Hope Is A Weapon of Mass Destruction
Title: Hope Is A Weapon of Mass Destruction
Rating: PG-13
Genre and/or Pairing: Criminal Minds; Gideon/Sarah
Warnings/Notes: set post season 2.
Word Count: 2,833
Summary: It’s not just a lack of hope that drives Gideon from from DC, not exactly. In truth, it’s more the aftermath of what happens when you have too much.
In all of human experience, only hope and love are as equally desired as they are potentially devastating. He left the District in part to find something he could hope for again, but honestly at the outset the idea seemed almost ludicrous in the wake of destruction that would’ve been less complete if he hadn’t had hope to boost it. His hope in Sarah, in them was something he’d thought lost long ago. At the very least it had become a weak wayward thing, coming to him in only certain breaths like secondhand smoke.
He’d felt it curling in his lungs when he heard her voice, his chest warming even as it tightened. He felt it every time they spoke, every time he had any opportunity to realize that no, nothing had changed, not between them.
When Gideon met Sarah he was young and ambitious, both contemplative and prone to sudden action. He planned and he worked and he dreamed and Sarah watched him and Max Ryan and David Rossi build the BAU from the ground up when others told them it couldn’t be done.
There’s a depressing statistic about BAU marriages, but in their case at least Gideon argued it didn’t apply, could never apply. Sarah met him before the BAU, loved who he was both as a man who would want to create such a post and as one with the drive to follow through. It wasn’t a job but a calling, and she was never unwilling to share. He remembered her words against his skin, fingers splayed across his chest as she kissed his bruised shoulder. He’d been late coming home, fresh from the take down of a shooter, late to a dinner that had long gone cold. She’d been a whirlwind checking his wounds, warming soup and cornbread, and it hadn’t been until the cover of darkness that they’d settled enough for him to whisper his apology.
“I knew what I was doing, Jason. I chose you. You don’t have to apologize; I got myself into this.”
Coming from her, even those last words didn’t sound bitter. There was an enveloping warmth to Sarah, less raging than a fire and more like a radiator, homey and safe. She listened to him, confided in him, looked after him and let him shelter her when a job shook him up. She loved him, in his entirety and without reservation, in a way that no one in his life ever had. He’d been close to his father, inseparable even when he was young but he left too soon, through no fault of his own. A heart attack when Jason was 16, an arresting moment that left him forever wondering if his dad would’ve been proud of the man he became.
Other losses, he’d planned for. He knew he’d lose his mother, his sister. Max he never really let in, and David, David he assumed would lose him to the job. One of them would go first, maybe even be forced to watch the other’s descent, the infinite drop that follows the crack of a bullet. Even as a young man that no longer felt too young, he’d known that everyone else he was forever a breath away from losing but Sarah, she was eternal to him in those years.
He cooked for her on Sundays, a haphazard mix of ingredients and clattering pans and the not quite graceful way he’d pause to pull her up from the island into his arms, dancing to Glenn Miller. He loved old things, old movies and baseball cards and music, and she’d wrap her arms around his neck with a laugh, tell him he’d been born just a little late, tell him she could see him in a uniform, in black and white.
It could’ve gone on forever, if everything hadn’t changed. Once, in therapy after the bombing, his therapist had asked him about those years, asked him if he regretted what had proven itself to be the beginning of the end. Even then, broken to shambles, he hadn’t had to think. He’d never regret Noah, not as long as he lived.
She told him over the phone, her voice breaking up across the line, and he’d cheered so jubilantly that the hotel concierge had given him a look of thinly veiled disapproval. It had all seemed so wonderful at the time. It was sudden, utterly unplanned and unexpected, but even so he’d been thrilled at the chance to be a father. They’d talked of it of course but always in an ‘eventually’ sort of way, some far off future time that if he’d been honest he’d probably expected to never arrive.
When he came home from Tuscon after that first phone call she met him at the door, and he dropped to his knees and kissed her stomach, laid his palm flat against her for movement he couldn’t possibly feel. The future then had seemed a shining thing, filled with the sort of moments that had colored his own childhood. There’d be baseball games and movie days, old ghost stories told on Halloween and trips to see Chicago in the spring as it thawed from the long winter. They’d said Noah Alexander, Elizabeth Casey, maybe, but Sarah, she’d been sure from the beginning he was Noah. Mother’s intuition she’d said, winking at him over her shoulder as they painted his room red and white.
The end came gradually, slow enough for him to see, slow enough that in theory, he should’ve had time to jump free. He told himself in the years after that it wasn’t that he hadn’t tried, and in a way that was true. In his fervor early on, in the bright eyed wonder of holding that little boy he’d failed to remember he already had a firstborn. The BAU was his creation, and its demands on him never ceased. He’d managed before to fit the rest of his life into the cracks but he could feel it slipping, feel everything shifting around him like sand drawn out from the soles of his feet by the tide.
In the end, it wasn’t really a surprise. He came home on a Tuesday after a case in Waynesville, North Carolina, just in time to find Noah in the kitchen, stepping out of his cleats.
The mumbled, “We won.” was nothing compared to the defeat in his eyes, the silent “You promised.” that slapped him more than words ever could have. For a fleeting second, he couldn’t help but wonder how things might have been different had they lost, had his drive back come a little sooner, had they had more evidence…
Sarah didn’t yell, even then. She was more than capable he knew, had heard it up close in the raging fights they’d rarely had, but just then her voice was hushed, almost reverent, her eyes closed as her head bowed toward the marble top of the island she rested against.
“Jason…I chose you. I don’t regret it, and it’s choice I’d happily make every day for the rest of my life, but I’m his mother. I’m his mother, and he didn’t choose you. And I can’t make him.”
She never said she was leaving, outright. Never said goodbye, never said she didn’t love him because she knew he’d have called her on the lie. She said Noah needed a different life, and she packed their things and took him to Wichita, where her mother lived. He waited for months on bated breath, but the more years that passed with divorce papers finding their way into his mailbox, the easier his ring seemed to sit on his finger. It had seemed so heavy in the initial aftermath, heavy and forever cutting into his skin. It settled until it became part of him, until he mostly noticed it only when he caught himself rubbing the band with his thumb on a rough case. It only left his hand when he couldn’t bear to keep it there, on the nights he took someone else into his bed only to wind up feeling colder.
The first time, the first woman since Sarah, he struggled with the choice as he gripped the sides of a white hotel sink. He almost kept it at first, some sort of twisted homage to the one he wished was here, the one he couldn’t forget, but in the end the thought of it touching any other woman’s skin made him nauseous, and he slipped it into the pocket of his jeans. He called her after, the next afternoon, and though he was sure he hid it well there must have been something in the way he said her name that gave up the tears leaking from the corners of his eyes.
“Where are you, Jason?”
Her voice sounded like honey, like hot tea and sweaters and wine and it further blurred his vision.
“Duluth.” He cleared his throat, fought his own tells. “Georgia.” For a second, just a second it felt like before, like next she’d tell him to hurry home, tell him it was cold without him, laugh and say that she almost, almost missed tripping over his shoes. Without him saying a word, though, he’d told her everything, told her everything just by calling at a time when now, he shouldn’t have. He could feel her across the line, the pain and the chill, and he hated himself for causing it almost as much as he hated the way it lessened his own. “Sarah…”
“Don’t.”
“I’m sorry. I’m-“
“Honestly, do you feel better?”
Whether she meant after the sex or after the apology, he wasn’t sure. He slipped the ring back on his finger, slid it around and hoped it cut him. “No. I don’t.”
It didn’t come up again for two years, two years and a handful of phone calls later at a time when she’d called him, when he sat down on top of a picnic table at a rest stop with David ten feet away counting change, and he wondered whose bed she’d just left. He wondered if they’d been good to her, if they knew how beautiful she looked when she came, if they’d wrapped her up in the sheets and wrestled with her enough to make her laugh. She was a playful thing sometimes, bright and beautiful and full of so much life. The thoughts burned him, caustic, and he knew she could feel the jumble of words as they stuck in his throat.
“I never accused you, Jason. I can’t. I know I gave up that right.” There was no warning in her voice, no threat against any question he might dare ask. There was only weary resignation, and from her more than almost any other, he hated to hear it.
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t give up anything.” At his heart, at his soul he still was and always would be hers, no matter the mistakes he made in-between.
In the long stretch of time between the day she walked out and the day she called to say she’d like to walk back in, that knowledge was most of all he had to hold onto. That, and eventually, Spencer. It wasn’t quite that he saw Noah in Spencer, although in a way he did. They were different, so very different, but despite his age and his brilliance, in many ways Spencer came to the BAU as a lost little boy. He told Gideon everything in trickling conversations, old hurts seeping up the more he learned to trust. His father had left him, long ago, and though he said a dozen times he didn’t miss him, there was something wooden to the words, something too stiff about the crook of his arms as he said it that gave him away. He didn’t miss him exactly, but he missed the father he’d never had the chance to have. A real father, the kind Jason had always wanted to be.
Sometimes, he couldn’t help but think he’d come to love Spencer in part because of how desperately he wanted to believe that somewhere along the line, someone had come to love Noah. He ached to believe it, to picture Noah throwing a ball around with a faceless stranger the way he sat and played chess with Spencer, that he had someone to confide in, an almost father to tell his troubles to. Even so, mostly he loved Spencer for Spencer, for his good heart and boundless imagination he was only just beginning to truly learn to use, for the life and spark he had to him, for the way he could look at Spencer’s love for the BAU and see a little in himself in a man far better than he’d ever been.
Looking back, past the bombing, those last few were good years. There was the team and Sarah’s phone calls, his birds and baseball and Noah’s facebook page that Garcia taught him how to stalk. Eventually he’d even managed that hardest of all phone calls, had talked to his son for he first time without Sarah bringing the phone to his ear and it hadn’t been as hard as he thought. They’d laughed, even, talked about a visit, talked about college(he wanted to be a psychologist, the kind that worked in practice, not a profiler. Never a profiler.) and baseball(He was still a White Sox fan) and girlfriends(He’d had two, but currently there was no one).
It was good, better than good, and when Sarah had told him on her next call that she knew they were speaking, he’d heard the smile in her voice.
When she called months later to say that she’d been thinking, Noah was gone to LSU and nothing was keeping her in Wichita, she had nothing but a dog she could leave with her mother for a few days if he wouldn’t mind a visit. She could visit and they could see, could see if it would really be as easy as it felt like it could be, if they could come back together and pick up where they left off, an extended pause. He’d been scared, of course he was scared, but it was Sarah, Sarah who chose him, Sarah who knew him like he didn’t know himself. Sarah, who perhaps had more profiler in her than she’d ever want to admit.
When he left the apartment covered in her blood, when he lost Frank in the streets and ended up shaking against a brick wall because he wasn’t immediately sure where to go, it was the hope of it all that nearly paralyzed him. They’d been so close, so close and now he’d finally done it, done something she could never forgive, if only because she’d never have the chance. She’d chosen him again and he’d been all too willing to let her, too willing to forget what he’d learned. His life wasn’t suited for passengers. He should’ve shelved the hope, should’ve told her no, should’ve done anything, anything but let her come back.
Even so, even after in the wake of loss and guilt and too much blood, it’s still the hope that drives him. She gave it to him, always, infused it into his skin and across telephone wires and if he’s going to find it again, he has to go to the source, to the only piece of her he has left.
He left a piece himself in the letter to Spencer, poured out in ink on the pages. There was so much he left out, his jumbled guilt and how close he’d come to using that gun and his love for the boy who’d read it, pale hands too white against the paper as he read it in that cabin alone. He could’ve said more, could’ve given him more hope for a future, but what good would it do? He was too uncertain, too unstable to know if his path would or could ever bring him back here, ever give him another chance to feel the easy way his arm fit across Spencer’s bony shoulders, just like it had in the graveyard after Hankel. There was just too much unknown. It cut him to think that the way Sarah would’ve said it, Spencer was the son who chose him. Out of the two of them it was Spencer, not Noah, who knew him almost wholly but let him in anyway. All the same, if he’s ever to make things right with Spencer, if he’s ever to even deserve the chance, he has to right that first wrong, that first failure. If he can’t, he doesn’t deserve to ask for a thing.
Somewhere on the road between DC and LSU, if he stretches the way out enough, he just might find the right words to explain his guilt to Noah, for his childhood and for the loss of his mother, to lay it all out dissected for his perusal. Maybe there, he can find his absolution.
Rating: PG-13
Genre and/or Pairing: Criminal Minds; Gideon/Sarah
Warnings/Notes: set post season 2.
Word Count: 2,833
Summary: It’s not just a lack of hope that drives Gideon from from DC, not exactly. In truth, it’s more the aftermath of what happens when you have too much.
In all of human experience, only hope and love are as equally desired as they are potentially devastating. He left the District in part to find something he could hope for again, but honestly at the outset the idea seemed almost ludicrous in the wake of destruction that would’ve been less complete if he hadn’t had hope to boost it. His hope in Sarah, in them was something he’d thought lost long ago. At the very least it had become a weak wayward thing, coming to him in only certain breaths like secondhand smoke.
He’d felt it curling in his lungs when he heard her voice, his chest warming even as it tightened. He felt it every time they spoke, every time he had any opportunity to realize that no, nothing had changed, not between them.
When Gideon met Sarah he was young and ambitious, both contemplative and prone to sudden action. He planned and he worked and he dreamed and Sarah watched him and Max Ryan and David Rossi build the BAU from the ground up when others told them it couldn’t be done.
There’s a depressing statistic about BAU marriages, but in their case at least Gideon argued it didn’t apply, could never apply. Sarah met him before the BAU, loved who he was both as a man who would want to create such a post and as one with the drive to follow through. It wasn’t a job but a calling, and she was never unwilling to share. He remembered her words against his skin, fingers splayed across his chest as she kissed his bruised shoulder. He’d been late coming home, fresh from the take down of a shooter, late to a dinner that had long gone cold. She’d been a whirlwind checking his wounds, warming soup and cornbread, and it hadn’t been until the cover of darkness that they’d settled enough for him to whisper his apology.
“I knew what I was doing, Jason. I chose you. You don’t have to apologize; I got myself into this.”
Coming from her, even those last words didn’t sound bitter. There was an enveloping warmth to Sarah, less raging than a fire and more like a radiator, homey and safe. She listened to him, confided in him, looked after him and let him shelter her when a job shook him up. She loved him, in his entirety and without reservation, in a way that no one in his life ever had. He’d been close to his father, inseparable even when he was young but he left too soon, through no fault of his own. A heart attack when Jason was 16, an arresting moment that left him forever wondering if his dad would’ve been proud of the man he became.
Other losses, he’d planned for. He knew he’d lose his mother, his sister. Max he never really let in, and David, David he assumed would lose him to the job. One of them would go first, maybe even be forced to watch the other’s descent, the infinite drop that follows the crack of a bullet. Even as a young man that no longer felt too young, he’d known that everyone else he was forever a breath away from losing but Sarah, she was eternal to him in those years.
He cooked for her on Sundays, a haphazard mix of ingredients and clattering pans and the not quite graceful way he’d pause to pull her up from the island into his arms, dancing to Glenn Miller. He loved old things, old movies and baseball cards and music, and she’d wrap her arms around his neck with a laugh, tell him he’d been born just a little late, tell him she could see him in a uniform, in black and white.
It could’ve gone on forever, if everything hadn’t changed. Once, in therapy after the bombing, his therapist had asked him about those years, asked him if he regretted what had proven itself to be the beginning of the end. Even then, broken to shambles, he hadn’t had to think. He’d never regret Noah, not as long as he lived.
She told him over the phone, her voice breaking up across the line, and he’d cheered so jubilantly that the hotel concierge had given him a look of thinly veiled disapproval. It had all seemed so wonderful at the time. It was sudden, utterly unplanned and unexpected, but even so he’d been thrilled at the chance to be a father. They’d talked of it of course but always in an ‘eventually’ sort of way, some far off future time that if he’d been honest he’d probably expected to never arrive.
When he came home from Tuscon after that first phone call she met him at the door, and he dropped to his knees and kissed her stomach, laid his palm flat against her for movement he couldn’t possibly feel. The future then had seemed a shining thing, filled with the sort of moments that had colored his own childhood. There’d be baseball games and movie days, old ghost stories told on Halloween and trips to see Chicago in the spring as it thawed from the long winter. They’d said Noah Alexander, Elizabeth Casey, maybe, but Sarah, she’d been sure from the beginning he was Noah. Mother’s intuition she’d said, winking at him over her shoulder as they painted his room red and white.
The end came gradually, slow enough for him to see, slow enough that in theory, he should’ve had time to jump free. He told himself in the years after that it wasn’t that he hadn’t tried, and in a way that was true. In his fervor early on, in the bright eyed wonder of holding that little boy he’d failed to remember he already had a firstborn. The BAU was his creation, and its demands on him never ceased. He’d managed before to fit the rest of his life into the cracks but he could feel it slipping, feel everything shifting around him like sand drawn out from the soles of his feet by the tide.
In the end, it wasn’t really a surprise. He came home on a Tuesday after a case in Waynesville, North Carolina, just in time to find Noah in the kitchen, stepping out of his cleats.
The mumbled, “We won.” was nothing compared to the defeat in his eyes, the silent “You promised.” that slapped him more than words ever could have. For a fleeting second, he couldn’t help but wonder how things might have been different had they lost, had his drive back come a little sooner, had they had more evidence…
Sarah didn’t yell, even then. She was more than capable he knew, had heard it up close in the raging fights they’d rarely had, but just then her voice was hushed, almost reverent, her eyes closed as her head bowed toward the marble top of the island she rested against.
“Jason…I chose you. I don’t regret it, and it’s choice I’d happily make every day for the rest of my life, but I’m his mother. I’m his mother, and he didn’t choose you. And I can’t make him.”
She never said she was leaving, outright. Never said goodbye, never said she didn’t love him because she knew he’d have called her on the lie. She said Noah needed a different life, and she packed their things and took him to Wichita, where her mother lived. He waited for months on bated breath, but the more years that passed with divorce papers finding their way into his mailbox, the easier his ring seemed to sit on his finger. It had seemed so heavy in the initial aftermath, heavy and forever cutting into his skin. It settled until it became part of him, until he mostly noticed it only when he caught himself rubbing the band with his thumb on a rough case. It only left his hand when he couldn’t bear to keep it there, on the nights he took someone else into his bed only to wind up feeling colder.
The first time, the first woman since Sarah, he struggled with the choice as he gripped the sides of a white hotel sink. He almost kept it at first, some sort of twisted homage to the one he wished was here, the one he couldn’t forget, but in the end the thought of it touching any other woman’s skin made him nauseous, and he slipped it into the pocket of his jeans. He called her after, the next afternoon, and though he was sure he hid it well there must have been something in the way he said her name that gave up the tears leaking from the corners of his eyes.
“Where are you, Jason?”
Her voice sounded like honey, like hot tea and sweaters and wine and it further blurred his vision.
“Duluth.” He cleared his throat, fought his own tells. “Georgia.” For a second, just a second it felt like before, like next she’d tell him to hurry home, tell him it was cold without him, laugh and say that she almost, almost missed tripping over his shoes. Without him saying a word, though, he’d told her everything, told her everything just by calling at a time when now, he shouldn’t have. He could feel her across the line, the pain and the chill, and he hated himself for causing it almost as much as he hated the way it lessened his own. “Sarah…”
“Don’t.”
“I’m sorry. I’m-“
“Honestly, do you feel better?”
Whether she meant after the sex or after the apology, he wasn’t sure. He slipped the ring back on his finger, slid it around and hoped it cut him. “No. I don’t.”
It didn’t come up again for two years, two years and a handful of phone calls later at a time when she’d called him, when he sat down on top of a picnic table at a rest stop with David ten feet away counting change, and he wondered whose bed she’d just left. He wondered if they’d been good to her, if they knew how beautiful she looked when she came, if they’d wrapped her up in the sheets and wrestled with her enough to make her laugh. She was a playful thing sometimes, bright and beautiful and full of so much life. The thoughts burned him, caustic, and he knew she could feel the jumble of words as they stuck in his throat.
“I never accused you, Jason. I can’t. I know I gave up that right.” There was no warning in her voice, no threat against any question he might dare ask. There was only weary resignation, and from her more than almost any other, he hated to hear it.
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t give up anything.” At his heart, at his soul he still was and always would be hers, no matter the mistakes he made in-between.
In the long stretch of time between the day she walked out and the day she called to say she’d like to walk back in, that knowledge was most of all he had to hold onto. That, and eventually, Spencer. It wasn’t quite that he saw Noah in Spencer, although in a way he did. They were different, so very different, but despite his age and his brilliance, in many ways Spencer came to the BAU as a lost little boy. He told Gideon everything in trickling conversations, old hurts seeping up the more he learned to trust. His father had left him, long ago, and though he said a dozen times he didn’t miss him, there was something wooden to the words, something too stiff about the crook of his arms as he said it that gave him away. He didn’t miss him exactly, but he missed the father he’d never had the chance to have. A real father, the kind Jason had always wanted to be.
Sometimes, he couldn’t help but think he’d come to love Spencer in part because of how desperately he wanted to believe that somewhere along the line, someone had come to love Noah. He ached to believe it, to picture Noah throwing a ball around with a faceless stranger the way he sat and played chess with Spencer, that he had someone to confide in, an almost father to tell his troubles to. Even so, mostly he loved Spencer for Spencer, for his good heart and boundless imagination he was only just beginning to truly learn to use, for the life and spark he had to him, for the way he could look at Spencer’s love for the BAU and see a little in himself in a man far better than he’d ever been.
Looking back, past the bombing, those last few were good years. There was the team and Sarah’s phone calls, his birds and baseball and Noah’s facebook page that Garcia taught him how to stalk. Eventually he’d even managed that hardest of all phone calls, had talked to his son for he first time without Sarah bringing the phone to his ear and it hadn’t been as hard as he thought. They’d laughed, even, talked about a visit, talked about college(he wanted to be a psychologist, the kind that worked in practice, not a profiler. Never a profiler.) and baseball(He was still a White Sox fan) and girlfriends(He’d had two, but currently there was no one).
It was good, better than good, and when Sarah had told him on her next call that she knew they were speaking, he’d heard the smile in her voice.
When she called months later to say that she’d been thinking, Noah was gone to LSU and nothing was keeping her in Wichita, she had nothing but a dog she could leave with her mother for a few days if he wouldn’t mind a visit. She could visit and they could see, could see if it would really be as easy as it felt like it could be, if they could come back together and pick up where they left off, an extended pause. He’d been scared, of course he was scared, but it was Sarah, Sarah who chose him, Sarah who knew him like he didn’t know himself. Sarah, who perhaps had more profiler in her than she’d ever want to admit.
When he left the apartment covered in her blood, when he lost Frank in the streets and ended up shaking against a brick wall because he wasn’t immediately sure where to go, it was the hope of it all that nearly paralyzed him. They’d been so close, so close and now he’d finally done it, done something she could never forgive, if only because she’d never have the chance. She’d chosen him again and he’d been all too willing to let her, too willing to forget what he’d learned. His life wasn’t suited for passengers. He should’ve shelved the hope, should’ve told her no, should’ve done anything, anything but let her come back.
Even so, even after in the wake of loss and guilt and too much blood, it’s still the hope that drives him. She gave it to him, always, infused it into his skin and across telephone wires and if he’s going to find it again, he has to go to the source, to the only piece of her he has left.
He left a piece himself in the letter to Spencer, poured out in ink on the pages. There was so much he left out, his jumbled guilt and how close he’d come to using that gun and his love for the boy who’d read it, pale hands too white against the paper as he read it in that cabin alone. He could’ve said more, could’ve given him more hope for a future, but what good would it do? He was too uncertain, too unstable to know if his path would or could ever bring him back here, ever give him another chance to feel the easy way his arm fit across Spencer’s bony shoulders, just like it had in the graveyard after Hankel. There was just too much unknown. It cut him to think that the way Sarah would’ve said it, Spencer was the son who chose him. Out of the two of them it was Spencer, not Noah, who knew him almost wholly but let him in anyway. All the same, if he’s ever to make things right with Spencer, if he’s ever to even deserve the chance, he has to right that first wrong, that first failure. If he can’t, he doesn’t deserve to ask for a thing.
Somewhere on the road between DC and LSU, if he stretches the way out enough, he just might find the right words to explain his guilt to Noah, for his childhood and for the loss of his mother, to lay it all out dissected for his perusal. Maybe there, he can find his absolution.