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whisperjack
Deslea R. Judd
Copyright 2003
DISCLAIMER: Characters not mine. Interpretation mine.
ARCHIVE: Sure, just keep my name and headers.
RATING: PG.
SPOILERS/TIMEFRAME: Jump The Shark post-ep.
CATEGORY/KEYWORDS: Angst, romance, vignette, post-ep,
Yves/Jimmy.
SUMMARY: "She watches the world through barred windows and
thinks of raising little Jimmys and teaching them a better way.
It seems so...inadequate. So miserable a contribution to a fight
she can no longer bear to lead."
MORE FIC: http://fiction.deslea.com
FEEDBACK: Love the stuff. deslea@deslea.com.
AWARDS/ELIGIBILITY: Spooky Awards 2003 eligible.
Jimmy grew up.
The thought recurs every time she looks at him. Poor, sweet,
hapless, boyish Jimmy finally got a clue. For all the times she's
wished it would happen, she wishes she could take it away again.
It hurts him, so much, and that hurts her far more than she ever
thought it would.
His understanding is not the comfort she thought it would be.
They screw now. He calls it making love, and it is, but the
slang words come easier for her. She isn't sure why. Maybe
because those are the words Langly or Frohike would have used.
Maybe it's a way of keeping them with her.
Or maybe she's even less equipped for this than Jimmy is.
The first time was after the funeral. It was brief, and not very
satisfying. Too raw, too desperate for comfort. Join and release.
But it helped. She thought it was something she did for him,
right up until she sank weeping to the floor of the shower recess
afterwards. Then she realised it was for her as well.
They live together now, in the Gunmen's home. Yves thinks his
attachment to the hovel is idiotic, but she can't bring herself
to say so. She should leave him, go back to her work - God knows,
her father has many more horrible plans that warrant her
attention. But she can't. She sits there in the empty computer
lab, watching Jimmy muddle through his daily trials, and she
thinks: I can't leave him. If she does, he will follow, and the
last time he did that, he came back like this.
She has grand dreams, even now. Depose her father. Kill him, and
destroy his terrorist empire. The empire is her birthright; she
is entitled to do it. Reign over its destruction with Jimmy at
her side. They will walk in the ashes in the name of the dead.
She has a poetic soul, for all her pragmatism, and she has
airbrushed fantasies of righteous vengeance.
But Jimmy doesn't have the stomach for that. And she isn't sure
she does, either.
Her father taught her to kill when she was fifteen. She killed
five men by her eighteenth birthday - good men, all of them, and
she wept for them. By then, she had harnessed the means to
escape, and when she walked away, she swore she would atone. She
would undo her father's evil. Break it down, brick by brick if
necessary. She would never kill again.
She's never told Jimmy that. He wouldn't understand.
She sees how he looks at her now. The way he wonders - how could
she? How could she kill a man and cut into his body like that?
Even to save so many? Jimmy wonders, because he couldn't do it.
Just couldn't.
Guns make murder easy, her father used to say, but it takes real
guts to go up behind a man and sink your knife into his flesh.
Yves has done both, and her father was right. In the worst
possible way.
She barely remembers her teenaged kills, the ones she did as
Lois, but the knowledge came to her when she hunched over
Houghton's body. She sat there on her heels, wondering, can I do
this? Could she afford to call up the ghost of the girl she left
behind?
But in the end, she couldn't afford not to. If she had to damn
herself to save so many, then she would. Perhaps there is a
special place in hell for people who sell their souls that way.
So she did it. She took her scalpel. The memory of how it felt
to slice into flesh came back to her, like preternatural
knowledge. Ingrained and eternal. She felt it give and shift,
softness dividing, and then the deeper, harder layers of muscle.
She felt sick...but she also felt powerful. When she removed the
cartilage with its deadly cargo, it was her trophy. Her prize.
For an hour, she held the lives of thousands in her hands, and
she longed to take it back to Malta and unleash it on her father
and his work. It took every higher instinct she had to burn it
instead.
She threw up when it was done.
When does the end cease to justify the means? How long can evil
fight evil before the cure is no better than the cause? How long
can she fight, and still keep her soul? She wonders on nights
like these, after Jimmy goes to sleep, and she never has an
answer. She watches the world through barred windows and thinks
of raising little Jimmys and teaching them a better way. It seems
so...inadequate. So miserable a contribution to a fight she can
no longer bear to lead.
"Lois?"
She looks away from the tiny window. "Over here, Jimmy." She
pulls her robe tighter around her. Suddenly aware of the cold.
"And don't call me that."
"Sorry." He gets up. Pulls on track pants, and pads over in his
bare feet. He drops down into the little armchair opposite hers.
"What are you thinking?"
"Nothing," she says, a bald-faced lie. "It's just-"
He frowns. His hair is sticking up, she notes fondly. "Yes?"
She shrugs. "It's funny that you called me Lois, that's all."
She shouldn't really have said anything, but something about that
messed-up hair brings her defences down a notch.
"It's your name."
She shakes her head. "No, Jimmy, it isn't. I haven't been Lois
for a long time. I hope never to be her again."
"But you named yourself for a killer," he reproaches. "I don't
like calling you that." Especially not now, she supposes, but she
doesn't say so.
"I am a killer, Jimmy." She looks away.
"Is that why you chose it?" he asks, and she wonders whether
he's guessed more than she's told him. Either that, or found out
more than she gave him credit for when he was looking for her.
"I chose it because he epitomises our generation's search. For
authority that we can trust. This country had that once, Jimmy,
and we lost it. Whatever else he did, or didn't do, he believed
we could do better. That we could be better. And he wasn't afraid
to defect to do it. He wouldn't identify with something he didn't
believe in."
"You thought about that when you ran away from your father?"
God yes. Back then, she thought Oswald was a misunderstood hero.
She knows it's more complicated now, but... "Yeah."
"I always wondered why you left. Like, why you didn't stay
inside and do it there."
She feels that cold chill again. It sweeps over her. Like heavy
wind, beating her back. "It would have eaten me alive."
Jimmy nods. Expression grave. "It was that bad?"
She sighs. Runs her hand over her face. "You wouldn't-"
He grabs her hand. "Don't *do* that! Don't tell me I wouldn't
understand. I know what the guys used to say about me. I loved
those guys, but I was just this big dumb puppy dog to them."
She tugs at her hand. "Jimmy-"
"And I'm *not* smart. But I'm not stupid, and I'm not mean. I'll
understand it if you tell me."
"Jimmy-"
"Yves, you have to stop shutting me out, or we're just gonna
drift along until it all falls to pieces."
She gets her hand away from him. "Jimmy!"
He looks at her. "What?"
She sighs again. He's right, dammit. "I can't believe I'm doing
this, but I'll tell you. Just promise me it won't muck things up,
all right?"
So she tells him, and he doesn't completely understand, but he
understands more than she thought he would. They sit up for
hours, and she tells him things she's never told anyone. There
are gentle touches, and tears, and when light begins to dawn,
there's lovemaking as well. She doesn't call it screwing any
more.
"Do you really think about raising little Jimmys?" he asks her
afterwards.
"I don't know, Jimmy," she sighs, propping up her head with her
hand. "Sometimes I do. But then, sometimes I think about Byers,
that last day."
"'We never gave up. We never will. If that's the best they can
say about us, that'll do,'" he quotes softly. "Yeah. I remember
that too. I never heard him talk like that before. It was almost
like he knew."
"I honestly don't know," she says. "I haven't always done what
was right, Jimmy. Not like you. But I've always known. But now -
for the first time in my life, I honestly don't know what's
right."
"Me either," he says, and that floors her. Jimmy was always the
moral conscience of the Gunmen, at least in her mind. "I think
that's what this time is for. This - downtime we're having."
"You may be right, Jimmy." She strokes his cheek with the back
of her hand. Smiles at him. He really is dear to her. "You're
smarter than you give yourself credit for, you know."
He beams at her in that silly, goofy way he has. "I'll be with
you when you work it out, Yves. You know that, right?"
"Yes. I know that, Jimmy."
Just a downtime, she tells herself. They haven't given up. They
never will.
If that's the best that can be said of them, that'll do.
END
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I don't normally go for oblique titles, but
nothing much came to me for this one. The title, whisperjack, is
derived from Whispering Jack, the title of an album by prominent
Australian singer John Farnham. A lot of Farnham's work deals
with social responsibility, and he's also a brilliant musician.
The guy has been around since the sixties and he's still going
strong. I think in a way he had quite a bit of influence on my
social conscience when I was growing up. I think of his work a
lot when I work with those kinds of themes.