Fic: TILL I AM MYSELF AGAIN, 3/?
TILL I AM MYSELF AGAIN (3/?)
Please see Prologue for disclaimers.
*****
So, they file all their paperwork and bring Logan and Wheeler up to date on their open cases. Logan - of course - grumbles about them dumping all the work on him while they run off to lie on a beach somewhere. He doesn’t specifically mention Tahiti, but she thinks exasperatedly that he and Ross are probably going to end up getting along just fine.
“We’re being given an opportunity here,” says Wheeler pointedly. “Let’s not screw it up.”
“Uh huh. Thanks, Wheeler,” Logan snaps, and Alex feels a stab of sympathy for both of them. God, that awkward getting-to-know-you stage of the partnership, where you’re constantly stepping on each other’s toes…I wouldn’t want to be back there, no sirree.
Not that she and her partner are exactly at the top of their game these days…but rather than getting on each other’s nerves, it’s more that they’re being too careful with one another, navigating tentatively around unspoken emotional minefields. They seem to have agreed - without ever actually talking about it, of course - to pretend to each other that everything’s fine. He swallows his guilt and worry about her recovery and his concerns about her coming back to work early, and she doesn’t ask about his mother, or about Jo and Declan Gage and how he’s dealing with that whole debacle.
A classic coping mechanism, she hears Dr. Nahdi say in her mind, with her precise diction and soft, slightly lilting accent (Tunisian, Alex found out when she pulled the files on her Department-assigned psychologist). But is it healthy, Alex, to withdraw instead of confronting those emotions?
Well, d-uh. Of course not, Alex thinks grumpily. She hates the thought that she’s being cowardly, taking the easy way out. But damn it, why should I have to be the one to force the issue? Haven’t I worked hard enough already, dealing with my own trauma? The prospect of facing Bobby’s wounds when her own are still healing - it makes her flinch inwardly and want to hide.
And that’s leaving aside the fact that he clearly doesn’t want to talk about any of it - to her or to anyone - and she can’t stand the thought of pushing him, fighting with him about it, hurting him any further. Instead, she’s been waiting - withdrawing, letting him withdraw, and waiting until they’re both healed, separately. And while she waits, the silences grow between them. The no-man’s-land where they’ve parked all the things they aren’t talking about stretches between them likewise; she knows it’s only going to get harder and harder to cross.
It’s happened before, after all. She learned in their first year of partnership that one of Bobby’s main responses to stress is to develop a sort of…tunnel vision. His tendency to live inside his own head becomes drastically more pronounced - she thinks it wouldn’t be going too far to say that he actually forgets that he’s a physical entity moving through a physical world. Pesky reminders like hunger, the need for sleep, other people trying to interact with him - he brushes them aside like so many mosquitoes.
The thing is…when they were just partners, she could handle that. She’s never liked it, has always struggled with feeling hurt that he’s ignoring her, that he doesn’t trust her enough to unburden himself to her - but once she’d gotten a handle on how his mind worked, and learned something of the demons he carried with him everywhere, she got better at letting him disappear down the rabbit hole when he needed to. After all, you get all prickly and impatient when you’re stressed or upset, she reasoned with herself. Same offence - just a different MO. And anyway, he always comes back, both literally and figuratively.
In retrospect, she probably should have anticipated how much harder it would be, once they were in a relationship outside of work. How she would know the signs, know that he was withdrawing and why…and still feel so damn lonely when it happened. This time round is no exception. He’s physically there with her, but not really present. He’s pretty much his usual self at work, but it’s as if maintaining that level of interaction takes all his resources, and in most other areas, he’s just going through the motions. And in some areas, he’s not even doing that, she thinks with a sigh. See “living in one’s head” above, corollary B: no touching. There are exceptions, of course - if he’s around when she has a nightmare, or is otherwise in obvious need of comfort - but even then, she can feel the effort it takes him to move past the barriers, both physical and emotional. She tells herself she can live without his arms around her when they get home after work, or his kiss on the top of her head when they cross paths in the bathroom in the morning - she’d rather go without, in fact, than have him touch her only because he knows it’s the right thing to do…but she misses tactile, casually affectionate Bobby with a constant, low-grade ache.
A couple of weeks ago, her GP cleared her for moderate exercise (“including the intimate kind,” nudge-nudge, wink-wink) and at the time, she’d sighed inwardly. If only. Since then she has actually considered seducing him, knowing that she could do it if she really tried: force him to come out of hiding, hope that he physical connection would help them bridge the emotional distance. But she finds herself paralysed by the fear that he might refuse her - or worse, not refuse and then resent her for it afterwards. Seeing him retreat from her again after it was over would just make everything worse, she knows. So…she waits, telling herself it’ll be okay, it always has been before, eventually. He’ll come out of it on his own. He will.
“Hey, earth to Eames,” Logan prods. “What, are you already on vacation here?”
“Sorry,” she says, forcing herself out of her reverie and bracing herself for more snark from Logan as Bobby hands over the multiple pages of notes he’s spent the greater part of the past few nights obsessively typing up. Crime scene analyses, victimology, preliminary profiles…it probably looks to Logan and Wheeler like Bobby doesn’t trust them, but she knows it’s just that he needs to feel he’s done everything he can, or he won’t be able to let the cases go.
At least he has agreed to let them go - that’s got to be a good sign, she thinks, pushing away the feeling that she’s grasping at straws. Maybe if he goes and spends some time with his mom - time where he doesn’t have to feel torn about work and me and everything else - maybe that’ll help. It had better.
The frightening truth is that she’s too much bound to him now. She won’t be entirely well until he is - until they’ve fixed what’s wrong between them, together. If we can.
After their meeting with Logan and Wheeler, they lock up their desks and head down to the parking garage.
“I’m going to my parents’ place for dinner - you’re invited, if you want to come along,” she says.
“Thanks, but I - I actually think I’ll get going…drive up to Carmel Ridge tonight. I drove in this morning, so I can leave from here. I have my bag in the car.”
“Oh,” she says, taken aback. “Okay.”
“I, uh…I have a room booked in a motel in Carmel. I just - now that I’ve decided to do this, I feel like I need…to leave. To get there as soon as I can. There’s - a lot to do…with my mom’s treatment, her doctors…”
“Of course,” she says, fighting a sudden feeling of emptiness. You wanted him to do this, she reminds herself. It’s only for a week, and then you’ll be joining him. Although they haven’t actually discussed that part of the plan, since she first suggested it. She’d thought he liked the idea, in the end - but he hasn’t brought it up again, and she’s finding it hard to read him, hard to know what he really wants.
As they reach his car, she straightens her shoulders and gives herself a mental shake. She circles round to the trunk and taps on the lid.
“Open it up,” she says, in a pretty good approximation of her tough cop voice.
“What - why?” Bobby looks nonplussed, but follows orders.
“I want to see this bag you claim to have packed,” she says, pulling the grey duffel towards her, “to make sure you don’t try to smuggle any case files along.”
She sorts through the carefully folded clothes, and zips up the bag again.
“Do I pass, Officer?” Bobby asks, amused. She snaps her fingers at him.
“Briefcase, please.”
He holds it open for her. “See? No laptop.”
“Good.” She looks up at him, and her gruff attitude crumbles. Please don’t leave me alone is what she wants to say, but what comes out instead is,
“It’s a vacation, Bobby. Try to remember the meaning of the word, okay?”
“I will if you will,” he says softly. It’s an old line between them, a reference to bargains they’ve made with one another before, and the way he says it, holding her gaze as though he’s really seeing her for once, gives her a flash of hope - a feeling that the distance between them is, maybe, not as great as it seems. She swallows hard and nods.
“I’ll try.”
He looks quickly from side to side, scanning the garage for prying eyes, and then leans down and kisses her, hard and fast, his hand gentle on her cheek, her neck, slipping into her hair. She leans into him, for once not caring that someone might see them, overwhelmed with yearning for the simple touch.
“Take care of yourself,” he mumbles against her mouth. “I’ll talk to you soon.”
He pulls away abruptly, and with an effort she smiles weakly and lets him go.
*****
TBC in Chapter Four…The First Week (Part Two)
Please see Prologue for disclaimers.
*****
So, they file all their paperwork and bring Logan and Wheeler up to date on their open cases. Logan - of course - grumbles about them dumping all the work on him while they run off to lie on a beach somewhere. He doesn’t specifically mention Tahiti, but she thinks exasperatedly that he and Ross are probably going to end up getting along just fine.
“We’re being given an opportunity here,” says Wheeler pointedly. “Let’s not screw it up.”
“Uh huh. Thanks, Wheeler,” Logan snaps, and Alex feels a stab of sympathy for both of them. God, that awkward getting-to-know-you stage of the partnership, where you’re constantly stepping on each other’s toes…I wouldn’t want to be back there, no sirree.
Not that she and her partner are exactly at the top of their game these days…but rather than getting on each other’s nerves, it’s more that they’re being too careful with one another, navigating tentatively around unspoken emotional minefields. They seem to have agreed - without ever actually talking about it, of course - to pretend to each other that everything’s fine. He swallows his guilt and worry about her recovery and his concerns about her coming back to work early, and she doesn’t ask about his mother, or about Jo and Declan Gage and how he’s dealing with that whole debacle.
A classic coping mechanism, she hears Dr. Nahdi say in her mind, with her precise diction and soft, slightly lilting accent (Tunisian, Alex found out when she pulled the files on her Department-assigned psychologist). But is it healthy, Alex, to withdraw instead of confronting those emotions?
Well, d-uh. Of course not, Alex thinks grumpily. She hates the thought that she’s being cowardly, taking the easy way out. But damn it, why should I have to be the one to force the issue? Haven’t I worked hard enough already, dealing with my own trauma? The prospect of facing Bobby’s wounds when her own are still healing - it makes her flinch inwardly and want to hide.
And that’s leaving aside the fact that he clearly doesn’t want to talk about any of it - to her or to anyone - and she can’t stand the thought of pushing him, fighting with him about it, hurting him any further. Instead, she’s been waiting - withdrawing, letting him withdraw, and waiting until they’re both healed, separately. And while she waits, the silences grow between them. The no-man’s-land where they’ve parked all the things they aren’t talking about stretches between them likewise; she knows it’s only going to get harder and harder to cross.
It’s happened before, after all. She learned in their first year of partnership that one of Bobby’s main responses to stress is to develop a sort of…tunnel vision. His tendency to live inside his own head becomes drastically more pronounced - she thinks it wouldn’t be going too far to say that he actually forgets that he’s a physical entity moving through a physical world. Pesky reminders like hunger, the need for sleep, other people trying to interact with him - he brushes them aside like so many mosquitoes.
The thing is…when they were just partners, she could handle that. She’s never liked it, has always struggled with feeling hurt that he’s ignoring her, that he doesn’t trust her enough to unburden himself to her - but once she’d gotten a handle on how his mind worked, and learned something of the demons he carried with him everywhere, she got better at letting him disappear down the rabbit hole when he needed to. After all, you get all prickly and impatient when you’re stressed or upset, she reasoned with herself. Same offence - just a different MO. And anyway, he always comes back, both literally and figuratively.
In retrospect, she probably should have anticipated how much harder it would be, once they were in a relationship outside of work. How she would know the signs, know that he was withdrawing and why…and still feel so damn lonely when it happened. This time round is no exception. He’s physically there with her, but not really present. He’s pretty much his usual self at work, but it’s as if maintaining that level of interaction takes all his resources, and in most other areas, he’s just going through the motions. And in some areas, he’s not even doing that, she thinks with a sigh. See “living in one’s head” above, corollary B: no touching. There are exceptions, of course - if he’s around when she has a nightmare, or is otherwise in obvious need of comfort - but even then, she can feel the effort it takes him to move past the barriers, both physical and emotional. She tells herself she can live without his arms around her when they get home after work, or his kiss on the top of her head when they cross paths in the bathroom in the morning - she’d rather go without, in fact, than have him touch her only because he knows it’s the right thing to do…but she misses tactile, casually affectionate Bobby with a constant, low-grade ache.
A couple of weeks ago, her GP cleared her for moderate exercise (“including the intimate kind,” nudge-nudge, wink-wink) and at the time, she’d sighed inwardly. If only. Since then she has actually considered seducing him, knowing that she could do it if she really tried: force him to come out of hiding, hope that he physical connection would help them bridge the emotional distance. But she finds herself paralysed by the fear that he might refuse her - or worse, not refuse and then resent her for it afterwards. Seeing him retreat from her again after it was over would just make everything worse, she knows. So…she waits, telling herself it’ll be okay, it always has been before, eventually. He’ll come out of it on his own. He will.
“Hey, earth to Eames,” Logan prods. “What, are you already on vacation here?”
“Sorry,” she says, forcing herself out of her reverie and bracing herself for more snark from Logan as Bobby hands over the multiple pages of notes he’s spent the greater part of the past few nights obsessively typing up. Crime scene analyses, victimology, preliminary profiles…it probably looks to Logan and Wheeler like Bobby doesn’t trust them, but she knows it’s just that he needs to feel he’s done everything he can, or he won’t be able to let the cases go.
At least he has agreed to let them go - that’s got to be a good sign, she thinks, pushing away the feeling that she’s grasping at straws. Maybe if he goes and spends some time with his mom - time where he doesn’t have to feel torn about work and me and everything else - maybe that’ll help. It had better.
The frightening truth is that she’s too much bound to him now. She won’t be entirely well until he is - until they’ve fixed what’s wrong between them, together. If we can.
After their meeting with Logan and Wheeler, they lock up their desks and head down to the parking garage.
“I’m going to my parents’ place for dinner - you’re invited, if you want to come along,” she says.
“Thanks, but I - I actually think I’ll get going…drive up to Carmel Ridge tonight. I drove in this morning, so I can leave from here. I have my bag in the car.”
“Oh,” she says, taken aback. “Okay.”
“I, uh…I have a room booked in a motel in Carmel. I just - now that I’ve decided to do this, I feel like I need…to leave. To get there as soon as I can. There’s - a lot to do…with my mom’s treatment, her doctors…”
“Of course,” she says, fighting a sudden feeling of emptiness. You wanted him to do this, she reminds herself. It’s only for a week, and then you’ll be joining him. Although they haven’t actually discussed that part of the plan, since she first suggested it. She’d thought he liked the idea, in the end - but he hasn’t brought it up again, and she’s finding it hard to read him, hard to know what he really wants.
As they reach his car, she straightens her shoulders and gives herself a mental shake. She circles round to the trunk and taps on the lid.
“Open it up,” she says, in a pretty good approximation of her tough cop voice.
“What - why?” Bobby looks nonplussed, but follows orders.
“I want to see this bag you claim to have packed,” she says, pulling the grey duffel towards her, “to make sure you don’t try to smuggle any case files along.”
She sorts through the carefully folded clothes, and zips up the bag again.
“Do I pass, Officer?” Bobby asks, amused. She snaps her fingers at him.
“Briefcase, please.”
He holds it open for her. “See? No laptop.”
“Good.” She looks up at him, and her gruff attitude crumbles. Please don’t leave me alone is what she wants to say, but what comes out instead is,
“It’s a vacation, Bobby. Try to remember the meaning of the word, okay?”
“I will if you will,” he says softly. It’s an old line between them, a reference to bargains they’ve made with one another before, and the way he says it, holding her gaze as though he’s really seeing her for once, gives her a flash of hope - a feeling that the distance between them is, maybe, not as great as it seems. She swallows hard and nods.
“I’ll try.”
He looks quickly from side to side, scanning the garage for prying eyes, and then leans down and kisses her, hard and fast, his hand gentle on her cheek, her neck, slipping into her hair. She leans into him, for once not caring that someone might see them, overwhelmed with yearning for the simple touch.
“Take care of yourself,” he mumbles against her mouth. “I’ll talk to you soon.”
He pulls away abruptly, and with an effort she smiles weakly and lets him go.
*****
TBC in Chapter Four…The First Week (Part Two)