Seven Veils: Two
Jun. 30th, 2009 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anjouficTitle: Seven Veils
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
comice aka Anjou (Anjou@rocketmail.com)
Posting Date: June 2009
Rating: R for language and sexuality; M for Mature readers
Classification: Crews/Reese
Spoilers: post-S2 finale, One
Disclaimer: Not mine, but they are fun to play with. All respect to Rand Ravich, Far Shariat and especially to Damian Lewis, Sarah Shahi and the rest of the exceptional cast. They created something I will always treasure.
Author's Note: Sorry to have been so long with this part, but ... there was a lot for me to cover. There's one perspective left after this post. Thank you for taking this journey with me.
WARNING: This chapter contains introspection/memories about past rape and sexual abuse, as well as addiction.
~
Charlie Crews smelled like fruit.
Unlike what she’d imagined when she sat next to him on endless stakeouts, the scent wasn’t from using some expensive, hand-milled soap. Instead, Crews exuded fruit because he ate so much of it that his sweat bore its sweet essence. Of course, she’d only learned that when she’d had the opportunity to taste his skin and confirm her theory. More than any other thing, it had forced her to revise her long-held opinion that she was not a fan of fruit, not that she'd actually told Charlie that – but she was sure he knew. He'd figured her out long before she had.
It had taken Dani Reese a while to get where she was right now, with Charlie’s sleep-warmed skin radiating next to her, her own private sun in the bed they were sharing. She lay watching him sleep as the light of the sunrise filled the quiet room, an activity that she enjoyed more than she would have admitted, if he thought to ask. There was something about seeing him this way, loose-limbed in peaceful repose, his red hair mussed against the white sheets. In the rising light, she could see the thousands of freckles that dotted his skin, easily outnumbering the scars that she had found far more places than she wished. As her hands had learned Charlie’s body, she could not help but count the too many healed wounds, such a contrast to her own smooth, nearly unmarked surface, as if her skin were an extension of the mask that she’d worn for so long, through so many years of hiding. But inside … she felt every scar that her fingertips discerned on Charlie’s fair skin echo within her.
She had more in common with Charlie Crews than would be evident from looking at their surface commonalities, from examining their known life histories. Or maybe that was oversimplification. Their experiences had been different, but their lives had diverged from the same piece of roadway only to intersect later, in ways that had astonished her, the more that she’d learned. It made her think that there was perhaps something to the notion of synchronicity, the kind of philosophical belief that she'd be more likely to scoff at rather than embrace. But the events that had spun out from the robbery at the Bank of LA had braided her life together with Charlie's in a way that was hard to deny. It had set her on the path that had led her to this bed --the necessary journey she'd heard it referred to, and she wasn't above feeling resentment for its horrors, even as she knew that without that, without all of it, she would not have this moment, right now as it was, or any of the ones that were still to come. It was the kind of paradox that Charlie enjoyed picking apart, and although it gave her less of a headache than she'd ever admit to him, she understood why. There were answers in the wreckage, things that she'd learned about herself, good and bad, that only could have happened because she had kept falling through the floor, through false bottom after false bottom, until she’d almost been destroyed. She was who she was because of it, and that was Zen, wasn't it? Acceptance of the all?
Charlie shifted in the bed, his forehead creasing with a frown as he shifted from his stomach to his side, still facing her. Even in his sleep, Charlie Crews was always puzzling over something, and she smiled as she ran her thumb lightly over the z-shaped crease between his brows, soothing him. She took a silent, secret pleasure in the way that her touch made his expression ease, made a half smile appear on his full lips. Even in the midst of his dreams, he knew her. It had taken her a long time to accept that, to see that his knowing her wasn’t an intrusion, or pity, but recognition. He saw her for who she was, and he didn’t love her in despite of it, or because of it. He simply loved her. She’d seen that clearly the day that he stood at the side of the road, and waited for her, letting her see his true face without any masks – letting her see that he loved her.
Accepting all of the ramifications of that had been more than she could manage to do, right away. She was broken, and she knew it, but believing that she worth fixing or that she could be fixed was something else entirely, and not something she was sure that she could do or that she even knew how. In truth, she found it annoying that Crews had been broken and managed to re-form himself. What she hadn't understood was how he still struggled with the opposing aspects of his personality -- she’d never considered that Charlie’s embrace of Zen principles had not simply been about regaining clarity, but also about managing his rage.
But she had felt none of those things that day, sitting in that car, moving inexorably down that road toward him. Instead, she'd felt surprise, and a tender sense of joy. Until he’d come for her, traded himself for her and extricated them both from near certain death, she’d never quite understood who he was, and what he was willing to do. Charlie Crews was a man on a mission, and not only had he recognized that she was part of it, he’d accepted it, accepted her. It was astonishing to her, the level of honesty and trust that he’d shown her, with just that one, long look … he’d told her so much.
No one had ever loved her like that.
That feeling had lingered, long after they'd returned to the station and endured hours of questions from the brass and IA, and during a mostly one-sided conversation with Tidwell. Every time she blinked her tired eyes she saw that image of Crews watching her with that expression of steadfast love. It was etched into her eyelids, like the afterburn from staring too long at the sun. She was not at all certain that she deserved such devotion -- in fact, was sure that she did not -- but Charlie hadn’t asked her opinion. And everything that she understood about him told her that she couldn’t talk, fuck, fight or run her way out of him loving her. Because if there was one person on the planet who was possibly more stubborn than she was, it was Charlie Crews.
When he’d finally been released from questioning, she has been slumped sideways in a chair, exhausted beyond measure, but unable to sleep. Tidwell had long since lapsed into frustrated silence and sat across from her, legs sprawling and open, staring at her as if waiting for an explanation. She was too beat and far too overwhelmed to deal with Tidwell’s hurt and rage – and he was too smart not to realize that their relationship had changed and that it hadn't been overnight. They’d been separated for weeks, and the distance had given her perspective she hadn’t had before.
Unfortunately for Tidwell, most of her new understanding had been about her partner. She’d never realized just how much she actually liked talking to Crews, how much she enjoyed bouncing ideas off him, how hearing his opinions refined and focused her own. She knew, from all the cases that he chose to discuss with her, that he felt the same way. It wasn’t just him talking aloud. He needed to hear her thoughts. The biggest surprise had been how difficult it was to keep secrets from Crews, how much it troubled her not to be able to talk to him about the real reason the FBI wanted her. Secret-keeping had always been a huge part of Dani's survival strategy. There were things that she had never told another soul, secrets that she had never once considered sharing. Lying came as easily too her as breathing, the same as it did for most addicts. Being dishonest was a way of life – telling the truth was the hard thing, even when it was only to herself.
But lying to Charlie? It had felt wrong, gnawed at her, forced her to seek answers in Zen philosophy, of all things. But even that search had been a shorthand, a way to get at the heart of the Charlie that she thought she knew, the one that she had ultimately decided that she did know. She’d made the choice to trust him, and deny the FBI, and set off a chain of events … one that she had never foreseen, but even then she knew, knew deep down inside that he would be the one to figure it out. That Charlie would be the one to come and get her, even if they both ended up dead, which was more than likely, but … he would find her. She never for one instant doubted that the only one that would get her out of that hell with Roman Nevikov was Charlie Crews.
She could hear Tidwell grumbling in the chair opposite her, fighting sleep, but she didn’t look up. The weeks that she’d been away she’d spent longing to talk to Charlie, to throw fruit at his head, to hear his batshit theories, to see his sweet smile. When she talked to Charlie on the phone, there was always something to say, always something to hear, even when she sometimes felt like they were both talking in code. By contrast, her conversations with Tidwell were briefer and less … just less. It wasn’t Tidwell’s fault, though. It was hers. She’d only let Tidwell see glimpses of her true self, the surface ways that they connected with each other. The truth was that she and Tidwell were a lot alike, and not in good ways – he used his relationships with women to anesthetize himself the same way that she’d used everything else -- alcohol, drugs, sex. It’s not that she doubted that Tidwell loved her, but she knew that she was just another in a long line of women that he'd wanted to fix, to love into health and wellbeing. If he could do that, just once, then he’d gain some value, some self-love.
Charlie Crews didn’t want to fix her, to love her into wellbeing.
Charlie Crews just loved her.
And somehow, in a way she could not explain, that made her want to fix herself.
Any rational person looking at how long it had taken her to get from that night of exhausted realization to sharing a bed with Charlie would accuse her of being a cocktease. On her worst days, she'd certainly accused herself of using anything as an excuse to postpone the inevitable intimacy, but even when the negative voices in her head were at their very loudest, she knew what it was really about. She wanted to be sober for a year before she committed herself to a relationship -- needed, just that once, to live by the rules, to live by a system that had worked for people like her, to not use his body to avoid going down into the dirt and digging up all the skeletons that were buried. She needed to know herself, to look herself in the eye and accept everything that had happened to her, and everything that she had allowed to happen to her. She had to own it all: the things that had been done to her, and the things that she’d done.
It had been both more painful and more freeing than she had ever imagined, the true paradox of the necessary journey, but it had all been worth it. Because when she finally locked her legs around Charlie's waist and felt him slide into her, her eyes were open and she was a part of everything that was happening, and it was the best thing she'd ever felt. She wasn't using him liked she'd used everything else, for that blissful instant of ecstatic nothingness that she'd find at orgasm, or in that first hit of drugs, or the stumble of leglessness before blackout. Having sex with Charlie Crews made her high in a way that all the junk that she'd shot into her veins had never done. And nothing about it hurt her later, not even how long it had taken her to get here.
It wasn't as if they didn't fight, or still fundamentally disagree about any number of things. Charlie Crews, the man of a million and one soliloquies, could still annoy the crap out of her like no one else on the planet. But she had many, many ways to shut him up now, even if she sometimes suspected that he was trying to provoke just that reaction from her. He could be, had proved himself to be, an incredibly manipulative bastard through all that he'd done in the years since he'd been exonerated. Not that she was blaming him. She understood, as much as she could without having actually experienced what had happened to him, what motivated him. After Nevikov … and Rayborn, she'd come to a new level of understanding.
It wasn't something that he'd shared in front of Paul Bodner. After being questioned for hours about Rayborn, he strode out of that interrogation room with no indication that he was at all tired. His gait was straight and unhesitating as he walked right over to her and gently placed a warm hand below her elbow, helping her haul herself upright as he looked at her searchingly. She could see his exasperation with the hours wasted, but his concern for her was the utmost emotion that she could discern before her own eyes were caught at the sight of a red mark on his jaw that was starting to bruise. She reached up toward it, feeling her face tighten in anger as she went to move around him and go after the assholes who'd been sitting across the table from him, but he'd stopped her, slinging a long arm in her way.
"Roman," he said, and she sucked in a breath, her own hand reflexively rising to where her lip was split.
The muscle in Charlie's jaw tightened in fury as he gritted his teeth, and she'd watch the rage glitter coldly in his eyes.
"I'm fine, Crews," she said firmly, looking him in the eye until he softened, taking one long breath in through his nose before exhaling slowly and fully. He blinked and his eyes were clear again, then he nodded at the empty corridor behind her, taking one step in that direction. She spared a glance at Charlie's interrogators and the union rep, huddled together a few feet away, still arguing furiously. They all looked totally exhausted, as if they'd been through the wringer, and she couldn't hide the smirk, so she turned and walked alongside Charlie, her back straightened and stride sure.
"Crews!" Tidwell said as they passed him, and there was a note of desperate angriness in his voice.
"I'm free to go, Captain," Charlie answered, but he did not turn back, and they did not stop. "And Detective Reese and I are both off duty for the next 48 hours."
She had no memory of falling asleep in the car, but then again, she had no memory of actually leaving the garage at the station. She only remembered the feeling of Charlie's fingers gently stroking her cheek, and the way his eyes lit up when she opened her eyes and looked at him. She wasn't surprised to see that he'd taken her to his house. She hadn't been at her place in weeks, but didn't think that she could stand being apart from Crews right at that moment. The sun was rising over the hills, and she had no damned idea what day it was, or if it was still April. Roman had kept her in darkness and silence for what seemed like forever, an experience had given her a new appreciation for what Charlie had gone through for years in solitary. She shivered at the thought, and Charlie's eyes darkened, watching her carefully.
"C'mon," he said gently, and turned and exited the LAPD-issued vehicle.
She looked around, noticing their ride for the first time, and asked, "Where's your car?" as Charlie opened the door and tugged on her hand, pulling her out onto the drive.
"Long story," he said, with a sigh.
She looked up at him, squinting against the brightening light and said, "Are you going to tell me all the long stories now?"
Charlie smiled that soft smile at her, and stepped into her, still holding her hand. "Yes," he answered simply, "but after we sleep." He stroked her cheek with one finger. "I haven't slept in weeks," he murmured tiredly.
She dropped her head against his breast bone and nodded, feeling a light pressure on the back of her head that might have been him pressing a kiss to her hair.
"C'mon," he said again, and tugged her into the house and up the stairs.
The bathroom off his bedroom was easily two-thirds the size of her condo, and Charlie showed her where everything was and then brought her a clean white t-shirt before he left her alone in the echoing room. Taking off her clothes seemed to take forever, and the thought of having to put them on again after an unknown number of days wearing them disgusted her. She stayed under the hot water until she finally felt clean, which wasn't until after she sat down on the floor of the shower and cried for the first time in a long time. She dragged herself out of the shower when she knew that she was risking Charlie coming in after her, then put on the swallowing t-shirt he'd given her and made an effort to at least dry her hair somewhat. She was so tired that she looked grey in the light of the bathroom, her swollen lip a dark red stain against her skin. She opened the door to the bedroom and saw Charlie on one side of the massive bed, his bright hair sleek and dark from his own shower, his face pale against the light blue sheets. His eyes opened as she stood at the door, and he flipped back the covers, welcoming her. She was too tired for pretense, and he looked too much like everything that she’d missed for far too long, so she crawled across his bed and right into his arms, exhaling fully for the first time in what felt like forever.
"Crews," she muttered against his cotton-covered chest, as he pulled the covers up over her and closed his arms around her, his sweet fruit smell filling her head. She wrapped her arm around his waist and held on.
"Right here," he murmured, and she fell asleep immediately, feeling the steady beat of his heart against her broken mouth.
They slept for twelve hours straight, and then Charlie had made them some breakfast and spooned up behind her while they slept for another six hours. When they finally woke for good, it was the middle of the night, but they ordered some takeout and sat in his bed and talked and talked. He told her all about Rayborn while she sat there, mouth agape, forgotten food dangling from her chopsticks. It was inconceivable, all of it, the joke about cops making the best criminals coming to life in a particularly hideous way. That Rayborn had set this all in motion from the beginning and then abandoned Charlie when it went wrong was just … she couldn't really assimilate what he was telling her. Rayborn. Captain Rayborn, the man who'd been her father's friend and mentor – the man who always urged her to call him Uncle Mickey, even when she was a grown woman. Fucking Rayborn. He'd lied right to her face when she went to him and asked if he had any idea where her father might have disappeared to. Oh God, her father.
"Roman said he killed my father, Charlie," she told him, and this time it was Charlie who was stunned, food only making it halfway to his mouth.
"Fuck," he said savagely, and it struck her that this was the first time that she could recall him swearing in anger.
"You killed Roman," she said to Charlie certainly.
"Yes," he growled, baring his teeth. "Fuck!" His arms were rigid with tension, his neck red.
She shook her head at him, understanding. "He never would have told you if it was true or not, no matter what you did to him," she said. "Never." She paused. "I don't think that he was lying to me, though," she said slowly. "At the time, I don't think he had any intention of letting me go."
At her words, Charlie snapped the chopsticks that he was holding right in two, the noodles dropping into the open box that was nestled between their knees spattering sauce over the sheets.
"Charlie," she said, watching blood well up from a tiny cut on his forefinger, but he'd gone deep inside his own head, his blue eyes unfocused on anything that was happening right now. She pulled herself up on her knees and touched his other hand, and his fingers wrapped around hers when she went to draw away.
"He hit you," Charlie said in a low voice. His eyes were hard and dangerous.
"Yes," she answered him.
"Did he do more than hit you?" he asked. His voice was quieter, but the anger was there, seething, and a surety about what he was asking her that confirmed something that she'd long believed.
"No," she said firmly, holding his eyes, telling him without saying that she would not lie about that. She stared into his blue eyes and let him see the truth. "Not him," she said.
Charlie nodded, and she knew she was right. "Not him," Charlie said, and the emphasis on the second word was subtle, but she knew he'd be trying to figure it out until she told him the whole story, just … not tonight.
Still, she decided to push a little, to test the boundaries of what they were establishing. She was not the only one with secrets. "What about you?” she asked quietly.
"He's dead," Charlie said flatly, but there was an air of finality about it that let her know that he was not lying, even as her heart broke a little bit more for her partner. She'd never expected this, to have rape in common with a man, a straight man.
“Good,” she said firmly, and he held her eye. She reached over and pulled the broken chopsticks out of his hand and pressed a napkin to his finger. "You're bleeding," she said quietly, and Charlie smiled softly, sardonically.
"Not the first time," he said to her.
"No," she answered, pulling his hand into her lap.
"C'mon," he said, moving the food out of the way, mood shifting to something still serious, but not so weighted. "I have something to show you."
Then, he'd tugged her off the bed and took her into his closet and showed her The Wall, and she knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that she’d made the right choice when she’d handed the file back to Agent Ray.
~
Before they left his house again, and returned to work together at the LAPD, enduring the stares and the questions, and Tidwell’s anger and hurt, she had asked him if he could wait until she was ready. She made no promises that she would ever be, and he didn't ask for them, nor did she give him a timeline. After those nights though, she didn't sleep with him again, didn't trust herself enough not to use him when things got really bad, especially if he was only an arm's length away. They continued in their oddly chaste relationship, never having shared a kiss, despite having spent nearly 48 hours in Charlie's bedroom, most of it in his bed, sleeping.
Instead, she got in the habit of being in his space, sleeping in Rachel's room a couple of nights a week. Somehow, the months went by and he felt it was safe enough to call Rachel home, and then after a couple of weeks of her not staying over at all and barely sleeping, Charlie had agitatedly mentioned that he'd bought furniture for her room. Oddly, what she felt, instead of pressure, was relief. He had made a space for her in his life, in his house, and when she saw the room, it looked more like her room than anyplace that she'd slept in for years.
She'd never gotten reaccustomed to living in what had been her home, saw it with new eyes when she returned there, feeling oddly alone. Had it always looked that impersonal? Her condo had all the warmth of a faceless corporate apartment. It felt totally alien to her, like the hotel rooms that she’d used to fuck married men that she picked up. Where was she, in this house? There were no pictures on her walls, no personal touches, nothing. She supposed that she could play it off and say that she was more like Charlie than people thought, but she knew that was a lie. The empty spaces in Charlie’s big house were about mindfulness, about wanting to fill the spaces with something meaningful, after it had stopped being about Charlie’s fear of being confined. But the empty spaces in her condo were about avoidance, about an unwillingness to commit herself to anything for fear that she wouldn't be able to flee. She had not put down roots anywhere, because she’d been yanked up before, been turned inside out, and she was not going to let it happen again. She’d walk away first. She'd run away first.
She started spending more time at Charlie's house, started teaching Rachel how to spar, how to defend herself, began to negotiate a friendship with this girl her father had chosen to save, when he'd let her fall. All along, she'd believed her father was dead, but when it was confirmed she found herself stricken with grief and anger in the days after the funeral. Charlie let her seethe, let her wear herself out on the heavy bag, once it had really sunk in that her father would never be able to explain to her why he had done what he'd done. It wasn't that she didn't understand regret – she wasn't a child any longer, and she knew what it meant to have done something that you couldn't take back, how it felt to wound another person who didn't deserve it. She was confronted with Tidwell's hurt eyes every day at the station, wasn't immune to his suffering, even as she couldn't stop it. She could even understand that her father's seeming disgust with her, the way he'd changed from being her daddy to being the father it seemed she always disappointed, the one who rejected her love for him so decisively, was about him, about the self-loathing that he felt for having broken his vows, for becoming the criminal he'd sworn to protect others from.
The adult Dani understood all this, but the adult Dani also saw how totally fucked up it was for a father to punish his daughter the way Jack Reese had punished her. He'd wanted to make her hate him so that some of his own self-loathing would be reflected back at him. And he'd gotten his wish, but it was all twisted and wrong, because what Dani began to reflect back at him was the drinking and the meanness and the way he was incapable of being faithful to her mother, despite her continued loyalty to him. And then he really did begin to hate her, and she began to hate him, too.
But, sometimes … she thought about what her father did for Rachel, and she could see that he had tried to redeem himself, even if it wasn't for her that he did this selfless thing. And when she thought back on the things that she'd done, the wreckage that she'd left in her wake, she knew that no matter how young she was, how hurt she was, that there were choices that she made along the way, times when she stood at crossroads, and she unfailingly chose the wrong way, knowing full well that it was wrong. Because sometimes when you're in pain, one way to excise it was to inflict it onto someone else, and she had done that.
The thing was, she didn't know to whom she should make amends. Her mother loved her, even if she did not understand her, and Ramon was dead. Most of the rest of them were faceless, aside from the boyfriend that she'd lost her virginity with when she was thirteen. Too young she knew now, but he was as broken as she was, and just barely older than she'd been. At the time, she didn't understand why he cried every time they had sex, but the cop in her, the adult Dani, she knew what was really going on in his house. Paul had run away the summer she was fifteen, and she'd spent the next few weeks drinking and drugging with the older kids, gradually moving closer and closer to looming danger. He was older, of course, and stronger than she was, and when she woke up from whatever he'd given her to knock her out, he was already raping her, and he beat her when she fought back, but she didn't stop fighting, because even then, it was not in her nature. When she woke up in the hospital, she'd been unconscious for two days. Her ribs were broken, and her nose, and she had sutures between her legs where he'd ripped her open in his fury.
Her mother had cried and cried, and her father wouldn't actually look at her for more than a month, just stared at a point near her head. She claimed that she didn't remember what had happened, and her father ground his teeth in anger but didn't argue with her. He was ashamed of her, and disgusted with her, and she hated him with everything that she was, everything that she was becoming. When she went back to school, and got out from under his thumb, she kept her grades up, but she smoked weed with the slackers out in the back of the school, and she fucked boys under the bleachers, anyone that she wanted to, including one of the teachers. And she was always on top, she was always in control, and she learned how to fight to make it come out the way she wanted, every time. She was not going to be used again. She knew that her father knew what she was doing, but he was a liar and a cheat, and he could see all her accusations in her eyes, and so he yelled and he broke things, but he could not stop her.
And she just kept falling through floor after floor on her trip to the bottom.
All the way through that long period of grieving -- after meetings that flayed her raw, times when she exhausted herself on the heavy bag -- Charlie let her be, let her excavate through the layers of rage and pain. He bandaged her bloody knuckles without comment, without judgment, watched her running the long hills around his house as if the Devil himself were chasing her, only coming to get her one night when she had finally run as far as she could and found herself hopelessly lost.
She kept waiting for the accusation to come into his eyes, to see the disappointment that was always inevitable in her relationships, but it never came. Instead, she saw solidarity, she saw recognition. She began to comprehend what empathy actually felt like; she began to understand that she was no longer falling; she began to believe that she was climbing up out of the abyss, hand over painful hand, sweating out the poison of her past slowly but surely. And if she wasn't becoming the kind of person who could truly believe in redemption, perhaps she was becoming one who saw the possibility of reclamation. And possibility? That was itself a victory.
It was around this time that she first really became conscious of a need to quantify exactly what Charlie smelled like. She'd lived long enough in his house to know what he used in the shower, and it was all simple, unscented. There was never any cologne, any aftershave that she saw him use. There was only the constant of the fruit itself, an array of different textures and tastes that was really rather astounding, once she began to actually note his rate of consumption. It went along way toward explaining some of his more hyper rants, what with the level of pure sugar he was consuming over the course of the day.
One day, shortly after the New Year, he was eating a pear and expounding on some connection between Rayborn and their unknown number 5 target, when she found herself mesmerized by the line of his throat as he swallowed. They were off duty, and alone in the house but for a sleeping Teddy, who was sacked out in his room upstairs while Rachel ran errands. Charlie was barefoot and wearing a pair of blue jeans that had faded to a color only a shade or two darker than his eyes. The cuffs had begun to fray, and she found herself wondering if he'd had the jeans before he went to prison, if this was part of what he'd recovered from the storage unit that Jen had kept all those years, even when there was no hope. He was wearing a light brown button down shirt, untucked and unbuttoned at the throat, the sleeves rolled up without precision. He never wore his sleeves rolled up at work, and she'd begun to wonder what it was about his arms that he wanted to keep hidden. The curve of them looked firm, his skin white and gold what with the freckles and the red-gold hair that shone in the warm light coming in from the kitchen windows. He'd pushed the chair back while he was talking, and was rocking on the two back legs, the arm that was holding the pear gesticulating as one long boned foot held the chair tipped backward, the toe pointing down to the floor. It wasn't until he said her name that she realized that she hadn't heard a word that he'd said for at least five minutes, that she'd been too caught up in seeing him, enjoying the loose sensuality of his form, of everything that made him Charlie.
She sucked in a breath and looked up at him, flustered, only to see that he was looking right back at her, but this time, the look that he'd first given her when he was waiting for her at the roadside next to his orange grove was leavened with something darker, something deeper. He let the foot tipping his chair backward drop slowly to the ground as he watched her. His knee was only inches from hers, and she could see the rise and fall of his breaths as he watched her, waiting.
It wasn't lust. Lust she knew, lust she could quantify, although … maybe only in its simpler permutations. This was desire, and she felt her breaths coming faster, her breasts rising and falling, because she felt it, too. It wasn't just about skin, or friction, or being in the presence of a good-looking, fit man. It was Charlie's skin. The idea of rubbing up against Charlie, of wanting to know how the muscles in his back would feel under his skin as he moved …
Rachel flung the front door open noisily and bellowed, "Can I get a little help with the groceries?"
"Dani," Charlie said, and she watched his lips forming her name, his voice pitched low. She wanted to kiss him, wanted to touch his smooth pink lips with her fingers, and her tongue, wanted to feel that mouth all over her body.
"Any day now!" Rachel snapped.
Upstairs, Teddy began to cry, and Charlie sighed and stood up. "Coming," he said, and somehow, his inflection managed to be both ironic and frustrated.
It made Dani laugh softly, and Charlie smirked, then handed Dani his half-eaten pear.
She raised an eyebrow, but for once, she took the fruit from his hand and turned it to where he'd last placed his mouth, and bit it, watching him the whole time.
Charlie's mouth dropped open and he groaned, and it was only slightly affected. "You're going to kill me, aren't you?" he said to her, low enough that he could not be overheard.
She smiled at him, noting with womanly pride that he had to pull at the leg of his jeans to give himself a bit more room as he walked away from her. She watched his ass as he walked away, then stretched up from her chair, and went to get Teddy.
Her hyper-awareness of Charlie's physicality and her own awakening desire continued to expand, to fill her senses as the days passed, and one day, she just knew. Her year chip was on the dresser of her room upstairs, and although it had not been a year since the last time she had sex, it was time. If only she knew how to begin. She'd never had to make the first move in quite this way before, never had it matter so much. It had never been Charlie before.
The night of Charlie's 42nd birthday, she took a chance and gave him his present while Rachel was still there, hoping that he'd glean her meaning, hoping that this would be enough of beginning. And the look in his eyes when she saw him understand, the way his hand gripped the spine of the book, the hunger and the heat in his gaze when his eyes traveled from it to her – it all let her know that her message had been received.
When Rachel excused herself, he came out of his seat in one graceful movement, dropping to his knees between her parted legs and kissing her with fire and intent, before he pulled back, searching her eyes. She wound her hands into his hair, and wrapped her legs around his broad back, as his hand skimmed up her calf. She smoothed one hand down his cheek to his mouth, running her fingers over his lips. "Charlie," was all she said before she closed the gap between them and gave him the kiss that she'd been holding back all the years of her life.
It was acceptance, it was love, it was everything.
.
That was how they began.
~
She'd been afraid for a while at the beginning, afraid that her need for him would prove their undoing, that once she'd betrayed her vulnerability that it would be used against her. Old habits, after all, and she'd spent most of her life guarding against any eventuality that would have brought her to the point where someone else had power over her again. But that first night, beyond the shaking hands and the nerves, and the longing for connection, for contact at every point between their bodies that was possible, she began to see that she was not alone in this. For all the power that Charlie had over her, she had over him as well. They could break each other.
Or be broken by outside forces. She'd never forget the paralyzing fear and rage that had overcome her in May when they'd been attacked and almost killed. The blood that poured out of Charlie as he lay on the ground, eyes fluttering closed and so, so pale. Her fear that she wouldn't be able to kill them all, wouldn't be able to protect him, when they'd come so close to getting them all, the bastards who had set Charlie up, consigning him to hell while they walked away. She'd spent days at his bedside, her own arm throbbing in pain, refusing meds, refusing sleep until her mother, nearly hysterical, had insisted. Even then, it was only when Ms. Puryer had shown her exactly how they would protect Charlie in her brief absence that she'd allowed herself to sleep for a while.
Still, it wasn't until they were here, back in their own bed, where she could hear Charlie breathing, knew that he was with her still, that she'd truly relaxed.
She watched Charlie's face as he began to wake, and reached over to curl her fingers around his. His lips quirked into a smile, and he pulled her hand up to them, pressing a kiss to her palm before his eyes were even open, pulling her to him.
She pushed against his shoulder and he obligingly lay on his back, eyes still closed. She lay down, half on top of him and waited while his blue eyes drowsily opened, and closed again, then opened to half-mast, as he peered at her through his lashes. Dani bent forward and kissed him softly, slipping her tongue in between his lips. Charlie smiled and pulled her in closer, and a little tighter, running his hand up her spine.
"What're we doin' today?" Charlie asked foggily.
Dani hitched a leg up and over him, straddling his body. "This," she said, then bent over to kiss him, her hair making a curtain around them.
"Oh," Charlie said, his voice a happy sigh. "Perfect."
~
Author:
comice aka Anjou (Anjou@rocketmail.com)Posting Date: June 2009
Rating: R for language and sexuality; M for Mature readers
Classification: Crews/Reese
Spoilers: post-S2 finale, One
Disclaimer: Not mine, but they are fun to play with. All respect to Rand Ravich, Far Shariat and especially to Damian Lewis, Sarah Shahi and the rest of the exceptional cast. They created something I will always treasure.
Author's Note: Sorry to have been so long with this part, but ... there was a lot for me to cover. There's one perspective left after this post. Thank you for taking this journey with me.
WARNING: This chapter contains introspection/memories about past rape and sexual abuse, as well as addiction.
~
Charlie Crews smelled like fruit.
Unlike what she’d imagined when she sat next to him on endless stakeouts, the scent wasn’t from using some expensive, hand-milled soap. Instead, Crews exuded fruit because he ate so much of it that his sweat bore its sweet essence. Of course, she’d only learned that when she’d had the opportunity to taste his skin and confirm her theory. More than any other thing, it had forced her to revise her long-held opinion that she was not a fan of fruit, not that she'd actually told Charlie that – but she was sure he knew. He'd figured her out long before she had.
It had taken Dani Reese a while to get where she was right now, with Charlie’s sleep-warmed skin radiating next to her, her own private sun in the bed they were sharing. She lay watching him sleep as the light of the sunrise filled the quiet room, an activity that she enjoyed more than she would have admitted, if he thought to ask. There was something about seeing him this way, loose-limbed in peaceful repose, his red hair mussed against the white sheets. In the rising light, she could see the thousands of freckles that dotted his skin, easily outnumbering the scars that she had found far more places than she wished. As her hands had learned Charlie’s body, she could not help but count the too many healed wounds, such a contrast to her own smooth, nearly unmarked surface, as if her skin were an extension of the mask that she’d worn for so long, through so many years of hiding. But inside … she felt every scar that her fingertips discerned on Charlie’s fair skin echo within her.
She had more in common with Charlie Crews than would be evident from looking at their surface commonalities, from examining their known life histories. Or maybe that was oversimplification. Their experiences had been different, but their lives had diverged from the same piece of roadway only to intersect later, in ways that had astonished her, the more that she’d learned. It made her think that there was perhaps something to the notion of synchronicity, the kind of philosophical belief that she'd be more likely to scoff at rather than embrace. But the events that had spun out from the robbery at the Bank of LA had braided her life together with Charlie's in a way that was hard to deny. It had set her on the path that had led her to this bed --the necessary journey she'd heard it referred to, and she wasn't above feeling resentment for its horrors, even as she knew that without that, without all of it, she would not have this moment, right now as it was, or any of the ones that were still to come. It was the kind of paradox that Charlie enjoyed picking apart, and although it gave her less of a headache than she'd ever admit to him, she understood why. There were answers in the wreckage, things that she'd learned about herself, good and bad, that only could have happened because she had kept falling through the floor, through false bottom after false bottom, until she’d almost been destroyed. She was who she was because of it, and that was Zen, wasn't it? Acceptance of the all?
Charlie shifted in the bed, his forehead creasing with a frown as he shifted from his stomach to his side, still facing her. Even in his sleep, Charlie Crews was always puzzling over something, and she smiled as she ran her thumb lightly over the z-shaped crease between his brows, soothing him. She took a silent, secret pleasure in the way that her touch made his expression ease, made a half smile appear on his full lips. Even in the midst of his dreams, he knew her. It had taken her a long time to accept that, to see that his knowing her wasn’t an intrusion, or pity, but recognition. He saw her for who she was, and he didn’t love her in despite of it, or because of it. He simply loved her. She’d seen that clearly the day that he stood at the side of the road, and waited for her, letting her see his true face without any masks – letting her see that he loved her.
Accepting all of the ramifications of that had been more than she could manage to do, right away. She was broken, and she knew it, but believing that she worth fixing or that she could be fixed was something else entirely, and not something she was sure that she could do or that she even knew how. In truth, she found it annoying that Crews had been broken and managed to re-form himself. What she hadn't understood was how he still struggled with the opposing aspects of his personality -- she’d never considered that Charlie’s embrace of Zen principles had not simply been about regaining clarity, but also about managing his rage.
But she had felt none of those things that day, sitting in that car, moving inexorably down that road toward him. Instead, she'd felt surprise, and a tender sense of joy. Until he’d come for her, traded himself for her and extricated them both from near certain death, she’d never quite understood who he was, and what he was willing to do. Charlie Crews was a man on a mission, and not only had he recognized that she was part of it, he’d accepted it, accepted her. It was astonishing to her, the level of honesty and trust that he’d shown her, with just that one, long look … he’d told her so much.
No one had ever loved her like that.
That feeling had lingered, long after they'd returned to the station and endured hours of questions from the brass and IA, and during a mostly one-sided conversation with Tidwell. Every time she blinked her tired eyes she saw that image of Crews watching her with that expression of steadfast love. It was etched into her eyelids, like the afterburn from staring too long at the sun. She was not at all certain that she deserved such devotion -- in fact, was sure that she did not -- but Charlie hadn’t asked her opinion. And everything that she understood about him told her that she couldn’t talk, fuck, fight or run her way out of him loving her. Because if there was one person on the planet who was possibly more stubborn than she was, it was Charlie Crews.
When he’d finally been released from questioning, she has been slumped sideways in a chair, exhausted beyond measure, but unable to sleep. Tidwell had long since lapsed into frustrated silence and sat across from her, legs sprawling and open, staring at her as if waiting for an explanation. She was too beat and far too overwhelmed to deal with Tidwell’s hurt and rage – and he was too smart not to realize that their relationship had changed and that it hadn't been overnight. They’d been separated for weeks, and the distance had given her perspective she hadn’t had before.
Unfortunately for Tidwell, most of her new understanding had been about her partner. She’d never realized just how much she actually liked talking to Crews, how much she enjoyed bouncing ideas off him, how hearing his opinions refined and focused her own. She knew, from all the cases that he chose to discuss with her, that he felt the same way. It wasn’t just him talking aloud. He needed to hear her thoughts. The biggest surprise had been how difficult it was to keep secrets from Crews, how much it troubled her not to be able to talk to him about the real reason the FBI wanted her. Secret-keeping had always been a huge part of Dani's survival strategy. There were things that she had never told another soul, secrets that she had never once considered sharing. Lying came as easily too her as breathing, the same as it did for most addicts. Being dishonest was a way of life – telling the truth was the hard thing, even when it was only to herself.
But lying to Charlie? It had felt wrong, gnawed at her, forced her to seek answers in Zen philosophy, of all things. But even that search had been a shorthand, a way to get at the heart of the Charlie that she thought she knew, the one that she had ultimately decided that she did know. She’d made the choice to trust him, and deny the FBI, and set off a chain of events … one that she had never foreseen, but even then she knew, knew deep down inside that he would be the one to figure it out. That Charlie would be the one to come and get her, even if they both ended up dead, which was more than likely, but … he would find her. She never for one instant doubted that the only one that would get her out of that hell with Roman Nevikov was Charlie Crews.
She could hear Tidwell grumbling in the chair opposite her, fighting sleep, but she didn’t look up. The weeks that she’d been away she’d spent longing to talk to Charlie, to throw fruit at his head, to hear his batshit theories, to see his sweet smile. When she talked to Charlie on the phone, there was always something to say, always something to hear, even when she sometimes felt like they were both talking in code. By contrast, her conversations with Tidwell were briefer and less … just less. It wasn’t Tidwell’s fault, though. It was hers. She’d only let Tidwell see glimpses of her true self, the surface ways that they connected with each other. The truth was that she and Tidwell were a lot alike, and not in good ways – he used his relationships with women to anesthetize himself the same way that she’d used everything else -- alcohol, drugs, sex. It’s not that she doubted that Tidwell loved her, but she knew that she was just another in a long line of women that he'd wanted to fix, to love into health and wellbeing. If he could do that, just once, then he’d gain some value, some self-love.
Charlie Crews didn’t want to fix her, to love her into wellbeing.
Charlie Crews just loved her.
And somehow, in a way she could not explain, that made her want to fix herself.
Any rational person looking at how long it had taken her to get from that night of exhausted realization to sharing a bed with Charlie would accuse her of being a cocktease. On her worst days, she'd certainly accused herself of using anything as an excuse to postpone the inevitable intimacy, but even when the negative voices in her head were at their very loudest, she knew what it was really about. She wanted to be sober for a year before she committed herself to a relationship -- needed, just that once, to live by the rules, to live by a system that had worked for people like her, to not use his body to avoid going down into the dirt and digging up all the skeletons that were buried. She needed to know herself, to look herself in the eye and accept everything that had happened to her, and everything that she had allowed to happen to her. She had to own it all: the things that had been done to her, and the things that she’d done.
It had been both more painful and more freeing than she had ever imagined, the true paradox of the necessary journey, but it had all been worth it. Because when she finally locked her legs around Charlie's waist and felt him slide into her, her eyes were open and she was a part of everything that was happening, and it was the best thing she'd ever felt. She wasn't using him liked she'd used everything else, for that blissful instant of ecstatic nothingness that she'd find at orgasm, or in that first hit of drugs, or the stumble of leglessness before blackout. Having sex with Charlie Crews made her high in a way that all the junk that she'd shot into her veins had never done. And nothing about it hurt her later, not even how long it had taken her to get here.
It wasn't as if they didn't fight, or still fundamentally disagree about any number of things. Charlie Crews, the man of a million and one soliloquies, could still annoy the crap out of her like no one else on the planet. But she had many, many ways to shut him up now, even if she sometimes suspected that he was trying to provoke just that reaction from her. He could be, had proved himself to be, an incredibly manipulative bastard through all that he'd done in the years since he'd been exonerated. Not that she was blaming him. She understood, as much as she could without having actually experienced what had happened to him, what motivated him. After Nevikov … and Rayborn, she'd come to a new level of understanding.
It wasn't something that he'd shared in front of Paul Bodner. After being questioned for hours about Rayborn, he strode out of that interrogation room with no indication that he was at all tired. His gait was straight and unhesitating as he walked right over to her and gently placed a warm hand below her elbow, helping her haul herself upright as he looked at her searchingly. She could see his exasperation with the hours wasted, but his concern for her was the utmost emotion that she could discern before her own eyes were caught at the sight of a red mark on his jaw that was starting to bruise. She reached up toward it, feeling her face tighten in anger as she went to move around him and go after the assholes who'd been sitting across the table from him, but he'd stopped her, slinging a long arm in her way.
"Roman," he said, and she sucked in a breath, her own hand reflexively rising to where her lip was split.
The muscle in Charlie's jaw tightened in fury as he gritted his teeth, and she'd watch the rage glitter coldly in his eyes.
"I'm fine, Crews," she said firmly, looking him in the eye until he softened, taking one long breath in through his nose before exhaling slowly and fully. He blinked and his eyes were clear again, then he nodded at the empty corridor behind her, taking one step in that direction. She spared a glance at Charlie's interrogators and the union rep, huddled together a few feet away, still arguing furiously. They all looked totally exhausted, as if they'd been through the wringer, and she couldn't hide the smirk, so she turned and walked alongside Charlie, her back straightened and stride sure.
"Crews!" Tidwell said as they passed him, and there was a note of desperate angriness in his voice.
"I'm free to go, Captain," Charlie answered, but he did not turn back, and they did not stop. "And Detective Reese and I are both off duty for the next 48 hours."
She had no memory of falling asleep in the car, but then again, she had no memory of actually leaving the garage at the station. She only remembered the feeling of Charlie's fingers gently stroking her cheek, and the way his eyes lit up when she opened her eyes and looked at him. She wasn't surprised to see that he'd taken her to his house. She hadn't been at her place in weeks, but didn't think that she could stand being apart from Crews right at that moment. The sun was rising over the hills, and she had no damned idea what day it was, or if it was still April. Roman had kept her in darkness and silence for what seemed like forever, an experience had given her a new appreciation for what Charlie had gone through for years in solitary. She shivered at the thought, and Charlie's eyes darkened, watching her carefully.
"C'mon," he said gently, and turned and exited the LAPD-issued vehicle.
She looked around, noticing their ride for the first time, and asked, "Where's your car?" as Charlie opened the door and tugged on her hand, pulling her out onto the drive.
"Long story," he said, with a sigh.
She looked up at him, squinting against the brightening light and said, "Are you going to tell me all the long stories now?"
Charlie smiled that soft smile at her, and stepped into her, still holding her hand. "Yes," he answered simply, "but after we sleep." He stroked her cheek with one finger. "I haven't slept in weeks," he murmured tiredly.
She dropped her head against his breast bone and nodded, feeling a light pressure on the back of her head that might have been him pressing a kiss to her hair.
"C'mon," he said again, and tugged her into the house and up the stairs.
The bathroom off his bedroom was easily two-thirds the size of her condo, and Charlie showed her where everything was and then brought her a clean white t-shirt before he left her alone in the echoing room. Taking off her clothes seemed to take forever, and the thought of having to put them on again after an unknown number of days wearing them disgusted her. She stayed under the hot water until she finally felt clean, which wasn't until after she sat down on the floor of the shower and cried for the first time in a long time. She dragged herself out of the shower when she knew that she was risking Charlie coming in after her, then put on the swallowing t-shirt he'd given her and made an effort to at least dry her hair somewhat. She was so tired that she looked grey in the light of the bathroom, her swollen lip a dark red stain against her skin. She opened the door to the bedroom and saw Charlie on one side of the massive bed, his bright hair sleek and dark from his own shower, his face pale against the light blue sheets. His eyes opened as she stood at the door, and he flipped back the covers, welcoming her. She was too tired for pretense, and he looked too much like everything that she’d missed for far too long, so she crawled across his bed and right into his arms, exhaling fully for the first time in what felt like forever.
"Crews," she muttered against his cotton-covered chest, as he pulled the covers up over her and closed his arms around her, his sweet fruit smell filling her head. She wrapped her arm around his waist and held on.
"Right here," he murmured, and she fell asleep immediately, feeling the steady beat of his heart against her broken mouth.
They slept for twelve hours straight, and then Charlie had made them some breakfast and spooned up behind her while they slept for another six hours. When they finally woke for good, it was the middle of the night, but they ordered some takeout and sat in his bed and talked and talked. He told her all about Rayborn while she sat there, mouth agape, forgotten food dangling from her chopsticks. It was inconceivable, all of it, the joke about cops making the best criminals coming to life in a particularly hideous way. That Rayborn had set this all in motion from the beginning and then abandoned Charlie when it went wrong was just … she couldn't really assimilate what he was telling her. Rayborn. Captain Rayborn, the man who'd been her father's friend and mentor – the man who always urged her to call him Uncle Mickey, even when she was a grown woman. Fucking Rayborn. He'd lied right to her face when she went to him and asked if he had any idea where her father might have disappeared to. Oh God, her father.
"Roman said he killed my father, Charlie," she told him, and this time it was Charlie who was stunned, food only making it halfway to his mouth.
"Fuck," he said savagely, and it struck her that this was the first time that she could recall him swearing in anger.
"You killed Roman," she said to Charlie certainly.
"Yes," he growled, baring his teeth. "Fuck!" His arms were rigid with tension, his neck red.
She shook her head at him, understanding. "He never would have told you if it was true or not, no matter what you did to him," she said. "Never." She paused. "I don't think that he was lying to me, though," she said slowly. "At the time, I don't think he had any intention of letting me go."
At her words, Charlie snapped the chopsticks that he was holding right in two, the noodles dropping into the open box that was nestled between their knees spattering sauce over the sheets.
"Charlie," she said, watching blood well up from a tiny cut on his forefinger, but he'd gone deep inside his own head, his blue eyes unfocused on anything that was happening right now. She pulled herself up on her knees and touched his other hand, and his fingers wrapped around hers when she went to draw away.
"He hit you," Charlie said in a low voice. His eyes were hard and dangerous.
"Yes," she answered him.
"Did he do more than hit you?" he asked. His voice was quieter, but the anger was there, seething, and a surety about what he was asking her that confirmed something that she'd long believed.
"No," she said firmly, holding his eyes, telling him without saying that she would not lie about that. She stared into his blue eyes and let him see the truth. "Not him," she said.
Charlie nodded, and she knew she was right. "Not him," Charlie said, and the emphasis on the second word was subtle, but she knew he'd be trying to figure it out until she told him the whole story, just … not tonight.
Still, she decided to push a little, to test the boundaries of what they were establishing. She was not the only one with secrets. "What about you?” she asked quietly.
"He's dead," Charlie said flatly, but there was an air of finality about it that let her know that he was not lying, even as her heart broke a little bit more for her partner. She'd never expected this, to have rape in common with a man, a straight man.
“Good,” she said firmly, and he held her eye. She reached over and pulled the broken chopsticks out of his hand and pressed a napkin to his finger. "You're bleeding," she said quietly, and Charlie smiled softly, sardonically.
"Not the first time," he said to her.
"No," she answered, pulling his hand into her lap.
"C'mon," he said, moving the food out of the way, mood shifting to something still serious, but not so weighted. "I have something to show you."
Then, he'd tugged her off the bed and took her into his closet and showed her The Wall, and she knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that she’d made the right choice when she’d handed the file back to Agent Ray.
~
Before they left his house again, and returned to work together at the LAPD, enduring the stares and the questions, and Tidwell’s anger and hurt, she had asked him if he could wait until she was ready. She made no promises that she would ever be, and he didn't ask for them, nor did she give him a timeline. After those nights though, she didn't sleep with him again, didn't trust herself enough not to use him when things got really bad, especially if he was only an arm's length away. They continued in their oddly chaste relationship, never having shared a kiss, despite having spent nearly 48 hours in Charlie's bedroom, most of it in his bed, sleeping.
Instead, she got in the habit of being in his space, sleeping in Rachel's room a couple of nights a week. Somehow, the months went by and he felt it was safe enough to call Rachel home, and then after a couple of weeks of her not staying over at all and barely sleeping, Charlie had agitatedly mentioned that he'd bought furniture for her room. Oddly, what she felt, instead of pressure, was relief. He had made a space for her in his life, in his house, and when she saw the room, it looked more like her room than anyplace that she'd slept in for years.
She'd never gotten reaccustomed to living in what had been her home, saw it with new eyes when she returned there, feeling oddly alone. Had it always looked that impersonal? Her condo had all the warmth of a faceless corporate apartment. It felt totally alien to her, like the hotel rooms that she’d used to fuck married men that she picked up. Where was she, in this house? There were no pictures on her walls, no personal touches, nothing. She supposed that she could play it off and say that she was more like Charlie than people thought, but she knew that was a lie. The empty spaces in Charlie’s big house were about mindfulness, about wanting to fill the spaces with something meaningful, after it had stopped being about Charlie’s fear of being confined. But the empty spaces in her condo were about avoidance, about an unwillingness to commit herself to anything for fear that she wouldn't be able to flee. She had not put down roots anywhere, because she’d been yanked up before, been turned inside out, and she was not going to let it happen again. She’d walk away first. She'd run away first.
She started spending more time at Charlie's house, started teaching Rachel how to spar, how to defend herself, began to negotiate a friendship with this girl her father had chosen to save, when he'd let her fall. All along, she'd believed her father was dead, but when it was confirmed she found herself stricken with grief and anger in the days after the funeral. Charlie let her seethe, let her wear herself out on the heavy bag, once it had really sunk in that her father would never be able to explain to her why he had done what he'd done. It wasn't that she didn't understand regret – she wasn't a child any longer, and she knew what it meant to have done something that you couldn't take back, how it felt to wound another person who didn't deserve it. She was confronted with Tidwell's hurt eyes every day at the station, wasn't immune to his suffering, even as she couldn't stop it. She could even understand that her father's seeming disgust with her, the way he'd changed from being her daddy to being the father it seemed she always disappointed, the one who rejected her love for him so decisively, was about him, about the self-loathing that he felt for having broken his vows, for becoming the criminal he'd sworn to protect others from.
The adult Dani understood all this, but the adult Dani also saw how totally fucked up it was for a father to punish his daughter the way Jack Reese had punished her. He'd wanted to make her hate him so that some of his own self-loathing would be reflected back at him. And he'd gotten his wish, but it was all twisted and wrong, because what Dani began to reflect back at him was the drinking and the meanness and the way he was incapable of being faithful to her mother, despite her continued loyalty to him. And then he really did begin to hate her, and she began to hate him, too.
But, sometimes … she thought about what her father did for Rachel, and she could see that he had tried to redeem himself, even if it wasn't for her that he did this selfless thing. And when she thought back on the things that she'd done, the wreckage that she'd left in her wake, she knew that no matter how young she was, how hurt she was, that there were choices that she made along the way, times when she stood at crossroads, and she unfailingly chose the wrong way, knowing full well that it was wrong. Because sometimes when you're in pain, one way to excise it was to inflict it onto someone else, and she had done that.
The thing was, she didn't know to whom she should make amends. Her mother loved her, even if she did not understand her, and Ramon was dead. Most of the rest of them were faceless, aside from the boyfriend that she'd lost her virginity with when she was thirteen. Too young she knew now, but he was as broken as she was, and just barely older than she'd been. At the time, she didn't understand why he cried every time they had sex, but the cop in her, the adult Dani, she knew what was really going on in his house. Paul had run away the summer she was fifteen, and she'd spent the next few weeks drinking and drugging with the older kids, gradually moving closer and closer to looming danger. He was older, of course, and stronger than she was, and when she woke up from whatever he'd given her to knock her out, he was already raping her, and he beat her when she fought back, but she didn't stop fighting, because even then, it was not in her nature. When she woke up in the hospital, she'd been unconscious for two days. Her ribs were broken, and her nose, and she had sutures between her legs where he'd ripped her open in his fury.
Her mother had cried and cried, and her father wouldn't actually look at her for more than a month, just stared at a point near her head. She claimed that she didn't remember what had happened, and her father ground his teeth in anger but didn't argue with her. He was ashamed of her, and disgusted with her, and she hated him with everything that she was, everything that she was becoming. When she went back to school, and got out from under his thumb, she kept her grades up, but she smoked weed with the slackers out in the back of the school, and she fucked boys under the bleachers, anyone that she wanted to, including one of the teachers. And she was always on top, she was always in control, and she learned how to fight to make it come out the way she wanted, every time. She was not going to be used again. She knew that her father knew what she was doing, but he was a liar and a cheat, and he could see all her accusations in her eyes, and so he yelled and he broke things, but he could not stop her.
And she just kept falling through floor after floor on her trip to the bottom.
All the way through that long period of grieving -- after meetings that flayed her raw, times when she exhausted herself on the heavy bag -- Charlie let her be, let her excavate through the layers of rage and pain. He bandaged her bloody knuckles without comment, without judgment, watched her running the long hills around his house as if the Devil himself were chasing her, only coming to get her one night when she had finally run as far as she could and found herself hopelessly lost.
She kept waiting for the accusation to come into his eyes, to see the disappointment that was always inevitable in her relationships, but it never came. Instead, she saw solidarity, she saw recognition. She began to comprehend what empathy actually felt like; she began to understand that she was no longer falling; she began to believe that she was climbing up out of the abyss, hand over painful hand, sweating out the poison of her past slowly but surely. And if she wasn't becoming the kind of person who could truly believe in redemption, perhaps she was becoming one who saw the possibility of reclamation. And possibility? That was itself a victory.
It was around this time that she first really became conscious of a need to quantify exactly what Charlie smelled like. She'd lived long enough in his house to know what he used in the shower, and it was all simple, unscented. There was never any cologne, any aftershave that she saw him use. There was only the constant of the fruit itself, an array of different textures and tastes that was really rather astounding, once she began to actually note his rate of consumption. It went along way toward explaining some of his more hyper rants, what with the level of pure sugar he was consuming over the course of the day.
One day, shortly after the New Year, he was eating a pear and expounding on some connection between Rayborn and their unknown number 5 target, when she found herself mesmerized by the line of his throat as he swallowed. They were off duty, and alone in the house but for a sleeping Teddy, who was sacked out in his room upstairs while Rachel ran errands. Charlie was barefoot and wearing a pair of blue jeans that had faded to a color only a shade or two darker than his eyes. The cuffs had begun to fray, and she found herself wondering if he'd had the jeans before he went to prison, if this was part of what he'd recovered from the storage unit that Jen had kept all those years, even when there was no hope. He was wearing a light brown button down shirt, untucked and unbuttoned at the throat, the sleeves rolled up without precision. He never wore his sleeves rolled up at work, and she'd begun to wonder what it was about his arms that he wanted to keep hidden. The curve of them looked firm, his skin white and gold what with the freckles and the red-gold hair that shone in the warm light coming in from the kitchen windows. He'd pushed the chair back while he was talking, and was rocking on the two back legs, the arm that was holding the pear gesticulating as one long boned foot held the chair tipped backward, the toe pointing down to the floor. It wasn't until he said her name that she realized that she hadn't heard a word that he'd said for at least five minutes, that she'd been too caught up in seeing him, enjoying the loose sensuality of his form, of everything that made him Charlie.
She sucked in a breath and looked up at him, flustered, only to see that he was looking right back at her, but this time, the look that he'd first given her when he was waiting for her at the roadside next to his orange grove was leavened with something darker, something deeper. He let the foot tipping his chair backward drop slowly to the ground as he watched her. His knee was only inches from hers, and she could see the rise and fall of his breaths as he watched her, waiting.
It wasn't lust. Lust she knew, lust she could quantify, although … maybe only in its simpler permutations. This was desire, and she felt her breaths coming faster, her breasts rising and falling, because she felt it, too. It wasn't just about skin, or friction, or being in the presence of a good-looking, fit man. It was Charlie's skin. The idea of rubbing up against Charlie, of wanting to know how the muscles in his back would feel under his skin as he moved …
Rachel flung the front door open noisily and bellowed, "Can I get a little help with the groceries?"
"Dani," Charlie said, and she watched his lips forming her name, his voice pitched low. She wanted to kiss him, wanted to touch his smooth pink lips with her fingers, and her tongue, wanted to feel that mouth all over her body.
"Any day now!" Rachel snapped.
Upstairs, Teddy began to cry, and Charlie sighed and stood up. "Coming," he said, and somehow, his inflection managed to be both ironic and frustrated.
It made Dani laugh softly, and Charlie smirked, then handed Dani his half-eaten pear.
She raised an eyebrow, but for once, she took the fruit from his hand and turned it to where he'd last placed his mouth, and bit it, watching him the whole time.
Charlie's mouth dropped open and he groaned, and it was only slightly affected. "You're going to kill me, aren't you?" he said to her, low enough that he could not be overheard.
She smiled at him, noting with womanly pride that he had to pull at the leg of his jeans to give himself a bit more room as he walked away from her. She watched his ass as he walked away, then stretched up from her chair, and went to get Teddy.
Her hyper-awareness of Charlie's physicality and her own awakening desire continued to expand, to fill her senses as the days passed, and one day, she just knew. Her year chip was on the dresser of her room upstairs, and although it had not been a year since the last time she had sex, it was time. If only she knew how to begin. She'd never had to make the first move in quite this way before, never had it matter so much. It had never been Charlie before.
The night of Charlie's 42nd birthday, she took a chance and gave him his present while Rachel was still there, hoping that he'd glean her meaning, hoping that this would be enough of beginning. And the look in his eyes when she saw him understand, the way his hand gripped the spine of the book, the hunger and the heat in his gaze when his eyes traveled from it to her – it all let her know that her message had been received.
When Rachel excused herself, he came out of his seat in one graceful movement, dropping to his knees between her parted legs and kissing her with fire and intent, before he pulled back, searching her eyes. She wound her hands into his hair, and wrapped her legs around his broad back, as his hand skimmed up her calf. She smoothed one hand down his cheek to his mouth, running her fingers over his lips. "Charlie," was all she said before she closed the gap between them and gave him the kiss that she'd been holding back all the years of her life.
It was acceptance, it was love, it was everything.
.
That was how they began.
~
She'd been afraid for a while at the beginning, afraid that her need for him would prove their undoing, that once she'd betrayed her vulnerability that it would be used against her. Old habits, after all, and she'd spent most of her life guarding against any eventuality that would have brought her to the point where someone else had power over her again. But that first night, beyond the shaking hands and the nerves, and the longing for connection, for contact at every point between their bodies that was possible, she began to see that she was not alone in this. For all the power that Charlie had over her, she had over him as well. They could break each other.
Or be broken by outside forces. She'd never forget the paralyzing fear and rage that had overcome her in May when they'd been attacked and almost killed. The blood that poured out of Charlie as he lay on the ground, eyes fluttering closed and so, so pale. Her fear that she wouldn't be able to kill them all, wouldn't be able to protect him, when they'd come so close to getting them all, the bastards who had set Charlie up, consigning him to hell while they walked away. She'd spent days at his bedside, her own arm throbbing in pain, refusing meds, refusing sleep until her mother, nearly hysterical, had insisted. Even then, it was only when Ms. Puryer had shown her exactly how they would protect Charlie in her brief absence that she'd allowed herself to sleep for a while.
Still, it wasn't until they were here, back in their own bed, where she could hear Charlie breathing, knew that he was with her still, that she'd truly relaxed.
She watched Charlie's face as he began to wake, and reached over to curl her fingers around his. His lips quirked into a smile, and he pulled her hand up to them, pressing a kiss to her palm before his eyes were even open, pulling her to him.
She pushed against his shoulder and he obligingly lay on his back, eyes still closed. She lay down, half on top of him and waited while his blue eyes drowsily opened, and closed again, then opened to half-mast, as he peered at her through his lashes. Dani bent forward and kissed him softly, slipping her tongue in between his lips. Charlie smiled and pulled her in closer, and a little tighter, running his hand up her spine.
"What're we doin' today?" Charlie asked foggily.
Dani hitched a leg up and over him, straddling his body. "This," she said, then bent over to kiss him, her hair making a curtain around them.
"Oh," Charlie said, his voice a happy sigh. "Perfect."
~
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-07-01 03:23 am (UTC)Heartbreaking at times but just so good. I loved Every time she blinked her tired eyes she saw that image of Crews watching her with that expression of steadfast love. It was etched into her eyelids, like the afterburn from staring too long at the sun.
Great work and can't wait to see the last chaper even while I'm sad that you're up to the last chapter already!
no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 12:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-01 03:27 am (UTC)Damn, I'm going to be on pins and needles for the finale. This is just so achingly, breathtakingly beautiful. CANNOT STAND THE PRETTY.
Apart from the phenomenal characterization and pitch perfect dialogue, the slow sensuality that's emerging between Dani and Charlie is UHMAZING. Case in point: She smiled at him, noting with womanly pride that he had to pull at the leg of his jeans to give himself a bit more room as he walked away from her.
I would literally have danced a jig to see this happen on the show. As it is, your exquisite writing forms the scene perfectly in my minds eye.
BRAVA! Now bring on the next installment!
no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-01 05:40 am (UTC)SUCH good characterization. I love it!
no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-01 05:41 am (UTC)Ohh, I love this! Such an awesome exploration of both Reese and Charlie.
Man. I hope you know what I mean when I say that every chapter I read of this brings me both happiness and pain, because we'll never get to see these two on TV again. *sigh*
no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 12:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-01 05:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 12:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-02 02:20 am (UTC)1. Dani. Reese.
2. The opening of this chapter fills the senses... come to think of it this whole chapter does that for me.
3. Harmony in the difference and friendship in the parallels.
3a. Dani being raped stoked my ire and instigated rage. And Charlie knows. Wow. I literally had to walk away for a few moments it was too intense.
3b. The part about the meaning of the spaces in their living areas? Pure. Genius. And so true.
3c. DADDY ISSUES.
3d. Recognition and acceptance. I feel like I'm in rehab.
4. Sleep.
5. Charlie's sexy.
6. Dani's sexy.
7. Broken people are so broken and pretty. And I do not have the words for how deftly you handle them.
8. YOU. ARE. AWESOME. Thank you SO much for this series. I'm so totally printing this out to read over and over and over and over and over and...
no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-10 01:43 pm (UTC)" It was astonishing to her, the level of honesty and trust that he’d shown her, with just that one, long look … he’d told her so much.
No one had ever loved her like that. "
That was a great line!!
I really really don't want this story to end, but at the same time I cannot wait to read more!
no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 12:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-10 03:23 pm (UTC)Your Tidwell section was the first bit of text that's ever made me like him, or appreciate him as a character. But this section. Just. Oh, this hurts in the best of ways because it's Dani. The Dani that I desperately wanted to see unfold onscreen, and the one that we got glimpses of here and there along the way. I am in awe that you managed to tie the final scene in one to the first scene in the pilot by answering Charlie's first question for her. Yes,, Dani's been loved like that. By Charlie. And that's such a small, but stunningly powerful moment.
Thank you so much for writing this series. I don't think I can impart the gravity of how very, very much I mean that. Thank you.
Also, while reading this, I just couldn't help but thinking the tone of this piece is very much linked to a song I've been listening to lately. If you haven't heard it, track down "Set Down Your Glass" by Snow Patrol. Rah, rah, mainstream band; but the gentle power of this just rings all my resonance bells with that song.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 12:36 am (UTC)I'm glad that you're enjoying the story, and the narrative weave throughs. When I started writing this story, I had just watched both versions of the pilot, and then I rewatched the whole arc where Dani and Charlie are separated in S2, and it just ... it struck me how much Rand Ravich had wound the story threads around each other, the progress the characters had made, and that look that Charlie gives her ... it absolutely is a callback to that line, as far as I'm concerned.
Thanks for your comments -- I really appreciate them.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-14 07:16 am (UTC)I love how she got that Charlie simply loved her, no reasons and qualifications just a simple fact. I loved that Charlie didn't push because he wouldn't. He wouldn't, not with her and the way they finally got together (42!) felt right too.
And then the end... *happy sigh*
I can't wait for the finale. I'm both anxious and excited. I don't want it to end but I also want to see what happens next!
no subject
Date: 2009-07-19 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-20 10:34 pm (UTC)I'm very much looking forward to the last chapter.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-05 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-01 02:21 am (UTC)The perspectives have all been wonderful, and the Crews/Reese has just the perfect mix of truth/cute/hot that is necessary to pull off their relationship believably. I really liked Dani's choice to wait a year. I also absolutely adore, even though it's kinda peripheral, the involvement of Dani in hunting the conspiracy. It was something we were robbed of with the lack of season 3.
So much more I could say, but mostly, I can't wait for the end (and also don't want the end).
no subject
Date: 2009-09-05 02:34 pm (UTC)I'm glad that you enjoyed Dani's piece in this tale. It was very important to me to get her voice right. Thanks again!
no subject
Date: 2009-09-05 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-02 08:43 pm (UTC)Now, I await the last chapter. i know it may be a while coming and that's okay. It will be worth the wait!!
no subject
Date: 2009-09-05 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-20 05:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-05 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 08:59 am (UTC)For some reason I dont find part 1. Is there part 1?
no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 02:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-28 08:41 pm (UTC)That's a perfect summary.
You've really got everyone's voices perfect, you can really see the love coming through in this, it just works brilliantly, am excited to see how you deal with Crews.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 02:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-12 04:16 pm (UTC)I hope someday there will be a last chapter, but even if there isn't, this coda is perfect. Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-26 02:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-06 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-14 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-28 08:45 pm (UTC)Thank you for sharing.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-12 01:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 03:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-30 07:18 am (UTC)And the bit with the pear in this chapter? Oh my...who knew fruit could be so damn sexy?
Even if you never do finish Charlie's chapter - which would be sad, but these things happen - this makes a beautiful and fairly satisfying ending as it is.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-30 11:44 pm (UTC)You know, I've spent a lot of time wondering why I haven't written Charlie's chapter, but in my mind's eye, it's a very simple chapter. Maybe I'll just go ahead and post it, as paltry as I've thought it was for so long. Stay tuned.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-21 08:05 pm (UTC)ughh. alright so one of my friends has been telling me for ages that I needed to watch this show, and then she finally enabled that this summer. so I finished the last episode (*sob*) yesterday and then there was flail. and then I went and flailed some more at her and she pointed me here and this is truly epic. ugh. your characterizations are just flawless and they're all so them that I really just want to grab this fic and love it and hug it and name it George. even though it's already got an excellent name. but whatever, it doesn't have to make sense to work in my head ;P
in any case! thank you for sharing this with the world, because it's lovely.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-22 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-25 11:09 pm (UTC)I've been watching life on Universal here in the UK - it's the first time I've seen it and it's brilliant. Can't believe it will be over next Monday, so sad :-(
This fanfic is absolutely brilliant, spent ages reading it in one go. You are a very good writter and gave me a lovely dose of Life on a Sunday when it does not show.
Can I ask a question, will you be posting the last part?
I hope you do
Many thanks once again
Caity :-))))
no subject
Date: 2012-12-02 06:18 pm (UTC)I've been very remiss in filling in the last part. Charlie's POV is the hardest to write for me, and that has been the impediment all this time. I promise that I am working on it, but it is a tough slog.
Thank you so much for your nice note. I appreciate it!
Anjou