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Disclaimer: Pretender characters are property of MTM, TNT, NBC, WB, Steve, Craig and all the others.
Stems of Pretence
It began with a puzzle and ended with a black rose on her desk. Half bloomed, it fell slightly to the left, its petals open, leering away from the windows were it sensed the sun beyond. There was never any sun in her office. She kept the blinds down and slanted closed, sealing even the smallest fragment to the underside of the steel coloured panels.
The rose that feared light rested in a garnet glass vase in the middle of her desk.
+ + +
He arrived late one night, standard and of the norm, full of vodka, sleeping pills and empty misery at the bottom of depleted glasses. She wasn’t sure how wasted she was, but she certainly wasn’t sober. But then, what is sober? Consciousness of all the heartache and loneliness that plagued her shadows and permeated her existence from childhood on.
And what is too much? Emptiness rather then longing, a dull pain rather then a fire iron searing that scratched at the back of her throat and fell to ashes in the pit of her soul.
She preferred the emptiness. Always had.
He stood on her front porch as she stared at him with dead eyes from beneath drooped lashes. She waved her glass and opened the door. Wind blew her soft caresses against her bare skin under her robe.
It wasn’t that she didn’t realize it was him; she was fully aware, it was only that she didn’t find the strength to care. She let him into her sacred place, her museum full of puzzle pieces for her secrets and keys to her fears, the parts of her life she tied in with chains before she left and only sometimes released when she came home.
She let him enter, not so much invited, and he seated himself comfortably. She gazed on with weary eyes and demanded his intentions. He shrugged and drug her into futile conversation. She nodded absently while he spoke, not bothering to fain interest in the slightest.
The next thing she felt were his hands, cold, hard and calloused against her own skin and bone. He took the glass and placed it in the sink and pressed her back against the counter.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Despite the crisp clarity of her words, and despite her mild stupor, he refused her question. His hand trailed her face in a half touch half grip and his sly smile snaked its coils around her neck and spat venom down her throat with his tongue.
He’d come expecting resistance, a fight. He’d counted on her struggling for arousal but received none. He pulled away, staring into her stainless blue glass spheres, etched over time with scratches and tape, obscuring the outside world from their vision. She in turn stared down his leer; slits for snake eyes that darted in every direction but held fast to her face, never moving, never searching.
And that was the difference. He didn’t care about her and neither did she. One thing in common they shared. And it was that one thread that, yanked from both sides, unraveled the rug beneath her and sent her falling.
+ + +
His grey eyes never wavered, baring down on her like long swords positioned from every angle. His bitter silence meant only that he knew, or suspected he knew. He entered positions deemed suitable for confrontation but never finished on his actions. She didn’t extend an olive branch and he stubbornly refused to seek one.
He stood over her desk, waiting for a response to his unasked question. She kept her head lowered, ignoring his proximity until he silently turned away.
The constants in her lowly life were slipping through the cracks in the door and she was just too tired to chase them. She’d chased enough.
Broots remained aware but blind to the enmity that broke the bridge between them. He stood his ground and said her name, rusty and metallic in his mouth, but all he received was a hollow stare straight through him. He sighed sadly and wondered again if there was anyone left living that could seal the holes.
He cried that night as he watched his daughter sleep.
+ + +
The woman he loved would never have done this. She was too strong, too stubborn and far too human to succumb to gravity, to let herself fall so far, so fast down the rabbit’s hole.
Knock knock anybody home?
The woman he loved was dead and in her place stood ambiguity and restless sleep. She never slept anymore, not after that.
Neither were the victim, both the prey, agile and deadly beneath their handsome masks. Both had different reasons, different motivations but neither had just cause.
“What’d you care?”
“I don’t. It’s none of my business what you do or who you do it with. But you’re killing yourself, slowly, and I made a promise to your mother that I would always look out for you.”
“Look out for me.” She scoffed. “My mother was a-”
“Don’t.” He released the intensity quickly gathered in his eyes. “You’ll regret it later.”
She knew he was right. “Well- a hell of a job you’ve done; I’m just the embodiment of all joy, aren’t I?”
He sighed. Nothing was every accomplished by chasing the same dead end. “It’s partly your own fault.”
Don’t be defensive.
“Look, all I’m saying is that I’m worried” about you “about the ramifications this might bring.”
“Ramifications.” She laughed bitterly, a reverberating cackle down the hollow hole. “These are the ramifications! The catalyst was a long time ago.”
He paced the floor –step, step, step, pivot, step, step, step, pivot- over and over. His skin of his knuckles opened and blood seeped through the cracks like weeds through the sidewalk and ran down his hand in rivulets like tears. The chair, upside down across the room was missing a leg, the table was overturned and all the work upon it was scattered on the floor, courtesy of earlier misplaced aggression.
“For God sakes, Parker, look at yourself!” His own voice of confrontation echoed back through him again and again. “It’s tearing you apart. My only fear is you won’t be able to put yourself back together.”
“Tearing?” She sighed a single breath that broke his heart. “Jarod… I’m a long ways past gone.”
“Then come back,” he insisted, but she shook her head. He tried again. “Let me help you.”
“How? How are you going to help me? For Christ’s sake, Jarod! You can’t even help yourself!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Don’t pick fights.
“You know damn well what it means. You’re just as lost as I am, probably more. You’re so hell-bent on helping everyone else that you’ve completely ignored yourself.”
“And this is something to be reprimanded for?”
“Yes! How can I be expected to trust you if you don’t?”
She was right, as always. He may have been brilliant on the matters of the mind, but when it came to the soul, she was the only guide he’d ever had, and through neither took first place in that area, she came out higher then he did.
“Please, let me do something. I can’t… I won’t sit idly by while you throw your life away. Please.” He reached across himself and took her hands. “Please. Don’t let them win.”
“They’ve already won, Jarod, can’t you see that? I can’t pretend like you can! I don’t have the strength to fight them anymore; I’m using up all I have left to fight myself- to survive. But I…”
the hopelessness she radiated penetrated his thick skin. It hadn’t been his intention to shatter her spirits, what was left of the fragments. But it always ended up that way. Her, broken, him, weary.
“After Thomas I tried to stop caring. As long as there wasn’t anyone to take, there would be no one to use against me. I tried, so hard. And they still found a way.”
“A way to what?”
“Break me.”
“Let me help you.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Parker-”
“I’ll come out of this, Jarod, I always do. I don’t need you hanging over my shoulder.”
“But-”
She stopped and turned and gazed upon him with saddened eyes. “If you really want to help me…”
“You know I do.”
“Then go.”
+ + +
Finally the branch of peace was extended. “Do yourself a favor, Parker- end this. Now. Before it’s too late. I’m sorry for what has happened. I know what he meant to you, and I understand your rage.”
“No, you don’t. You can’t. He was the last link, Sydney. The last part of my family I could love. And they destroyed him for it.” She looked away. “It would have been better if he’d died.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Break the chain. End it here.” From behind closed eyes she felt the iced, slippery metal of her gun and his soft, wrinkled hands gently pressing her slender fingers around it. “End it.”
+ + +
Four years, four bullets. Two in the chest, non-fatal, one in the palm, where his scar had been, and the fourth embedded in his skull.
Traitor.
Liar.
Deceiver.
She betrayed them. Thirty years of taking the swinging blows and finally the last straw was pulled from the woven basket. A four year old boy, the reason and cause of so many deaths, after all that, destroyed. Handed over to the greatest evil she knew. His sweet smile, gone, his laugh, silenced, his brown eyes, soft like cinnamon and honey, darkened to black.
His idea. The man she later let into her sanctuary. She’d known before that Lyle had sprung the plan to turn her four year old brother into their private warrior. An innocent mind and a kind heart turned to the epitome of fear and destroyer of lives and loves. All because he could solve the puzzle. That stupid puzzle they’d created as a test.
He passed.
He gasped her name as the third bullet hit him in the hand. “When Patrick was two he got himself stuck in the air vent and cut his hand on the grating. He was up there for five hours before anyone bothered to search for him.
“He wasn’t the genius you wanted. Wasn’t the mind you thought you could control. So you destroyed him instead.”
“We did what was needed to be done,” he hissed, smiling slightly. “He’ll be the pride and joy of the Centre. He’s the new legacy.”
“He was.”
The remaining tint faded from Lyle’s face. “I swore to him he wouldn’t have to endure the life I did. And I’d rather he be dead then spend the rest of his life in that place.”
“You… you killed him?”
“No… I saved him. I killed you.”
The last silenced bullet claimed another Centre survivor.
+ + +
It ended with her, standing in the graveyard, above her little brother’s tomb with a bouquet of different coloured roses on the ground in front of it.
“It’s funny,” she said to the figure behind her. “I spent my life searching for my freedom, and now that I’ve found it, I don’t know what to do with it.”
“You’ll figure something out.”
She turned. “Will I?” She held his gaze momentarily, then was drawn back to the grave. “For all the time I was fighting, it was always for someone else. My mother, Thomas… Patrick.” Her voice broke. “There’s no one left to fight for.”
A soft hand on her shoulder brought all the reassurance she could need, and she almost believed him when he told her: “You can fight for yourself.” She covered his aged hand with her own. In all the years she’d known him, she never had to say thank you. He always knew.
Somehow.
“Where will you go?”
“Away. There’s nothing left for me here.”
It ended with a rose that feared light, and rested in a garnet glass vase in the middle of her desk. But she never saw the crimson glass or the ebony rose, just the sun, warm on her face from the other side of the blinds.
+ + +
end
Stems of Pretence
It began with a puzzle and ended with a black rose on her desk. Half bloomed, it fell slightly to the left, its petals open, leering away from the windows were it sensed the sun beyond. There was never any sun in her office. She kept the blinds down and slanted closed, sealing even the smallest fragment to the underside of the steel coloured panels.
The rose that feared light rested in a garnet glass vase in the middle of her desk.
+ + +
He arrived late one night, standard and of the norm, full of vodka, sleeping pills and empty misery at the bottom of depleted glasses. She wasn’t sure how wasted she was, but she certainly wasn’t sober. But then, what is sober? Consciousness of all the heartache and loneliness that plagued her shadows and permeated her existence from childhood on.
And what is too much? Emptiness rather then longing, a dull pain rather then a fire iron searing that scratched at the back of her throat and fell to ashes in the pit of her soul.
She preferred the emptiness. Always had.
He stood on her front porch as she stared at him with dead eyes from beneath drooped lashes. She waved her glass and opened the door. Wind blew her soft caresses against her bare skin under her robe.
It wasn’t that she didn’t realize it was him; she was fully aware, it was only that she didn’t find the strength to care. She let him into her sacred place, her museum full of puzzle pieces for her secrets and keys to her fears, the parts of her life she tied in with chains before she left and only sometimes released when she came home.
She let him enter, not so much invited, and he seated himself comfortably. She gazed on with weary eyes and demanded his intentions. He shrugged and drug her into futile conversation. She nodded absently while he spoke, not bothering to fain interest in the slightest.
The next thing she felt were his hands, cold, hard and calloused against her own skin and bone. He took the glass and placed it in the sink and pressed her back against the counter.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Despite the crisp clarity of her words, and despite her mild stupor, he refused her question. His hand trailed her face in a half touch half grip and his sly smile snaked its coils around her neck and spat venom down her throat with his tongue.
He’d come expecting resistance, a fight. He’d counted on her struggling for arousal but received none. He pulled away, staring into her stainless blue glass spheres, etched over time with scratches and tape, obscuring the outside world from their vision. She in turn stared down his leer; slits for snake eyes that darted in every direction but held fast to her face, never moving, never searching.
And that was the difference. He didn’t care about her and neither did she. One thing in common they shared. And it was that one thread that, yanked from both sides, unraveled the rug beneath her and sent her falling.
+ + +
His grey eyes never wavered, baring down on her like long swords positioned from every angle. His bitter silence meant only that he knew, or suspected he knew. He entered positions deemed suitable for confrontation but never finished on his actions. She didn’t extend an olive branch and he stubbornly refused to seek one.
He stood over her desk, waiting for a response to his unasked question. She kept her head lowered, ignoring his proximity until he silently turned away.
The constants in her lowly life were slipping through the cracks in the door and she was just too tired to chase them. She’d chased enough.
Broots remained aware but blind to the enmity that broke the bridge between them. He stood his ground and said her name, rusty and metallic in his mouth, but all he received was a hollow stare straight through him. He sighed sadly and wondered again if there was anyone left living that could seal the holes.
He cried that night as he watched his daughter sleep.
+ + +
The woman he loved would never have done this. She was too strong, too stubborn and far too human to succumb to gravity, to let herself fall so far, so fast down the rabbit’s hole.
Knock knock anybody home?
The woman he loved was dead and in her place stood ambiguity and restless sleep. She never slept anymore, not after that.
Neither were the victim, both the prey, agile and deadly beneath their handsome masks. Both had different reasons, different motivations but neither had just cause.
“What’d you care?”
“I don’t. It’s none of my business what you do or who you do it with. But you’re killing yourself, slowly, and I made a promise to your mother that I would always look out for you.”
“Look out for me.” She scoffed. “My mother was a-”
“Don’t.” He released the intensity quickly gathered in his eyes. “You’ll regret it later.”
She knew he was right. “Well- a hell of a job you’ve done; I’m just the embodiment of all joy, aren’t I?”
He sighed. Nothing was every accomplished by chasing the same dead end. “It’s partly your own fault.”
Don’t be defensive.
“Look, all I’m saying is that I’m worried” about you “about the ramifications this might bring.”
“Ramifications.” She laughed bitterly, a reverberating cackle down the hollow hole. “These are the ramifications! The catalyst was a long time ago.”
He paced the floor –step, step, step, pivot, step, step, step, pivot- over and over. His skin of his knuckles opened and blood seeped through the cracks like weeds through the sidewalk and ran down his hand in rivulets like tears. The chair, upside down across the room was missing a leg, the table was overturned and all the work upon it was scattered on the floor, courtesy of earlier misplaced aggression.
“For God sakes, Parker, look at yourself!” His own voice of confrontation echoed back through him again and again. “It’s tearing you apart. My only fear is you won’t be able to put yourself back together.”
“Tearing?” She sighed a single breath that broke his heart. “Jarod… I’m a long ways past gone.”
“Then come back,” he insisted, but she shook her head. He tried again. “Let me help you.”
“How? How are you going to help me? For Christ’s sake, Jarod! You can’t even help yourself!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Don’t pick fights.
“You know damn well what it means. You’re just as lost as I am, probably more. You’re so hell-bent on helping everyone else that you’ve completely ignored yourself.”
“And this is something to be reprimanded for?”
“Yes! How can I be expected to trust you if you don’t?”
She was right, as always. He may have been brilliant on the matters of the mind, but when it came to the soul, she was the only guide he’d ever had, and through neither took first place in that area, she came out higher then he did.
“Please, let me do something. I can’t… I won’t sit idly by while you throw your life away. Please.” He reached across himself and took her hands. “Please. Don’t let them win.”
“They’ve already won, Jarod, can’t you see that? I can’t pretend like you can! I don’t have the strength to fight them anymore; I’m using up all I have left to fight myself- to survive. But I…”
the hopelessness she radiated penetrated his thick skin. It hadn’t been his intention to shatter her spirits, what was left of the fragments. But it always ended up that way. Her, broken, him, weary.
“After Thomas I tried to stop caring. As long as there wasn’t anyone to take, there would be no one to use against me. I tried, so hard. And they still found a way.”
“A way to what?”
“Break me.”
“Let me help you.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Parker-”
“I’ll come out of this, Jarod, I always do. I don’t need you hanging over my shoulder.”
“But-”
She stopped and turned and gazed upon him with saddened eyes. “If you really want to help me…”
“You know I do.”
“Then go.”
+ + +
Finally the branch of peace was extended. “Do yourself a favor, Parker- end this. Now. Before it’s too late. I’m sorry for what has happened. I know what he meant to you, and I understand your rage.”
“No, you don’t. You can’t. He was the last link, Sydney. The last part of my family I could love. And they destroyed him for it.” She looked away. “It would have been better if he’d died.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Break the chain. End it here.” From behind closed eyes she felt the iced, slippery metal of her gun and his soft, wrinkled hands gently pressing her slender fingers around it. “End it.”
+ + +
Four years, four bullets. Two in the chest, non-fatal, one in the palm, where his scar had been, and the fourth embedded in his skull.
Traitor.
Liar.
Deceiver.
She betrayed them. Thirty years of taking the swinging blows and finally the last straw was pulled from the woven basket. A four year old boy, the reason and cause of so many deaths, after all that, destroyed. Handed over to the greatest evil she knew. His sweet smile, gone, his laugh, silenced, his brown eyes, soft like cinnamon and honey, darkened to black.
His idea. The man she later let into her sanctuary. She’d known before that Lyle had sprung the plan to turn her four year old brother into their private warrior. An innocent mind and a kind heart turned to the epitome of fear and destroyer of lives and loves. All because he could solve the puzzle. That stupid puzzle they’d created as a test.
He passed.
He gasped her name as the third bullet hit him in the hand. “When Patrick was two he got himself stuck in the air vent and cut his hand on the grating. He was up there for five hours before anyone bothered to search for him.
“He wasn’t the genius you wanted. Wasn’t the mind you thought you could control. So you destroyed him instead.”
“We did what was needed to be done,” he hissed, smiling slightly. “He’ll be the pride and joy of the Centre. He’s the new legacy.”
“He was.”
The remaining tint faded from Lyle’s face. “I swore to him he wouldn’t have to endure the life I did. And I’d rather he be dead then spend the rest of his life in that place.”
“You… you killed him?”
“No… I saved him. I killed you.”
The last silenced bullet claimed another Centre survivor.
+ + +
It ended with her, standing in the graveyard, above her little brother’s tomb with a bouquet of different coloured roses on the ground in front of it.
“It’s funny,” she said to the figure behind her. “I spent my life searching for my freedom, and now that I’ve found it, I don’t know what to do with it.”
“You’ll figure something out.”
She turned. “Will I?” She held his gaze momentarily, then was drawn back to the grave. “For all the time I was fighting, it was always for someone else. My mother, Thomas… Patrick.” Her voice broke. “There’s no one left to fight for.”
A soft hand on her shoulder brought all the reassurance she could need, and she almost believed him when he told her: “You can fight for yourself.” She covered his aged hand with her own. In all the years she’d known him, she never had to say thank you. He always knew.
Somehow.
“Where will you go?”
“Away. There’s nothing left for me here.”
It ended with a rose that feared light, and rested in a garnet glass vase in the middle of her desk. But she never saw the crimson glass or the ebony rose, just the sun, warm on her face from the other side of the blinds.
+ + +
end
