Fic: Five Things Gillian Foster Has Never Told Anyone (Lie to Me)
This was inevitable, wasn't it? :) I've been trying to wrap my head around Gillian, and this seemed to be as good a way as any to do it. Unbetaed, mostly gen but including a bit of Gillian/Cal, assume spoilers for all aired episodes.
Five Things Gillian Foster Has Never Told Anyone
1.
She might, or might not, have been pregnant her sophomore year of college.
There was a broken condom that she and her boyfriend hadn't thought much about at the time. They were nineteen and invulnerable and really quite responsible most of the time, and when they realized what had happened Gillian laughed away the knot in her stomach and washed away the stickiness between her legs and managed, within a few hours, to forget about it.
Until a few weeks later when she was late.
It was midterms, and she was just stressed, she told herself. If the anxiety made her late and made her nauseous, well, these things happened. She didn't allow herself to contemplate any other possibility.
Finally, six weeks after the broken condom, she drove two towns over to buy a pregnancy test. Positive. Her world was upended for 48 hours, while she imagined what David would say, what her parents would say, what would happen if she just went to a clinic and never told anyone at all.
And then she got her period, and she had never before been so. fucking. relieved.
She's always wondered, in all the subsequent years of trying and failing, of this test and that procedure, of two decades' worth of periods like clockwork, of watching a social worker's car pull out of her driveway with her daughter inside, what really happened to her body during those six weeks back in college. She was under a lot of stress. Pregnancy tests are often wrong. Plenty of experts have told her she could probably never conceive in the first place, much less carry a child to term.
She's answered the question "have you ever been pregnant?" on dozens of medical forms. She always hesitates but always checks "no."
2.
She is an alcoholic.
Admitting you have a problem is the first step, and she knows this as well as anyone. She thinks of her father-"My name is Steven, and I'm an alcoholic"-and of Alec-"My name is Alec, and I'm an addict"-and she's stood in the bathroom and looked herself in the mirror and opened her mouth and then run out of the room again.
She's very careful. She knows how to have one glass of wine, pour out the rest of the bottle, and eat a pint of Ben and Jerry's instead. Every time Cal teases her about the sugar, she celebrates a minor victory: he doesn't realize it's her crutch. She's a better liar than he realizes.
She plays games with herself, like never saying "I need a drink" but only "I want a drink," because "need" is the first step down a slippery slope. Semantics are important. If she can control her words, control her face and her smile and her unobtrusively casual glass of wine with dinner or two fingers of scotch with Cal after a long day, she's won.
The fundamental difference between herself and Cal, Gillian has realized, is their relationship to control. Cal's game is roulette; his rush comes from throwing himself to the mercy of chance. Gillian's game, if she had one, would be poker; she gives nothing away, even to herself.
3.
It took her a very long time to fall in love with Cal Lightman.
Cal fell in love with Gillian approximately 30 seconds after he met her. He wouldn't realize this until years later, but Gillian knew it, and Zoe knew it, and even Emily knew it. And of all the lies Cal could tell, the only one no one but Cal himself believed was that he and Gillian were just business partners.
But it took Gillian the better part of a decade to feel the same way about him. She didn't even like Cal much at first. He was rude and arrogant; he drove her crazy when he read her and when he mocked her profession and suggested she'd do better to work with him instead. But when she asked him not to read her he complied, and underneath his belittling of psychology she recognized his genuine admiration for her professional talents. She wasn't satisfied in her job, so she decided to give him a chance.
Slowly, tolerance became respect, respect became friendship, and friendship became intimacy. She learned his shoe size and his menu preferences and his secrets, and in turn she trusted him with hers. She learned how to read him and when not to. He spent a week in her spare room after Zoe left; she spent a weekend in his after she lost Sophie.
She fell in love with him on a Tuesday afternoon in April, for no particular reason. He walked into her office to tell her something she already knew about the case they were working on. She looked at him and thought, "I'm in love with you" and almost gave herself away, she knew, because there was a flash of a response in his face that no one else would have caught, and then it was gone.
"You ready to go talk to Dr. Barrett's ex-husband, then?" he asked.
"Sure," she replied, and they fell into step.
4.
She embraced Vegas once, and that experience has far more to do with her attitude toward it than anything Cal has ever done.
The summer after she finished her B.A., she and some girlfriends went to Vegas and went a little wild. She thought, for once in her life, she'd let herself lose control. She drank like a fish, went into debt at the blackjack table, and flirted shamelessly.
Reality came crashing around her in a hotel room full of people she didn't know. She hadn't been sober for two days, but suddenly she had a moment of stone-cold clarity: she was being groped by not one but two decidedly seedy men, strangers were fucking on the bed five feet away, and she had no idea where her friends were. Gillian had never been more appalled or terrified in her life.
Sometimes she thinks she could keep Cal permanently away from Vegas and all it represents to him if she told him that story, but she also knows she never will.
5.
She hates the pedestal everyone seems to keep her on, but she's terrified to come down from it.
She created her own reputation, after all. She fell into the pattern before she was old enough to know what she was doing, and once she became conscious of it, she did it on purpose. If she was happy, optimistic, and successful, no one would notice her family fraying around the edges of her father's drinking problem. Her smiles put people at ease. They put herself at ease. Fake it till you can't tell anymore what's faked and what's real.
Mostly it works. She genuinely likes her life, on balance. She had hoped for a better marriage, she had hoped for a child, but her lot has been no worse than many people's. She loves her job, and she's good at it. She's finding new freedom in divorce, and she has a family of sorts in Cal and Emily. And sometimes, late at night when she's feeling either very strong or very weak, she has memories of Sophie.
Once, she accidentally overheard Cal and Zoe fighting in his office-either before they divorced or shortly thereafter. Zoe sneered something about "your beloved Dr. Perfect," and Cal snapped back with a threatening "don't," and Gillian slipped back to her own office feeling false and horrible and vaguely triumphant.
Sometimes she gets in her car and just drives away, out into the countryside of Virginia or Maryland, away from the city, just away. At night she'll roll down the car windows and feel the familiar masks fall away, and it both frightens and thrills her.
One winter night she made it all the way to West Virginia, and it began to snow in the mountains, and rounding a curve she almost skidded off the road. She wondered, briefly, what would happen if she died here, in a snow bank in West Virginia, at 3 am on a Thursday morning in January, all by herself. Some police officer would tell Cal, and he would spend the rest of his life wondering what he'd missed, wondering how she could end up dead in West Virginia when he knew her better than anyone.
She turned the car around then and headed home, like she always does and always will. She had time to shower before work but not to sleep, and he does notice that she's tired the next day. "I stayed up late finishing a novel," she lies, and he grins at her and launches into the familiar diatribe against romance novels. She reads doubt in his face but feels victorious anyway when he masks it.
"Foster, you're the only woman I know who would lose a night's sleep to a romance novel. It's one of your many charms," he says, holding out her coat for her. "Come on, I'll buy you a coffee and some sort of cake with lots of sugar in it on our way over to the FBI."
"You know how to win a girl over, Cal," she jokes, wrapping the lies around her like accessories to her perfect dress, perfect hair, perfect shoes.
"Just you, Foster. I know you."
Five Things Gillian Foster Has Never Told Anyone
1.
She might, or might not, have been pregnant her sophomore year of college.
There was a broken condom that she and her boyfriend hadn't thought much about at the time. They were nineteen and invulnerable and really quite responsible most of the time, and when they realized what had happened Gillian laughed away the knot in her stomach and washed away the stickiness between her legs and managed, within a few hours, to forget about it.
Until a few weeks later when she was late.
It was midterms, and she was just stressed, she told herself. If the anxiety made her late and made her nauseous, well, these things happened. She didn't allow herself to contemplate any other possibility.
Finally, six weeks after the broken condom, she drove two towns over to buy a pregnancy test. Positive. Her world was upended for 48 hours, while she imagined what David would say, what her parents would say, what would happen if she just went to a clinic and never told anyone at all.
And then she got her period, and she had never before been so. fucking. relieved.
She's always wondered, in all the subsequent years of trying and failing, of this test and that procedure, of two decades' worth of periods like clockwork, of watching a social worker's car pull out of her driveway with her daughter inside, what really happened to her body during those six weeks back in college. She was under a lot of stress. Pregnancy tests are often wrong. Plenty of experts have told her she could probably never conceive in the first place, much less carry a child to term.
She's answered the question "have you ever been pregnant?" on dozens of medical forms. She always hesitates but always checks "no."
2.
She is an alcoholic.
Admitting you have a problem is the first step, and she knows this as well as anyone. She thinks of her father-"My name is Steven, and I'm an alcoholic"-and of Alec-"My name is Alec, and I'm an addict"-and she's stood in the bathroom and looked herself in the mirror and opened her mouth and then run out of the room again.
She's very careful. She knows how to have one glass of wine, pour out the rest of the bottle, and eat a pint of Ben and Jerry's instead. Every time Cal teases her about the sugar, she celebrates a minor victory: he doesn't realize it's her crutch. She's a better liar than he realizes.
She plays games with herself, like never saying "I need a drink" but only "I want a drink," because "need" is the first step down a slippery slope. Semantics are important. If she can control her words, control her face and her smile and her unobtrusively casual glass of wine with dinner or two fingers of scotch with Cal after a long day, she's won.
The fundamental difference between herself and Cal, Gillian has realized, is their relationship to control. Cal's game is roulette; his rush comes from throwing himself to the mercy of chance. Gillian's game, if she had one, would be poker; she gives nothing away, even to herself.
3.
It took her a very long time to fall in love with Cal Lightman.
Cal fell in love with Gillian approximately 30 seconds after he met her. He wouldn't realize this until years later, but Gillian knew it, and Zoe knew it, and even Emily knew it. And of all the lies Cal could tell, the only one no one but Cal himself believed was that he and Gillian were just business partners.
But it took Gillian the better part of a decade to feel the same way about him. She didn't even like Cal much at first. He was rude and arrogant; he drove her crazy when he read her and when he mocked her profession and suggested she'd do better to work with him instead. But when she asked him not to read her he complied, and underneath his belittling of psychology she recognized his genuine admiration for her professional talents. She wasn't satisfied in her job, so she decided to give him a chance.
Slowly, tolerance became respect, respect became friendship, and friendship became intimacy. She learned his shoe size and his menu preferences and his secrets, and in turn she trusted him with hers. She learned how to read him and when not to. He spent a week in her spare room after Zoe left; she spent a weekend in his after she lost Sophie.
She fell in love with him on a Tuesday afternoon in April, for no particular reason. He walked into her office to tell her something she already knew about the case they were working on. She looked at him and thought, "I'm in love with you" and almost gave herself away, she knew, because there was a flash of a response in his face that no one else would have caught, and then it was gone.
"You ready to go talk to Dr. Barrett's ex-husband, then?" he asked.
"Sure," she replied, and they fell into step.
4.
She embraced Vegas once, and that experience has far more to do with her attitude toward it than anything Cal has ever done.
The summer after she finished her B.A., she and some girlfriends went to Vegas and went a little wild. She thought, for once in her life, she'd let herself lose control. She drank like a fish, went into debt at the blackjack table, and flirted shamelessly.
Reality came crashing around her in a hotel room full of people she didn't know. She hadn't been sober for two days, but suddenly she had a moment of stone-cold clarity: she was being groped by not one but two decidedly seedy men, strangers were fucking on the bed five feet away, and she had no idea where her friends were. Gillian had never been more appalled or terrified in her life.
Sometimes she thinks she could keep Cal permanently away from Vegas and all it represents to him if she told him that story, but she also knows she never will.
5.
She hates the pedestal everyone seems to keep her on, but she's terrified to come down from it.
She created her own reputation, after all. She fell into the pattern before she was old enough to know what she was doing, and once she became conscious of it, she did it on purpose. If she was happy, optimistic, and successful, no one would notice her family fraying around the edges of her father's drinking problem. Her smiles put people at ease. They put herself at ease. Fake it till you can't tell anymore what's faked and what's real.
Mostly it works. She genuinely likes her life, on balance. She had hoped for a better marriage, she had hoped for a child, but her lot has been no worse than many people's. She loves her job, and she's good at it. She's finding new freedom in divorce, and she has a family of sorts in Cal and Emily. And sometimes, late at night when she's feeling either very strong or very weak, she has memories of Sophie.
Once, she accidentally overheard Cal and Zoe fighting in his office-either before they divorced or shortly thereafter. Zoe sneered something about "your beloved Dr. Perfect," and Cal snapped back with a threatening "don't," and Gillian slipped back to her own office feeling false and horrible and vaguely triumphant.
Sometimes she gets in her car and just drives away, out into the countryside of Virginia or Maryland, away from the city, just away. At night she'll roll down the car windows and feel the familiar masks fall away, and it both frightens and thrills her.
One winter night she made it all the way to West Virginia, and it began to snow in the mountains, and rounding a curve she almost skidded off the road. She wondered, briefly, what would happen if she died here, in a snow bank in West Virginia, at 3 am on a Thursday morning in January, all by herself. Some police officer would tell Cal, and he would spend the rest of his life wondering what he'd missed, wondering how she could end up dead in West Virginia when he knew her better than anyone.
She turned the car around then and headed home, like she always does and always will. She had time to shower before work but not to sleep, and he does notice that she's tired the next day. "I stayed up late finishing a novel," she lies, and he grins at her and launches into the familiar diatribe against romance novels. She reads doubt in his face but feels victorious anyway when he masks it.
"Foster, you're the only woman I know who would lose a night's sleep to a romance novel. It's one of your many charms," he says, holding out her coat for her. "Come on, I'll buy you a coffee and some sort of cake with lots of sugar in it on our way over to the FBI."
"You know how to win a girl over, Cal," she jokes, wrapping the lies around her like accessories to her perfect dress, perfect hair, perfect shoes.
"Just you, Foster. I know you."