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fic: changes
A/N: Title and epigraph from David Bowie’s Changes. For zulu_ottawa, because she understands the Lucas/Lakes love. :-*
Summary: “Who are you? Are you John the murderer? Or are you Lucas? The man who gave up so many years to help so many people, saved so many lives? Who are you?”
Changes
I watch the ripples change in size, but never leave the stream
It is foolish to expect that his home will be exactly as he left it. Time has passed, people have come and gone, and the course of nature has taken its toll. Just as the past fifteen years have altered him beyond recognition, so too has it reshaped the land he comes from.
The crunch of the ground underfoot is alien, taking the stead of the squelch of mud he remembers. The dry-stone wall has been recently stripped bare of its mossy overcoat, and he grazes his palm on the hostile schist as he trips on an unfamiliar rut in the path. The quaint little front door - now repainted, bland, untrue – bears the full brunt of the bitter north wind. Once the mass of ivy would have sheltered it, meandering across the front face of the house and up the chimney breast, but the walls have been ripped of their blankets and exposed to the air.
The sunlight bounces off the shiny resurrected stone and glares into his eyes. He shields them with one hand – the same hand that trickles a line of blood down the dust on his palm – and stops in the middle of the pathway, frowning. He pauses for a moment, enough time to catch a glimpse a grey squirrel disappearing into the drey of the first red he ever saw, and then drops his hand to side. He’s already lost the outside of his home; why knock on the door and spoil the inside as well?
His welcome would hardly be comforting. A sympathetic smile, perhaps a cup of tea, and he’d be sent on his way by a stranger. It would hardly do to replace a warm embrace and a clap on the back; even a cuff around the ears (his age and height wouldn’t have been the slightest deterrent) would be more welcome than forced politeness when the intruder tells him he’d be welcome to visit at any time.
---
He cannot bring himself to visit his parents’ graves, tempted though he is to walk among the ever-crumbling headstones and omnipresent weeds. He’d feel like a fraud if he walked through the churchyard, flowers in hand. How could he stand among the resting places of those whose families and friends and colleagues had mourned their loved ones and wished they were still alive, while he had not long ago wished himself dead?
He just about has enough of a conscience to shy away from the thought.
He’s tempted to seek out the sanctuary of the church, if only to bow his head and pray for the sound of his father’s soothing voice to reverberate in his memory. The constant ebb and flow in the tide of demolition and construction force him to find a pew of a different kind. He leans back into the cold wooden bench and lets the bustle of the Thursday bazaar engulf him, revelling in anonymity. His hands trail over the seat of the bench, tracing the outlines of entwined names and expletives scored irrevocably into the weathered wood. The clock in the square strikes a blessedly familiar note, then falls silent. The clamour of the market resumes, and the illusion is broken.
He doesn’t stay for long. It’s the wrong day of the week for the market, the wrong sounds, the wrong voices and aromas coming from the stalls.
---
He trudges up the hill as if on auto-pilot, his feet carrying him forward, staggering. It’s an unconscious imitation of his stumbling towards Harry, towards ‘freedom’. He’s stumbling from the clutches of a different gaoler now; this time it’s he himself who put the hood over his head, concealing his face – his identity – from the world.
The air is imperceptibly thinner as he ascends, but he breathes more freely and easily with each step further into solitude, the layers of lie upon lie untwisting from around his chest. He breaks out of the shadow of the trees and stands on the craggy precipice, the thin promontory jutting out of the rock and teetering above the sheer drop below. The layers and layers of lie upon lie fall, unravelled from their suffocating coils around his chest, and he looks to the distant ground as if following their flight, reassuring himself of their descent.
He’s contemplated jumping before, not long after ‘Lucas North’ arrived back in England. What he’d done (what awful, appalling things he’d done) to get there played on his mind over again, the broken record that would never cease. This was to be his punishment, every single aching day for fifteen years, not even suppressed by the soaking cloth that muffled his cries against the excruciating flow of water, or the flow of electricity over his beaten body, the agony burnished in black and blood behind his screwed-up eyelids, or the feel of the rope pulling tight around his neck. Perhaps if Darshavin hadn’t stopped him, hadn’t caught him in the air and brought him down from his act of desperation, he might have known respite from true pain again. Perhaps now, stepping dangerously closer to the edge of the overhang, and then even further, he still might.
He couldn’t though – not then, and certainly not there, hundreds of miles and thousands of dreams away from the place where he would want to draw his last breath. Instead he continued as he had intended - because to do otherwise would mean his friend (he mustn’t think of him as Lucas anymore) died for nothing. Hard as it is to imagine, he knew (he still knows) the nightmares would only be worse. He forges himself anew and begins afresh, erasing John Bateman, his life, his friends, from mind. In his strife to be what he now cannot he surpasses all that he could have ever been or done, but he’ll never ever think he’s done enough. He’ll keep striving, keep trying to do better, to be worthy of bearing his stolen name.
His home is the only thing he cannot deny. It slips out in a conversation and he cannot bring himself to suppress it again. When lying, the first rule was to steep it, somewhere, in some degree of truth. He had always imagined it would be this slip-up, staring them in the face for so long, that would expose his lies.
For once the truth is far less simple. He has little choice now; no longer can he tread the increasingly thin line between Lucas and John. His past – both of them – is catching up with him, and he knows it’s only a matter of time. He’s right on the edge of that precipice now, and a movement in any direction will only send him tumbling down. It’s a small choice – he knows he can’t have it both ways – but it’s an impossible one to make.
The sun disappears behind shadows which settle in above the dark mirrors of the lakes. The world below vanishes behind the low cloud and up here, so high, he cannot see the changes of the last fifteen years. This is what has drawn him here – the need for something familiar, something safe, to comfort him in his turmoil. So up he climbs, up the side of a waterfall to the top of a hill, just to find something that has remained unchanged.
Even when it’s right in front of him, glaring him in the eye, it eludes him. It’s like he’s been told not to look for the differences, and now that’s all he can see. It’s almost as if he needs to reassure himself that the past fifteen years haven’t just blended into nothing. He needs to separate the strands of himself that are Lucas and John, disentangle them and cut them free of one another, but he can’t find which end is which, and where the connections are. It’s a thin, blurred line between the two sides of himself, and he doesn’t know which side he’s standing on.
He steps back from the edge, overwhelmed.
Lucas North. John Bateman. He could be either of them, but not both. Never both.
The names merge in his head, a new cacophony to play over the sound of choking his friend to death, pulling tighter even after the struggling had stopped far too long to be a bluff. It does not matter who he is, or who he pretends to be, that noise (that sight, that scent in the air) will never leave him.
When the rain falls, lashing out and thundering down on his upturned face, there is no-one to hear his wretched scream; no-one to see his arms spread wide to embrace to the wild desolation of the distant moors; no-one to rush to his aid when he falls to his knees and beats uselessly at the sodden earth.
Exhausted, he huddles down further, his clothes providing feeble protection from the raging downpour. He shivers (from cold? from fear?), sending streams of icy water down the back of his neck. He knows he should run and cower among the tree just behind him, but the blood of a brother holds him under the freezing retribution. The graze on his hand is washed clean of dust and blood, but there’s grit under the surface and a serration in the skin. It’s another tattoo in his collection of many, etching his incarceration into his skin. Over and over he shakes his head to clear the raging torrents that hammer down on him, but the rain only seems to pelt harder, heavier, crushing him further in fear. His blood soars through his body; its soft susurrations amplifying as his heart beats impossibly faster in panic. He grits his teeth, screws up his eyes, clenches his fists. Cowed on his knees, hands pressed together and fingernails digging into his skin, he could almost be praying. His face is obscured, and his falling tears are lost amidst the raindrops maiming his face.
Alone in a terror of his own making, he grabs a stone from the ground and hurls it into the sky, screaming his desperation into the clouds. The piercing cry is lifted by the wind, the stone plummets against it, both lost in its opaque folds.
Hours later, he steals through the dusk, back down the hill. His footsteps are sure, his eyes are dry. There’s a certain wistfulness about him as his fingers skim the bark of passing trees for the final time, committing the new labyrinth to memory.
---
The greyness of the buildings, the sky, the people, pervades him. His voice catches in his throat, over and over again, his words of treachery sand-paper in his mouth. His lips are dry and his knuckles turn white as he grips the leaden weight of the gun in his hands and aims it at Harry. Harry, who gave him more chances than he deserved, Harry, whom he’s always been lying to. Harry, who fought so hard, so long, to bring him home, and who he cannot even now look in the eyes. Why does he always hurt the ones who care about him?
“Who are you? Are you John the murderer? Or are you Lucas? The man who gave up so many years to help so many people, saved so many lives? Who are you?”
He’s brought down the prison bars once again, thrown away the key. No way out.
“I’m nothing.”
His arm drops to his side, and he’s gone well before the gun clatters to the floor. There’s the scent of mossy earth in the breeze, and the sound of the wind whistling through the valleys, and as he soars through the air, he swears he can hear the cry of an osprey.
“Welcome home, Lucas.”
“Home isn’t where you live. It’s where people understand you.”
He couldn’t even understand himself. No wonder he could only ever be back in England.
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And no, he can't be both. I just wonder which one he was when he died. Was he Lucas? Did he get that final bit of redemption? AND OH GOD THAT QUOTE. UURRGHHH.
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And no, he can't be both.
That's why I only ever referred to him as as the neutral 'he', except when I used both Lucas and John. I felt that if I referred to him as Lucas, then I'd kind of be burying the part of him that is John (and vice versa).
I just wonder which one he was when he died. Was he Lucas? Did he get that final bit of redemption?
Oh god, I hope so. That's why I wrote the 'There's the scent of mossy earth in the breeze, and the sound of the wind whistling through the valleys, and as he soars through the air, he swears he can hear the cry of an osprey' bit.
Wait, which quote???
P.S. Do you think I should have put an explanation for some of the Lakes-specific stuff? Like schist, dry-stone walls, red/grey squirrels, ospreys, the fact that the market place and clock and story of the Methodist church is all real, that sort of thing?
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The quote about 'home isn't where you live, it's where people understand you'. He needs that trust.
I don't think you need explanations. I could understand what it was all about.
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(Btw, our "Missing scenes/Postscripts" ficathon is going quite well... but I really, really don't want to be a temptress. :D Good luck with everything.)
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I've got an evening free from homework tonight, so I'll do a bit of forum visiting then. Can't say anything about the missing scenes / postscripts ficathon though.
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Good to see you dipping your toes back in. :D Oh, and I didn't mean necessarily to write anything for the ficathon, just take a look at the entries already there.