WARNINGS: Necrophilia, violence, sexual assault, major character death, torture, dubious consent, abduction, swearing.
…
Kellerman contemplates Sara's shape on the floor, the smell of gunpowder in the air teasing his sanity.
Moments when death is so fresh are deceiving.
You feel as if you could thrust your hand into the hot brew of time and pluck out the last few seconds—
Go to hell.
BANG.
His mouth is dry as winter air.
That's not what was supposed to happen.
Of course, he followed orders, like the good soldier he is. Kim made the choice crystal clear—You disobey me and you are done. Put her in the ground, Paul.
Kellerman gave Sara as many exits as he could think of. The waterboarding didn't work, and it should have worked. The woman isn't a trained assassin or some spy inured to torture. She hasn't been taught to withstand pain. When they got started, he expected he'd only have to suffocate her two or three times. The first time, for fifteen seconds, then twenty, so she knew it could get worse. The longest he's ever seen anyone endure waterboarding was forty-nine seconds. By this point, usually, people are pissing themselves and offering to sell you their spouse or their children for you to just get it over with and shoot them in the head.
Kellerman never wanted to go that far with Sara. Those afternoons at her apartment were too fresh. It was surprisingly easy to slip into the persona of Lance the Addict, who never voted anything but Democrat, was morally disgusted by the death penalty and believed that saying 'All Cops Are Bastards' was as useful as calling the sky blue.
Of course, only one of them was real during those moments. He looks at Sara, lying dead on the ground. And it was you.
Yet part of it felt real to Kellerman, in no way he could explain. Conversations with her were surprisingly enjoyable. Kellerman isn't a man who likes to talk—they don't teach you the value of introspection in the military. Likewise, he isn't a man who likes to wait, though he'll sit in a car watching an entry door, waiting for a target to step out, if need be. He always feels the flow of time passing. When he eats, when he showers, even when he takes a woman to bed. The steady trickle of seconds weaving into minutes never escapes him.
So it was a surprise, meeting Sara, and realizing that as he stepped into her apartment, vortexes opened and sucked in two or three hours on end without Kellerman being aware of it.
Well.
He contemplates her red hair splayed onto the tile floor, dark with water and blood.
Whatever spell Sara can cast on time to make Paul forget that ticking clock, it didn't happen today, in Gila.
It's funny.
Funny.
The afternoon replays in his mind.
How he hardened against surprise, against mercy, when he realized a couple of times shoving her head into that bathtub weren't going to cut it. Setting the timer on his phone to increasingly long intervals. Thirty seconds. Forty.
Surely, sweet cinnamon-eyed Sara couldn't take forty seconds of waterboarding. Men built like wardrobes collapsed crying before his eyes after thirty-five. Part of him couldn't believe he was actually subjecting her to this. The cold water soaking his sleeve up to the elbow, the push of her head against his palm as she struggled—all that felt real enough.
But it mustn't be real. Couldn't be.
Why had playing Lance the Addict felt real, when this didn't?
If this were real, Sara's lungs would be catching fire, the need for oxygen driving her half insane. Survival instinct would kick in and thrash like a wild animal, demanding she give up the brothers. That she do and say anything it took for him to stop.
When he pulled her out, the first time after setting the timer to forty-five, he thought maybe some sort of magical intervention was taking place. The water turned into clouds at the touch of her face, or she was miraculously immune to pain.
Forty-five seconds.
She coughed for twice that time when he pulled her out, and he squeezed water from her hair with a towel, half-aware the hushed reassurances coming out of his mouth were ludicrous.
"It's okay. You're all right."
Then she planted eyes on him that might as well have been two pieces of moonless sky. A splinter of ice speared through his breastbone.
And he realized she was serious when she let out, "Even if I knew I wouldn't tell you."
Incredible.
You couldn't help be fascinated by the tales of people who resisted torture. They were more myth than men, if you asked Kellerman. He'd never met one before who couldn't be cracked using the right tools, the right method.
He would have never thought he'd meet the myth in the flesh someday, and that the myth would be a woman.
After that, he kept trying. Set the timer to fifty seconds. One minute. One minute and ten seconds.
But part of him knew it was useless. That they could be at it all afternoon and Sara would just give him that look. And wasn't it funny, wasn't it ridiculous, that true courage would come in such an unlikely shape?
A sweet-smile, girl-next-door prototype who would give her vote to Bernie Sanders in a heartbeat, with addiction issues, naïve enough to fall for a white knight convict covered in tattoos, and who would leave the door of the infirmary open for his innocent brother to escape because 'it was the right thing to do'.
"I'm not messing around, Sara," he said, at some point. As if three hours of waterboarding could have given her that idea. "For God's sake, does your life mean nothing to you? Do you want to see what the next stage to this looks like? Because we're just brushing the surface."
A tremor in her jaw let on that his bluff was having the intended effect. Sharing the fact that he was impressed by her resistance to pain would goad her toward further resistance.
At this point, he wasn't sure what more he could do to her without risking killing her. He could keep setting that timer back ten more seconds and ten more, but it clearly wasn't having the intended effect.
What else? Kellerman had never tortured someone using a different method. Breaking bones, ripping fingernails. That all seemed like things barbarians would do, not representatives of the American government. Not that waterboarding was less painful. But it was—cleaner. More civilized.
Yes, civilization came down to whether your interrogation techniques shed blood or not.
Sara just held his eyes for a moment. "It doesn't matter what I tell you. You'll do what you want, anyway. I can't stop you."
What I want?
His teeth clenched in annoyance. Did she think he was getting off on this?
"You can stop me, Sara. You're the only one of us who can stop this."
"Fuck you."
He blinked at the swear word. She was not the sort of woman to use colorful language.
Was that when he knew? That it was over, that as far as she was concerned, he had already killed her?
Even as he stands before her dead body, now, despite the bullet hole in her head, he can't really believe he did it.
There's so little blood. The gun, still hanging like lead from his hand, is a small caliber. He could have left her to drown, but suffocation is such a painful death. It seemed wrong, cruel, perhaps, to finish on this one note of torture. He hoped at least there could be mercy in this ending. Show that he respected her, by a painless death.
BANG.
Looking at her, now—
Funny, yes.
Time has always been funny with Sara.
He feels as if he could wind back the past few minutes and she would be standing in that chair again, facing him with her unbroken silence. "Go to hell," is the last thing she told him.
It feels like he could have done better by her. Showed her admiration, in the end. What would it have mattered to tell her then?
Devotion such as yours is rare, Sara. I don't know why I didn't manage to break you, and for your sake I wish that I had. But I'm fascinated that I could not. Fascinated that sweet, harmless you, brimming with vulnerability and looking like a strong wind might take you apart, are what the face of true defiance looks like.
He closes his eyes. "I'm sorry, Sara." He means that. The gun feels radioactive in his hand. A sound draws his attention—when he looks at her again, his heartbeat picks up. He could have sworn she let out a sound. A moan, a tentative answer.
But he's just dreaming it, of course. A woman with a bullet to the head does not talk. She wouldn't speak under torture, she's not going to speak now, Paul.
Yet he kneels, despite himself, shoving the gun back in his holster. Needing to touch her. Her eyes are closed, not open with the strange stiffness of fresh cadavers. She could be sleeping. A jolt courses through him as he brushes his knuckles against her cheek. It feels illicit, wrong, somehow, although how can he possibly wrong her now? He becomes aware that he has never touched her like this. Though his hand may have come in contact with her cheek as he was drying her hair, this is different.
She feels soft as peach fuzz and he wonders, absently, how the touch of her face would feel if he brushed his lips along the line of her cheekbone.
Something strange—it's a while before he puts his finger on it.
She's still warm.
Her body temperature should have chilled faster due to the waterboarding. And yet she feels just as warm as she did, when he was plunging her head underwater—
No.
Warmer.
He startles to a standing position as the door of the motel room swings open. He called backup, twenty minutes ago, but he wasn't expecting them to come so fast.
What really surprises him, though, as he turns around, is the face of the man that enters the room.
"Bagwell?"
When he first caught a glimpse of that face, on the Wanted: Fox River 8 poster, it struck Kellerman that Theodore Bagwell looked like the bastard offspring of a weasel and a fox, grossly translated into human shape.
As he stands in the motel room that has become Sara's deathbed, the image seems more appropriate than ever. Annoyance sprinkles into Kellerman's chest at the intrusion—
This feels like an intrusion. And he is annoyed, though there can't be much sense in that.
"What the hell are you doing here?" he says.
But what he's thinking is, Why didn't Kim warn me? It's possible they're relying on that approach, as old as time. It takes a con to catch a con. If the company didn't warn him though, it can only mean—
I'm out of the loop. Caroline's shutting me out.
Kellerman squares his shoulders, not to betray weakness. The more he lets on that he's surprised, the more it'll show that he's lost grip on the situation.
He affects anger—it proves surprisingly easy. "I asked for a professional."
"They don't make them more professional than me when it comes to disposing of bodies."
His eyes sweep over Sara's figure on the ground.
"Such fine bodies," he says.
"Hey—"
Bagwell puts his palms up. "I'm joking, boss."
Boss. Urgh. Kellerman debates shooting the inmate in the head right now, deal with Sara's body and Bagwell's all by himself. Two birds, one stone. Show Kim what he thinks of this little strategy.
But then, he'd have to chop Sara's body up with his own hands, and he's not sure that he can do that. To butcher her like she's a slab of meat, feel the heat of her blood through his rubber gloves.
Bagwell's eyes are still roving up and down Sara's body on the ground, and that gives him second thoughts.
"You shot her good, boss. Fall in love with a con and get a bullet to the head, eh? Sounds like a cautionary tale. Not that all cons are equal. Lemme tell you, in Fox River, she wouldn't give me the time of day. I used to daydream about getting her alone in a locked room, puttin' my hands where my mouth was, if you catch my drift."
Kellerman is not catching his drift, and does not want to catch his drift for all the money in the world.
"Kind of a shame you did away with her so fast. I would have finished her off, boss, and you wouldn't have needed to get your hands dirty—"
"You don't shut up, I swear to God, I'll get my hands dirty right now."
"A'right, a'right," Bagwell smiles, pacifyingly.
Jesus, Kellerman hates his job today. Hates his life. Hates himself.
"So what's the plan, boss?"
Kellerman hesitates. The plan was to get in the truck, which the backup agent brought, and drive while said backup chopped Sara's body to pieces, all the way to an isolated spot in the forest where they could bury her.
But now, he's not so comfortable with that anymore.
The thought of Bagwell carving up this woman like some Christmas ham is almost worse than doing it himself.
Christ, Kellerman thinks. He's being possessive over a dead woman who couldn't feel an ax falling down on her. She won't care who's handling her, won't feel sullied by Bagwell's hand on the knife.
Maybe he feels sullied on her behalf, but that's his problem, isn't it?
He just shot a woman he cared about, after spending three hours torturing her. What does comfort have to do with it?
So he sums up the plan to Bagwell, who nods, his eyes not leaving Sara's body. "Uh-huh. Copy that, boss."
"I'll need to drive for about an hour," Kellerman continues. "By then, I want you to be done."
"Sure thing."
"Hey!"
Kellerman snaps his fingers, to draw Bagwell's attention. The man makes eye-contact promptly. Smiling, like he's used to being treated like a dog—it repels Kellerman, how easily Bagwell falls into the kowtowing persona. No one should butter up to him like that.
When they've dealt with Sara, he'll shoot Bagwell and bury him, too. His favor to humankind.
He continues, "I want her to be—disposed of, by the time we get to the woods. There's bags you can use. I don't want to see chopped up pieces of her, to waste time cleaning the truck before we get going."
He tries to make it about speed, rather than about his own reluctance to see this woman reduced to pieces of meat.
Bagwell's eyes gleam, like he can see right through Kellerman. "Cover her face," he says, "mine eyes dazzle."
"What?"
"It's a play, boss," Bagwell answers. "From Shakespeare's time, 'bout a man who kills his sister and regrets it after the fact. 'Cover her face,' he tells her executioner. 'Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.'"
Kellerman blinks in surprise, stupidly silent for a few seconds. Has this inmate really just quoted John Webster to him?
He says, "Just get it the fuck done."
…
But he does not drive for an hour, or even twenty minutes. The woods outside the road whisper with smells of pine and earth and moss. They could bury her now—they don't have to wait.
We don't have to cut her in pieces, either.
Kellerman tries to harden against the glass shard sinking through his ribcage. He doesn't want her to be cut in pieces.
It's ridiculous, foolish, and probably too late.
Yet his pulse throbs, with an urgent need to stop the truck. To stop Bagwell.
Sara is dead. He shot her through the head, for God's sake.
When they carried her into the back of the truck, she was limp, not stiff. Rigor mortis wouldn't have had time to settle, of course, so it makes perfect sense.
Still. Still, Kellerman feels this will all be so much more bearable if they bury Sara intact. Stupid, yes. If she's found, fragmentation will make her much harder to identify.
Fragmentation? God, you're pathetic, Paul. Call a spade a spade.
The fact that it's stupid doesn't make it any less true.
He doesn't want Sara's body mutilated. And he's had such a shit day, he's earned the right to indulge, hasn't he?
He stops the truck, after gliding into a patch of woodland at enough distance from the road that they can act with some discretion. He flings open the car door, strides to the back of the truck. Why is he rushing?
Shit, why is he even doing this?
The thought of finding Bagwell sawing through Sara's body—
No.
He doesn't need that image carved into his eyes. Or does he? Is this some masochist streak, goading him on? Is that why he's prying apart the doors at the back of the truck?
They open with a squeal, and a block of salt goes down Kellerman's throat.
His feet turn to roots where he stands.
Bagwell is not butchering Sara.
He's straddling her body—her whole, unmutilated body.
And he's raping her.
Though maybe the word shouldn't apply to Sara, right now, it's the only one that does.
She is entirely nude, a puddle of clothes, stacked between the piles of carton boxes. A stretch of white thigh and hip and buttocks slice into him before he can brace himself. She's flipped her on her stomach, but he can make out a nipple pressing against the floor. Her auburn hair falls like a curtain over her face.
Cover her face, he thinks. Mine eyes dazzle.
The shock is so great that Kellerman cannot physically react for a while.
A necrophile?
That son of a bitch Theodore Bagwell is a fucking necrophile?
"God, boss," he has time to get back on his feet and pull his jeans back up. "You literally caught me with my pants down here. I wasn't gonna dawdle, scout's honor. You can get back in the driver's seat, we'll be done by the time you get us where we need to be."
But Kellerman does not move. The rage that boils through his veins is thick as volcano lava.
This is what she gets? The one woman who didn't break under torture—who'd sooner die than give in to brute force?
If she'd lived back in the days of the Romans, writers would have made her immortal. The woman who died sooner than give up her lover. She'd have been a staple of sexism that feminists would have denounced thousands of years later.
If she'd been on the right side of government, on Kellerman's side, and enemy forces had tortured her in vain, she would be a national hero.
Kellerman's teeth clench so hard he's afraid they'll explode.
What does it matter that she happens to be a terrorist, that the man she loves is an escaped fugitive?
She's earned some fucking respect.
After a while of looking at him, Bagwell's lips break into a smile. Kellerman has no idea what the man has seen in his eyes.
"You, er—you wanna have a go at her, boss? Not gonna judge you. I'm on my second round here, so you can go first. We'll split her. Figuratively," he chuckles. "I wasn't gonna say anything, but I seen you jumping back, when I arrived at the motel. Was that what you was doing, eh? 'Cause you don't need to get all shy on account of me. If it's your first time doing it like that, that's all right. I'll talk you through it."
Kellerman hears the click of the safety disengaging before he realizes that he's pulled out his gun, and pressed the lever against the rear of the grip. The barrel is aimed straight at Bagwell's head—and all things considered, the man doesn't look too impressed.
"You are a fucking disgrace," Kellerman says.
"Ah, boss. There ain't no such thing as grace and disgrace. Only pleasure and pain." The smile twitches. "Sometimes they're one and the same."
"Get off her."
Bagwell is already standing up, but he's standing over Sara, and Kellerman doesn't want him collapsing on her like a dead sack of meat.
Bagwell obliges, without breaking eye-contact. Without dropping the smile. "You shoulda said you loved her, boss. I would've understood."
Kellerman doesn't tell him to shut up. It's pointless, now, what this piece of detritus thinks.
"God," Bagwell laughs, "it is like in that play. The brother turns on his own hit man, too, for killing the girl. You gonna go crazy about this, boss? Turn into a werewolf?"
Kellerman fires, doesn't hesitate, doesn't care whether Bagwell is done talking. The thump as his body hits the ground is not even a little satisfying. None of this is about satisfaction.
Disgust has turned every nerve in his body to snakes, writhing under his skin. He wants to fall to his knees, to throw up until his stomach is empty. The sight of Bagwell straddling Sara's dead body is etched into his eyes so deep, he knows that it's the last image he'll take with him on his deathbed.
After a few seconds—the time it takes for him to reel from what's happening—Kellerman gets into the back of the truck, and closes the door. He's going to have to handle the bodies separately. More superstition on his part, probably, but there's no way he's burying that animal in the same hole as Sara.
You've got to have standards. Got to—
"Jesus," he hears himself say. "Jesus Christ."
He'd be ashamed at how vulnerable he sounds, if anyone were there to hear him. Kicking Bagwell's body aside, he crouches next to Sara, careful not to take in her nudity. Before he can think better of it, he takes off his jacket and covers her body with it.
Stupid. Very stupid, Paul.
If he buries her in that jacket, they'll trace it back to him. Even if he doesn't. Traces of the fiber will be detectable during the post mortem evaluation. If she's found, which is a big if. Still. He's really got to start using his brain again, instead of—
"I'm so sorry," he says. "I'm so fucking sorry."
His hand hovers over her cheek—
Cover her face.
—but in the end, he lets it fall back along his side.
He'd better get started now. No time to waste.
Instead, he says, "It wasn't supposed to end like this, Sara. Not just that disgusting creep touching you. I swear to God if I'd known what he'd do to you I would have shot him at the motel. But I mean everything."
His mouth is dry.
Why is he saying all this, exactly?
He drops to the ground, sitting next to her. It's crazy. He'd swear he can feel her warmth, a few inches from him.
Probably a trick of his mind. Taunting him, with all the times he sat at her apartment, whiling the hours away.
I liked you, and I don't like people, Sara.
This is all such a fucking shame, such a goddamn travesty. That you die while so many deadbeats get to live.
"So," he says, "hi, my name is not Lance, and you've never met the real me. Well, I suppose this is the real me. Really, Sara, I'm not sure I've got any real left in me. I don't know, and it seems like I should. Know. I know I hated every fucking minute that I hurt you. You didn't deserve this. I don't—"
He grabs the ridge of his nose.
"I didn't want to have to do this. You wouldn't have understood that, but if I'd had any choice, I would have spared you. There's no choice, in my line of work. Only orders. You learn to stop questioning them, and I—Christ. This is all supposed to fall into some scheme, you know. The Greater Good. Not that it means I'm not going to hell, or that you're any less dead."
He bites down his lip. All right, now. Apparently, he's going crazy. Bagwell would have pointed out that's what happens in the play.
"You know what I wish you'd told me?" he says. "How did you do it? Torture breaks everybody. Everybody. Now I'll live my whole life and wonder what the secret is. Is it love? As simple as that? Do all the songs get it right, then? Or—I don't know. Do you just refuse to give in to suffering. Some spirit of defiance, refusing to submit? I like that better, I think. It's, Paul, by the way. My real name," he adds.
That doesn't make it the real him, but at least, it's a try.
He should get up now. Start getting to work on her—he'll have to chop her up, now, because there's no way he can carry her far enough into the woods in one piece, without wearing himself out.
"Paul…"
An icy finger travels down Kellerman's neck.
Her voice.
He just heard her voice.
His pulse quickens, and for a second, he's more terrified than he's ever been in his life. Because it's not possible. Either he's going crazy, real, Webster-crazy, or after all the people he's killed, a ghost has finally taken it upon itself to haunt him.
Sara is dead.
As if to persuade himself of the fact, he stares into the back of her head, where a fist-sized halo of blood has darkened her hair.
Yet—
His jaw drops open. Nothing he can do to stop it.
Even as she lies on her stomach, he can see her chest inflating with a tiny intake of air.
Old, military reflexes kick in. He turns her around, not bothering to be gentle. He has to know. And this can't be Sara, anyway—in all the movies, whatever takes over a person's body after their death is never the same.
She lets out a small cry as he flips her on her back.
A bullet all made of ice explodes inside his chest.
His jacket rolls off onto the floor, but he doesn't look lower than her eyes. My God. Her eyes are open.
"Paul—" she swallows.
And Lord, she's looking into his eyes, sweat beading down her lashes and blood trickling down her eyebrow because he has shot her in the head.
She's dead. She's dead, she has to be dead.
A stupid thought enters his mind.
I should have covered her face.
"Please," she says, and he is vaguely aware it's the first time she's begged him for anything. "You have to shoot me again."
He startles. Can't make sense of her demand. His whole body is still spiked with adrenaline, as it would in the presence of something not human—a vampire, a ghost.
"I don't want you to bury me while I'm still alive," she says. "Or—or cut me up in pieces. Please just make sure I'm dead. I'm afraid I'll freeze up, but I'll still be awake for all of it. You can shoot me in the heart. It's actually a safer bet, when it's well done. Just—just shoot me, okay? Or use a knife if you don't want to waste a bullet."
He sits, mystified, looking at her.
Incapable of an answer.
This is her.
No way in hell is he being swindled by some other-worldly creature that will try to rip his throat out with its teeth.
For a long, stupid moment, he can't speak. I just shot you in the head, he thinks.
She waits. Patient. She's in no position to be impatient.
He forces himself to take in the details. The blood that has caked into her hair. The smell of blood and cum in the air. The way her set jaw trembles, just once, before she hardens it. She looks so tired he wants to die, a little, when he considers the day she's just had. The torture was enough, but—
No.
She can't have been alive to experience her own death. Hearing herself be chopped to body parts as he gave Bagwell the instructions, and then the rape—
I'm on my second round here, the bastard said.
"How—" he lets out. The word feels hard, like had to excise it from his throat.
She licks her parched lips. There's no room for feeling there. He understands she has accepted death, has become dead, sometime during the afternoon while he was torturing her. All she wants now is to avoid the additional torment of being turned into meat while she can still feel it.
"Sometimes it happens."
"There's a bullet in your brain."
"Yeah. It—sometimes, it happens."
Like that's enough. A freak aberration of the human body, impossible to explain through reason or medicine.
For a while longer, he can't think.
Not as Paul Kellerman, secret agent, creature of the government, at least.
Thoughts do flash through his mind, but they have nothing to do with what he's expected to do, the person he's expected to be.
Is this the real me?
Because he's actually fucking relieved. And horrified.
The thought that Sara went through all she did, alive, is too cruel to contemplate.
And yet she isn't dead.
Everyone who wanted her so believes her to be. Kim, Caroline. He's got a very convincing picture of her, with a bullet hole in the back of her head. And Bagwell confirmed it to his superiors by text when he showed up at the motel.
As far as the world is concerned, Sara Tancredi is dead.
He can't help but think there's a certain magic to it. Minutes after he fired the gun, he watched her, and felt as if he could fish around in the cauldron of time and take back what he'd just done.
And though he hasn't, can never take back what Sara has just gone through today—
She isn't dead anymore.
"Paul—you said you didn't want to have to do this this. Hurt me," she hesitates. Shy, perhaps, of using things he's said while he thought she couldn't hear him, like it might embarrass him.
And it does, somewhat.
Only he's too high to feel it just now.
She lets out a breath. It rips out in shreds, like she's growing impatient—or tired. He has no idea the kind of pain she's in. "Will you just shoot me again?" she says.
But for a long time, all he can do is look at her.
The incredible, impossible absurdity of her.
He couldn't torture the truth out of her, and somehow, couldn't shoot the fight out of her either.
Is he dreaming? Is he insane?
Finally, his mouth opens. On what?
I'll save you.
For once in my life, I'll do something right.
I'm so sorry you had to go through this. That I put you through this.
"Paul," she tries again.
And in a breath, he says, "Mine eyes dazzle."
…
End Notes: This fic is bleak, even for me. Let me know your thoughts and leave kudos if you enjoyed it. The title, and all the references to the play, are from "The Duchess of Malfi" by John Webster.