April, 1997
The moon was half-full, rising over the mountains; bright enough to light my way back to my quarters. I closed the door behind me, locked it; passed through to my living room. The curtains were open, the moonlight a white ghost of a path across the greyness of the carpet. I didn't turn on the lights; just slumped on the couch, and sat. Trying not to think. Trying, and failing, not to feel, not even to be, until finally I gave in. I got up and went to the bureau; opened a locked drawer and took out the secret that I kept there: one of my many secrets. Then I went back to the sofa again. I sat for a long time, just looking at the bottle. Yes, there are rules about hard liquor on government-stroke-military property. I can quote them, if you'd like. Nonetheless, there was the bottle. For the past eight years it hadn't been a bottle. It had been a symbol. A symbol of how low a man can fall; a symbol of his ability to rise again ... ... given a little help from his friends ... Or, at least, from one friend. Tonight - tonight, it was just a bottle. Narrow-necked, curving into a wider belly, clear dimpled glass enclosing a swirl of golden-amber liquid, its foil cap intact, sealing away its seductive promises of warmth and comfort and, eventually, oblivion. Oblivion that I craved. Oblivion ... To forget the look in his eyes: the look of storm-wracked anguish, of bewilderment turning slowly to stunned comprehension, the guilt and the grief ... The look that I had put there. Deliberately. Intentionally. Perhaps even maliciously. Why had I done it? There was no reason, no need for me to mention the picture. If I hadn't mentioned it, he would never have looked; and if he had never looked, then he would never have known - Never have known that the price of his brother's life was not only Maggie Dawson's life, but also my freedom. A freedom, admittedly, that I had never lived, but which was no less precious to me for the knowledge that I would survive its loss, having already done so ... Why had I made him look at that picture? Was I so small-minded that I had to have my sacrifice acknowledged, like the corporate businessman who ensures that his charitable works are front-page news? Or did I, somewhere deep inside, want to cause him pain? Did I resent him so much - for everything that he has, for everything that I have not? Even though everything that I am, I owe to him? Do I resent him - blame him for trying so hard to change his own life, breaking all the rules, when he refuses to break them for me? Maybe I do. Maybe I do resent him. For Donna. For the wife he doesn't remember, the wife who has lived without him for almost three years, the wife he may never see again. For the few days he was permitted to live his own childhood, with his own family, knowing all the time that he would have to leave them again, lose them as he had before; knowing that their fates were written in stone, that nothing he could do would make a difference to their lives: that his sister would still elope with a brute, his father die too soon, his brother ... His brother ... be killed in action. And then this Leap. The very day of his brother's death. What was he to think? What else could he have done but to try to save him? If there is some sentient controlling force behind Sam's Leaps, some kind of higher power - then what kind of sick sense of humour can it have, to send him back to that day, back to April 7, 1970, and then dare to tell him not to try to interfere? It's ironic. If I hadn't been so distracted by Maggie Dawson undressing - as if I had never seen a woman's breasts before - I might have wondered just how that radio had gone off signal ... and just what it was tuned to. Sam's no soldier; he couldn't be expected to realise that something was wrong, not from something as trivial as an untuned radio. I don't have that excuse. I should have known, I should have picked up on it. And if I'd had my wits about me, if I'd followed it through, then the chu hoi's cover would have been blown, the mission would have been aborted. No difference to me, or to the men with me; we had never been, never would be rescued in either timeline. But to Tom Beckett and to Maggie Dawson - all the difference in the world. Instead, the mission went ahead, and, when the moment of truth came, the moment when the universes split, when past became future and maybe became now, I made my decision. What else could I have done? Stood there in the middle of the jungle, laid out the facts for him and then asked him to choose? I chose to lead him to Tom, not to my own former self. I just didn't quite have the strength of character to follow through. If I was going to be selfless, then I was sure as hell going to make sure I got the credit for it ... I was going to make damn sure that Sam knew what I'd done for him. Maybe that's why I did it - even knowing how it would hurt him. Maybe I thought it was time he felt some pain in his life. Or maybe I'm still angry with him because of Beth. Another Leap where he could have changed the wreck of my life for one a man might want to live and where he refused to do it. He could have done it. But that was afterwards ... I hadn't known there were lives at stake, I'd said. And so lives had been lost. Sam had been made to kill again. Oh, make no mistake, those two were scum, as far as I'm concerned the world's a better place without them ... But Sam doesn't see things that way. Sam ... Sam almost blew his chance at a medical degree when he took a stand on the subject of animal testing. Lab rats, drug dealers, he allows them all their rights. And if he had been where he was supposed to be, if he had gotten there earlier, he would have found some way to avoid the killing - or tried his damnedest. Bet on that. But he hadn't been where he should have been. He'd been caught up in the throes of my obsession ... ... and had ended up with blood on his innocent hands. And, again, that look in his eyes: his awareness of my guilt and, simultaneously, his absolution, his assumption of blame. I could have stood it better if he'd screamed at me, sworn at me, howled and yelled and kicked. Because that's what I would have done. Not Sam. It was done, and he could never walk away from it; but even numb with shock as he was, frozen with the horror of what he'd had to do, what I had made him do, he still found room in his thoughts for me; still sent me in to her, to say goodbye ... But he wouldn't go in himself. I'd tried so hard to cut this Leap to a pattern of my own choosing, and all that my meddling had succeeded in doing was to hurt Beth yet more. Watching, observing, often without Sam's awareness, I had seen tears in her eyes more than once. I had never wanted to make her cry; but, somehow, in all our years of marriage, that seemed to be all I could do. And after all that had gone before, after his whirlwind courtship and as abrupt abandonment - somehow I couldn't find it in myself to ask him to go back in to her. I wonder - if I had have done so, what would he have done? And if I had asked him - where would we be now? He had never found it easy to say "no" to me. He owed me, he used to say. I don't know for what. I know what I owe him for. For my life, for one. For the times that he did say no. For the times that he lied for me, and covered up for me; for the times that he held me when I was sick, and let me work out my alcoholic rages against him. For not turning away in disgust when I staggered and blustered, when I raved and howled and fought and wept. For finally taking the bottle away from me, and for staying with me through the long, bitter months before I realised I could live without it, for standing up to me, for never giving in to me, no matter how I pleaded, or up on me, no matter what I said or did, no matter how hard I pushed him ... I reached for the bottle; cradled it lovingly between my hands. The curves fit familiarly into my palms, sensuous and as full of promise as any woman ... As full of promise as Maggie Dawson, as lovely Maggie Dawson, who had fucked my friend to get her shot at fame and glory and had found that the wages of sin is ... ... death ... Oh, god, life hurts. But it's all that we have. And when it's gone, then we have nothing, nothing at all. And sometimes that nothing, that void, that emptiness, seems far greater a temptation than anything mere life has to offer. But I speak from the vantage point of one who has been privileged to survive. I thought that Tom Beckett, if he knew what I knew, might disagree with me. I was damn sure that Maggie Dawson would. I wanted nothing more than to take that bottle and to crawl inside it; crawl inside and never come out: never face the cold light of day, never face the horror show that was myself. There was only one thing stopping me. Just one thing; one memory. The memory of the last time I had faced this temptation - the day I accidentally discovered, through Ziggy, that my mother had died, forgotten, unreconciled, years ago, in 1974 - and, with it, the memory of the look in Sam's eyes when he had found me. How can I explain what I saw there? There was disappointment; there was sadness there, and regret. But most of all there was betrayal. He had trusted me, he had believed in me, and I had failed him. As I had failed him tonight. He gives me too much credit. How can any man live up to his impossible standards? But then again: how can any man, any man who would call himself a friend, any man with any kind of sense of honour - how can he not at least try? Slowly I set the bottle back down on the table. My hands were shaking as badly as though I had drained the thing in one long gulp. But I hadn't. The seal was still unbroken. Would remain so. For now. Maybe one day I would fall ... But it wouldn't be tonight. Whatever I have done in my life that's been bad or wrong or shameful or only weak, Sam has always been prepared to forgive me, to give me another chance. Against all reason, all motivation to the contrary, he goes on gifting me with his trust. A trust that I had betrayed already once tonight. Once was enough. More than enough. There would be no second time.
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