THERE ARE NO LIES IN THIS COMMUNITY.
Title: Tom Cruise Must Die (10/10)
Cast: Kristen Bell. Jason Dohring. Joshua Jackson. With sundry guest stars of the CW and Scientology variety!
Authors: buffyx & missdeviant
Rating: NC-17 (this section is NC-17)
Words: 5,877 (final total: 50K+)
Notes/Warnings: Rule number one of VM RPS: Do not talk about VM RPS. Not to the actors, anyway. It's just not cool, and DEFINITELY NOT AT ALL FUNNY, OKAY? OKAY. Just so we're clear!
Disclaimers:
1. I am impatient, so I posted this before running the final draft past the eagle eyes of buffyx, so hyphen and comma overuse in this chapter, as well as any minor or glaring continuity errors, are the fault of me.
2. But the plot was (as always) a 50/50 collaboration with buffyx, so she is AT LEAST equally to blame for the whole fiasco.
3. Even if I narratively fleshed out the bulk of that scene, and probably did take more joy in it than she did.
4. SPOILER ALERT?
5. Ripley's Believe It Or Not: The outline and some of the chapter itself has been written and on our hard drives since the middle of last summer!
6. Yes, we are mean.
7. Cliches are intentional, in case you'd forgotten.
And now, without further (further, further, further...) ado.
Tom Cruise Must Die. CHAPTER TEN (of ten)
Kristen wakes up swaddled in faded quilts, sweating. Alone. Sometime while she's been unconscious, the weather's shifted. Not much, but enough. The air seeping through the chinks in the wood plank wall next to the bed where she's been laid is still cold, but not in the frigid, biting way that it had been. That morning? The day before?
Her first thought is: how long have I been out?
Her second thought is: oh god, the baby.
Her third thought is: Jason.
She has to see Jason.
Someone, maybe in an effort to be kind, had taken the wet and dirty clothes - the scrubs of her imprisonment - from the back of the desk chair where she had - in a daze, maybe - draped them to dry.
She hopes they burned them.
The immediate effect is that she's left wearing only the camisole and underpants that she had slept in. She untangles herself from two of the three quilts, wraps the third over her shoulders, and climbs out of bed. While she was unconscious, someone had tended to her wounds, removed whatever was slicing into her injured heel, bandaged it. Her foot throbs when it hits the floor, but she can put weight on the heel, which is…not ideal, but better. Her legs ache. Everything aches. Next to the braided bedside rug, the hardwood is still cold. She wishes the safehouse rooms came equipped with complimentary slippers. Or socks.
She's not in the same cabin that they were in before the mission-gone-awry, she knows that much. The room where she's been sleeping is small but not crowded. A bank of file cabinets stands against one windowless wall. A flat screen monitor sits on the desk, in high-tech contrast to the rustic furnishings. When the building isn't doubling as hostel to bedraggled revolutionaries, the room probably serves as an office.
Venturing into the hall, she nearly trips over a saucepan. It's filled with at least an inch of sediment-y looking water. Five feet on, there's another.
She looks up to the ceiling and is promptly hit in the eye with a wet droplet.
Well. That answers that.
She pads through the hallways carefully, making sure that her dragging quilt doesn't scrape over any of the random water receptacles. A bucket. A wastebasket. A nine by thirteen cake pan. Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
It's quiet in the halls, dark except for the glow of nightlights in ankle-high outlets every five feet or so. When she tentatively pulls aside the blackout curtain over the first window she passes, the sky is clear and filled with stars.
So. It's night. Which night, she's not sure. But it's night.
Drip.
Drip.
The watery echoing sound makes her feel like she's in a cavern. She misses her headlamp.
Where is Josh? Where is Jason?
A light is on off the main hallway.
"Jason?" It's a whisper, and a foolish one. Rounding the corner to a large kitchen, she sees Regan. She's standing alone behind a butcher block island, attempting to carve a hunk of meat with a dangerous looking knife. A frying pan filled half to the brim with water is beside her elbow. The effort of one particularly vicious stroke jostles the pan, slopping water onto the counter and floor.
"Dammit," Regan mutters without looking up.
"Can I - can I help?" At full volume, Kristen's voice is rusty, like maybe she's been screaming in her sleep.
"Not unless you know a good roofer," Regan answers. She's still focused on sawing off a slice of meat. "You'd think there'd be enough money in the budget for a good patch job on HQ, but no, the board of directors wanted to blow it all on Uzis and a Blackhawk helicopter. Idiots."
"The resistance has a - a board of directors?"
"Kidding. They're more of a cabal."
Regan finally succeeds in removing a chunk of meat from the roast with a soft "aha!" and slides it onto a slice of bread that’s sitting on a plate, then dribbles what seems to be a gallon of ketchup onto the thing before dropping on another piece of bread.
It's disgusting.
"Midnight snack?" Regan gestures towards the meat, then Kristen, with the knife.
Vomit, says her brain, but her mouth manages to be polite. "No thank you. A glass of water, though, would be nice?"
Regan nods, opens a cabinet to grab a glass, then gets a pitcher of water from the refrigerator. Magnetized to the door of the fridge is a button. Kristen steps next to the counter to accept her glass of water and to get a better angle on the button, then reads off the magnet to herself, "I saved the world and all I got was this lousy button."
"The Liberation Front has buttons?" she asks.
"We have a button maker. We're in hiding. We have a lot of time to kill, all right?" Regan smiles. "We also have a listserv. Mostly humorous pictures of cats, that sort of thing. But we don't typically share that intel."
Jokes. From Regan. Ha ha ha funny, but she doesn't have the energy to laugh. She has a mission. Kristen takes a sip from the glass. The cold water makes her throat feel better, less scratchy.
"Where's Jason?"
"I wouldn't bother him right now. Unlike you, he spent most of the last seventeen hours in debrief."
Seventeen hours. She hadn't slept for seventeen hours at a stretch since she had gotten mono from James Bowen back in high school. For the first time, Kristen looks at the back of her sore left hand. The bruising was faint, almost undetectable, given that her entire body felt like it probably resembled an atlas. But upon close inspection, it's clear that she had at some point been administered an IV.
"Did you DRUG me?"
"Mild sedatives. You were screaming. Incoherent. We already had you bagged. In the van, don't you recall? When we extracted you, you were on the verge of being dangerously dehydrated."
Her thoughts swim. Handing the baby over. Jason. Stumbling into the van. Josh, strapped into a seat, wearing plastic handcuffs. Being guided into a sweatshirt, wrapped in crackling silver blankets. A voice yelling "she's going into shock!"
Time jumps, and she's being carried into a cabin. Not Regan's from before, but what must be the other, larger cabin. This cabin? Her memory is swiss cheese. She's trembling.
"It was better that way," Regan continues smoothly. "Unless you would have preferred we restrain you."
More jumps. An older female revolution operative helping her remove the clothes that she was wearing, easing her elbows through treacherous sleeves like she's four years old.
"Is that where Jason is? Being restrained?"
"Kristen, he's resting. I'd advise you to do -"
"He has to EAT!" she interrupts Regan, then eyes the sandwich sitting on the counter wildly. "And I am going to bring him this roast beef sandwich." She grabs at the plate, pulls it to her side of the counter. Regan lets her.
"He's been through a trauma, Kristen."
"And so have I, which is precisely why we should be together. De-traumatizing. When a baby monkey is abandoned, they put a fake mother monkey into the incubator with it to - hug - and stuff. I'm his monkey."
"That well may be, but Jason -" she hesitates. Kristen senses she's on the precipice of a lie.
"Jason what?" she demands.
Regan sighs. "Jason is currently operating on the belief that he was predestined to be the key player in a very important religious prophecy. He's spent his adult life resisting, disbelieving. But by destroying the child, he now feels locked into the destiny that he fought so hard against…"
Regan's words jar Kristen. Mostly because she realizes they're the truth. It all matches. Craww's incomprehensible babble - It’s you, it was always you. The prophecies. It’s the only thing that adds up - what he had said before he had -
She shakes the visual - the blood, so much blood - and the accompanying gagging feeling in the back of her throat out of her head and squares off against Regan.
"So why did he have to kill her then, if it made him into this…person? He could have given her to you, to the Resistance, you could have hidden her, better than before. We could have kept whatever power she held from being unleashed. She didn't have to -"
Regan interrupts, her eyes glinting like the edge of the knife she holds. "You may have believed that. But what I know, what Jason knew, is that it was too much of a liability for her to exist at all. If she had remained with the Scientologists, they may not have killed her, but she'd be their experiment. If we had rescued her once again, after what they had done to her in the last few days, she still would have changed. As a result, they would have NEVER stopped trying to take her back. And they would have succeeded. She would end up living her life as an instrument, hooked up to machines. She wouldn't be a person. Ever. Not even with Josh and Katie. It was too late for that. It's better this way"
"Better that she's dead?" Kristen is fighting back tears for like the millionth time in recent memory.
"If you could save a million lives by ending one innocent life, would you do it?"
It's a question that people ask sitting in circles in a dorm room after hours; an answer teased out of you by a philosophy student in a bar. It's supposed to be a hypothetical. It's not supposed to be applied to actual, real life situations.
Except for when it is.
"Craww was supposed to be the one to take care of it," Regan says after a long pause. "Unfortunately his choice to end his own life, with the effect of forcing Jason into becoming the one the prophecy foretold - we didn't expect that. Jason's impulsivity, on the other hand…" She trails off.
The Resistance had known. Of course they had known. Had contingency plans for the very thing that had occurred; had counted on Jason to be reckless even as they advised him against that path of action. Their forethought is probably the only reason that both she and Jason are alive right now.
"I need to see him," Kristen says, swallowing hard. Pressure builds behind her eyes, whether left over from before or a whole new round, she's not sure. She wills the tears not to spill over.
Regan regards her for a long moment before responding. "Hall on the left. Opposite the way you came. Third door." Kristen takes the plate with the sandwich in her right hand, gathers the quilt around her shoulders with the other, turns to leave.
"And Kristen?" Regan's voice stops her before she exits the kitchen. She looks over her shoulder.
"Have mercy."
Regan's accent imbues the words with a certain sort of profundity. Kristen takes a moment, lets them register. Then, back into the hallway. It's just her and the pans. The world is thawing, changing.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
*
Jason is exactly where Regan says he will be. The room has a wide window and an overstuffed sofa on one wall instead of filing cabinets, but otherwise resembles the one she had been in. The light is as dim as it had been in the hallway. It smells like cedar and candle wax.
Laying on a double bed with flannel sheets tangled around his legs is Jason. He looks like he's been through a riot. Bruised. Caked blood covers the shoulder of his ripped shirt. God. Whoever had come in to her room to tend to her as she slept hadn't offered the same courtesy to Jason.
She wonders briefly, bitterly, whether all of Jason's wounds are from the imprisonment and escape, or whether some were inflicted during his "debriefing."
When she enters his eyes are closed, but he opens them as the door snicks shut behind her. She locks it.
"Oh, god. Jason," she says, and doesn't think about being gentle, just swoops down next to him and sits on the bed. The sandwich, all but forgotten, ends up on the nightstand. "Those bastards."
She's not sure who she's referring to. The Org, who captured and tortured him. Tom Cruise, who shot him. The Resistance, who abandoned him in this room, alone and bloody.
Kristen touches his left shoulder, the one covered in blood, gingerly. Like a question.
"S'okay," Jason grates out, attempting to wave her off. "It was in and out. Closed on its own. Wasn't even a bullet to remove."
"But they didn't even clean -" she protests.
"Wouldn't let them," he cuts her off.
What he's saying sinks in, and for a moment she's just Kristen, he's just Jason, and she wants to beat him with her fists, tiny and ineffectual they may be. Fucking macho boys.
Then she remembers what Regan said, and it strikes her. It's not the Resistance who are to blame for failing in their care. It's Jason himself who is deeply, deeply destroyed. His eyes still have the same unfocused look she had observed at the compound. If he's this fucked up after a comprehensive and rigorous debrief, she doesn't want to know what he was like before.
No. That's wrong too. Despite her distrust, the Resistance probably had done no harm. But they clearly didn't help. She may be his Achilles heel, but she's also the one who dipped him in the River Styx. She's stricken with the knowledge that she may very well be standing with her finger in Jason's last remaining dike, holding back the flood of insanity.
Her metaphors have clearly been influenced by all the leaking water in this place.
"Christ, Jason."
Even if she's not the only person who can reach him, she's definitely the only one in the room. And a part of her thinks - yes. It's possible that she is the only one.
It should be scary, but it's not. Before they were abducted, she was ready to commit herself to him fully. Maybe being with him in this room, trying to repair what is wrong, is the first step.
Kristen stands up, walks over to a dresser, begins opening drawers. The first two are filled with box after box of bullets. Dozens of varieties. Some of them, she can't even tell what kind of gun they'd be used for. On the third try, she finds it: a laptop-case sized gunmetal grey box with a bright red cross on the lid. Well, at least there are a few thing she can still count on, such as Resistance safehouses being well stocked in medical supplies and ammo, no matter how leaky their roofs are.
She brings the case back to the bed with her. "I'm going to take off your shirt," she warns. Except she can't. The pain in his face as she helps him sit and tries to manipulate his left shoulder into a position where he can shrug the shirt off is too much for her to deal with.
"Okay," she amends after a minute of trying. "I'm going to cut off your shirt." She tries to make it sound light, like a joke.
"It only sounds sexy when you say it," Jason replies flatly. After that she stops giving him information.
After his shirt is removed she uses a cloth dampened by the glass of water she found next to the bed to clean the worst of the dried blood from the surrounding skin, then inspects the wound. It's long, running diagonally across the surface of his shoulder from the base of his neck to the cap, as though he had turned as the bullet whizzed toward him, dodging a shot that was aimed at his throat. Which was probably the case. But Jason's irritatingly right, as usual. As luck would have it, he came away with nothing but a deep gouge. Even with her extremely limited (like, limited to the hourlong dramas E.R. and the ever-whiny Grey's Anatomy and sometimes, guiltily, General Hospital) medical knowledge, she can identify that it's superficial.
The wound certainly hadn't felt superficial when the blood had burbled out under her fingers. But it's superficial nonetheless.
Kristen shuffles through the contents of the kit, examining and discarding items haphazardly.
"You have no idea what you're doing, do you?" Jason asks after a long silence.
She doesn't look up. "Shut up and let me try."
He hisses a little between his teeth when she dabs a peroxide-covered cotton ball against the wound. She repeats the process until the remainder of the dried blood is cleaned off, then plasters a white stretch of gauze across it, taping down the loose edges.
"There," she murmurs. Her fingers linger on the bandage, move to the bare skin of his chest.
He flinches and moves away from her touch. "Don't."
"Why?" she asks, but keeps her hand against his skin. "Does it hurt?"
When she looks up at him, his eyes are like liquid, and she feels the way his chest rises and falls with ragged breaths.
"Don't," he says again, pained, and turns his face away, but she cups his cheek with the heel of her other hand and makes him look at her. Leans in so they're only inches apart.
"It's okay," she soothes, "okay? I know. Okay. Just. Just-" The words die before they leave her lips: Just let me have this, just let me make it better.
Her hands skitter down his chest, to the taut muscles of his abdomen, and she feels them tighten under her warm palms. She grabs at his belt, begins to undo the buckle methodically as she slides the strap out of the loops. Her fingers work at his jeans button; the zipper comes loose, and when she slides her hand underneath the waistband of his boxers, he inhales sharply at the contact. Sliding further down, she feels the smooth skin and start of coarse hair. Rubs her hand up and down, slowly, deliberately, watching how he tenses beneath her, the way his breathing quickens.
She moves her hips against his, leans down and kisses the column of his throat, waits and waits for the hard press of him against her hand. At first he lets her, his hands tangling in her hair, but when she begins to work his jeans off of him, he grasps her waist.
"I can't," he gasps, pushing her back.
"What?" She sits herself up and stares down at him. "Is it because of--"
"No," he cuts in, "I mean... I can't."
"Oh," she says, her eyes widening as realization dawns. Her cheeks flush in embarrassment. "Oh."
It's probably too much to hope that the Resistance first aid kit comes stocked with Viagra.
She doesn't want to force anything. She lies down next to him. The flannel of the sheets is itchy against her skin when she pulls the blanket over their bodies. Kristen arranges her body against his until they are interlocking pieces; the backs of her knees nestled against his, the top of her head snugly under his chin. She decides that this is a perfect fit, that this is the way men and women are supposed to be, large and small, one able to completely envelop the other.
Reaching behind her body, she finds his hand and laces her fingers in his, pulls it across her chest to her mouth. Kisses Jason’s knuckles, then lowers his hand until it is resting in the hollow of her throat. She wants to feel her heart beat against it, wants him to feel it too, to remind him that she is alive, and there, and with him.
“What are you thinking?” she asks, playing her fingers across the back of his hand.
He doesn’t answer for a long time, then finally swallows and says, “What I did.”
“You shouldn’t,” she starts, and feels him stir beneath her. “Jason, you-”
“I killed her.”
“You did what you had to.”
He tries to pull his arms back, but she holds onto his wrists, keeps them around her stomach.
"I knew," he says, "I knew. What she was."
"I know," says Kristen. "I know," she repeats. It's too much to take. She doesn't want to forget, she just wants to - not talk about it. Not right now.
"Do you think you can sleep?" she asks.
She's had nearly seventeen hours but suddenly she's drowsy again. Lingering side-effects of the sedatives, maybe, or maybe just the warmth of Jason's body pressing against her back.
"Couldn't before," mumbles Jason. Kristen holds her breath, willing sleep into Jason's exhausted body.
"But maybe I can try," he finally says.
*
When she opens her eyes some time later it's still dark in the room. Jason's breathing is erratic behind her. She rolls over and he's awake, watching her.
"No luck?"
He shakes his head forlornly. She presses against him, facing his body, draping her leg over one of his thighs. Not trying to start anything, just trying to find a new place that's comfortable. He puts his hand to her face, pulls her chin up to him, places his mouth over hers. Jason's lower lip is still swollen. His tongue is harsh and dry as it probes her. Dangerously dehydrated, she remembers.
They kiss for a while. Nothing urgent, just an acknowledgement of their continued survival. She's okay with it, despite the post-battle tension that still thrums inside her. A-ok. No pressure. They've been through a lot. If she really needs an orgasm, maybe she can use her hand, later.
She's not a lying high school boy, or a fiend. She can wait for sex. Totally. Not forever, but she would never - push.
She's almost convinced herself of this when Jason's hands go to her panties, working them down over her hipbones.
Kristen gently extracts herself from his grip. "It's okay, it's okay, we don't have to."
He looks at her pleadingly and says, "Yes, we do. If we don't have this, then what do we have left? What do I have left?"
He unbuttons his jeans, and she guides them down, takes his underwear with them. She cups his cock and he feels fragile, soft under her palm.
"Can I do something to - help?" If he asks me to put my fingers in his ass like Kevin did that one time I am so in trouble, Kristen thinks to herself.
"No," he grits and presses into her hand. "It's just - I can't stop thinking about her. Suri. Sara."
She hooks her leg behind his thigh and raises her torso off the mattress, lifting her arms and allowing him to draw the camisole up over her head. The room is cold; she's glad for the extra warmth that the flannel sheets offer, even if they could use a dose of fabric softener. Jason's fingertips skitter down her ribcage.
"When I got in the room I rearranged the blanket around her because it looked like she was cold or whatever. She wrapped one of her hands around my finger - god, her hands are so big now. And then I put my palm over her face."
His mouth is on her left breast as he talks and he's moving against her, building friction against her upper thigh.
God, her hands are so big now.
Kristen notices the present tense but doesn't speak. "The patient displays a disassociated perspective as he discusses the deceased," remarks a clipped, nasally voice in her head. Against her leg, she can feel his cock stirring. She should be appalled, she knows she should. But there are also his hands to contend with, his lips and tongue engulfing her nipple. She can feel herself getting wet in spite of his words.
"I knew what was inside of her, but she was still so small. So fucking small." Jason's voice breaks on 'fucking.' "It's like - she didn't know. But I did."
His breath is hot on her shoulder, and he's actually hard, so hard, throbbing and she's throbbing too. He rolls her onto her back, the weight of his body an anchor.
"I couldn't let her be that, Kristen. I just couldn't."
Kristen is remembering, because she saw her there, under the blanket tucked carefully to her chin, eyes still open and glassy and she wants to throw up.
"She was so small. She looked like Sara still. She was-- and it felt... good. She was gone. And I was glad."
"You don't mean that," she whispers, and gasps as his fingers are on her clit. He's pressing and she's leaking as he finds his way inside her, skin on skin. It feels so necessary that she doesn't stop him; if she stops him who knows what sins he will have to confess to achieve this moment again.
"I was glad," he insists, voice straining, and he's moving in painfully exquisite ways as his mouth ghosts over hers. She wants to swallow his sorrow more than anything.
Under him, she's moaning and writhing. Her eyes close, her head tilts back, and she thinks of Sara-- Suri-- the baby. Tucked under the cotton blanket, so carefully, eyes open and glassy. How when she held her lifeless body in her arms, she felt like a rag doll stuffed with sand. Dead weight.
Jason's hands slide across her skin, and she shivers, and tries not to imagine them cupped over the baby's small pink mouth.
She can't breathe and she's shaking so hard and she's not sure it's because she's coming or if it's because she's crying.
Jason buries his face in her neck, hands tightening around her ribs, makes a sound like he's choking.
He slips out of her, his head still in the curl of her neck and she lets out a breath she didn't know she was holding. She holds him to her chest as their mingled sweat cools and dries, licks the tears off his throat and lets him twine his fingers in her hair. This as much as their shared grief tethers them together. Kristen doesn't know if they're grieving Sara's death or something else, the loss of something human in them both.
She drifts off to sleep with Jason's fingers in her hair and these thoughts in her head.
*
This time, Kristen wakes up to clear light streaming through the open window. Not exactly happy, but. Sated. She feels that way for almost ten seconds. Those blissful ten seconds that everyone has in the morning, before they remember whatever shit they have to do that day. What awful shit happened the day before.
Then she does remember, and she hates those ten seconds for their deceit.
Rolling over, she stretches out an arm for Jason, but finds only nubbly sheets and emptiness. The cold air blowing the curtains of the open window makes her arm hairs prickle.
The open window.
She sits up with a start, clutching the blankets to her bare chest, glancing around the room wildly. This is when she spots him, sitting on the sofa. His head is in his hands, but then he looks up at her. His eyes are narrow and his mouth is downturned.
"He's gone," Josh states plainly.
"I locked the door," says Kristen. It's an accusation.
"Wasn't locked."
"Was he -" she swallows hard, "- taken?"
"Taken?" Josh looks like he's biting back a laugh. "A few of the perimeter guards saw him go. Tried to approach him and he waved them off. Waved them off. No, he wasn't taken. He went."
That's a lie. It has to be a lie. "But we have to find him! He could be eaten by a bear or a Sasquatch or something! If they won't, we will. We're a team! Muckrackers!"
Josh's chuckle is like oil spreading across the surface of her skin.
"What the hell did you do to him?" she demands.
"Me?" His cheeks wobble, "I just tried to save my child. Darling, what did you do?"
"I. Did. Everything. I. Could." Each word has its own punctuation.
"No," says Josh, and she averts her eyes so she doesn't have to watch the tear slide down his stubbled face. "No."
"I don't believe you."
They're both crying now, silently weeping, wetness streaming down their faces without buckets to catch it. It would be so easy, so fucking easy to go over there and take Josh into her arms, to apologize, to murmur "I've lost someone I loved too, I lost someone too." But she can't and so she doesn't.
*
Outside the window of the SUV, the world speeds by in monochromes. The skeletons of the black trees starkly contrast the white of the snow, the smoky grey of the cloud covered sky, the heathered surface of salted asphalt.
By herself in the backseat, Kristen keeps an index finger balanced on power window control, pressing it intermittently as the unchanging landscape whizzes by. Up, down. Up, down. Down, up.
The uniformed driver who has been charged with taking her to the airport and making sure she's safely boarded a chartered flight back to Los Angeles doesn't ask her to stop. There's no one else in the car.
Up, down.
The child locks are engaged. She had tried the door handle. When the hell did she stop being the internet's favorite television ingénue and occasional combatant against badass alien evil and become a candidate to launch herself from a moving vehicle?
Probably around the time her life became bleaker than a Sarah McLachlan ballad.
Josh had been given clearance to depart three days before, empty-handed. He had requested, of course, that he be allowed to bring Sara's body back to Katie, for closure, but had been denied by the Resistance scientists, who needed to keep the corpse for additional tests before it could be returned to her family. No more than eight weeks, they had said, with smiles that were probably supposed to be comforting.
Josh still isn't speaking to her, so Kristen had been told all this by Regan, who had not added that after the verdict had been shared he had merely hung his head and didn't fight. That, she had overheard two Resistance members gossiping about as she walked past an open room. Their voices had been filled with sympathy, but not sadness or understanding. That was for Kristen alone to conclude. After all, she had watched as Josh had left the bedroom the morning that Jason had disappeared, his shoulders rounded, devoid of fight. It had been heartbreaking, but she was too involved in her own grief to notice until later.
Down, up.
Jason hasn't reappeared.
The Resistance had allowed her to remain in the safehouse for a week while they followed several leads regarding Jason's disappearance - or as they simply called it, "his unexpected departure." They had reason to believe he was safe, and not in the hands of the Scientologists, though they wouldn't reveal to Kristen what their reasoning behind this stance was, no matter how many times she demanded to be told. Finally, yesterday, Regan had taken her aside and told her that they had arranged a private aircraft to take her to her home. She'd be safe there, once again, even in the public eye, despite everything that had happened. The same deal as before: Scientologists didn't consider her a threat, were not in hot pursuit, blah blah blah.
Didn't Regan understand that she wanted to be considered a threat?
In the pocket of the parka that she is wearing she has a laminated card detailing how she can contact the Resistance if Jason does decide to show himself. Stealth instructions about encrypted e-mails, or signal flags, or Navajo code talkers. Something. She had barely glanced at it before balling it into her fist and shoving it into the recesses of the borrowed coat.
The parka is warm enough, if a bit oversized. It keeps the air rushing in through the open window from stinging too much, at least.
Kristen stares at the bare trees, the way their branches reach quietly up toward the sunless heavens. Splaying her fingers, she lets her arm drift out of the car, feeling the pressure of the wind, waiting, waiting.
Around a curve in the road, a male cardinal alights on the top of a leafless tree and whistles "whoit, whoit, whoit." Just as abruptly it spreads its wings and takes to the air, as if the empty and barren landscape is too much for its cheerful song.
Kristen watches it fly until the red is swallowed up by the grey of the sky.
Epilogue
The stranger sitting at the farthest barstool had been couched in the same spot for several hours. During that time, most of the patrons who had been at the bar prior to the stranger's arrival had finished their drinks and quietly exited, and those who had pushed open the swinging door had scarcely had time to enter before they suddenly "remembered" that they had pressing business elsewhere.
Only the bartender and a few diehards remained, and they had, by unspoken agreement, congregated near the front windows, away from the shadows where the unknown visitor sat. The bartender would venture to the opposite end of the bar as rarely as possible, only when a finger was raised to indicate that the stranger's glass was nearing empty, or that the bowl of nuts on the bar needed refilling.
He was a man, vaguely. From a distance, this was concrete, undoubtable. It was only when someone approached him closely that the dissimilarities became clear. The staggering gait, the wild hand gestures, the hawkish stare that lasted too long. His skin was too pale, too transparent; as if it weren't blood that ran through his veins, but a malignant substance. Actually, that was fact. Seeping into the air around his body were a few of the better known carcinogens, side effects of the process. Certain parts of his face appeared to have been constructed of putty.
The man (if he was a man, after all), was aware of the unease that people felt when he was present. It had been this way before, to a degree, though the response certainly hadn't been helped by recent events. Others' perceptions of him didn't have an effect, anyway. He was empty except for a couple of screams. He'd save them for another day, he thought idly, and crushed a peanut shell between his thumb and forefinger.
"Bartender!" he croaked, and smiled. His teeth were long. There were too many of them.
The bartender scuttled over, took his glass and refilled it from the tap with shaking hands. He had scarcely placed it on the counter before hustling away. It was okay, the man thought. It was only a matter of time.
They'd all stop running. They'd stop turning away in disgust and put their hands where his had been. He would return to his place of power, and then his face would once more be splayed across the newsstands. Worshipped.
Soon enough, his star would rise again.
Soon enough.
- The End (???) -
STAY TUNED FOR THE THRILLING FINAL INSTALLMENT OF THE REVOLUTION TRILOGY, SAVING JASON DOHRING.
COMING SUMMER 2012
6/30/2012 - a note from missdeviant
We're like George R.R. Martin - first we say one thing, then we do another.
Yes, Summer 2012 was a joke when we wrote it. Was it a coincidence that the final chapter was supposed to appear as Tom and Katie's Five Year Marriage Contract just concluded? Maybe...or maybe not.
We're glad you enjoyed the story up to this point, and hope you can forgive us that there's no "real" conclusion. Let's just say Kristen rescued Jason from his Rivers Cuomo style downward spiral and killed Tom Cruise (again), the real Suri was discovered and rescued (alien cloning FTW!) and Jason went through lots and lots of therapy. We love you, and we thank you for the years-long love!
Cast: Kristen Bell. Jason Dohring. Joshua Jackson. With sundry guest stars of the CW and Scientology variety!
Authors: buffyx & missdeviant
Rating: NC-17 (this section is NC-17)
Words: 5,877 (final total: 50K+)
Notes/Warnings: Rule number one of VM RPS: Do not talk about VM RPS. Not to the actors, anyway. It's just not cool, and DEFINITELY NOT AT ALL FUNNY, OKAY? OKAY. Just so we're clear!
Disclaimers:
1. I am impatient, so I posted this before running the final draft past the eagle eyes of buffyx, so hyphen and comma overuse in this chapter, as well as any minor or glaring continuity errors, are the fault of me.
2. But the plot was (as always) a 50/50 collaboration with buffyx, so she is AT LEAST equally to blame for the whole fiasco.
3. Even if I narratively fleshed out the bulk of that scene, and probably did take more joy in it than she did.
4. SPOILER ALERT?
5. Ripley's Believe It Or Not: The outline and some of the chapter itself has been written and on our hard drives since the middle of last summer!
6. Yes, we are mean.
7. Cliches are intentional, in case you'd forgotten.
And now, without further (further, further, further...) ado.
Tom Cruise Must Die. CHAPTER TEN (of ten)
Kristen wakes up swaddled in faded quilts, sweating. Alone. Sometime while she's been unconscious, the weather's shifted. Not much, but enough. The air seeping through the chinks in the wood plank wall next to the bed where she's been laid is still cold, but not in the frigid, biting way that it had been. That morning? The day before?
Her first thought is: how long have I been out?
Her second thought is: oh god, the baby.
Her third thought is: Jason.
She has to see Jason.
Someone, maybe in an effort to be kind, had taken the wet and dirty clothes - the scrubs of her imprisonment - from the back of the desk chair where she had - in a daze, maybe - draped them to dry.
She hopes they burned them.
The immediate effect is that she's left wearing only the camisole and underpants that she had slept in. She untangles herself from two of the three quilts, wraps the third over her shoulders, and climbs out of bed. While she was unconscious, someone had tended to her wounds, removed whatever was slicing into her injured heel, bandaged it. Her foot throbs when it hits the floor, but she can put weight on the heel, which is…not ideal, but better. Her legs ache. Everything aches. Next to the braided bedside rug, the hardwood is still cold. She wishes the safehouse rooms came equipped with complimentary slippers. Or socks.
She's not in the same cabin that they were in before the mission-gone-awry, she knows that much. The room where she's been sleeping is small but not crowded. A bank of file cabinets stands against one windowless wall. A flat screen monitor sits on the desk, in high-tech contrast to the rustic furnishings. When the building isn't doubling as hostel to bedraggled revolutionaries, the room probably serves as an office.
Venturing into the hall, she nearly trips over a saucepan. It's filled with at least an inch of sediment-y looking water. Five feet on, there's another.
She looks up to the ceiling and is promptly hit in the eye with a wet droplet.
Well. That answers that.
She pads through the hallways carefully, making sure that her dragging quilt doesn't scrape over any of the random water receptacles. A bucket. A wastebasket. A nine by thirteen cake pan. Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
It's quiet in the halls, dark except for the glow of nightlights in ankle-high outlets every five feet or so. When she tentatively pulls aside the blackout curtain over the first window she passes, the sky is clear and filled with stars.
So. It's night. Which night, she's not sure. But it's night.
Drip.
Drip.
The watery echoing sound makes her feel like she's in a cavern. She misses her headlamp.
Where is Josh? Where is Jason?
A light is on off the main hallway.
"Jason?" It's a whisper, and a foolish one. Rounding the corner to a large kitchen, she sees Regan. She's standing alone behind a butcher block island, attempting to carve a hunk of meat with a dangerous looking knife. A frying pan filled half to the brim with water is beside her elbow. The effort of one particularly vicious stroke jostles the pan, slopping water onto the counter and floor.
"Dammit," Regan mutters without looking up.
"Can I - can I help?" At full volume, Kristen's voice is rusty, like maybe she's been screaming in her sleep.
"Not unless you know a good roofer," Regan answers. She's still focused on sawing off a slice of meat. "You'd think there'd be enough money in the budget for a good patch job on HQ, but no, the board of directors wanted to blow it all on Uzis and a Blackhawk helicopter. Idiots."
"The resistance has a - a board of directors?"
"Kidding. They're more of a cabal."
Regan finally succeeds in removing a chunk of meat from the roast with a soft "aha!" and slides it onto a slice of bread that’s sitting on a plate, then dribbles what seems to be a gallon of ketchup onto the thing before dropping on another piece of bread.
It's disgusting.
"Midnight snack?" Regan gestures towards the meat, then Kristen, with the knife.
Vomit, says her brain, but her mouth manages to be polite. "No thank you. A glass of water, though, would be nice?"
Regan nods, opens a cabinet to grab a glass, then gets a pitcher of water from the refrigerator. Magnetized to the door of the fridge is a button. Kristen steps next to the counter to accept her glass of water and to get a better angle on the button, then reads off the magnet to herself, "I saved the world and all I got was this lousy button."
"The Liberation Front has buttons?" she asks.
"We have a button maker. We're in hiding. We have a lot of time to kill, all right?" Regan smiles. "We also have a listserv. Mostly humorous pictures of cats, that sort of thing. But we don't typically share that intel."
Jokes. From Regan. Ha ha ha funny, but she doesn't have the energy to laugh. She has a mission. Kristen takes a sip from the glass. The cold water makes her throat feel better, less scratchy.
"Where's Jason?"
"I wouldn't bother him right now. Unlike you, he spent most of the last seventeen hours in debrief."
Seventeen hours. She hadn't slept for seventeen hours at a stretch since she had gotten mono from James Bowen back in high school. For the first time, Kristen looks at the back of her sore left hand. The bruising was faint, almost undetectable, given that her entire body felt like it probably resembled an atlas. But upon close inspection, it's clear that she had at some point been administered an IV.
"Did you DRUG me?"
"Mild sedatives. You were screaming. Incoherent. We already had you bagged. In the van, don't you recall? When we extracted you, you were on the verge of being dangerously dehydrated."
Her thoughts swim. Handing the baby over. Jason. Stumbling into the van. Josh, strapped into a seat, wearing plastic handcuffs. Being guided into a sweatshirt, wrapped in crackling silver blankets. A voice yelling "she's going into shock!"
Time jumps, and she's being carried into a cabin. Not Regan's from before, but what must be the other, larger cabin. This cabin? Her memory is swiss cheese. She's trembling.
"It was better that way," Regan continues smoothly. "Unless you would have preferred we restrain you."
More jumps. An older female revolution operative helping her remove the clothes that she was wearing, easing her elbows through treacherous sleeves like she's four years old.
"Is that where Jason is? Being restrained?"
"Kristen, he's resting. I'd advise you to do -"
"He has to EAT!" she interrupts Regan, then eyes the sandwich sitting on the counter wildly. "And I am going to bring him this roast beef sandwich." She grabs at the plate, pulls it to her side of the counter. Regan lets her.
"He's been through a trauma, Kristen."
"And so have I, which is precisely why we should be together. De-traumatizing. When a baby monkey is abandoned, they put a fake mother monkey into the incubator with it to - hug - and stuff. I'm his monkey."
"That well may be, but Jason -" she hesitates. Kristen senses she's on the precipice of a lie.
"Jason what?" she demands.
Regan sighs. "Jason is currently operating on the belief that he was predestined to be the key player in a very important religious prophecy. He's spent his adult life resisting, disbelieving. But by destroying the child, he now feels locked into the destiny that he fought so hard against…"
Regan's words jar Kristen. Mostly because she realizes they're the truth. It all matches. Craww's incomprehensible babble - It’s you, it was always you. The prophecies. It’s the only thing that adds up - what he had said before he had -
She shakes the visual - the blood, so much blood - and the accompanying gagging feeling in the back of her throat out of her head and squares off against Regan.
"So why did he have to kill her then, if it made him into this…person? He could have given her to you, to the Resistance, you could have hidden her, better than before. We could have kept whatever power she held from being unleashed. She didn't have to -"
Regan interrupts, her eyes glinting like the edge of the knife she holds. "You may have believed that. But what I know, what Jason knew, is that it was too much of a liability for her to exist at all. If she had remained with the Scientologists, they may not have killed her, but she'd be their experiment. If we had rescued her once again, after what they had done to her in the last few days, she still would have changed. As a result, they would have NEVER stopped trying to take her back. And they would have succeeded. She would end up living her life as an instrument, hooked up to machines. She wouldn't be a person. Ever. Not even with Josh and Katie. It was too late for that. It's better this way"
"Better that she's dead?" Kristen is fighting back tears for like the millionth time in recent memory.
"If you could save a million lives by ending one innocent life, would you do it?"
It's a question that people ask sitting in circles in a dorm room after hours; an answer teased out of you by a philosophy student in a bar. It's supposed to be a hypothetical. It's not supposed to be applied to actual, real life situations.
Except for when it is.
"Craww was supposed to be the one to take care of it," Regan says after a long pause. "Unfortunately his choice to end his own life, with the effect of forcing Jason into becoming the one the prophecy foretold - we didn't expect that. Jason's impulsivity, on the other hand…" She trails off.
The Resistance had known. Of course they had known. Had contingency plans for the very thing that had occurred; had counted on Jason to be reckless even as they advised him against that path of action. Their forethought is probably the only reason that both she and Jason are alive right now.
"I need to see him," Kristen says, swallowing hard. Pressure builds behind her eyes, whether left over from before or a whole new round, she's not sure. She wills the tears not to spill over.
Regan regards her for a long moment before responding. "Hall on the left. Opposite the way you came. Third door." Kristen takes the plate with the sandwich in her right hand, gathers the quilt around her shoulders with the other, turns to leave.
"And Kristen?" Regan's voice stops her before she exits the kitchen. She looks over her shoulder.
"Have mercy."
Regan's accent imbues the words with a certain sort of profundity. Kristen takes a moment, lets them register. Then, back into the hallway. It's just her and the pans. The world is thawing, changing.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
*
Jason is exactly where Regan says he will be. The room has a wide window and an overstuffed sofa on one wall instead of filing cabinets, but otherwise resembles the one she had been in. The light is as dim as it had been in the hallway. It smells like cedar and candle wax.
Laying on a double bed with flannel sheets tangled around his legs is Jason. He looks like he's been through a riot. Bruised. Caked blood covers the shoulder of his ripped shirt. God. Whoever had come in to her room to tend to her as she slept hadn't offered the same courtesy to Jason.
She wonders briefly, bitterly, whether all of Jason's wounds are from the imprisonment and escape, or whether some were inflicted during his "debriefing."
When she enters his eyes are closed, but he opens them as the door snicks shut behind her. She locks it.
"Oh, god. Jason," she says, and doesn't think about being gentle, just swoops down next to him and sits on the bed. The sandwich, all but forgotten, ends up on the nightstand. "Those bastards."
She's not sure who she's referring to. The Org, who captured and tortured him. Tom Cruise, who shot him. The Resistance, who abandoned him in this room, alone and bloody.
Kristen touches his left shoulder, the one covered in blood, gingerly. Like a question.
"S'okay," Jason grates out, attempting to wave her off. "It was in and out. Closed on its own. Wasn't even a bullet to remove."
"But they didn't even clean -" she protests.
"Wouldn't let them," he cuts her off.
What he's saying sinks in, and for a moment she's just Kristen, he's just Jason, and she wants to beat him with her fists, tiny and ineffectual they may be. Fucking macho boys.
Then she remembers what Regan said, and it strikes her. It's not the Resistance who are to blame for failing in their care. It's Jason himself who is deeply, deeply destroyed. His eyes still have the same unfocused look she had observed at the compound. If he's this fucked up after a comprehensive and rigorous debrief, she doesn't want to know what he was like before.
No. That's wrong too. Despite her distrust, the Resistance probably had done no harm. But they clearly didn't help. She may be his Achilles heel, but she's also the one who dipped him in the River Styx. She's stricken with the knowledge that she may very well be standing with her finger in Jason's last remaining dike, holding back the flood of insanity.
Her metaphors have clearly been influenced by all the leaking water in this place.
"Christ, Jason."
Even if she's not the only person who can reach him, she's definitely the only one in the room. And a part of her thinks - yes. It's possible that she is the only one.
It should be scary, but it's not. Before they were abducted, she was ready to commit herself to him fully. Maybe being with him in this room, trying to repair what is wrong, is the first step.
Kristen stands up, walks over to a dresser, begins opening drawers. The first two are filled with box after box of bullets. Dozens of varieties. Some of them, she can't even tell what kind of gun they'd be used for. On the third try, she finds it: a laptop-case sized gunmetal grey box with a bright red cross on the lid. Well, at least there are a few thing she can still count on, such as Resistance safehouses being well stocked in medical supplies and ammo, no matter how leaky their roofs are.
She brings the case back to the bed with her. "I'm going to take off your shirt," she warns. Except she can't. The pain in his face as she helps him sit and tries to manipulate his left shoulder into a position where he can shrug the shirt off is too much for her to deal with.
"Okay," she amends after a minute of trying. "I'm going to cut off your shirt." She tries to make it sound light, like a joke.
"It only sounds sexy when you say it," Jason replies flatly. After that she stops giving him information.
After his shirt is removed she uses a cloth dampened by the glass of water she found next to the bed to clean the worst of the dried blood from the surrounding skin, then inspects the wound. It's long, running diagonally across the surface of his shoulder from the base of his neck to the cap, as though he had turned as the bullet whizzed toward him, dodging a shot that was aimed at his throat. Which was probably the case. But Jason's irritatingly right, as usual. As luck would have it, he came away with nothing but a deep gouge. Even with her extremely limited (like, limited to the hourlong dramas E.R. and the ever-whiny Grey's Anatomy and sometimes, guiltily, General Hospital) medical knowledge, she can identify that it's superficial.
The wound certainly hadn't felt superficial when the blood had burbled out under her fingers. But it's superficial nonetheless.
Kristen shuffles through the contents of the kit, examining and discarding items haphazardly.
"You have no idea what you're doing, do you?" Jason asks after a long silence.
She doesn't look up. "Shut up and let me try."
He hisses a little between his teeth when she dabs a peroxide-covered cotton ball against the wound. She repeats the process until the remainder of the dried blood is cleaned off, then plasters a white stretch of gauze across it, taping down the loose edges.
"There," she murmurs. Her fingers linger on the bandage, move to the bare skin of his chest.
He flinches and moves away from her touch. "Don't."
"Why?" she asks, but keeps her hand against his skin. "Does it hurt?"
When she looks up at him, his eyes are like liquid, and she feels the way his chest rises and falls with ragged breaths.
"Don't," he says again, pained, and turns his face away, but she cups his cheek with the heel of her other hand and makes him look at her. Leans in so they're only inches apart.
"It's okay," she soothes, "okay? I know. Okay. Just. Just-" The words die before they leave her lips: Just let me have this, just let me make it better.
Her hands skitter down his chest, to the taut muscles of his abdomen, and she feels them tighten under her warm palms. She grabs at his belt, begins to undo the buckle methodically as she slides the strap out of the loops. Her fingers work at his jeans button; the zipper comes loose, and when she slides her hand underneath the waistband of his boxers, he inhales sharply at the contact. Sliding further down, she feels the smooth skin and start of coarse hair. Rubs her hand up and down, slowly, deliberately, watching how he tenses beneath her, the way his breathing quickens.
She moves her hips against his, leans down and kisses the column of his throat, waits and waits for the hard press of him against her hand. At first he lets her, his hands tangling in her hair, but when she begins to work his jeans off of him, he grasps her waist.
"I can't," he gasps, pushing her back.
"What?" She sits herself up and stares down at him. "Is it because of--"
"No," he cuts in, "I mean... I can't."
"Oh," she says, her eyes widening as realization dawns. Her cheeks flush in embarrassment. "Oh."
It's probably too much to hope that the Resistance first aid kit comes stocked with Viagra.
She doesn't want to force anything. She lies down next to him. The flannel of the sheets is itchy against her skin when she pulls the blanket over their bodies. Kristen arranges her body against his until they are interlocking pieces; the backs of her knees nestled against his, the top of her head snugly under his chin. She decides that this is a perfect fit, that this is the way men and women are supposed to be, large and small, one able to completely envelop the other.
Reaching behind her body, she finds his hand and laces her fingers in his, pulls it across her chest to her mouth. Kisses Jason’s knuckles, then lowers his hand until it is resting in the hollow of her throat. She wants to feel her heart beat against it, wants him to feel it too, to remind him that she is alive, and there, and with him.
“What are you thinking?” she asks, playing her fingers across the back of his hand.
He doesn’t answer for a long time, then finally swallows and says, “What I did.”
“You shouldn’t,” she starts, and feels him stir beneath her. “Jason, you-”
“I killed her.”
“You did what you had to.”
He tries to pull his arms back, but she holds onto his wrists, keeps them around her stomach.
"I knew," he says, "I knew. What she was."
"I know," says Kristen. "I know," she repeats. It's too much to take. She doesn't want to forget, she just wants to - not talk about it. Not right now.
"Do you think you can sleep?" she asks.
She's had nearly seventeen hours but suddenly she's drowsy again. Lingering side-effects of the sedatives, maybe, or maybe just the warmth of Jason's body pressing against her back.
"Couldn't before," mumbles Jason. Kristen holds her breath, willing sleep into Jason's exhausted body.
"But maybe I can try," he finally says.
*
When she opens her eyes some time later it's still dark in the room. Jason's breathing is erratic behind her. She rolls over and he's awake, watching her.
"No luck?"
He shakes his head forlornly. She presses against him, facing his body, draping her leg over one of his thighs. Not trying to start anything, just trying to find a new place that's comfortable. He puts his hand to her face, pulls her chin up to him, places his mouth over hers. Jason's lower lip is still swollen. His tongue is harsh and dry as it probes her. Dangerously dehydrated, she remembers.
They kiss for a while. Nothing urgent, just an acknowledgement of their continued survival. She's okay with it, despite the post-battle tension that still thrums inside her. A-ok. No pressure. They've been through a lot. If she really needs an orgasm, maybe she can use her hand, later.
She's not a lying high school boy, or a fiend. She can wait for sex. Totally. Not forever, but she would never - push.
She's almost convinced herself of this when Jason's hands go to her panties, working them down over her hipbones.
Kristen gently extracts herself from his grip. "It's okay, it's okay, we don't have to."
He looks at her pleadingly and says, "Yes, we do. If we don't have this, then what do we have left? What do I have left?"
He unbuttons his jeans, and she guides them down, takes his underwear with them. She cups his cock and he feels fragile, soft under her palm.
"Can I do something to - help?" If he asks me to put my fingers in his ass like Kevin did that one time I am so in trouble, Kristen thinks to herself.
"No," he grits and presses into her hand. "It's just - I can't stop thinking about her. Suri. Sara."
She hooks her leg behind his thigh and raises her torso off the mattress, lifting her arms and allowing him to draw the camisole up over her head. The room is cold; she's glad for the extra warmth that the flannel sheets offer, even if they could use a dose of fabric softener. Jason's fingertips skitter down her ribcage.
"When I got in the room I rearranged the blanket around her because it looked like she was cold or whatever. She wrapped one of her hands around my finger - god, her hands are so big now. And then I put my palm over her face."
His mouth is on her left breast as he talks and he's moving against her, building friction against her upper thigh.
God, her hands are so big now.
Kristen notices the present tense but doesn't speak. "The patient displays a disassociated perspective as he discusses the deceased," remarks a clipped, nasally voice in her head. Against her leg, she can feel his cock stirring. She should be appalled, she knows she should. But there are also his hands to contend with, his lips and tongue engulfing her nipple. She can feel herself getting wet in spite of his words.
"I knew what was inside of her, but she was still so small. So fucking small." Jason's voice breaks on 'fucking.' "It's like - she didn't know. But I did."
His breath is hot on her shoulder, and he's actually hard, so hard, throbbing and she's throbbing too. He rolls her onto her back, the weight of his body an anchor.
"I couldn't let her be that, Kristen. I just couldn't."
Kristen is remembering, because she saw her there, under the blanket tucked carefully to her chin, eyes still open and glassy and she wants to throw up.
"She was so small. She looked like Sara still. She was-- and it felt... good. She was gone. And I was glad."
"You don't mean that," she whispers, and gasps as his fingers are on her clit. He's pressing and she's leaking as he finds his way inside her, skin on skin. It feels so necessary that she doesn't stop him; if she stops him who knows what sins he will have to confess to achieve this moment again.
"I was glad," he insists, voice straining, and he's moving in painfully exquisite ways as his mouth ghosts over hers. She wants to swallow his sorrow more than anything.
Under him, she's moaning and writhing. Her eyes close, her head tilts back, and she thinks of Sara-- Suri-- the baby. Tucked under the cotton blanket, so carefully, eyes open and glassy. How when she held her lifeless body in her arms, she felt like a rag doll stuffed with sand. Dead weight.
Jason's hands slide across her skin, and she shivers, and tries not to imagine them cupped over the baby's small pink mouth.
She can't breathe and she's shaking so hard and she's not sure it's because she's coming or if it's because she's crying.
Jason buries his face in her neck, hands tightening around her ribs, makes a sound like he's choking.
He slips out of her, his head still in the curl of her neck and she lets out a breath she didn't know she was holding. She holds him to her chest as their mingled sweat cools and dries, licks the tears off his throat and lets him twine his fingers in her hair. This as much as their shared grief tethers them together. Kristen doesn't know if they're grieving Sara's death or something else, the loss of something human in them both.
She drifts off to sleep with Jason's fingers in her hair and these thoughts in her head.
*
This time, Kristen wakes up to clear light streaming through the open window. Not exactly happy, but. Sated. She feels that way for almost ten seconds. Those blissful ten seconds that everyone has in the morning, before they remember whatever shit they have to do that day. What awful shit happened the day before.
Then she does remember, and she hates those ten seconds for their deceit.
Rolling over, she stretches out an arm for Jason, but finds only nubbly sheets and emptiness. The cold air blowing the curtains of the open window makes her arm hairs prickle.
The open window.
She sits up with a start, clutching the blankets to her bare chest, glancing around the room wildly. This is when she spots him, sitting on the sofa. His head is in his hands, but then he looks up at her. His eyes are narrow and his mouth is downturned.
"He's gone," Josh states plainly.
"I locked the door," says Kristen. It's an accusation.
"Wasn't locked."
"Was he -" she swallows hard, "- taken?"
"Taken?" Josh looks like he's biting back a laugh. "A few of the perimeter guards saw him go. Tried to approach him and he waved them off. Waved them off. No, he wasn't taken. He went."
That's a lie. It has to be a lie. "But we have to find him! He could be eaten by a bear or a Sasquatch or something! If they won't, we will. We're a team! Muckrackers!"
Josh's chuckle is like oil spreading across the surface of her skin.
"What the hell did you do to him?" she demands.
"Me?" His cheeks wobble, "I just tried to save my child. Darling, what did you do?"
"I. Did. Everything. I. Could." Each word has its own punctuation.
"No," says Josh, and she averts her eyes so she doesn't have to watch the tear slide down his stubbled face. "No."
"I don't believe you."
They're both crying now, silently weeping, wetness streaming down their faces without buckets to catch it. It would be so easy, so fucking easy to go over there and take Josh into her arms, to apologize, to murmur "I've lost someone I loved too, I lost someone too." But she can't and so she doesn't.
*
Outside the window of the SUV, the world speeds by in monochromes. The skeletons of the black trees starkly contrast the white of the snow, the smoky grey of the cloud covered sky, the heathered surface of salted asphalt.
By herself in the backseat, Kristen keeps an index finger balanced on power window control, pressing it intermittently as the unchanging landscape whizzes by. Up, down. Up, down. Down, up.
The uniformed driver who has been charged with taking her to the airport and making sure she's safely boarded a chartered flight back to Los Angeles doesn't ask her to stop. There's no one else in the car.
Up, down.
The child locks are engaged. She had tried the door handle. When the hell did she stop being the internet's favorite television ingénue and occasional combatant against badass alien evil and become a candidate to launch herself from a moving vehicle?
Probably around the time her life became bleaker than a Sarah McLachlan ballad.
Josh had been given clearance to depart three days before, empty-handed. He had requested, of course, that he be allowed to bring Sara's body back to Katie, for closure, but had been denied by the Resistance scientists, who needed to keep the corpse for additional tests before it could be returned to her family. No more than eight weeks, they had said, with smiles that were probably supposed to be comforting.
Josh still isn't speaking to her, so Kristen had been told all this by Regan, who had not added that after the verdict had been shared he had merely hung his head and didn't fight. That, she had overheard two Resistance members gossiping about as she walked past an open room. Their voices had been filled with sympathy, but not sadness or understanding. That was for Kristen alone to conclude. After all, she had watched as Josh had left the bedroom the morning that Jason had disappeared, his shoulders rounded, devoid of fight. It had been heartbreaking, but she was too involved in her own grief to notice until later.
Down, up.
Jason hasn't reappeared.
The Resistance had allowed her to remain in the safehouse for a week while they followed several leads regarding Jason's disappearance - or as they simply called it, "his unexpected departure." They had reason to believe he was safe, and not in the hands of the Scientologists, though they wouldn't reveal to Kristen what their reasoning behind this stance was, no matter how many times she demanded to be told. Finally, yesterday, Regan had taken her aside and told her that they had arranged a private aircraft to take her to her home. She'd be safe there, once again, even in the public eye, despite everything that had happened. The same deal as before: Scientologists didn't consider her a threat, were not in hot pursuit, blah blah blah.
Didn't Regan understand that she wanted to be considered a threat?
In the pocket of the parka that she is wearing she has a laminated card detailing how she can contact the Resistance if Jason does decide to show himself. Stealth instructions about encrypted e-mails, or signal flags, or Navajo code talkers. Something. She had barely glanced at it before balling it into her fist and shoving it into the recesses of the borrowed coat.
The parka is warm enough, if a bit oversized. It keeps the air rushing in through the open window from stinging too much, at least.
Kristen stares at the bare trees, the way their branches reach quietly up toward the sunless heavens. Splaying her fingers, she lets her arm drift out of the car, feeling the pressure of the wind, waiting, waiting.
Around a curve in the road, a male cardinal alights on the top of a leafless tree and whistles "whoit, whoit, whoit." Just as abruptly it spreads its wings and takes to the air, as if the empty and barren landscape is too much for its cheerful song.
Kristen watches it fly until the red is swallowed up by the grey of the sky.
Epilogue
The stranger sitting at the farthest barstool had been couched in the same spot for several hours. During that time, most of the patrons who had been at the bar prior to the stranger's arrival had finished their drinks and quietly exited, and those who had pushed open the swinging door had scarcely had time to enter before they suddenly "remembered" that they had pressing business elsewhere.
Only the bartender and a few diehards remained, and they had, by unspoken agreement, congregated near the front windows, away from the shadows where the unknown visitor sat. The bartender would venture to the opposite end of the bar as rarely as possible, only when a finger was raised to indicate that the stranger's glass was nearing empty, or that the bowl of nuts on the bar needed refilling.
He was a man, vaguely. From a distance, this was concrete, undoubtable. It was only when someone approached him closely that the dissimilarities became clear. The staggering gait, the wild hand gestures, the hawkish stare that lasted too long. His skin was too pale, too transparent; as if it weren't blood that ran through his veins, but a malignant substance. Actually, that was fact. Seeping into the air around his body were a few of the better known carcinogens, side effects of the process. Certain parts of his face appeared to have been constructed of putty.
The man (if he was a man, after all), was aware of the unease that people felt when he was present. It had been this way before, to a degree, though the response certainly hadn't been helped by recent events. Others' perceptions of him didn't have an effect, anyway. He was empty except for a couple of screams. He'd save them for another day, he thought idly, and crushed a peanut shell between his thumb and forefinger.
"Bartender!" he croaked, and smiled. His teeth were long. There were too many of them.
The bartender scuttled over, took his glass and refilled it from the tap with shaking hands. He had scarcely placed it on the counter before hustling away. It was okay, the man thought. It was only a matter of time.
They'd all stop running. They'd stop turning away in disgust and put their hands where his had been. He would return to his place of power, and then his face would once more be splayed across the newsstands. Worshipped.
Soon enough, his star would rise again.
Soon enough.
- The End (???) -
STAY TUNED FOR THE THRILLING FINAL INSTALLMENT OF THE REVOLUTION TRILOGY, SAVING JASON DOHRING.
COMING SUMMER 2012
6/30/2012 - a note from missdeviant
We're like George R.R. Martin - first we say one thing, then we do another.
Yes, Summer 2012 was a joke when we wrote it. Was it a coincidence that the final chapter was supposed to appear as Tom and Katie's Five Year Marriage Contract just concluded? Maybe...or maybe not.
We're glad you enjoyed the story up to this point, and hope you can forgive us that there's no "real" conclusion. Let's just say Kristen rescued Jason from his Rivers Cuomo style downward spiral and killed Tom Cruise (again), the real Suri was discovered and rescued (alien cloning FTW!) and Jason went through lots and lots of therapy. We love you, and we thank you for the years-long love!