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Eventual
by vega
Rate: PG-13
Spoilers: Contains some spoilers from Understudy and thoroughly ignores Wasteland. Takes place some time in season three.
Warning: Sappy and sentimental as hell.
Statue: Complete
Pairing: Jesse/Shalimar.
Summary: "Of course, she hadn't known that the very act of letting go of Jesse was making a choice. Who to die. Who to live."
Notes: It's all Vill's fault. Her MX100 made me look through my old scribbles and even force me to put together a fic with them. Really.
The dream is always the same.
And it is a beautiful dream. He is standing far enough, and she can safely be a spectator without intruding into this perfect dreamscape.
He turns around, his hands in the pockets, his white shirtsleeves dancing with the cool breeze. His hair is all tousled, his hair glittering in gold and amber with the dawn light that now basks the world, the white sand they stand on, and the ocean in front of them. Perfect. She is captivated by the stark beauty of all, fraught with romance that is never really a part of her life.
"It's like the end of the world," he says, watching the waves. "I like it."
He's smiling, for her, but there is something else in his gesture that she can't name. A shiver goes down through her whole body, and her fingers tremble.
"Jesse?"
He is staring at the sand and the waves that keep coming, his eyes too far away from her.
"Jesse?"
One moment he's there. The next, he is phasing, dissolving into the water.
Feeling her breath coming up to choke her, she rushes toward him, to catch him, to hold him, to anything. But with one touch that reaches his hand, he shatters. When she stops shaking, she finds herself standing alone in the empty beach that pans out to the miles of nothingness.
From somewhere far away, a voice asks, "Is that what you want?"
She doesn't wake up screaming, but in all intensions and purposes, it comes pretty close.
She blinks, shaking away the non-tears from her eyes. Blinks more. The ceiling is grey. The wall surrounding her is the matching grey without a window. The confinement is barren except for the makeshift bed that she is using right now for the feeble sleep that invites nightmares that she's become accustomed to.
"Nice dream?"
He's here again, she realizes. She groans under the sheet cover. "Go. Away."
The hallucination, or whatever, makes no attempts to 'go away'. "I'm the subconscious manifestation induced by your guilt. The self on-and-off switch doesn't come attached to this package."
The voice and the shrug are right down perfect, but subconscious thing can't always get the details straight. "Now see, Jesse doesn't speak like that. Not to me, anyway. Ergo, you're not him. Go away."
She can practically hear him smile in the dark. "I'm right out of your imagination, so if you want me switched off, you do it, 'cause I can't."
Well, that's more like it. But she'll not be admitting that she's one fuse short of sanity by actually telling her hallucination just that.
He's silent and there's no movement to be heard, but his presence at the far corner of the grey room cannot be ignored. It's constantly there, coolly simmering down into the drop of intense fire. He's her only companion in this captivity. Unwelcome company, but a company nonetheless, and she feels him as well as she feels the pulse flowing through her veins.
"Shal, ever wonder who's going to fall over and shed any tear over our dead bodies?" his voice is softer this time, and his calm, hurt eyes--it is Jesse. This is the Jesse from the beach, with all of the early morning brilliance and agony. "I do. I wonder who's going to shed tears over me."
She pulls the blanket over her body to cover her eyes, ears, and everything that tells her that he is here, yet isn't.
She sits through time, knowing that being time, being measured into hours, minutes, seconds, will tick its way by.
*
She woke up when she suddenly realized the mechanical hum of the Sanctuary, one that almost sounded musical to her ears and comforted her with the promise of safety and love, had stopped.
She forced herself up from the infirmary bed. How long had she been asleep? Her body rhythm was completely off with all the painkillers in her system, and she almost suspected it wasn't the Sanctuary that had gone silent but her own hearing that was deteriorating. But when she got up, it soon became obvious it wasn't her. She stood up, kicking off the blanket and reaching for her comlink, then stopped when a crashing sound broke the silence.
Even her dulled senses didn't take kindly to this development. When the door sled open, she was half-ready to attack whoever coming through it.
She stopped midway, because it was Jesse. He stood across the room, leaning against the doorframe.
"You're okay," he whispered, his chest heaving.
"Of course I am," she snapped. It was irritating beyond description how they were all treating her like a fragile china after she had broken a leg in a stupid fall. She was about to proceed to give him hell for babysitting her when she suddenly noticed something wrong. Very wrong. His smile was unnaturally forced, more like a wince than his usual small smiles. His hand was clasped over his lower chest and there was red spot spreading larger and larger...
Oh god. At once she was at his side, and she wasn't even aware how she got there. "What happened?"
"Barely a scratch." His answer was a bravado, his grin a feigned testimony. She was angry. Angrier than she'd ever been.
"What the hell is going on?" She helped him steady on his feet, "Where's everyone?"
His fingers locked into hers in a vice-like grip. "We're under attack. We have to get to the lab."
She blinked to buy some time to comprehend the situation. This made no sense. There was nothing she could hear, nothing she could detect that hinted something was wrong except--except the dead silence.
Her hearing wasn't the same any more. There was nothing she could trust.
Then she saw Jesse.
She reached for him and put her arm around him. She nodded at the door. "Let's go."
*
Hours. Minutes. Seconds.
They're ticking away, and she feels their flow around her, in this cell, in this prison of her life.
He's still here when she gets up.
"Good morning, Shal."
He seems to be in a good mood, most definitely enjoying the irony. If he weren't a hallucination, she would've kicked his butt for good. But since he definitely is, it's a little difficult task to accomplish.
Dammit.
"Shut up," she mutters, stretching her arms. Dammit, dammit, dammit. It feels so natural, his presence in this cell. She doesn't remember just when this Not-Jesse began to pop out from which wrecked part of her brain in order to haunt her every single breathing second of hers. Probably about a day or two after she found herself in this grey room.
She goes through all the wake-up motions all the while feeling his gaze on her. She doesn't have to look to know that he is sitting on the shadowed corner, his eyes occasionally on the non-existing window and his head resting on his palm perched against the rail.
"Why are you here, really?" she asks finally, and her voice is so shaky that she can hardly recognize.
"Now that is a very good question," he gets up from his corner, his index finger drawn, "Why me? Why not Brennan, your beautiful partner in bed? Why not Adam? Not Emma?"
The obvious answer forms in her lips. Because you're dead now, too. Like them.
"Ah, but you don't believe that. You think you'd know if I'm dead."
True.
This is really, really disconcerting.
"Because you're talking to yourself or because you're talking to me?"
Both.
Which just reaffirms the fact that this is a very disconcerting turn of events.
"That hurts. You don't enjoy my company?" The Not-Jesse is faking a hurt look, and she retrains the urge to punch him on the face only because experience indeed teaches you things. The past experience tells her that it isn't all that fun to be punching the air.
This isn't Jesse. Jesse is never cruel, never to her.
"But you think that was even more cruel. To always be there for you, never a complaint. Because you never noticed."
Jesse is never cruel, yet this Jesse is.
"Like you were to me?" he asks.
She doesn't answer.
*
Nikki left. Except for Adam, she was now alone in Mutant X.
She kicked and jumped and ran and rolled, feeling her blood rushing to her ears. Normally it would make her feel so much better but it didn't, not this time. The dummy was falling apart in front of her. She didn't care for it except that Adam might not be happy about getting her a new one. You should know when to stop, he'd say.
Right. She kicked the dummy for the last time and turned around.
Across the hall, a boy was staring at her.
Fifteen? Sixteen, maybe? He had an oak-coloured hair that shone with streaks of gold, smelled of pine trees, and had the eyes that were the like the river she had seen once on a brilliant spring morning. The boy was marked by his expression that was shy and lost at the same time.
For no reason at all, she liked him immediately.
"You lost?" she asked, throwing away the towel after wiping away sweat tingling down from her forehead.
He watched her in long silence. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet and curious and powerful in the way that hers -- throaty, hyper, and vulnerability hidden underneath the forced strength -- wasn't, "Your eyes are different."
She didn't wince. She didn't flinch. She would have in any other situation, but he had a quiet way about him that calmed her down somehow. "How?"
"They're gold," he whispered, wonderingly, magically. "Like twilight. Like your hair." Then he smiled. It was like he'd decided, just at that moment, that he'd put all his trust in her. "They're beautiful," he said.
From then on, she no longer closed her eyes when her eyes turned feral.
*
Brennan literally made her heart pump faster. She always had to be in control, but he could make her let go of petty things, let her explode. If she wasn't always in tight control of her feral side, there wasn't enough damage she could do to herself and others. She was dangerous and unpredictable enough even with the tight rein she imposed on herself. And it was all stressful.
But, with Brennan, there was nothing of that. He was all about letting things out, sizzling and erupting energy, manifesting in all kinds of forms. And he could take her. He was tough enough to take her wild side and didn't have to run away screaming.
It didn't hurt that she was supremely attracted to him, either.
She also liked to decipher what was underneath his skin. Brennan was a mystery she eagerly wanted to solve. She had so much wanted to figure out the layers underneath him until she found the last, true, shape. Underneath his flippant remarks and I-was-a-thief walls and the life on the street. He was important to her.
So when she heard his scream, she let go of her grip on Jesse, just a little, to turn around, to see if the attackers had got to Brennan.
Of course, she hadn't known that the very act of letting go of Jesse was making a choice. Who to die. Who to live.
She hadn't known.
*
She should be climbing up the wall by now, shrieking and pounding at everything around her, imposing every damage possible on herself. Even if she doesn't want to, her feral senses should've been going crazy. They aren't. She guesses they're drugging her with the crap of a meal they bring her once a day.
Still, she has to eat. She doesn't want to die. Not yet. Not when she doesn't even know....
"--that if I'm dead or alive?"
She glares at Not-Jesse hatefully.
Jesse's image lingers at her bedside. "Hey, you should've expected this much complaint. After all, you did leave me behind."
And finally, finally, she explodes, almost glad to let go of the tight pain in her chest. "You told me to leave! You did! What was I supposed to do?"
Not-Jesse looks away, almost reminiscent of her real Jesse, and she is angry. She's incredibly angry. So angry that she doesn't really care she would be yelling at herself, or the ghost of herself, or him. "Answer me, goddammit! You practically pushed me out. What was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to do?"
A sharp turn of the head, and Not-Jesse is staring into her eyes. He isn't talking about that, she realizes. He's talking about--
"You left me long before that, Shalimar," Jesse says softly. Not accusatory, but there is a trace of disappointment that is too much for her to bear.
"You know what?" she jumps up, pointing her index finger at the not-Jesse in front of her with all her might, "This is ridiculous. You're just a manifestation of this guilt I'm feeling for not protecting you. Better yet, this is the drug talking. I won't be played. I won't."
Jesse's image shrugs in the way he always does, exactly right down to his little gesture with his hands. "If you wouldn't, I should've disappeared already. I'm still here, aren't I? You really are not working hard enough. Or maybe, now that I'm not actually here any more, you want to be with me."
Bastard, she thinks.
She sinks back on her bare bed.
Weeks, days, hours, seconds.
No one is coming to the rescue.
She thinks about Brennan's relaxed smile, the way his shirts smell like sweat and strength, the way he holds her.
She thinks about how she doesn't miss any of that now.
*
The first few years, every birthday Jesse used to stare at the phone that did not ring. Jesse at seventeen experienced the art of waiting to a severe degree that was even more poignant than the others that were to come later. It was his first birthday since becoming a part of this Sanctuary life.
"Give up, Jess," she advised him after the hours of watching him and imagining herself slapping the hell out of his parents for all of the time their son suffered for them. "Obviously they're not good enough to care. They're not worth it."
He nodded silently as if he understood. By then she'd come to know him enough to figure out where to find him after he quietly disappeared, so she gave him an hour before she went for him. However, in the shore against the rock mountain of the Sanctuary, his favorite hiding spot, he was nowhere to be seen. The comlink was off. She panicked.
After thirty minutes of frantic search, the most absurd answer came to her mind. She rushed to his room and opened the door.
On the bed, she saw a blob of dark blond hair edging out from the blanket. Jesse's. It was too adorable. Anger and worry and panic, all of them subsided in a second, and Shalimar stifled a laugh.
She slipped into the bed, pulling up the blanket to cover both of them. Her arms found their place tightly wrapped around him, the gesture now almost habitual. She murmured against his soft hair, "Feel better?"
He didn't move a muscle. His eyes remained closed. His answer was just above the hearing threshold, "Mm-hmm."
"You know, they might call you back and all, and then you'll leave me here all alone. And I'll be sad."
"I know."
"I won't be happy without you. I'll never be happy without you."
"I know."
"You're not gonna leave me, are ya?"
"No."
"Good. You still my bro?"
"Always."
"Love you."
"Me, too."
That night, Adam actually went through the pain of cooking and she decorated the Sanctuary with small balloons that took hours to make, but it was all worth it because Jesse smiled and smiled until she thought his face must hurt and laughed when he blew the candles on the cake.
*
"And Brennan. He makes you happy?"
Jesse was serious, his gentle face almost frozen with gravity.
She stood across him, the corridor of the Sanctuary darker, heavier. "Yeah." It was an honest answer. At least she thought it was. "He does."
For a second, there was nothing on his face. Then he smiled. "Good," he said.
She knew she was. Yet in the immediate mission that followed this brief conversation that should've been insignificant, she made a mistake and ended up breaking her leg.
This was where the real tragedy began.
*
"You know, not eating isn't going to help."
She's used to his taunting now. She casually ignores his words and doesn't reply, although his presence, his familiar face, and all his smiles still hurt her just by being there.
"You can try to escape. Doesn't mean I'll forgive you, though."
It doesn't hurt. Sitting cross-legged on the grey concrete floor, she concentrates on her breathing and relaxes her muscles. They feel dulled and slow because of the drugs and long time of disuse, but she can do this. She has to. She will force the drugs out of her system and get out of this.
The silence of the grey room deepens and she awakes from the meditation when she realizes that Jesse hasn't spoken for the longest time that she can remember. This suddenly frightens her. When she opens her eyes, she sees a shadow of him. It lingers at the farthest corner, his back turned away from her, his face unseen.
She has never really taken notice of his back, she realizes now. He's always been taller than her, much to her dismay, but he's never seemed this tall. He couldn't have overgrown the years this fast. Couldn't have.
Could he?
He has always been a step behind her without a single complaint. He would step forward only to play the shield for them. For her. She's been watching his back for all her life, yet she has never noticed his back. How breakable it is.
There's something obscenely ridiculous about this picture that she can't decide whether the tight feeling in her chest means that she needs to explode with crazy, unhinging laughter or to kick the hell out of something and cause as much damage as possible.
You realize this only now, she thinks. Only now that you have seen him fall.
She feels something in her going sour instantly, rotten and decayed. For it is not disappointment that haunts her now. Or even regret.
Shalimar, you're the biggest fool of all.
"Help me," she says. Not-Jesse freezes, startled by her words, but he doesn't turn around. She doesn't really think of what she's saying, what she's saying to, and all the non-thoughts. She just needs to hear him speak. "I know you can. Help me."
He is still. So still.
"Help me, dammit! Help me find you!"
When he turns around, she believes for a moment that he is real. Her kid brother who really isn't really her brother any more. From his fingertips to his wistful smile.
"Get out of here, Shal. You can. You will."
There's no edge in his voice, and she recognizes his smile as what it is. The same smile, just before he fell away from her. Because she'd let go of him.
One second later, he's fading away, like in the dream, phasing into shattering water and leaving only the shadow of his presence. When she closes her eyes and opens them again, even the shadow has disappeared.
He doesn't come back again. She's left alone. For the first time since she'd ended up in this place, she begins to think of the way out.
And when the steel door opens and a few men in white labcoats and pain sticks come in, she's ready.
*
Her body is moving through the endless white corridors, her fists and feet hitting and kicking so hard that she can feel the bodies ripping apart and piling behind her. It is odd. She knows what rage is like, but it has never been like this, this cold, filled with certainty. She might kill them all, and it won't be her feral side going crazy and taking over. It will be her, and if they've killed Jesse, she, the human and feral all together, will kill them all.
There might have been voices, familiar voices, yelling her name. Hers and Jesse's. Asking her to speak because they're here to get her out. There are gunshots, more gunshots, and even more voices. She doesn't listen to any of them, can't, because she sees him now.
He stands at the end of the corridor, heavily leaning against the wall, his eyes shut.
He looks utterly destroyed.
He's unbreakable. He isn't supposed to look like this. But now he looks tall, beautiful, and utterly destroyed at the same time.
She's there to catch him when his legs collapse.
His body goes limp in her arms and she, too, collapses on the floor, her arms around him. Not as tightly as she would like. She's afraid he would break and disappear.
And she can't let that happen. Not again.
His head is on her lap and his hands fall weakly to his sides. His body is cold, so cold, and she thinks, he's not breathing. No. No. Don't you dare. Don't you dare.
His eyes flutter open. They're unfocussed, fading fast, but they eventually find their way to meet hers.
"Your eyes," he says, and just watching him trying to speak is painful. "....They're gold."
Tears burn in the back of her eyes.
"Let's go home, Jesse."
*
Brennan is leaning against the doorframe when she is just finished with packing and about to leave her room.
"Where are you going?" he asks, even though she can tell from the looks of his eyes that he's already guessed her destination.
"I'm bringing him back," she tells him.
He stops her at the door, subtly blocking her path. "He's just taking some time alone. Away from us. He wanted this break, Shal."
She knows that. She really does. She rationalizes that Jesses is still hurt and is in no shape to be alone for this long. She can still refuse to acknowledge the tight knots that grate in her chest like broken glasses when she's thinking about him. "He's had a week. That's enough."
"He promised to come back. You don't believe him?"
"It's not about believing him. It's... I don't know what it's about."
Brennan watches her. Suddenly, she notices that he looks uncharacteristically solemn. "If I ask you to stay with me, will that stop you?"
She tells him nothing, but she doesn't look away, either. He deserves this much.
Brennan's jaw tightens. "I didn't think so."
They're both not in habit of emotional outbursts. They stare at each other until they both know this is the end. And that ends there.
*
He is writing epitaph on the sand with foams. Casting flowers into the ocean. Petals, red and amber, falling and falling.
Merely by watching him, she is captivated by the stark beauty of all, fraught with romance that has never really been a part of her life. And she does watch him, until she finds herself walking toward him, closing the distance between them.
She's breathless. "I had a dream just like this."
He turns around, hands in the pockets, his white shirtsleeves dancing with the cool breeze. His hair is all tousled, his hair glittering in gold and amber with the dawn light that now basks the world, the white sand they stand on, and the ocean in front of them.
He doesn't look surprised to see her. In fact, he seems to have expected her, almost.
"I didn't know you had precognitive abilities," he tells her. It takes a while for her to realize that he's teasing her, and that there's that smile on his face. The smile she recognizes from anywhere.
And she realizes she's in love. In such love that if she loses him, she will lose every meaning there it is to be. Since it makes no sense, she thinks it is not possible. So not possible that it's beyond ridiculous. And yet here it is. No longer intangible.
What to say? She can't ask for forgiveness like she's intended. Words are no use because she'd never been good at them. But something has to be said. She's said nothing and he hasn't said anything and it hurt him. It had almost killed her. Killed him.
"I love you, Jesse," she speaks at last.
He watches her for a moment, his blue eyes glittering in the colour of the ocean. "Okay."
"Okay?"
He smiles. "Me, too."
It is that simple. All those years, all those times, all she had to do was ask. All he has wanted was this.
This is too much. Because she's been a fool for all these years, and she hasn't known. Oh, how she hasn't known.
"Shal," he speaks his name so softly that it hurts to listen, "Let's walk."
He offers his hand, and she takes it, gladly.
The gentle breeze blows against her hair as they walk away, his hand in hers warm and solid, and the sunlight is so bright that it brings tears into her eyes.
Because this is absolutely beautiful, and she now knows what happiness is like.
-Happiness-
A state you must dare not answer
With hopes of staying,
quicksand in the marches and all
the roads leading to a castle
that doesn't exist
But there it is, as promised.
With its perfect bridge above
the crocodiles
and it's doors forever open.
-Stephen Dunn
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