[Fic] Irreconcilable
Nov. 14th, 2010 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeTitle: Irreconcilable
Source: Eve and Dawn
Genre: Mainstream
Characters: Eve/Grace/Lily
Word Count: 1,490 words
Summary: Lily thinks on her past life as Grace, and her husband at the time, and the nature of marriage.
A/N: Written for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
origfic_bingo prompt "Marriage"
Of all things, the fight with Jason (or Jack or David or whoever he was) reminded her of fights with her ex-husband. "Which," she muttered, standing in front of the fridge and staring at its contents without seeing anything. "Should be a sign that you should stay away from him."
That was going to be difficult, living close to him as she did and as wide a radius as they both seemed to have. It was the running that did it. She kept catching glimpses of him when she went for her runs, and sometimes she ran into him in one of the local coffee houses. There was that time in the diner.
She wasn't going to pick up and move again because there was an amnesiac ex-spy in her backyard. No one wanted that, not her, not Rose, and there was no reason to suspect that his former employers knew where he was or had any inclination to go after him. And even if they did, that didn't make them targets. The CIA didn't know they had anything to do with Bourne, she and he hadn't been seen together more than a couple of times jogging and once in the diner.
"Which is also a sign you should stay away from him." Lily shut the door and headed into the living room, flopping on the couch. If she did keep hanging around, sitting with him in diners, people would see them together. People would associate them together.
And fighting with him reminded her of fighting with her ex. Not arguing directly, but somehow she felt wrong-footed and angry.
There were a number of things she could have been doing. Wrapping up the post-end-of-day business (she kept business hours at least in part to keep her head on straight), getting dinner started, picking up a little. She started the picking up part but by the time she got to the last couple of unpacked boxes she was sitting cross-legged on the floor going through old photo albums. Dating pictures. Wedding pictures. They'd looked really happy together. They had been happy together, hadn't they? Some days she thought so, some days she wasn't sure she trusted her own memories. Her wedding ring was tucked down between the pages of the photo album; her engagement ring had fallen out of the book into the bottom of the box. She left both where they were.
Leaning back against the couch and letting her head fall back to the cushions, she didn't know what she was doing. What she meant to do. Retirement, she was pretty sure, was a good idea. At least for her. Daydreaming about married life, about taking long walks with someone by a river, taking simple pleasure in going running with another human being? That was a sign, surely, that it was time to settle down. Except Rose wasn't ready to settle. She still had that taste for adventure, and with how she'd been raised she was more than prepared to have adventures most women her age didn't, and couldn't. And there was the matter of enemies she'd made, although admittedly most of them were dead, in prison, or had bigger targets than her to come after before they got to her. With her baby sister to look after she'd worked as hard as she could to make sure as few people as possible could or had a reason to come after her.
Things were so much simpler when she'd just worked security. When she'd had a cover identity to make herself older than she seemed, to give herself a background that would keep her there, but that was it. When she'd been working a steady job, and she'd been good at it, too. When she'd been with someone, then engaged, then married. A steady job, a stable home life.
Sure, there had been a few incidents, sometimes things had gotten more violent than they probably did at most security jobs. Then again, most security jobs probably provided guards and radios to sit in front of buildings where nothing ever happened, and every thirty they got up to do their rounds.
Lily stopped at the pictures of their honeymoon. She remembered this, moments of realizing that she was a wife, she was someone's wife, she was his wife, and he was her husband forever and ever. Feeling like this was enough.
There was a picture of the two of them mugging it for a hand-held camera along the wall of a turret of some castle or another in Europe. She didn't recognize the treeline and she hadn't written the location on the back, but she remembered that castle. She remembered how he'd bowed in one of the rooms and invited her to dance, and she'd curtsied with invisible skirts and they'd danced. She remembered his smile. The way he'd laughed. And afterwards they'd gone for cool drinks and a light dinner and walked for hours, till her feet were sore and blistered the next morning. Which didn't matter, because they spent the whole next day in bed.
No, she hadn't thought married life was always going to be like that, but she'd kind of hoped. Maybe not adventures and castles and wandering around Europe not shooting anyone, but this kind of easy comfort where she could look up and he'd be coming out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and his hair dripping, brushing his teeth. And he'd look at her with that silent question in his eyes and toothpaste on the corner of his mouth. And she'd look back at him while doing that bounce you did trying to squeeze into your jeans.
Except it hadn't been that way. It had been good for the first couple of years. And when she got pregnant it was good, too. It wasn't the best, but it was good, and it was sustainable. They made plans. They fixed up a nursery. He threw himself into work, saving money for their baby, working long and sometimes odd hours but it meant they could start a sizable college fund and still renovate the house in a couple years besides.
(In retrospect, that was probably when it started.)
And then there had been the fall, and the men she'd fought. She'd been in the hospital. They told her what had happened, that she'd been injured, they hadn't been able to save the baby. A boy, they said. And they'd had to deal with some emergency bleeding, and a rupture, and they said she shouldn't have children again. And then they'd sent her home.
The fighting started then. Not that it started from nothing, but he was tense, quiet. She wanted to try and talk it out after the first couple of days, she knew from living alone with Joy, Dawn, Rose all those years that if it didn't get talked out it festered and made things worse, but he didn't want to talk. He left. Or he got called out. So they didn't talk, and they took the pictures and the mobile and the wallpaper down from the nursery in silence. There were no pictures of that nursery; she'd destroyed them all, or he had, one or the other.
He'd started divorce proceedings, citing irreconcilable differences, and she'd put up one or two night's worth of arguments before she realized she was too exhausted to argue. She could trace what had happened between them back to a point, but she didn't know why. Why they hadn't been strong enough to recover from this. What she had done wrong.
It took her some years to realize that it hadn't been anything she had done wrong. They hadn't worked out because of many reasons, and enough of them were his reasons as well as hers that... that was just how marriage worked. You got out of it what you put into it, and you shared it equally. And if one person stopped participating, it stopped working. Like any partnership. She knew that about work, she knew that even about the business of assassination. But she hadn't realized that about marriage, somehow. Maybe she still believed in a little magic, after all that. That she'd caught a little of her own.
"No..." Lily murmured to herself, closing the books and shoving them back in their boxes, the boxes under the spare bed. No, fighting with Bourne wasn't at all like fighting with her ex-husband. There was no magic there. There was the reality of one shell-shocked, amnesiac ex-soldier, ex-assassin, and one tired and scarred assassin, circling each other until they decided that they weren't a threat. And probably for weeks, maybe years after that, depending on how long he stayed. Fighting with Bourne was just arguing with another one sort of like her. Not like her ex-husband.
Right, then. And it was time to get dinner on, Rose would be getting home soon, and they could pick up a little and then maybe they could go out for a walk or a run afterwards.
Source: Eve and Dawn
Genre: Mainstream
Characters: Eve/Grace/Lily
Word Count: 1,490 words
Summary: Lily thinks on her past life as Grace, and her husband at the time, and the nature of marriage.
A/N: Written for
origfic_bingo prompt "Marriage"Of all things, the fight with Jason (or Jack or David or whoever he was) reminded her of fights with her ex-husband. "Which," she muttered, standing in front of the fridge and staring at its contents without seeing anything. "Should be a sign that you should stay away from him."
That was going to be difficult, living close to him as she did and as wide a radius as they both seemed to have. It was the running that did it. She kept catching glimpses of him when she went for her runs, and sometimes she ran into him in one of the local coffee houses. There was that time in the diner.
She wasn't going to pick up and move again because there was an amnesiac ex-spy in her backyard. No one wanted that, not her, not Rose, and there was no reason to suspect that his former employers knew where he was or had any inclination to go after him. And even if they did, that didn't make them targets. The CIA didn't know they had anything to do with Bourne, she and he hadn't been seen together more than a couple of times jogging and once in the diner.
"Which is also a sign you should stay away from him." Lily shut the door and headed into the living room, flopping on the couch. If she did keep hanging around, sitting with him in diners, people would see them together. People would associate them together.
And fighting with him reminded her of fighting with her ex. Not arguing directly, but somehow she felt wrong-footed and angry.
There were a number of things she could have been doing. Wrapping up the post-end-of-day business (she kept business hours at least in part to keep her head on straight), getting dinner started, picking up a little. She started the picking up part but by the time she got to the last couple of unpacked boxes she was sitting cross-legged on the floor going through old photo albums. Dating pictures. Wedding pictures. They'd looked really happy together. They had been happy together, hadn't they? Some days she thought so, some days she wasn't sure she trusted her own memories. Her wedding ring was tucked down between the pages of the photo album; her engagement ring had fallen out of the book into the bottom of the box. She left both where they were.
Leaning back against the couch and letting her head fall back to the cushions, she didn't know what she was doing. What she meant to do. Retirement, she was pretty sure, was a good idea. At least for her. Daydreaming about married life, about taking long walks with someone by a river, taking simple pleasure in going running with another human being? That was a sign, surely, that it was time to settle down. Except Rose wasn't ready to settle. She still had that taste for adventure, and with how she'd been raised she was more than prepared to have adventures most women her age didn't, and couldn't. And there was the matter of enemies she'd made, although admittedly most of them were dead, in prison, or had bigger targets than her to come after before they got to her. With her baby sister to look after she'd worked as hard as she could to make sure as few people as possible could or had a reason to come after her.
Things were so much simpler when she'd just worked security. When she'd had a cover identity to make herself older than she seemed, to give herself a background that would keep her there, but that was it. When she'd been working a steady job, and she'd been good at it, too. When she'd been with someone, then engaged, then married. A steady job, a stable home life.
Sure, there had been a few incidents, sometimes things had gotten more violent than they probably did at most security jobs. Then again, most security jobs probably provided guards and radios to sit in front of buildings where nothing ever happened, and every thirty they got up to do their rounds.
Lily stopped at the pictures of their honeymoon. She remembered this, moments of realizing that she was a wife, she was someone's wife, she was his wife, and he was her husband forever and ever. Feeling like this was enough.
There was a picture of the two of them mugging it for a hand-held camera along the wall of a turret of some castle or another in Europe. She didn't recognize the treeline and she hadn't written the location on the back, but she remembered that castle. She remembered how he'd bowed in one of the rooms and invited her to dance, and she'd curtsied with invisible skirts and they'd danced. She remembered his smile. The way he'd laughed. And afterwards they'd gone for cool drinks and a light dinner and walked for hours, till her feet were sore and blistered the next morning. Which didn't matter, because they spent the whole next day in bed.
No, she hadn't thought married life was always going to be like that, but she'd kind of hoped. Maybe not adventures and castles and wandering around Europe not shooting anyone, but this kind of easy comfort where she could look up and he'd be coming out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and his hair dripping, brushing his teeth. And he'd look at her with that silent question in his eyes and toothpaste on the corner of his mouth. And she'd look back at him while doing that bounce you did trying to squeeze into your jeans.
Except it hadn't been that way. It had been good for the first couple of years. And when she got pregnant it was good, too. It wasn't the best, but it was good, and it was sustainable. They made plans. They fixed up a nursery. He threw himself into work, saving money for their baby, working long and sometimes odd hours but it meant they could start a sizable college fund and still renovate the house in a couple years besides.
(In retrospect, that was probably when it started.)
And then there had been the fall, and the men she'd fought. She'd been in the hospital. They told her what had happened, that she'd been injured, they hadn't been able to save the baby. A boy, they said. And they'd had to deal with some emergency bleeding, and a rupture, and they said she shouldn't have children again. And then they'd sent her home.
The fighting started then. Not that it started from nothing, but he was tense, quiet. She wanted to try and talk it out after the first couple of days, she knew from living alone with Joy, Dawn, Rose all those years that if it didn't get talked out it festered and made things worse, but he didn't want to talk. He left. Or he got called out. So they didn't talk, and they took the pictures and the mobile and the wallpaper down from the nursery in silence. There were no pictures of that nursery; she'd destroyed them all, or he had, one or the other.
He'd started divorce proceedings, citing irreconcilable differences, and she'd put up one or two night's worth of arguments before she realized she was too exhausted to argue. She could trace what had happened between them back to a point, but she didn't know why. Why they hadn't been strong enough to recover from this. What she had done wrong.
It took her some years to realize that it hadn't been anything she had done wrong. They hadn't worked out because of many reasons, and enough of them were his reasons as well as hers that... that was just how marriage worked. You got out of it what you put into it, and you shared it equally. And if one person stopped participating, it stopped working. Like any partnership. She knew that about work, she knew that even about the business of assassination. But she hadn't realized that about marriage, somehow. Maybe she still believed in a little magic, after all that. That she'd caught a little of her own.
"No..." Lily murmured to herself, closing the books and shoving them back in their boxes, the boxes under the spare bed. No, fighting with Bourne wasn't at all like fighting with her ex-husband. There was no magic there. There was the reality of one shell-shocked, amnesiac ex-soldier, ex-assassin, and one tired and scarred assassin, circling each other until they decided that they weren't a threat. And probably for weeks, maybe years after that, depending on how long he stayed. Fighting with Bourne was just arguing with another one sort of like her. Not like her ex-husband.
Right, then. And it was time to get dinner on, Rose would be getting home soon, and they could pick up a little and then maybe they could go out for a walk or a run afterwards.