Forget, Ch. 2-A Caskett WIP set between seasons 3 & 4
Title: Forget, Ch. 2
WC: ~1400, this chapter; 3300 so far
Rating: T
Summary: "It's been seventy-one days since she told him that she needed time. Seventy-one days of the only silence that matters. Wherever she is, he'll never be any nearer." Set between seasons 3 and 4-really in the middle of "Rise," (4 x 01) I suppose. And AU, I guess? The premise is that Beckett is back in the city for weeks before she returns to the 12th.
A/N: I apologize for the wait. I'm going to try very hard to finish this before the year is up. Thank you very much for reading and reviewing chapter 1.
He knows she's there.
It's not that he sees her. He just knows.
He's curious about it. In a far-off kind of way, with his feet moving beneath him. With storefronts disappearing out of the corner of his eye and the scenery changing as it does-as it has all these nights-he wonders how he knows.
His mind is ruthless about it. His broken heart. Whichever or both. They're in agreement for once. There's never a moment when it feels like a wish or a sign or things coming right. There's not a single second when he thinks it means something.
She's just there. But he does wonder how he knows.
He wonders if it might be a glimpse, really. If it might be as mundane as that. Light reaching cells, like every image the eye takes in. He read somewhere that he sees more than he sees. That everyone alive moves through the world learning how not to see. How to filter the constant barrage of image. The mind like a shutter, managing. Exlcuding. A frantic flicker of noticing and not noticing.
The writer in him hates the very thought. That every blink could be a crisis. An unseen fork in the road. A decision of some kind that can't be unmade with every foot falling unnoticed on to one path, not the other. Choice snatched away and everything in life left to chaos. The glint of sunlight on a glass scope, once, twice, three times. Unseen 'till the last. His life. Hers. Droplets running one way, not the other, down the back of a dying hand.
The writer in him protests. What little there is left protests, but it could be that simple. It could be how he knows she's there now. In this moment. When he's seen her a hundred times before. In a hundred hundred moments he's seen her and known every one for a fantasy. A dream.
It's probably as simple as seeing, but he wonders about it. The bigger picture and everything he hasn't seen along the way. How many times he's been the fool who just won't see.
As for her, she's just there. He knows.
He wonders why now? Another practical matter to busy his mind. Eighty-seven days and why now? But that leaves him soon enough. He doesn't wonder long. Chancewithout meaning. Heart and mind in agreement again. She hasn't come for him. The final act unfolded months ago. Eighty-seven days ago.
Why now? It's just the unkindness of entropy, as uncaring as anything else. In a city of eight million people, it was bound to happen sometime. It shouldn't surprise him. It doesn't, really.
Why shouldn't it happen today? Chance doesn't mark time the way he does. It doesn't care how long it's been since he ran out of fingers and toes and hope. Physics doesn't know if it's been eighty-seven days or a thousand. If it's tomorrow or the day he dies.
Eighty-seven days.
He's out of questions then. How? Why now? Asked and answered and there's only one thing left in it. It's not even a question. His mind won't frame it and his heart is done with all that. It's done with why? and what things mean. What anything means.
She's there. He knows. It doesn't make a difference. That's the whole truth of it.
It's nothing more than the blare of a cab horn that really draws his eye to the far side of the street. He sees her then, he supposes. Light reaching cells and nothing more, then. Image, afterimage, and the strangeness of it all. The crown of her head. Fingers knotted behind, sheltering.
He sees her then, but he already knew. It's all the same, before and after. Seeing her-knowing-doesn't slow his steps or change his trajectory. He moves on as before. As he has, from breath to breath, since he gave up. He stays the course. A straight line going nowhere. Burning seconds and minutes and hours and days.
She's there, he knows, and this is the rest of his life.
It doesn't matter where she is. Her position in time and space have nothing to do with him anymore.
It hurts worse than anything, and this is the rest of his life.
He sets a brutal pace.
It feels brutal, but the scenery says different. She counts the seconds between streetlights. His heavy, deliberate steps from doorway to doorway. She anchors her mind with the exercise. Seconds and footfalls and street numbers. They add up.
He's moving slowly. He's moving with care, like he expects the world to rise up and hurt him. Like he's guarding against it. He's broken, too, and the days weigh on him. He has nowhere in mind and no time he needs to be there. But, to her, the pace feels brutal in more ways than one.
It's faster than she can go. Her breath comes hard before the first streetcorner. A stoplight, but no respite. No moment to pull air into her lungs. He swings his head from side to side, not really seeing, and crosses against it.
She can't follow. The traffic is far off yet but coming steadily. Headlights and glinting chrome grills like angry faces. Menacing and coming steadily on. Her ribs catch hooks of pain and she's light headed. It's faster than she can go. She needs to follow. She knows she won't make it. She leans against a newspaper box. Waits as he recedes and the fear makes itself known.
She can't do it. She can't go after him.
She can't not. Pain and airlessness and fear give way to something else. A tiny corner of silence inside her. The rightness in the moment she first saw him. Solidity. Realness and potential she refuses to let go. She can't not go after him.
But the fear drags at her feet. It slows her. Makes her hug the wall and it whispers. That it's farther than she can go at stretch. That she's all her fingers and all her toes and then some away from home and there's no shelter here. Nowhere to press shoulderblades to solid brick and hands to thighs and she can't. She can't do this.
A car rolls by, dark windows rattling with cranked up bass. A shriek goes up from a shoving group of teenagers. Her heart pounds. She breaks for shadow. Scrabbles for something solid and knuckles meet sharp corners. Blood comes. It wells up in raw places and her scars burn.
All of her burns. She's a riot of flames, inside and out. Pain. Exhaustion. Fear. Her mind is a black tangle of fear and he's small, smaller, smallest in the distance.
She's not beside him. That's the worst of all. The most brutal. She's hobbling and out of step and she should be there. Her feet should strike the pavement in rhythm with his. Side by side. Together at every turn, not each of them alone.
But they are alone. He is and she is and this is her doing.
She falls still. Stops in the middle of the sidewalk, far from shelter, and strains up on her toes to look. To see for as many moments as she can. She strains up, and It hurts. It hurts.
He moves alone toward the vanishing point. Any second he'll disappear and the last breath in her rises up. A cry waiting.
He stops then. At the last possible moment, he stops. His hands find his pockets and his shoulders hunch in a gesture so familiar she can taste it. So familiar that she almost spends the last breath in her crying out.
He turns. It's not even an instant, but he turns. She sees him in profile. Brow, nose, chin like he's beside her. Like things are as they should be.
But they're not. It's a glance over his shoulder. Not even an instant and he's gone.
He knows.
It dawns on her as he winks out of sight. Certainty of it taking his place in the world like conservation of mass. She sees her life before this moment and after. No uncertainty on either side of it.
He knows she's there.
He's known for a hundred doorways and so many seconds that she lost count. And he didn't miss a single step. Never slowed or faltered. He's known all along, and it's nothing to him that she's there. Nothing.
It almost takes her to her knees all over again.
Almost.