Warnings: Non-con, violence.
…
There is nothing sexy about the smell of burning flesh.
In a way, none of this is about sex.
Kellerman leaves the ring to cool on the desk and puts the tongs by the fireplace. The marred skin on Sara's hip is no bigger than the bruise he could have left with his thumb. He's still going easy on her. There's no reason for this to get sadistic.
It is nice, to think she'll wear his ring on her skin every day until the end of her life. Love marriages have been shorter than that.
"Here," he grabs a bottle of water from the mini-fridge and pulls the gag off. The tie is damp from her saliva—his favorite tie. He cups the back of her head and guides the neck of the bottle into her mouth. Gentle. He missed this, missed her, and somehow he can't come up with a way for this to last as long as he'd want.
How long will she give him?
It was around ten p.m. when the plane landed. He can get one full night out of her. That's at least what her husband's life is worth.
Part of him expects she'll toss the bottle to the floor, the kind of bravado she let him glimpse in New Mexico. But she doesn't.
She takes small sips of water.
"If you need a moment–"
"I'm fine."
He puts the bottle down and looks at her. He needs to look. Annihilate every inch of mystery about her, the places where she curves, where bones jut out a little too sharply. He never got why women have to be so skinny, what's supposed to be attractive about long-limbed bodies that look like a strong wind will take them apart.
She reaches behind her chest and before he's registered what she's doing, her bra comes off, drops unceremoniously to the ground.
He hardens against his jeans, and he's not all pleased about it. Even now—especially now—she has power over him.
He grabs her by the shoulders and makes her swivel so she faces the couch. A gasp escapes her when he yanks her arms back and binds her wrists with his tie.
Her hair comes down her back in black rivers, and he could almost think she's dyed it just to spite him. But the red would have been unbearable now, would have smelled of lost innocence and accidental lust.
"You're not gonna want to hear this," he says, "but this isn't personal. It never was."
He pulls her underwear down.
She doesn't scream when he enters her, and doesn't bite into a cushion either.
A mad throb starts in his heart.
He really hopes he's making the deathbed of his obsession right now, and not giving birth to a new one.
…
The one thing she didn't expect was the pain. In a way, it's ridiculous. You see this on television—the after. Girls who cry prettily under a hot spray of shower, but pain spears into her so stiff and cold, she feels her entire body has been cast in molten gold.
She doesn't move, and the tie cutting into her wrists has nothing to do with it.
There's no room for screaming, either. The pain is nothing like the surprise-sharpness of burning metal against her flesh, nothing she's ever experienced, even if there have been others. Times when she woke up, buzzing from morphine, her body sore from men mounting her while she was drugged out of her mind.
This is different.
His hand clutches the back of her neck, and every few thrusts she catches wafts of his perfume. The same minty sandalwood smell as in Gila. Her body remembers.
Seconds expand, not into minutes, but into white stretches of forever.
She doesn't think of Michael, of why she's doing this, of the bliss of him being alive that obliterates everything in its path.
There is only forever.
There is only right now.
…
The kitchen is lopsided and shrouded-red to Lincoln's eyes. He's kicked the chair to the ground so many times, they've stopped putting it back into a sitting position. A headache the size of a fist pounds at his temple and ignites his skull. Blood trickles from his eyebrow and down his lashes, from the impact when he kicked the chair down the first time.
Wait.
A fly whizzes by. The bleep bleep of a faucet dripping somewhere. Though the neon light presses nuclear-bright against his eyes, he can tell it's the middle of the night. Life has drained out of the neighboring rooms, the chatter has died away.
Lincoln's never been a patient man.
Maybe his brother is back in the country by now, waking up to the team's buzzing excitement, while he wonders why the two pillars of his life are missing. His brother and his wife.
I tried, Michael.
Maybe the whole thing is a trick from Kellerman. There is no plane, no deal. Michael is dead, and Sara is dead, and Lincoln is lost in purgatory.
For some reason, his mind drifts to the early days of Michael's loss, when the hurt was so raw, it left a crater inside Lincoln's life that he could only exist around, and just touching it threatened to suck him into a black hole.
It had been two weeks when he woke up to Sara tossing a shirt at him.
"Come on," she said, instead of, Good morning.
Lincoln blinked at her stupidly. The bottle of whisky he'd drained during the night clinked to the ground when he sat up, the sheets pooling at his waist. He was naked from the waist up, possibly from the waist down. If Sara saw something she didn't want to, it'd teach her right for barging in like that.
"Get dressed," she said. "We have to be downstairs in ten."
"No, no," Lincoln groaned. "I don't have to be nowhere." Sara stood there, arms crossed over her chest. The hot glare coming from his window was clearly too bright for dawn. Would he even get back to sleep? "Goddamn it," he said, and kicked the sheets down.
He was naked, as it turned out, and later he'd redden at the swift way Sara stared at the floor. Yesterday's jeans lay on the ground and he slipped them on, not bothering with underwear. It was possible they were also the jeans from the day before yesterday. And the day before that.
"Having fun yet?" he told her.
All she said was, "You could use a shirt."
He heard the grunt coming out of his mouth, felt more beast than man right now. Still he put on the shirt she'd tossed his way earlier.
Their eyes crossed, and venom struck like a snake. "You my brother's wife or my mother?" he said.
It'd be nice to say he didn't mean to hurt her—except he did, absolutely.
The very sight of her hurt too much, pushed him closer to the gulf that Michael's death had opened up.
Her pain, her face, her voice, were all reminders of what he'd lost.
Sara looked at him, unfazed. She did look a bit like a mother just now, or maybe a doctor, who doesn't budge under the impotent threats of a difficult patient.
"This is the moment you tell me Michael would want me to keep going? Quit the booze, get my shit together?"
He spoke nearly into her face, and his breath must be a wind from hell. Still she didn't move back or lower her eyes. She said, "Your brother doesn't want anything anymore."
Your brother. Not Michael.
He stared down at her, like she was someone trying to pick a fight with him in a bar. He was maybe twice her weight and a good head taller than her. And it should intimidate her, because he was not the guy who'd danced with her at their wedding just then. Since Michael had died, he had not been anything he knew how to name.
"So what?" he said. "I go downstairs with you, meet up with the gang, pretend everything's peachy? Life feels back on tracks to you, Sara?"
It flicked through his head to grab her by the shoulders. For some reason, a miracle, he didn't.
Since Sara had come back from the mission that had killed his brother, he had not seen her tear up once. He overheard Daryl telling the others she was so hysterical when it happened he considered knocking her out, because they didn't need to get arrested on top of everything. But that didn't sit right with the Sara who stood opposite him, calm as a picture.
"Michael's dead," he said.
Nothing.
"He's gone, and you want me to sit at a table for fucking breakfast?"
Still, silence. Rage swelled up inside him and finally it was out, the words he'd been thinking since he had learned of his brother's death. The reason why he couldn't look at Sara without wanting to punch a wall.
"If I'd gone with him instead of you, I could have saved him! I would have saved him, you fucking bitch! You—"
His legs crumbled from under him. The abyss had claimed him.
The sobs that rocked his body were the force of an avalanche. He shook, a great tide washing in, and out, in, and out, and marveled at the strange raw scream that tore out of him all the while.
Sara held him, and his grief didn't break her as he thought it might.
There was no hushing, no, It'll be all right.
She just held him.
And he felt, suddenly, that she was on the verge of that abyss as well. That Michael's death had created a pit of darkness in both of them that only he and her in this whole world could understand.
Approaching footsteps yank Lincoln out of the memory.
The stiffness of his body, tied to the chair, the coolness of the floor against his face.
For the first time, it really enters his brain that maybe he couldn't have saved his brother, even if he'd been there.
The only logic he knows says, I would have found a way. There's always a way.
And yet, he stayed in Washington to save Sara. And what good has that done?
…
End Notes:
I don't usually leave notes on this fic. Though I'm getting a lot out of it, both from a creative and cathartic standpoint, it feels a bit like I'm dragging all of you along on a messed up therapy session. I hope those of you who enjoy it are finding it helpful with your own demons-or that you enjoy reading it for other reasons.
I just thought I'd mention that if you don't know the song "Avalanche" by Leonard Cohen, that's what the title of the chapter is referring to, and you might want to listen to it. It's a beautiful song.
Thanks for your support. I'm always happy to read your comments or see kudos on this work.
Take care,
Rachel