agent Bennet did not die on Casper Mountain, but she disappeared there, never to be seen again."

Bingley seemed unsurprised. "You love Darcy, don't you?"

Lizzy delayed for a moment — stop it! — then she nodded firmly. "Yes, I do, desperately."

Vitamin T.

After Bingley left, Lizzy slept for hours.

When she woke, a nurse came to help her from the bed and to walk around the room. She was unsteady at first but quickly did better.

The walking helped clear her mind, bringing her back to herself. She reinhabited herself.

The nurse left and just as Lizzy had settled in the bed again her room phone rang. She had noticed the landline on the nightstand but assumed it was not yet connected.

No one had mentioned it and it had never rang.

Lizzy picked it up and answered hesitantly. "Hello?"

"Lizzy, it's Director Kellynch. How are you?"

"The doctor says I'm doing fine, physically."

He made a pleased sound. "Good, good. But how are you, I mean, given what happened, what almost happened?"

She thought about what Darcy said before he left her. "What happened was awful. I don't want to think about what almost happened."

"No, I suppose not. Do you need someone to talk to there? I can send one of our psychologists, have someone there tomorrow. For you — and Agent McDougal, if she wants."

"Do you know any more about Karen? They haven't told me anything but that she's stable, but still under sedation."

"Dr. Williams is chary with information. I don't think she likes me. Or the Company." He seemed more personally offended by the second than the first. "Yes, that's what I know. All I know." He stopped and Lizzy could all but hear him change gears. "Agent Bingley told me about what happened, what you told him. I take it Agent McDougal performed satisfactorily? How would you evaluate her performance?"

"Yes. She was exemplary, resourceful, and courageous. I doubt I would be here at all without her."

"But she forgot to give you a sat phone, even when she was tasked to do it."

"Yes, but this was all thrust on her, last minute, an agent with no real field experience. When you factor that in, what she did was remarkable. I would work with her again in a moment, and put my life in her hands."

"Well, perhaps you will have a chance to do that, down the line."

Lizzy pulled up. She had said that to praise Karen, not to promise her future to Kellynch. She was done. Done with Kellynch. Done with the Company. Hearing his voice only made that clearer.

"No, sir, I won't. I haven't given you my self-evaluation. I did not perform satisfactorily." She told him about Wickham's sat phone, about the numerous errors she had made in the cabin and on the mountain.

When she finished, he was silent for a moment. "Well, Lizzy, you made errors, but those are more or less the first. And the outcome, while not all we wanted where the Wicker Man was concerned, was more than satisfactory. You saved lives, the Pow Wow. Well done — especially since I know how much you hate seduction missions, since I know your heart was not in this assignment."

"That's incorrect, sir. The problem was not that my heart was not in it; the problem is that my heart was."

"What?"

She cleared her throat. Years ago, Kellynch had stepped into the twilight blank spot in Lizzy's life that her father's death had created. She had substituted pleasing Kellynch for pleasing her father. She had chosen the Company in extremis and then lived in extremis ever since. She had imprisoned her heart and fed it falsity.

No more.

"Director Kellynch, I am resigning. Effective immediately I will send an email to that effect later today, so there's an official record."

She could tell that the resulting silence was stunned. Her tone had been final, resolved. It took Kellynch a minute to speak. "And there's nothing I can do to change your mind? Nothing? I don't want to lose you. What can I do?"

Her eyes filled with tears, spilling from her eyes and down her cheeks.

She began to cry, not because she was divided about her decision; she wasn't. She cried for herself, for what happened on the mountain. For Karen. Lizzy cried for all the missions before that. For the years of self-division she had repressed. Tears for her Company past, lived in shadows and now lost in shadows. Tears for her imagined future, now doubtful. Tears for Darcy returned to the shadows.

Despair backward and despair forward.

She restrained the tears long enough to answer Kellynch, to control her voice.

"Nothing, sir. Goodbye."

She hung up the phone, dropped her head into her hands, and sobbed bitterly.

A/N: A difficult few chapters to write. One more chapter in the fourth arc, Doubting Castle. Then a short fifth and final arc.