On Being Tom
Title: On Being Tom
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: None
Spoilers: Up Through “Two For the Road”, flashback-wise
Summary: Christian reflects on his shortcomings as a father.
A/N: Done for prompt #20 Reflection for the philosophy_20
Tom.
He looked like a Tom.
Or so says the petite brunette sitting on the stool next to him, a woman wound so tightly around herself that even he can see she’s either going to implode with self-hatred or explode with anger at any second.
Christian knows what it looks like because he sees the same deeply set frown, the same hunched shoulders, and the same sad and disappointed eyes every time he wakes up in the morning and forces himself to look in the mirror.
He wonders every day if facing that mirror is what drives him to drink. He wonders what would happen if he simply didn’t look, if he pretended his reflection wasn’t there. Maybe he would be able to make it through an entire day without trying to wash away his whole life with a bottle of booze.
After all, if he has no reflection, he doesn’t exist.
And then there’d be nothing to forget.
He takes another drink.
He called her Sarah.
He doesn’t know why. Just the first thing that popped into his head.
Perhaps he’d always felt a kinship with the woman, knowing she was in the same boat as him, drifting offshore after cutting anchor from the one real thing they had left.
Such things always seem like a good idea when the rope is being cut. Regret only happens when something’s been done. A person can only become lost if they once belonged somewhere.
This girl seems just as lost he does.
So he calls her Sarah.
Jack would hate him if he had heard that.
Jack would hate him, if Jack knew how to hate anyone beside himself.
He had taught him to do that. Taught him that he wasn’t good enough, that every failure rested solely, squarely, on his shoulders, and that that failure was inevitable, simply because of who Jack was.
Is.
But his son isn’t a failure. Despite what he now realizes were unconscious attempts to waylay him, to bring Jack down to his level, Jack had resisted. Became something more. Something better.
He’d realized too late that Jack was the better man. He’d spent his whole life telling Jack what he couldn’t be, what he couldn’t do. He’d spent his whole life unaware, convinced that he was doing Jack a favor. That by being hard on him, by telling him like it was, making him face reality, he was preparing Jack for the future.
Now he sees exactly who he is, and who Jack is.
He is a drunkard. An adulterer. A liar. A murderer. A coward.
Jack is courageous and strong, honest and straightforward.
The kind of person any father would want his son to be.
Yet he had resented Jack for it, resented his own son for being what he couldn’t. So he had pretended awhile longer, pretended that it was Jack who was in the wrong.
The only advantage he has over Jack is the ability to pretend.
Jack never pretends.
That’s most likely his fault too. Make a kid face reality at a young age, and somehow the imagination, the flights of fancy, get left behind. Jack never imagines. Never fantasizes. His dreams are limited to the here and now, the tangible and the true.
Jack never escapes, not even into his own mind. He always turns and faces it, accepts it like a man. Accepts responsibility, even if it’s not his to have.
Jack’s world is limited by the words should and must.
His world is ruled by want and need.
He wants this girl. He’s not sure in what way.
She’s attractive, to be sure, but he doesn’t think that’s the reason why he’s asking her to come to Sydney with him.
She has a smile that says simply: I’m not really smiling. Her eyes contradict anything that her mouth may try to convey and he knows which is the lie between the two.
She is the kind of girl who would like Jack. Would like his no-nonsense attitude and brutal honesty. She is blunt, just like him.
But there’s nothing pure and sincere behind it; Jack’s honesty is really an intolerance for deceit. This girl’s frankness is an attack, a defense, and perhaps if it were turned back upon herself, that honesty would disappear. She has something to hide. Her honesty doesn’t reach all the way down. It’s just a painted trompe l’oeil façade, masquerading as the real thing.
But he has no right to judge. At least she wore the mask, put it on and gave it a try. At least she had it halfway right.
His honesty doesn’t even exist.
That’s why he’s going to Sydney. To Australia.
Australia.
He’d told Margo he was going to the store.
She’d find out though, soon enough, when he didn’t come back. Make some phone calls, check the credit cards. He’d married a smart woman. Not smart enough to leave him, though.
He’s the one who does the leaving.
But now he’s returning, in a way. Returning to someone who never even knew he was gone, because she didn’t know he existed.
He didn’t know what she’d been told, but he knows it’s not the truth. Her mother wouldn’t tell her that she had had an affair with a married man, that her time in America wasn’t really to further her career but had actually been spent in a small dank apartment she could barely afford while her American, older, rich doctor of a lover popped in and out between surgeries and dinners with the family. Her mother wouldn’t tell her that when she got pregnant, that same rich doctor had told her there was no way he’d ever leave his wife, that she was on her own. He’d send money, but that was it.
He sent money. She always sent it back.
Claire. His daughter’s name.
It’s not the name he would’ve chosen. He would’ve named her Anne. He always liked the name. Anne and Jack. Jack and Anne.
Except Jack had been an only child. There was no Anne.
There was only Claire. Jack has no idea that there’s a Claire. It might’ve been nice, to tell Jack that there might be some family out there left for him that wasn’t bent on making him miserable, that there might be hope for one relation who would appreciate him, love him.
But he couldn’t tell Jack. One, he was too ashamed. He knows that Jack knows he was never faithful. But he’d never come out and said it aloud, admitted it like he was confessing a sin. It was just an unspoken truth, something Jack hated and he acknowledged with a sheepish shrug, a such is life sigh.
Two, and far more importantly, it didn’t matter. If he told Jack, he’d only discover that Claire was inaccessible, that if her mother ever caught a whiff that he or anyone from his life was trying to get back in hers, there’d be intervention. He couldn’t offer Jack the hope of a sister only so it can be taken away, denied.
He’d hired someone. A private investigator. Down in Sydney. He had found Claire, found out that she was pregnant. Now Jack wasn’t only a brother, but an uncle. More family he would never know about.
Unless he does what he’s going down there to do, which is to face what he did, try to apologize to the only family he can apologize to. Because he can’t apologize to Jack. Can’t admit that he was wrong, even though he knows he was.
So he’ll find Claire, tell her he’s sorry. His apology won’t mean anything to her, she doesn’t know him from Adam, but he can say it, congratulate himself on saying it. Give himself a big pat on the back.
He knows where she is, or at least where she was. His private investigator had lost track of her for a few days, wasn’t sure where she went. She had been living with her boyfriend, the father of her baby.
Apparently he left.
His apartment. She had to go. Even though he left, she had to go.
Because no one wants to be surrounded by reminders of a failure, of what didn’t work. That’s why he’s trying to find her. Because he hadn’t had the chance to not work.. One has to be present in order to not work.
Maybe if he’d just show up, they’d work. Maybe she could forgive him for not being there. Forgive him for what he didn’t do.
There are a lot of things he didn’t do that he should’ve. The list goes longer the more he thinks about it, so he tries not to think about it.
It’s easier not to think after half a bottle of scotch.
He looks at the woman sitting next to him at the bar, and asks her again to come along. Come along as his protection. Protection from what, he’s not sure.
Himself, really.
She is still considering it. She’ll say yes.
She’s ready to run, he can see it in her eyes.
Running is what Thomas did. The father of Claire’s baby. The P.I. told him that too. He ran. Bolted. Christian had been spared the indignity of the physical act of leaving; all he had to do was wait for her to get the drift and wait for her to go. To leave him alone.
But that’s running all the same.
Thomas. Tom.
Yeah, he sure looks like a Tom all right.
And she looks like a Sarah.
And they’ll run together this time, ditching one problem for another.
Somehow it feels better not to be a coward alone.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: None
Spoilers: Up Through “Two For the Road”, flashback-wise
Summary: Christian reflects on his shortcomings as a father.
A/N: Done for prompt #20 Reflection for the philosophy_20
Tom.
He looked like a Tom.
Or so says the petite brunette sitting on the stool next to him, a woman wound so tightly around herself that even he can see she’s either going to implode with self-hatred or explode with anger at any second.
Christian knows what it looks like because he sees the same deeply set frown, the same hunched shoulders, and the same sad and disappointed eyes every time he wakes up in the morning and forces himself to look in the mirror.
He wonders every day if facing that mirror is what drives him to drink. He wonders what would happen if he simply didn’t look, if he pretended his reflection wasn’t there. Maybe he would be able to make it through an entire day without trying to wash away his whole life with a bottle of booze.
After all, if he has no reflection, he doesn’t exist.
And then there’d be nothing to forget.
He takes another drink.
He called her Sarah.
He doesn’t know why. Just the first thing that popped into his head.
Perhaps he’d always felt a kinship with the woman, knowing she was in the same boat as him, drifting offshore after cutting anchor from the one real thing they had left.
Such things always seem like a good idea when the rope is being cut. Regret only happens when something’s been done. A person can only become lost if they once belonged somewhere.
This girl seems just as lost he does.
So he calls her Sarah.
Jack would hate him if he had heard that.
Jack would hate him, if Jack knew how to hate anyone beside himself.
He had taught him to do that. Taught him that he wasn’t good enough, that every failure rested solely, squarely, on his shoulders, and that that failure was inevitable, simply because of who Jack was.
Is.
But his son isn’t a failure. Despite what he now realizes were unconscious attempts to waylay him, to bring Jack down to his level, Jack had resisted. Became something more. Something better.
He’d realized too late that Jack was the better man. He’d spent his whole life telling Jack what he couldn’t be, what he couldn’t do. He’d spent his whole life unaware, convinced that he was doing Jack a favor. That by being hard on him, by telling him like it was, making him face reality, he was preparing Jack for the future.
Now he sees exactly who he is, and who Jack is.
He is a drunkard. An adulterer. A liar. A murderer. A coward.
Jack is courageous and strong, honest and straightforward.
The kind of person any father would want his son to be.
Yet he had resented Jack for it, resented his own son for being what he couldn’t. So he had pretended awhile longer, pretended that it was Jack who was in the wrong.
The only advantage he has over Jack is the ability to pretend.
Jack never pretends.
That’s most likely his fault too. Make a kid face reality at a young age, and somehow the imagination, the flights of fancy, get left behind. Jack never imagines. Never fantasizes. His dreams are limited to the here and now, the tangible and the true.
Jack never escapes, not even into his own mind. He always turns and faces it, accepts it like a man. Accepts responsibility, even if it’s not his to have.
Jack’s world is limited by the words should and must.
His world is ruled by want and need.
He wants this girl. He’s not sure in what way.
She’s attractive, to be sure, but he doesn’t think that’s the reason why he’s asking her to come to Sydney with him.
She has a smile that says simply: I’m not really smiling. Her eyes contradict anything that her mouth may try to convey and he knows which is the lie between the two.
She is the kind of girl who would like Jack. Would like his no-nonsense attitude and brutal honesty. She is blunt, just like him.
But there’s nothing pure and sincere behind it; Jack’s honesty is really an intolerance for deceit. This girl’s frankness is an attack, a defense, and perhaps if it were turned back upon herself, that honesty would disappear. She has something to hide. Her honesty doesn’t reach all the way down. It’s just a painted trompe l’oeil façade, masquerading as the real thing.
But he has no right to judge. At least she wore the mask, put it on and gave it a try. At least she had it halfway right.
His honesty doesn’t even exist.
That’s why he’s going to Sydney. To Australia.
Australia.
He’d told Margo he was going to the store.
She’d find out though, soon enough, when he didn’t come back. Make some phone calls, check the credit cards. He’d married a smart woman. Not smart enough to leave him, though.
He’s the one who does the leaving.
But now he’s returning, in a way. Returning to someone who never even knew he was gone, because she didn’t know he existed.
He didn’t know what she’d been told, but he knows it’s not the truth. Her mother wouldn’t tell her that she had had an affair with a married man, that her time in America wasn’t really to further her career but had actually been spent in a small dank apartment she could barely afford while her American, older, rich doctor of a lover popped in and out between surgeries and dinners with the family. Her mother wouldn’t tell her that when she got pregnant, that same rich doctor had told her there was no way he’d ever leave his wife, that she was on her own. He’d send money, but that was it.
He sent money. She always sent it back.
Claire. His daughter’s name.
It’s not the name he would’ve chosen. He would’ve named her Anne. He always liked the name. Anne and Jack. Jack and Anne.
Except Jack had been an only child. There was no Anne.
There was only Claire. Jack has no idea that there’s a Claire. It might’ve been nice, to tell Jack that there might be some family out there left for him that wasn’t bent on making him miserable, that there might be hope for one relation who would appreciate him, love him.
But he couldn’t tell Jack. One, he was too ashamed. He knows that Jack knows he was never faithful. But he’d never come out and said it aloud, admitted it like he was confessing a sin. It was just an unspoken truth, something Jack hated and he acknowledged with a sheepish shrug, a such is life sigh.
Two, and far more importantly, it didn’t matter. If he told Jack, he’d only discover that Claire was inaccessible, that if her mother ever caught a whiff that he or anyone from his life was trying to get back in hers, there’d be intervention. He couldn’t offer Jack the hope of a sister only so it can be taken away, denied.
He’d hired someone. A private investigator. Down in Sydney. He had found Claire, found out that she was pregnant. Now Jack wasn’t only a brother, but an uncle. More family he would never know about.
Unless he does what he’s going down there to do, which is to face what he did, try to apologize to the only family he can apologize to. Because he can’t apologize to Jack. Can’t admit that he was wrong, even though he knows he was.
So he’ll find Claire, tell her he’s sorry. His apology won’t mean anything to her, she doesn’t know him from Adam, but he can say it, congratulate himself on saying it. Give himself a big pat on the back.
He knows where she is, or at least where she was. His private investigator had lost track of her for a few days, wasn’t sure where she went. She had been living with her boyfriend, the father of her baby.
Apparently he left.
His apartment. She had to go. Even though he left, she had to go.
Because no one wants to be surrounded by reminders of a failure, of what didn’t work. That’s why he’s trying to find her. Because he hadn’t had the chance to not work.. One has to be present in order to not work.
Maybe if he’d just show up, they’d work. Maybe she could forgive him for not being there. Forgive him for what he didn’t do.
There are a lot of things he didn’t do that he should’ve. The list goes longer the more he thinks about it, so he tries not to think about it.
It’s easier not to think after half a bottle of scotch.
He looks at the woman sitting next to him at the bar, and asks her again to come along. Come along as his protection. Protection from what, he’s not sure.
Himself, really.
She is still considering it. She’ll say yes.
She’s ready to run, he can see it in her eyes.
Running is what Thomas did. The father of Claire’s baby. The P.I. told him that too. He ran. Bolted. Christian had been spared the indignity of the physical act of leaving; all he had to do was wait for her to get the drift and wait for her to go. To leave him alone.
But that’s running all the same.
Thomas. Tom.
Yeah, he sure looks like a Tom all right.
And she looks like a Sarah.
And they’ll run together this time, ditching one problem for another.
Somehow it feels better not to be a coward alone.