Challenge Fic: Once They Built a Railroad (Sam/Jack, PG-13)
Cutting it predictably close to the end of the month, here's my "Love Gone Wrong" offering. *G* I've been doing the job-interview tango and I'm behind in reading and commenting on all the lovely fics, but I'll try to catch up ASAP.
Whee, angst! Can I say how much I loved participating in this challenge and putting the characters through the wringer?? ;)
Once They Built a Railroad
Author: Robin Nance
Story Type: Jack/Samantha, Drama/Angst
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Summary: Written for the February “Love Gone Wrong” challenge. Surely you didn’t think they had to break up to be miserable?
She becomes aware of it somewhere in the tiny rhythmic silences between the ticking of the clock.
“Samantha.”
She finishes the paragraph and flips the page of the dog-eared paperback; maybe she can ignore it for a little while longer.
“S’mantha!”
Or maybe not. The half-rasp, half-cough evolves into a full-out coughing fit, punctuated by sharp breathless curses. And it’s only ten o’clock in the morning. With a curse of her own, she throws down the book.
“Yes, what do you need?”
“Tea. And treatment. Time - time for it.”
She glances at the grandfather clock, still placidly ticking away in the corner. “It’s not time for a treatment yet. You’re supposed to wait another hour, remember?”
“Fuck’n hour - I need it now!”
He’s able to throw an impressive amount of venom behind the half-gasped words. There was a time when that tone would have cut her to the quick, sent her scrambling to rectify whatever she might have done to disappoint him or piss him off. Now she scrambles so she won’t have to listen to him any longer than necessary.
“Fine, fine, I’ll fix your tea and be right in.” It hurts to pull herself out of the chair again this morning, and she wonders exactly when it was that she’d switched bodies with the tired old woman who stares back at her from the living room mirror.
She counts the cracks in the kitchen tiles for a few minutes while she waits for the water to boil, then abandons that pursuit in favor of a second paperback that sits beside the stove. She has dozens of them scattered throughout the old house, all of them half-read generic romance novels with the same formulaic plots, so it doesn’t matter which one she picks up or which page she turns to. The heroine is always headstrong and beautiful, the hero is always dangerous and misunderstood, and love conquers all in the end.
It’s all she’s motivated to read these days, but there are times she wishes the authors would have the balls to write about the way that kind of story would really end.
But she supposes no one would shell out the cash to read about a heroine who walks away from everything and everyone she’s ever cared about, only to discover that maybe she had the better deal before the dangerous stranger came along. And there’s not much romance in a hero who gives up so much of his dangerousness in the name of love that one day he simply stops being interesting.
As she stirs a small amount of flavored brandy into the tea (it cuts the cough and quiets him down for a few hours, when she’s lucky), she hears the first thin, tinny strains of music wafting from the bedroom.
Once I built a railroad, made it run
Made it run against time
Once I built a railroad, now it’s done -
Brother, can you spare a dime?
She sighs sharply as the headache starts to thrum just behind her eyes. Over a hundred equally odd and obscure songs on that damned machine, and yet he always chooses this one to play over and over when he’s in one of his moods.
The cup is hot against the pads of her fingers as she opens the bedroom door without knocking, and she distractedly registers the scent of his surroundings. It’s funny how time changes things that once seemed inviolable. She used to believe that her last memory of him (of them) would involve the intermingled fragrances of roses and tobacco. Now it’s something altogether different, a sharp bitter mix of stale food, sweat and despair, and she knows she’ll never think of him again without this sensory association.
It’s all made more intense by the semi-darkness, and as always she stills her hand just before she hits the light switch. Not that there’s even a working bulb in the room; for all she knows, the curtains are stapled shut over the tiny window she hasn’t tried to open in months. Because he hates the daylight now, hates that the earth can look forward to such a regularly scheduled rebirth when he can’t. So he lives by a feeble electric glow, pale blue light from the bedside television competing with the gaudy candy-colored bubbles framing the Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner of the room. She watches pink change to blue change to yellow, each hue playing over the waxy skin pulled tight over sharp cheekbones and veiny hands, over the wasted chest with the ribs that jut sharply in time to his breathing. At one time a computer sat beside the television, but he made her get rid of it - he hates computers now, the same way he hates roses and sunlight and probably her.
She offers him the tea without comment; he carefully avoids touching her hand as he takes it. From in here the music is almost deafening.
Once I built a tower up to the sun
Brick and rivet and lime
Once I built a tower, now it’s done
Pulmonary cripple, the doctors said. He’d been a chain-smoker since his early teens, and his habit finally took its toll, the symptoms creeping up on him in his late forties and into his fifties, until one day the cough just didn’t get better; he lost his breath and never got it back. Now he sits, an angry wasted shell attached to an oxygen tank that’s bigger than he is, afraid to do anything except sit and stare and scream at her for treatments and contemplate how he could quite possibly live like this for many more years. In better times he’d laughed at her concern over his cigarettes, teasing her about the benefits of living with her very own Marlboro man: I’ve had worse hobbies in my life than this, you know, he’d said (and how her heart had hammered over the excitement of being the focus of those forbidden pastimes). I live fast and I’ll die fast - if not from a bullet, then from a tumor.
She figures he’s still furious that he never got the tumor after all.
Back in the day, back when she still thought of him as a challenge and a nemesis, she was frequently invited to lecture to forensic psych students on the inner lives of serial killers. Although each one has his unique quirks, she’d tell them, it’s safe to say that they share certain traits. One of these is a chronology, a life-cycle if you will. Serial killers don’t kill forever. Obviously, if we’re good - and sometimes if we’re lucky - we can catch them and stop them. But what about the killers we don’t catch? They stop too, eventually. It’s not that they become solid citizens overnight, but something changes them - they get old, they get sick, they just get bored. They reach the end of that part of their life-cycle. Do they regret the past, or are they contented in their new roles? Unless you meet up with one of these killers, all you can do is speculate.
Squinting in the darkness as she sets up the nebulizer, she reflects that no one has ever conducted a study of serial killers who end up fucking their profilers. Do they all agree to give up their kills in exchange for big pretty concepts like love and starting a new life together, or was that just him? Do their partners slowly come to realize that the end of all that forbidden excitement heralds the beginning of boredom and mutual resentment, or is that just her? She guesses it would be too hard to do a study with a population of two.
Her bridges were burned so long ago that they’re barely a memory now, and the people who’d populated her past have long since forged their lives without her. But there was a time during the early years that she’d tried to dabble in both worlds, if only to eavesdrop on their reactions to her choices. Chloe had moved in with her grandparents (and oh, how sweet it must’ve been for them to be proved right about their fucked-up daughter-in-law), then disappeared up north into an Ivy League college and a brighter future. Angel was long gone, moved out west far away from the bad memories. Bailey stopped looking for her after a couple of years, perhaps finally deciding that losing her was acceptable if it meant the killings stopped. He closed her files and moved on to focus on other cases, and he continued to work until the day his heart gave out, right there in the office that was his real home. At least, she thinks, it was a death that suited him; Bailey Malone kept his dignity right to the end. The thought still gives her a flicker of happiness.
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum
Half a million boots went slogging through hell
And I was the kid with the drum
“I need your help, S’mantha.”
She turns toward him, mask and nebulizer in hand. “I know, I have your treatment ready.”
“’S not what I meant.” His eyes are hard and bright as he regards her. “Y’know how you can help me.”
She feels the tension settle in her gut like a fist. “Don’t start this, please? I don’t want to hear it today.”
“Never want to hear it, but ‘s true!” There’s a petulant whine in his raspy voice. “It’s easy - I’d talk you th-through…” He coughs sharply and gasps in alarm for a moment, but still waves her off irritably when she tries to put the mask over his mouth. “Right in that drawer, S’mantha…two bullets in case it didn’t work th’ first time…”
“The answer’s still no. Now sit still for your treatment.”
“Fuck it!” He slaps her hand away with enough force that she struggles not to drop the nebulizer, bolting up out of his chair with startling speed. “Why won’t you ever help me? I’d do it for you! I’ve done it for you!”
“Because you can’t even do it for yourself.”
The surfeit of pent-up anger and regret that hurtles out of her mouth with the words surprises both of them; he staggers back half a step, as if the truth quite literally hurts him. And she’d tell him that it hurts her too, this realization of two lives wasted too long, but then the music and her thoughts are drowned out by a long loud howl of rage and anguish.
“Not supposed to happen like this, not fair, it’s not fair, not fucking fair!”
As he kicks futilely at the chair the spasm overtakes him; he bends low, almost crumpling to the ground as he chases his breath. She grabs him around the shoulders before he hits the floor, then eases him into the chair. His eyes are wide with terror as she presses the mask against his face.
“Breathe, Jack, breathe, nice deep breaths, OK? Just nice, calm…like so.”
His breaths come in long loud sobs for what seems like an hour, but he finally calms down as the meds and humidified air ease his constricted lungs. Shuddering in relief, he slides back against the chair as she removes the mask.
“There you go, Jack, see? Do you feel better?”
“Y-yeah, yeah,‘s better.” He’s still too terrified to tax his voice beyond a whisper. He yawns, and she feels the slackening tension in his limbs as he relaxes into the chair; the adrenaline-fueled panic is wearing off and the brandy is taking over.
“I’ll let you rest now and catch your breath, OK?” She gets up to leave, but is stopped by his hand clutching at her sleeve.
“Don’ leave me, S’mantha. I’ll wither away without you. And you’ll w-wither without me.”
The memory of the first time she heard those words, of everything that’s come to pass in both their lives since then, would be enough to make her cry if she had any tears left.
“Shh, Jack, I’ll be here. Go to sleep now.”
By the time she settles back into her chair she can hear faint snoring, almost in time to the song that plays again and again.
Say, don’t you remember, they called me Al;
It was Al all the time
Say, don’t you remember, I’m your pal?
Buddy, can you spare a dime?
One of these days she might use those bullets, both of them. But today she sits, waiting for something she can’t name, staring at the reflection of a tired old woman until the daylight fades.
***
*"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime" by Yip and Gorney Harburg, 1931*
Whee, angst! Can I say how much I loved participating in this challenge and putting the characters through the wringer?? ;)
Once They Built a Railroad
Author: Robin Nance
Story Type: Jack/Samantha, Drama/Angst
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Summary: Written for the February “Love Gone Wrong” challenge. Surely you didn’t think they had to break up to be miserable?
She becomes aware of it somewhere in the tiny rhythmic silences between the ticking of the clock.
“Samantha.”
She finishes the paragraph and flips the page of the dog-eared paperback; maybe she can ignore it for a little while longer.
“S’mantha!”
Or maybe not. The half-rasp, half-cough evolves into a full-out coughing fit, punctuated by sharp breathless curses. And it’s only ten o’clock in the morning. With a curse of her own, she throws down the book.
“Yes, what do you need?”
“Tea. And treatment. Time - time for it.”
She glances at the grandfather clock, still placidly ticking away in the corner. “It’s not time for a treatment yet. You’re supposed to wait another hour, remember?”
“Fuck’n hour - I need it now!”
He’s able to throw an impressive amount of venom behind the half-gasped words. There was a time when that tone would have cut her to the quick, sent her scrambling to rectify whatever she might have done to disappoint him or piss him off. Now she scrambles so she won’t have to listen to him any longer than necessary.
“Fine, fine, I’ll fix your tea and be right in.” It hurts to pull herself out of the chair again this morning, and she wonders exactly when it was that she’d switched bodies with the tired old woman who stares back at her from the living room mirror.
She counts the cracks in the kitchen tiles for a few minutes while she waits for the water to boil, then abandons that pursuit in favor of a second paperback that sits beside the stove. She has dozens of them scattered throughout the old house, all of them half-read generic romance novels with the same formulaic plots, so it doesn’t matter which one she picks up or which page she turns to. The heroine is always headstrong and beautiful, the hero is always dangerous and misunderstood, and love conquers all in the end.
It’s all she’s motivated to read these days, but there are times she wishes the authors would have the balls to write about the way that kind of story would really end.
But she supposes no one would shell out the cash to read about a heroine who walks away from everything and everyone she’s ever cared about, only to discover that maybe she had the better deal before the dangerous stranger came along. And there’s not much romance in a hero who gives up so much of his dangerousness in the name of love that one day he simply stops being interesting.
As she stirs a small amount of flavored brandy into the tea (it cuts the cough and quiets him down for a few hours, when she’s lucky), she hears the first thin, tinny strains of music wafting from the bedroom.
Once I built a railroad, made it run
Made it run against time
Once I built a railroad, now it’s done -
Brother, can you spare a dime?
She sighs sharply as the headache starts to thrum just behind her eyes. Over a hundred equally odd and obscure songs on that damned machine, and yet he always chooses this one to play over and over when he’s in one of his moods.
The cup is hot against the pads of her fingers as she opens the bedroom door without knocking, and she distractedly registers the scent of his surroundings. It’s funny how time changes things that once seemed inviolable. She used to believe that her last memory of him (of them) would involve the intermingled fragrances of roses and tobacco. Now it’s something altogether different, a sharp bitter mix of stale food, sweat and despair, and she knows she’ll never think of him again without this sensory association.
It’s all made more intense by the semi-darkness, and as always she stills her hand just before she hits the light switch. Not that there’s even a working bulb in the room; for all she knows, the curtains are stapled shut over the tiny window she hasn’t tried to open in months. Because he hates the daylight now, hates that the earth can look forward to such a regularly scheduled rebirth when he can’t. So he lives by a feeble electric glow, pale blue light from the bedside television competing with the gaudy candy-colored bubbles framing the Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner of the room. She watches pink change to blue change to yellow, each hue playing over the waxy skin pulled tight over sharp cheekbones and veiny hands, over the wasted chest with the ribs that jut sharply in time to his breathing. At one time a computer sat beside the television, but he made her get rid of it - he hates computers now, the same way he hates roses and sunlight and probably her.
She offers him the tea without comment; he carefully avoids touching her hand as he takes it. From in here the music is almost deafening.
Once I built a tower up to the sun
Brick and rivet and lime
Once I built a tower, now it’s done
Pulmonary cripple, the doctors said. He’d been a chain-smoker since his early teens, and his habit finally took its toll, the symptoms creeping up on him in his late forties and into his fifties, until one day the cough just didn’t get better; he lost his breath and never got it back. Now he sits, an angry wasted shell attached to an oxygen tank that’s bigger than he is, afraid to do anything except sit and stare and scream at her for treatments and contemplate how he could quite possibly live like this for many more years. In better times he’d laughed at her concern over his cigarettes, teasing her about the benefits of living with her very own Marlboro man: I’ve had worse hobbies in my life than this, you know, he’d said (and how her heart had hammered over the excitement of being the focus of those forbidden pastimes). I live fast and I’ll die fast - if not from a bullet, then from a tumor.
She figures he’s still furious that he never got the tumor after all.
Back in the day, back when she still thought of him as a challenge and a nemesis, she was frequently invited to lecture to forensic psych students on the inner lives of serial killers. Although each one has his unique quirks, she’d tell them, it’s safe to say that they share certain traits. One of these is a chronology, a life-cycle if you will. Serial killers don’t kill forever. Obviously, if we’re good - and sometimes if we’re lucky - we can catch them and stop them. But what about the killers we don’t catch? They stop too, eventually. It’s not that they become solid citizens overnight, but something changes them - they get old, they get sick, they just get bored. They reach the end of that part of their life-cycle. Do they regret the past, or are they contented in their new roles? Unless you meet up with one of these killers, all you can do is speculate.
Squinting in the darkness as she sets up the nebulizer, she reflects that no one has ever conducted a study of serial killers who end up fucking their profilers. Do they all agree to give up their kills in exchange for big pretty concepts like love and starting a new life together, or was that just him? Do their partners slowly come to realize that the end of all that forbidden excitement heralds the beginning of boredom and mutual resentment, or is that just her? She guesses it would be too hard to do a study with a population of two.
Her bridges were burned so long ago that they’re barely a memory now, and the people who’d populated her past have long since forged their lives without her. But there was a time during the early years that she’d tried to dabble in both worlds, if only to eavesdrop on their reactions to her choices. Chloe had moved in with her grandparents (and oh, how sweet it must’ve been for them to be proved right about their fucked-up daughter-in-law), then disappeared up north into an Ivy League college and a brighter future. Angel was long gone, moved out west far away from the bad memories. Bailey stopped looking for her after a couple of years, perhaps finally deciding that losing her was acceptable if it meant the killings stopped. He closed her files and moved on to focus on other cases, and he continued to work until the day his heart gave out, right there in the office that was his real home. At least, she thinks, it was a death that suited him; Bailey Malone kept his dignity right to the end. The thought still gives her a flicker of happiness.
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum
Half a million boots went slogging through hell
And I was the kid with the drum
“I need your help, S’mantha.”
She turns toward him, mask and nebulizer in hand. “I know, I have your treatment ready.”
“’S not what I meant.” His eyes are hard and bright as he regards her. “Y’know how you can help me.”
She feels the tension settle in her gut like a fist. “Don’t start this, please? I don’t want to hear it today.”
“Never want to hear it, but ‘s true!” There’s a petulant whine in his raspy voice. “It’s easy - I’d talk you th-through…” He coughs sharply and gasps in alarm for a moment, but still waves her off irritably when she tries to put the mask over his mouth. “Right in that drawer, S’mantha…two bullets in case it didn’t work th’ first time…”
“The answer’s still no. Now sit still for your treatment.”
“Fuck it!” He slaps her hand away with enough force that she struggles not to drop the nebulizer, bolting up out of his chair with startling speed. “Why won’t you ever help me? I’d do it for you! I’ve done it for you!”
“Because you can’t even do it for yourself.”
The surfeit of pent-up anger and regret that hurtles out of her mouth with the words surprises both of them; he staggers back half a step, as if the truth quite literally hurts him. And she’d tell him that it hurts her too, this realization of two lives wasted too long, but then the music and her thoughts are drowned out by a long loud howl of rage and anguish.
“Not supposed to happen like this, not fair, it’s not fair, not fucking fair!”
As he kicks futilely at the chair the spasm overtakes him; he bends low, almost crumpling to the ground as he chases his breath. She grabs him around the shoulders before he hits the floor, then eases him into the chair. His eyes are wide with terror as she presses the mask against his face.
“Breathe, Jack, breathe, nice deep breaths, OK? Just nice, calm…like so.”
His breaths come in long loud sobs for what seems like an hour, but he finally calms down as the meds and humidified air ease his constricted lungs. Shuddering in relief, he slides back against the chair as she removes the mask.
“There you go, Jack, see? Do you feel better?”
“Y-yeah, yeah,‘s better.” He’s still too terrified to tax his voice beyond a whisper. He yawns, and she feels the slackening tension in his limbs as he relaxes into the chair; the adrenaline-fueled panic is wearing off and the brandy is taking over.
“I’ll let you rest now and catch your breath, OK?” She gets up to leave, but is stopped by his hand clutching at her sleeve.
“Don’ leave me, S’mantha. I’ll wither away without you. And you’ll w-wither without me.”
The memory of the first time she heard those words, of everything that’s come to pass in both their lives since then, would be enough to make her cry if she had any tears left.
“Shh, Jack, I’ll be here. Go to sleep now.”
By the time she settles back into her chair she can hear faint snoring, almost in time to the song that plays again and again.
Say, don’t you remember, they called me Al;
It was Al all the time
Say, don’t you remember, I’m your pal?
Buddy, can you spare a dime?
One of these days she might use those bullets, both of them. But today she sits, waiting for something she can’t name, staring at the reflection of a tired old woman until the daylight fades.
***
*"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime" by Yip and Gorney Harburg, 1931*