Title: On Permanent Repeat
Author: Sarken (sarken@gmail.com)
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I played with other people's toys. They were already broken.
Author's Note: A certain coated chocolate girl said to me, "I feel a little like we're still hanging on the PON cliffhanger and aftermath as well, and I'm not sure if it's a good thing to keep hoping that -that- story isn't concluded either [...]" This takes place in season six, but deals with The Price of Nobility just as much as Monsters.
---
He added a fifth packet of artificial sweetener to his iced tea and swirled the straw around, clinking the ice cubes against the translucent brown plastic. These days, I have a fascination with ice and the different sounds it makes. The cup was important, too, because I haven't seen a cup like that in a long time, and I can only recall seeing them in cheap, dark restaurants, maybe places like the one inside Woolworth's. He took a sip and cringed at the sweetness; the moment would have been less awkward had he ordered unsweetened tea. The point being, of course, that he just looked really stupid adding sugar to tea that was already sweet. He tossed the lemon slice into the cup and pushed it across the table. "Are we going to talk?"
Faith wrapped her hand around the cup slick with condensation. I went back and forth on whether to use "which was" when describing the cup. Neither way sounded right, and I'm still in that place. When she took a sip, the sweetness did nothing to overpower the bitterness inside her. "Yeah." She ran her finger over the textured plastic. The cups were bumpy, not smooth, and made this one sound when you ran your fingernails over it."Yeah. So -- yeah." Homage to both M*A*S*H and The West Wing. The first "yeah" was a Wing "yeah" and the group of three words was the awkward moment between Hawkeye and Margaret in M*A*S*H's final episode. At least, it was my recollection of it.
He stared at her staring at the table. "Do I have to guess?" I love this whole thing right here. He's observing her, he always is, but he's not very good at it.
"What?" She looked up and her eyes focused on him for the first time.
"Do I have to guess what you want to talk about?" he asked, impatient. "'Cause if I do, I gotta tell you, we're going to be here a while." And here it is, folks, the return of dialect. I used to leave off letters and do "gotta" and "gonna" and "wanna" all the time, but I'd stopped while writing Star Trek. Truthfully, I don't like it anymore, but it was needed for this. The dialogue had to be dirty, choppy, simple.
"No," she said. "No. I -- I didn't want to sit here. Fred left me." Hopefully, you were lost here, had no idea what one thought had to do with the other. I wanted it to only make sense to Faith, but not because she was crazy or strange or anything of the like -- just because not everyone knows the story. Bosco has yet to find out, and the reader has yet to connect the dots.
"Okay." He waited for her to connect those thoughts, and he waited to feel surprised. He waited and waited, but nothing. He slid out of the booth and stood, tossing a five dollar bill onto the table.
The sound of the paper hitting the table made Faith stiffen and snap. "Fred took the kids and left. He told me he found someone else, and he left me. He left me for good, right here, he left me. He threw the money on the table, it bounced, and he left." And this was the big hint for the story: sounds trigger memories for Faith. This didn't come from "Noel" or anything, no, of course not.
Bosco stared at the money sitting on the table. He wanted to put it back in his pocket, hide the way he was like Fred, but he didn't want to draw attention to it. In "Of This Body," I wrote about how Bosco and Fred liked bars of soap, and how they both had pale, average-looking, white feet. I like saying, hey, they hate each other, but it might be because they're the same. "We can leave, go to your place." He realized it would be worse, not better. "Someplace, not your place." I'm going to take this moment to say I wrote the dialogue in this fic with Sorkinese in mind. I wrote a lot of this with Sorkin in mind, but that's not important. I can hear Josh or Sam saying this so clearly that it may very well be pilfered from an episode.
"We can go to my place," she said. "Not like Fred'll care. Can sit in his chair and everything."
---
He didn't sit in Fred's chair; he sat next to her and they stared at the television's blank screen. Again, an obsession of mine. I like blank television sets in my fic. It goes back to "Of This Body." The low rumble of New York at night could be heard. "And now?" he asked, turning to face her. "What's next?" Soundsoundsound. Also, Sorkin. Good writers borrow. Great writers steal outright. My ego is slightly inflated, yes.
She shrugged, not looking at him. "I'm not worried about now; I'm still stuck on the past. He was cheating on me while I was paralyzed, while every loud noise sent me back to the hotel room." She stopped, listening to cars speeding, splashing through puddles. "You didn't know about that, did you?" Did you catch on to the fact that it did rain, not is raining? The bad is over, now it's just what's left behind. (I know, I know -- I used rain as a sort of metaphor. Bad me.)
He shook his head, knowing she would feel the motion if not see it. No, he didn't know. Knowing, not knowing. Another big thing. Bosco doesn't know much here.
She forced a laugh, a quiet version of the laugh she gave before a fight with Cruz. Crazy, sarcastic, fake laugh. I think it was "Snowblind.""Yeah, it started the day I woke up. Fred dropped his Bible and it all happened again. Four shoots: bang. Bang. Bang, bang. The second he dropped that Bible in that episode, I fell in love with that scene. I'm not sure if the bang we heard was the gunshot or not, but it was in my mind. I could feel the bullet again, which was why it took me so long to realize I couldn't feel anything. I could see you staring at me, I could hear you calling for help, I could feel your hand on my chest." It drove me insane that it took her so long to realize she couldn't move.
Neither said anything, and Faith's words echoed in the partially empty apartment. No, that wasn't some stupid thing that I just tossed in there. It was "partially empty" because Fred took his shit when he left. Ooh.
I could feel your hand on my chest
I could feel your hand on my chest
I could feel --
This was going to be smut, by the way. I then realized I couldn't bring myself to ruin what I thought was a pretty good fic (so far).
"I could feel it, Bosco. I thought I could feel it, but I couldn't feel anything. I don't know when I stopped feeling, if I ever felt you or if it was all an illusion." Her hand went to her chest and she ran her fingers over the scar, back and forth, back and forth. "Did I move?" I once started a piece involving touching scars and not feeling. I lost it, though, but I keep coming back to the scar.
He went back to the hotel suite. I wasn't sure what to do here. I liked the way it sounded, but I worried that maybe it would be taken literally, because some people in the fandom aren't the sharpest knives, if you know what I'm saying. I'm glad I decided I didn't care. Faith lay on the floor, her eyes open and her body still and bleeding. He grabbed his radio and called in a 10-13, two officers down. He dropped to his knees on the blood-soaked carpet and tore open her uniform, searching for the wound, realizing he had gone from fabric to flesh with no Kevlar between. This was all based on an untitled fic I wrote the day before episode 5.02 aired, and that fic was based on the commercials NBC was showing. See, I also stole from myself.
"Boz, tell me. In the hotel, did I move?" She faced him, her knee touching his through denim. She saw his eyes and knew where he had just gone.
He shook his head. "No."
She frowned, her features seeming to draw inward. "I didn't feel it, then. I could swear I felt it." She sounded confused, disappointed. Just another phantom pain. Those phantom pains that were magically exorcised really pissed me off, you know.
A car backfired and her eyes widened, taking on the same look as they had in the hotel room. Her hand pressed harder against the scar on her chest. Soooooound.
"10-13, 10-13. We have officers down. Repeat, two officers down." If this were an episode, it would be Bosco's face, blurred, and a voice over, distant and echoing. It would be a question of is this a reenactment, or is this a flashback. Are they pretending, to help her deal, or is it only in her head?
Bosco wrapped his hand around hers and pulled it away, feeling her resist as she tried to apply pressure with what little strength she had. "Let me see, Faith. Yokas, let me see, damn it." I love when he calls her Yokas. He does it when he needs her to be tough. I think he'd have spent more time calling her by her last name than professing his love. He sat cross-legged and pulled her upper body onto his lap. His hand replaced hers and pressed against her chest. Tears streamed from her wide eyes as she stared upward, past his face.
"It's okay, Faith." I had this ending before I got here. I was so proud of myself. And, hopefully, you're still not sure what just happened.
:end: