Snapshot on an Autumn Afternoon
A/N: This is a side story to Always Love. I had written the first page of it when I had a discussion with Kelly, but it ended up being an attempt to address Kelly's questions. Which was just because Beck thanked Heather at the end of the series doesn't mean he might not still have trust issues with her or isn't still hurt by what she did get herself thrown into jail originally after the series ended. I also firmly believe (due to personal experience) that when you have at least one or two hardheaded people too close to a situation & can't see eye to eye, it's best to have a third party point out the flaws in their logic, because usually the third party usually gets a better reception. It's also my first real attempt to get inside Beck's head. And, as always, unbetaed, so all mistakes are my own.
Beck went out to survey the damage after the bombing stopped. Heather had been gone for four days.
Not long enough for him not to feel the press of her lips on his every time he closed his eyes.
It was wrong, he kept telling himself that. He was a married man. What had he been thinking?
When he closed his eyes, though, his body pushed all of that aside. It only remembered the press of her lips, the feel of her hands as they cradled his head, and the beat of her heart hammering against his chest.
It was wrong. What was he going to tell Lisa when he found her again?
Even now, his body was still leading him in the wrong direction.
He stood in the remains of Heather Lisinski’s house. It was burnt to the point that only the cinderblocks of the chimney gave any clue that this pile ash and debris was once a home.
A scrap flickered in the breeze, catching his eye. He knelt down, pulling the half singed and grainy picture from the soot.
Heather’s profile shone brightly as she cupped a sunflower branch. He was turned away. It was a picture he didn’t realize had been taken until sometime later. They had been out on the Green Ranch.
It had been a couple of weeks after his resignation from the ASA.
Officially, they were there for a meeting with the Rangers. Unofficially, it had been a reunion of sorts with Jake Green and Robert Hawkins, newly returned from Texas. There had been a lengthy discussion about tactics and defense of Jericho. In that meeting, he came to understand why both Jake and Heather were so insistent that “the Rangers were there before him and would be there after he left.” There were few groups that he had encountered that were as resilient, cohesive, or organized as the Rangers had become since the attacks.
Jake and Beck stood off in a corner afterward. Beck apologized for his actions toward Jake.
“I wanted answers, and it was getting to the point that I didn’t particularly care how I got them. It was a lapse in my judgment. I’m sorry.”
Jake had his arms folded in front of him defensively, looking down at the ground. Beck knew that he needed Jake and the Rangers on his side in the months to come. He held out his hand to Jake.
“Truce?” Beck asked.
Jake hesitated, staring at Beck’s extended hand. After a moment, he clasped Beck’s hand in his own.
“I’m just glad we’re both on the same side, that you were able to see the ASA for who they are,” Jake said. “Just promise me if you want to get answers again, that you’ll trust me and not chuck me into some pig sty?”
Beck looked down at the ground.
“I’ve learned a lot since then. I don’t think it will happen again.”
“No?” Jake asked, curiosity and cautiousness in his voice.
“Chances are if you end up in a pig sty, I’ll be occupying the stall right next to you.”
“I’m guessing Heather helped you see things differently?”
Heather. What she had done still hurt. While he had been cordial enough to her that first day when he resigned, there were days since then were the tension between them was palpable. His staff would sense it as they walked into the room, quickly giving their reports and not tarring a second after they were dismissed.
There had been a time or two after he had barked at her that she had come back into the office with swollen eyes. When he asked, she snapped at him that it was allergy problems.
At the end of winter. When not even the first buds had begun to bloom. If she didn’t want to tell him, fine. He had missed talking to her, discussing things with her.
But who was to say she wouldn’t turn around and use it against him anyway? She had used him and his trust. Who was to say she wouldn’t do it again?
“Well, Heather Lisinski can quite persuasive when she wants to be,” he said. His words were clipped.
Jake saw Beck’s uneasiness and attempted some levity.
“Yeah, once Heather has her mind set to something; it’s pretty hard to dissuade her.”
Beck looked Jake in the eye. Talking about it brought all the hurt and distrust to the surface.
“So how hard was it to persuade her to take that page out of my office?”
Jake took a step back, surprised, but did not break eye contact. Disbelief filtered into his features. He folded his arms before him, raising his hand to his lips like he usually did when he contemplated on an answer.
“You really don’t think that was an easy decision for her to make, do you, Major?”
“It certainly seemed like it from where I was standing.”
“It was nothing like that.”
“Look, Jake, I know you want to defend her considering how you two are friends, but it doesn’t make what she did right.”
Beck surprised himself at how much animosity came out when he said the word ‘friends’. With all the hurt and betrayal he had been feeling toward Heather, it was only natural for those feelings to overflow towards people who were close to her. He hated not being in that position anymore. Why couldn’t she have trusted him? Why couldn’t she have told him the truth from the beginning? As he paused, waiting for Jake’s response, a feeling in him came to the forefront, one that he had suppressed for some time now.
He was envious. Envious of the relationship between Jake and Heather, wishing that he could have just as close a friendship with his liaison as she appeared to have with Jake Green.
Beck could tell by the narrowing of Jake’s eyes that Jake had interpreted his words not as envy, but as an implication that there was more going on between Heather and Jake then they were saying.
Jake moved to speak and stopped. He tried once more without success. Finally, he shook his head, breaking eye contact with Beck and studying the ground for a moment. He braced his hands against his hips when he did speak.
“Wow. Just - wow,” he said.
Beck’s anger flared to the surface.
“That’s all you have to say?” he asked.
“You’ve had Heather as your liaison, for what, a few months now?”
“Yes, but I don’t see what that has to do with this.”
Jake turned away from him, again shaking his head. He looked back at Beck with sheer disbelief.
“If you’ve been working with her that closely for that amount of time and still don’t realize how loyal she is to you, Beck, then you’re blind. Not the ASA. You. And if you can honestly say that you can’t see that,” Jake nodded his head once, “Well, then, you’re truly blind as a bat.”
Doubt reared its ugly head in Beck’s mind.
“When I asked her to take the page out of your office, she asked me if you were in on this.”
Did she have so little faith in him? Did she really think he was capable of such - cowardice? Beck thought.
“When I told her no, she was so hurt and angry that there might be implications of you being involved, I really did think she was going to deck me. Hawkins and I talked to her for hours, Major, practically the entire morning, convincing her what she was going to do was the right thing. She didn’t agree with us until I asked her to trust me. It was a leap of faith on her part.”
And yet she couldn’t take one with me, he thought.
Jake seemed to hear his words.
“She took that leap for a lot of people, but I think it was mostly for you.”
“Why do you say that?” Beck asked, curious.
“When we gave her the slip of paper with the coordinates on it, she asked me if things would end badly for you if the ASA knew that you suspected a cover up. Hawkins told her probably, that you were a smart guy, capable of putting events together. The ASA would probably make it look like an accident of some sort.
‘But if he doesn’t know everything, he might still have a chance?’ she asked us. Possibly, is what Hawkins told her. You know, until he said that to her, I still didn’t know if she’d go through with it. She was saying stuff like ‘Maybe the survey didn’t go that far, maybe they just did Jericho and that’s it.’”
“She was looking for another way to solve the problem.”
“Yeah. Hawkins told her she was grasping at straws. She told him ‘I’m about to betray a friend. What do you want me to do? Be happy about it?’”
“But she went through with it.”
“Yeah. I knew she probably wouldn’t back out after I asked her to trust me, but when Hawkins told her what would happen to you, her doubts seemed to leave.”
Beck looked over at Heather. After a moment, she seemed to sense his eyes on her and turned to him. Her look was at first questioning, then turning to concern the longer he looked at her. Emily, who had been speaking to her, had fallen silent and turned to follow Heather’s gaze.
He couldn’t say exactly what it was when she looked at him to realize Jake was right. He had been blind. By removing him from the loop, she had given him plausible deniability. She was sacrificing herself in order to save him. Watching over him, keeping him safe. He almost shuddered at the thought of what could have happened to her, what she was willing to do to keep him in a position to correct Cheyenne’s mistakes.
He began to wonder what he was really angry about, that she hadn’t told him the truth from the beginning or that she had stung his pride instead? Because he was proud, proud at being good at his job, in producing the right answer, of having control of the situation.
But it had been a situation that he couldn’t control, because he didn’t know all the variables in the equation, which ultimately lead him to fail at what had been assigned to him.
He stared at her. He was her sole focus now. She had squared back her shoulders ever so slightly, almost as if she were saying to him that she would carry any burden he asked her to carry, for as long as he needed. Just one look, one word from him, and she would be wherever he needed her.
Even after he had meted out his punishment to her on daily basis, going from one cold command to the next. And she had taken it with more grace than he would have. Perhaps she thought it was penance for what she had done.
He had been blind. It was time to end this. Time to build a bridge over these cold waters that had come between them. Time to admit to himself and to her how much he worked on putting this distance between them., that he had been just as guilty of it as her. More so, as he looked back, seeing all the olive branches she had extended in hindsight, all that he had slapped away in his indignation. Perhaps it was not too late; perhaps if he made the first step, she would be there to take his hand.
He could see her moving to walk over to him. Beck gave her the smallest of smiles as he shook his head. She hesitated, the look of concern still there.
‘It’s ok,’ he mouthed to her.
‘You’re sure?’ her lips replied.
He nodded his head once.
She stared at him for another moment, then nodded her head and turned back to Emily.
“Thank you, Jake,” he said, turning back to the man standing next to him. “Hopefully the next time you point something out that I’m missing, I won’t be so resistant to admitting to it.”
Jake gave a light hearted scoff that came more from a sense of disbelief than derision and said, “I’ll do my best.”
Beck shook his head. He was beginning to notice many things in hindsight, one being that Jake would be a solid and reliable ally. He would not misplace his judgment in Jake Green twice, he decided.
Their conversation drifted onto other topics and they stood there talking for an hour more.
Heather came to stand beside him as they were finishing up.
“We better be heading back if you want to check the border reports for this afternoon,” she said to him.
“I best get going myself,” Jake said to him.
He clasped Emily’s hand as she walked up and turned to Heather, “We’ll see you later.”
Heather gave a quick nod of farewell.
Beck looked at his watch. It was 15:35. They could make it back into town with a few minutes to spare if they left now.
Still looking out for me, Beck thought. It reminded him of something Lisa had once said to him. That he needed someone to keep him on the right path because when he was so busy doing what was right by the letter of the law, he would forget its spirit. Or at least that’s how he interpreted it.
He sometimes wondered if Lisa had sent him this way. Sent him towards someone who would watch over him when she could not.
“Major?” Heather asked when he had not replied. “Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine,” he replied. She began to move away from him. He reached out, clasped her by the elbow and quickly released it when she turned back to him.
“Uh, you know, um,” he started, not quite sure where to begin making amends with her. “I, uh, never thanked you for being my liaison. In all this time. Thank you. What you’ve done,” he avoided looking at her, thoughts of her rejecting him crawling about in his mind, “It’s meant a lot. It means a lot.”
She was silent. Seconds spun out like long filaments before him as he built up the courage to look at her.
She was staring at him, her face devoid of emotion. His confidence slowly ebbed away.
Then he saw her bite the inside of her cheek and she turned away.
“It’s no problem,” she replied. Her voice shook slightly. She kept her face hidden from him a moment longer before turning to him and giving him a smile that brightened up the dim room considerably.
“It’s no problem at all.”
As they walked out to the Humvee, they came across Lt. Hamilton taking pictures of some wild flowers with his cell phone.
“What are you up to, Lieutenant?” Heather asked.
“Just taking some pictures of these sunflowers. I’ve never seen anything like them.”
Heather giggled and some of the weight that had been on his shoulders for these past weeks floated away with her laughter.
“That’s because they’re not quite sunflowers, same family, different genus. They’re called black-eyed susans. Haven’t you seen one before?”
“No, ma’am. I’m a city kid, born and bred. The only flowers we usually saw were the ones growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk. Never saw these before.”
Heather walked up to some wild sunflowers growing nearby, Beck trailed behind her and Hamilton behind him. Her face was in profile, a wide grin lighting up her face.
“Now these - these are true sunflowers,” she said, plucking off a stem. She climbed into the vehicle, explaining the differences to Hamilton. Beck only half listened to her impromptu lecture, lost instead in the animation of her voice and the smile on her face. She had accepted his first tentative step back towards friendship with heart felt welcome. He’d make sure that as the days past, he would do all that he could to make their friendship even stronger than it had been before.
Without thinking, Beck shoved the picture behind his body armor and into his breast pocket. He looked over the scene once more.
There were other areas to be assessed and the daylight was growing short. He left the rubble of Heather Lisinski’s house without backward glance.
Beck went out to survey the damage after the bombing stopped. Heather had been gone for four days.
Not long enough for him not to feel the press of her lips on his every time he closed his eyes.
It was wrong, he kept telling himself that. He was a married man. What had he been thinking?
When he closed his eyes, though, his body pushed all of that aside. It only remembered the press of her lips, the feel of her hands as they cradled his head, and the beat of her heart hammering against his chest.
It was wrong. What was he going to tell Lisa when he found her again?
Even now, his body was still leading him in the wrong direction.
He stood in the remains of Heather Lisinski’s house. It was burnt to the point that only the cinderblocks of the chimney gave any clue that this pile ash and debris was once a home.
A scrap flickered in the breeze, catching his eye. He knelt down, pulling the half singed and grainy picture from the soot.
Heather’s profile shone brightly as she cupped a sunflower branch. He was turned away. It was a picture he didn’t realize had been taken until sometime later. They had been out on the Green Ranch.
It had been a couple of weeks after his resignation from the ASA.
Officially, they were there for a meeting with the Rangers. Unofficially, it had been a reunion of sorts with Jake Green and Robert Hawkins, newly returned from Texas. There had been a lengthy discussion about tactics and defense of Jericho. In that meeting, he came to understand why both Jake and Heather were so insistent that “the Rangers were there before him and would be there after he left.” There were few groups that he had encountered that were as resilient, cohesive, or organized as the Rangers had become since the attacks.
Jake and Beck stood off in a corner afterward. Beck apologized for his actions toward Jake.
“I wanted answers, and it was getting to the point that I didn’t particularly care how I got them. It was a lapse in my judgment. I’m sorry.”
Jake had his arms folded in front of him defensively, looking down at the ground. Beck knew that he needed Jake and the Rangers on his side in the months to come. He held out his hand to Jake.
“Truce?” Beck asked.
Jake hesitated, staring at Beck’s extended hand. After a moment, he clasped Beck’s hand in his own.
“I’m just glad we’re both on the same side, that you were able to see the ASA for who they are,” Jake said. “Just promise me if you want to get answers again, that you’ll trust me and not chuck me into some pig sty?”
Beck looked down at the ground.
“I’ve learned a lot since then. I don’t think it will happen again.”
“No?” Jake asked, curiosity and cautiousness in his voice.
“Chances are if you end up in a pig sty, I’ll be occupying the stall right next to you.”
“I’m guessing Heather helped you see things differently?”
Heather. What she had done still hurt. While he had been cordial enough to her that first day when he resigned, there were days since then were the tension between them was palpable. His staff would sense it as they walked into the room, quickly giving their reports and not tarring a second after they were dismissed.
There had been a time or two after he had barked at her that she had come back into the office with swollen eyes. When he asked, she snapped at him that it was allergy problems.
At the end of winter. When not even the first buds had begun to bloom. If she didn’t want to tell him, fine. He had missed talking to her, discussing things with her.
But who was to say she wouldn’t turn around and use it against him anyway? She had used him and his trust. Who was to say she wouldn’t do it again?
“Well, Heather Lisinski can quite persuasive when she wants to be,” he said. His words were clipped.
Jake saw Beck’s uneasiness and attempted some levity.
“Yeah, once Heather has her mind set to something; it’s pretty hard to dissuade her.”
Beck looked Jake in the eye. Talking about it brought all the hurt and distrust to the surface.
“So how hard was it to persuade her to take that page out of my office?”
Jake took a step back, surprised, but did not break eye contact. Disbelief filtered into his features. He folded his arms before him, raising his hand to his lips like he usually did when he contemplated on an answer.
“You really don’t think that was an easy decision for her to make, do you, Major?”
“It certainly seemed like it from where I was standing.”
“It was nothing like that.”
“Look, Jake, I know you want to defend her considering how you two are friends, but it doesn’t make what she did right.”
Beck surprised himself at how much animosity came out when he said the word ‘friends’. With all the hurt and betrayal he had been feeling toward Heather, it was only natural for those feelings to overflow towards people who were close to her. He hated not being in that position anymore. Why couldn’t she have trusted him? Why couldn’t she have told him the truth from the beginning? As he paused, waiting for Jake’s response, a feeling in him came to the forefront, one that he had suppressed for some time now.
He was envious. Envious of the relationship between Jake and Heather, wishing that he could have just as close a friendship with his liaison as she appeared to have with Jake Green.
Beck could tell by the narrowing of Jake’s eyes that Jake had interpreted his words not as envy, but as an implication that there was more going on between Heather and Jake then they were saying.
Jake moved to speak and stopped. He tried once more without success. Finally, he shook his head, breaking eye contact with Beck and studying the ground for a moment. He braced his hands against his hips when he did speak.
“Wow. Just - wow,” he said.
Beck’s anger flared to the surface.
“That’s all you have to say?” he asked.
“You’ve had Heather as your liaison, for what, a few months now?”
“Yes, but I don’t see what that has to do with this.”
Jake turned away from him, again shaking his head. He looked back at Beck with sheer disbelief.
“If you’ve been working with her that closely for that amount of time and still don’t realize how loyal she is to you, Beck, then you’re blind. Not the ASA. You. And if you can honestly say that you can’t see that,” Jake nodded his head once, “Well, then, you’re truly blind as a bat.”
Doubt reared its ugly head in Beck’s mind.
“When I asked her to take the page out of your office, she asked me if you were in on this.”
Did she have so little faith in him? Did she really think he was capable of such - cowardice? Beck thought.
“When I told her no, she was so hurt and angry that there might be implications of you being involved, I really did think she was going to deck me. Hawkins and I talked to her for hours, Major, practically the entire morning, convincing her what she was going to do was the right thing. She didn’t agree with us until I asked her to trust me. It was a leap of faith on her part.”
And yet she couldn’t take one with me, he thought.
Jake seemed to hear his words.
“She took that leap for a lot of people, but I think it was mostly for you.”
“Why do you say that?” Beck asked, curious.
“When we gave her the slip of paper with the coordinates on it, she asked me if things would end badly for you if the ASA knew that you suspected a cover up. Hawkins told her probably, that you were a smart guy, capable of putting events together. The ASA would probably make it look like an accident of some sort.
‘But if he doesn’t know everything, he might still have a chance?’ she asked us. Possibly, is what Hawkins told her. You know, until he said that to her, I still didn’t know if she’d go through with it. She was saying stuff like ‘Maybe the survey didn’t go that far, maybe they just did Jericho and that’s it.’”
“She was looking for another way to solve the problem.”
“Yeah. Hawkins told her she was grasping at straws. She told him ‘I’m about to betray a friend. What do you want me to do? Be happy about it?’”
“But she went through with it.”
“Yeah. I knew she probably wouldn’t back out after I asked her to trust me, but when Hawkins told her what would happen to you, her doubts seemed to leave.”
Beck looked over at Heather. After a moment, she seemed to sense his eyes on her and turned to him. Her look was at first questioning, then turning to concern the longer he looked at her. Emily, who had been speaking to her, had fallen silent and turned to follow Heather’s gaze.
He couldn’t say exactly what it was when she looked at him to realize Jake was right. He had been blind. By removing him from the loop, she had given him plausible deniability. She was sacrificing herself in order to save him. Watching over him, keeping him safe. He almost shuddered at the thought of what could have happened to her, what she was willing to do to keep him in a position to correct Cheyenne’s mistakes.
He began to wonder what he was really angry about, that she hadn’t told him the truth from the beginning or that she had stung his pride instead? Because he was proud, proud at being good at his job, in producing the right answer, of having control of the situation.
But it had been a situation that he couldn’t control, because he didn’t know all the variables in the equation, which ultimately lead him to fail at what had been assigned to him.
He stared at her. He was her sole focus now. She had squared back her shoulders ever so slightly, almost as if she were saying to him that she would carry any burden he asked her to carry, for as long as he needed. Just one look, one word from him, and she would be wherever he needed her.
Even after he had meted out his punishment to her on daily basis, going from one cold command to the next. And she had taken it with more grace than he would have. Perhaps she thought it was penance for what she had done.
He had been blind. It was time to end this. Time to build a bridge over these cold waters that had come between them. Time to admit to himself and to her how much he worked on putting this distance between them., that he had been just as guilty of it as her. More so, as he looked back, seeing all the olive branches she had extended in hindsight, all that he had slapped away in his indignation. Perhaps it was not too late; perhaps if he made the first step, she would be there to take his hand.
He could see her moving to walk over to him. Beck gave her the smallest of smiles as he shook his head. She hesitated, the look of concern still there.
‘It’s ok,’ he mouthed to her.
‘You’re sure?’ her lips replied.
He nodded his head once.
She stared at him for another moment, then nodded her head and turned back to Emily.
“Thank you, Jake,” he said, turning back to the man standing next to him. “Hopefully the next time you point something out that I’m missing, I won’t be so resistant to admitting to it.”
Jake gave a light hearted scoff that came more from a sense of disbelief than derision and said, “I’ll do my best.”
Beck shook his head. He was beginning to notice many things in hindsight, one being that Jake would be a solid and reliable ally. He would not misplace his judgment in Jake Green twice, he decided.
Their conversation drifted onto other topics and they stood there talking for an hour more.
Heather came to stand beside him as they were finishing up.
“We better be heading back if you want to check the border reports for this afternoon,” she said to him.
“I best get going myself,” Jake said to him.
He clasped Emily’s hand as she walked up and turned to Heather, “We’ll see you later.”
Heather gave a quick nod of farewell.
Beck looked at his watch. It was 15:35. They could make it back into town with a few minutes to spare if they left now.
Still looking out for me, Beck thought. It reminded him of something Lisa had once said to him. That he needed someone to keep him on the right path because when he was so busy doing what was right by the letter of the law, he would forget its spirit. Or at least that’s how he interpreted it.
He sometimes wondered if Lisa had sent him this way. Sent him towards someone who would watch over him when she could not.
“Major?” Heather asked when he had not replied. “Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine,” he replied. She began to move away from him. He reached out, clasped her by the elbow and quickly released it when she turned back to him.
“Uh, you know, um,” he started, not quite sure where to begin making amends with her. “I, uh, never thanked you for being my liaison. In all this time. Thank you. What you’ve done,” he avoided looking at her, thoughts of her rejecting him crawling about in his mind, “It’s meant a lot. It means a lot.”
She was silent. Seconds spun out like long filaments before him as he built up the courage to look at her.
She was staring at him, her face devoid of emotion. His confidence slowly ebbed away.
Then he saw her bite the inside of her cheek and she turned away.
“It’s no problem,” she replied. Her voice shook slightly. She kept her face hidden from him a moment longer before turning to him and giving him a smile that brightened up the dim room considerably.
“It’s no problem at all.”
As they walked out to the Humvee, they came across Lt. Hamilton taking pictures of some wild flowers with his cell phone.
“What are you up to, Lieutenant?” Heather asked.
“Just taking some pictures of these sunflowers. I’ve never seen anything like them.”
Heather giggled and some of the weight that had been on his shoulders for these past weeks floated away with her laughter.
“That’s because they’re not quite sunflowers, same family, different genus. They’re called black-eyed susans. Haven’t you seen one before?”
“No, ma’am. I’m a city kid, born and bred. The only flowers we usually saw were the ones growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk. Never saw these before.”
Heather walked up to some wild sunflowers growing nearby, Beck trailed behind her and Hamilton behind him. Her face was in profile, a wide grin lighting up her face.
“Now these - these are true sunflowers,” she said, plucking off a stem. She climbed into the vehicle, explaining the differences to Hamilton. Beck only half listened to her impromptu lecture, lost instead in the animation of her voice and the smile on her face. She had accepted his first tentative step back towards friendship with heart felt welcome. He’d make sure that as the days past, he would do all that he could to make their friendship even stronger than it had been before.
Without thinking, Beck shoved the picture behind his body armor and into his breast pocket. He looked over the scene once more.
There were other areas to be assessed and the daylight was growing short. He left the rubble of Heather Lisinski’s house without backward glance.