HLotS fiction: Unlove You - #9 (1/?)
Nov. 30th, 2008 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omg_wtf_yeahTitle: Coming Home (part 1/?)
Rating: 13
Fandom: Homicide: Life on the Street
Pairing: Frank/Tim
Summary: Preslash, set after the movie. (Spoilers for the entire series.) When Tim is released from prison Frank offers a helping hand.
Warnings: Mild profanity.
Disclaimer: The characters of Frank Pembleton and Tim Bayliss as well as the series Homicide belong to NBC, Tom Fontana and David Simon.
Table: In this post.
Prompt: #9 Always wondered what this would be like.
9. Always wondered what this would be like.
(Part One)
The road stretched out before his eyes, a thread the color of granite, hung lax and drawn taut by the dark shape of the landscape in the darkness. The headlights pierced the evening shadows and lit a narrow space on the blacktop – lighting up the road markers and guide lines that slipped past, softly. Frank shifted his numb fingertips over the rough leather of the steering wheel, feeling beneath them the wells of the indentations meant for his fingers. Dark eyes, preoccupied, focused on the road, seeing something else.
A few days ago he’d been in the kitchen with his family when the phone had rung. He’d been telling Frank Jr. to use a napkin, Mary in the alcove behind him with the phone to her ear, when he heard the timber of her voice change. “Oh, Tim.” She’d said, surprised, her eyes lifted as Frank had turned to look at her. And suddenly his heart had begun to pound. “Oh, fine, we’re doing fine. The kids?” Mary’s voice continued. The chair scraped the floor beneath him as Frank pushed it back and stood. He took a step toward her, hand outstretched for the receiver. Mary glanced at him, knitting her brows as she returned whatever conversation Tim was making. “They’re good. Frank Jr.’s in first grade now and he’s doing well.” Frank stood at her side and Mary turned from him, covering her ear with her fingers to hear more clearly. “Olivia? Yes. She’s in advanced classes now.” Over the curve of his wife’s shoulder Frank caught her bewildered expression, their eyes met and Frank felt irritated. “Yes. Yes. Do you want to talk to Frank?” Frank nodded, flexing his fingers in demand in her direction.
“Yes, you too. Uh huh. Yes.” The phone cord coiled around Mary’s thin wrist and hung between them. She covered the mouthpiece, turning toward Frank. “It’s for you.” She said lowly. Frank nodded. “It’s Tim.” Frank nodded again, lifting his eyebrows as though this were expected – an ordinary routine occurrence though they hadn’t spoken in two years. Mary seemed to want to say something, her lips sagging as she hesitated then the phone was in Frank’s palm and Mary was walking past him. Whatever it was that she’d wanted to say gone with her as she returned to the kids.
Frank felt his heartbeat in his fingers, thunderous and immense. He turned his back to the dinner table for privacy. He took a breath, eyes low on the floorboard, soft and ponderously dark. He lifted the receiver and cupped silence to his ear.
“Yeah.”
There was a pause and Frank was reminded of the distance between them, alone and together. He could see Tim’s face on the back of his eyelids – the expression he was making when he heard Frank’s long absent voice. The furrow between his brows formed on emotion that throttled his voice. Frank felt above it and yet his voice was difficult to train around words. And they were together, like they’d been in the scrubby grass and the moonlight when Tim had been shot and Frank’s vision had narrowed to him. The others were forgotten and they were alone.
“Frank.” Tim’s voice was like an exhalation. It was painful that it sounded the same. Frank lifted his eyes heavenward, mouth bowing as he closed his eyes and opened them again. A moment paused and Tim asked him again, “Frank?” His tone undemanding, lonesome. Far away. “Yeah. Yeah. I’m here.” Frank replied. He smoothed his hand over his neck, curving his shoulders as he listened. “Oh.” It sounded grateful. “I just wanted…”
Wanted what? Frank wanted to ask him but he was silent, listening Tim’s voice as though to perceive him. “I wanted to say I’m-my release date was set. I’m-I’m being released on parole. I don’t know if you heard that.”
“I heard.” Frank cut him off. Tim said “Oh” in that shaky way, that soft way that got Frank’s attention. “From-?”
“Kay Howard. She told me she spoke for you.” A brief pause. Frank rolled his eyes over the floorboard. “At the parole hearing.”
“Yeah. She did.” Tim sounded embarrassed and weary. “She did good.” Frank said in the ensuing silence. “Got you out.” There was something unforgiving in the timber of Frank’s voice. “Yeah.” Tim agreed. There was an unspoken condition on the agreement but Frank refused to accept it. “You gonna be all right?”
“All right?” Tim echoed. “Are you going to be all right?” Frank repeated, word by word. Irritation set his teeth on edge, a sense that crawled up his spine. What Tim had said on the roof came back to him. “Yeah,” Tim said softly, “I think…I’m going to be all right.” There it was – the quiet way he accused him, the silent way he let himself down. Right then he was thinking he was expecting too much from Frank or that Frank let him down again. His thoughts were clear as a pane of glass.
“You need a ride?” Frank interrupted the silence, whatever Tim would say whenever the silence was up. “Want me to come and pick you up?” Frank looked at the wall before him, eyes a deep, matte darkness. “Pick me up?” Tim asked after him. “Yeah.” Frank asserted, staring at the wall. “No. I can… I can get a ride.” Tim’s voice returned in his ear. “You sure? Do you have a place where you’re staying?”
At the table, Mary stood up, her chair legs scraping the floor. Frank turned his eyes to her over his shoulder as she communicated her surprise and reticence in her expression. She shook her head slowly, hand raised in objection. In Frank’s ear Tim’s voice came softly, confused. “N-no. My lease…” A short pause. Frank stared over the children’s heads to Mary, the minute movement of his head a shake in dismissal. “What are you asking, Frank?”
The overhead light shone on Olivia’s face as she looked between Mary and Frank, on the table where Frank’s half eaten dinner was forgotten. Beneath the light Mary was knitting her eyebrows, her head tilted. “You don’t have a place right now come stay over here while you’re looking.” Frank’s soft eyes followed Mary as gave up and she sat back down, quietly directing Olivia and Frank to get back to dinner. Her mouth formed in a downturned line.
“At your house?” Tim asked. “With Mary and the kids?”
“Yeah.” Frank supplied like Tim was an idiot.
“You don’t like sharing your space, Frank. You want to be alone with your family.” Tim sounded irritated, the rigidity of his tone returning. “Yeah.” Frank agreed diffidently. “So you come until you find your own place.” Frank couldn’t tell if he himself wanted this. Just that the words came and they were surprisingly easy though the pressure in his chest hadn’t let up. The silence on the line stretched on without either of them saying anything. Tim, skeptical of the invitation, and Frank, staring past Mary at the wall.
“I can’t do that, Frank.”
“Why not?”
“I’m a criminal, Frank.” Tim said, as patronizing as Frank had been. Frank rolled his eyes, turning back to the alcove. “Shut up.” Tim did. The soles of Frank’s dress shoes tread over the floor, bringing him further into the hallway. Shadow moved over his shoulders and the side of his face. “You want me to pick you up?”
There, in the hallway, the pitch of his voice was lower, like privacy. Tim didn’t reply for a moment as Frank waited and Frank felt conscious of the time that had passed. Of how long it had been since they’d spoken.
“Yeah. I want you to pick me up.”
“Okay.” Like smoothing a hand over fabric – like the conversation was old hat. And then they were done talking and Frank returned to the table.
As Tim’s release date had approached Frank’s mind had rotated in a different orbit. The past, what led to what happened. Back to the Baltimore Police Department, twelve years back. Back to Tim.
Mary was angry because he hadn’t consulted her before inviting Tim. She’d met him maybe a dozen times over the six years of their partnership. They were more like acquaintances than strangers but more like strangers than friends. Tim had moved cautiously in their house, a welcome interloper, pleased when he was invited in. He’d held Olivia in his arms in his nursery, smiling down at her and touching her tiny hands with his fingertips, always careful not to be too rough. And he’d killed a man with the same hands with which he’d held her. Mary didn’t know him well enough to understand the crime. Or that Tim was incapable of killing again. Mary wasn’t a police – she didn’t get the nature of crime. She lived on a separate plain, separate and above the violence to which humanity was prone.
Being an intellectual, she despised brute force. She lived above it. She wasn’t a police so she didn’t understand that there was no theory or rhetoric to it – it just was.
Frank could tell that she was thinking about taking the kids to her parents, back to D.C. for a while – for as long as it took but she didn’t want to be rude either. They’d gotten along, she and Tim, their relationship all respect between them. It was against Mary’s nature to destroy what she’d built up but her children had always been her priority and the idea of a criminal in her home with her children galled her. Frank told her she could leave if she wanted to, not expecting her to take him up on it and a few days more found her buying new sheets for the guest room, her stony silence a complement to the oppression of Frank’s heart.
He passed his days in recollection, distracted by the past.
Friday after work Frank got in the car with the evening light slanting over his windshield. Mary saw him off, standing on the stoop, still displeased with his decision. In the waning sun she’d lifted her hand in his rearview mirror as she waved goodbye.
Bayliss never made it easy for himself. Frank couldn’t stand his brand of self loathing. Through his trial news stations and victims’ advocacy groups had wanted to weigh in on the issue and Bayliss never said anything in his defense save what would hurt him. That Ryland was a predator and that he knew what he did was right. After that there was little that Danvers could do to save him, arguing more in defense than prosecution – he forgot which side of the court he was on, remembering himself the words Tim had said to him before gunning Ryland down.
Judge Broadman’s sentence was considerably light given the public scrutiny. Privately Ed Danvers had convinced her to place him in a medium security prison out of state, separating him from the convicts he’d put there. Danvers always blamed himself for the killing, something he admitted to Kay and Kay alone with Gee gone. But this went without Frank’s knowledge. All he knew was what Tim told him, what came out at the trial. For him, the proceedings passed like a fantasy and then Tim turned to look at him after the sentence was read and as Frank was standing, the bailiff led him away.
Frank eased off of the main highway onto a narrower thoroughfare, a state road, ill maintained, that snaked over dark land. The terrain got more southern, those hills and shadowed pines that made hulking shapes in the darkness beyond the headlights. The road noise rose beneath the car, through the car and suffocated the presence of the outside. It was just Frank and his memories and loss.
Warm air blew from the vents and made his eyes itchy. He watched the road.
By the time he pulled into the parking lot of Dunham Correctional Facility it was some time after eight and before ten. The night sky spread a dark and light flecked cover over the large gray building and its concrete outcroppings, seen through the chain link fences at night.
Frank had visited him once in the five years he’d been there. Standing under the weak fluorescents in the visiting room Tim had looked pale and haunted. Frank had been unable to come back. What had Tim said back then on the pier when he’d told him about his uncle? That Frank didn’t hug people – Frank didn’t offer comfort. Tim didn’t accept it either.
Metal lamps hung against the barbed wired at the top of the second fence, spilling light in circles over the sidewalk. Beyond the perimeter of the fence was an expanse of green grass, coarse to the touch but maintained. Frank parked the car in the second row of the parking lot, his headlights glancing off the concrete and the metal and the sparse green lawn. He climbed out, the sound of his car door shutting like a thunder clap as he closed it at his back. The cold of December struck his face and hands.
He turned his dark eyes over the sky and the building, over the watchtowers and the fence. The light cast a reflection on his eyes like halos or tiny orbs. Taking it in, he turned his chin down and caught sight of Tim’s figure by the fence.
The light framed his black trench coat and tousled hair. From fifty feet away Frank could see the tension in his shoulders. Tim took a step toward him then stopped. His mouth bowed open and the light shone on his lips, red and chafed from the cold. He was pale, his beard shadowed with gray. A feeling seized Frank’s chest at his sudden appearance. Tim would say it was like thirteen years ago but for Frank it wasn’t the same.
All it was was remembering what was forgotten without forgetting it at all. It was painful and it was cold. Tim’s mouth hung open, his hazel eyes focused on Frank’s approaching figure, as though he didn’t know how he looked then. Like he’d thought he’d never see him again. They commiserated in silence, what they didn’t say synchronized.
Then Frank nodded and Tim hesitated before returning his gesture. Frank could tell he was almost shaking, knew that if he touched his cheek his skin would be cold from the outdoors. Five years and Tim was still his partner. Frank reached out and grasped his arm. “Frank.” Tim said his name like it meant something else entirely. Frank nodded again and suddenly smiling, found his voice hoarse.
“Tim.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-01 04:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-01 04:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-01 04:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-01 04:19 am (UTC)♥ ♥ ♥
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-01 04:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-02 04:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-03 05:38 am (UTC)Btw, if you enjoyed mine so far my sister's writing a story about Frank and Tim after the movie, too. (She's a better writer than me so you should (http://kay-greatness.livejournal.com/2663.html#cutid1)! lol. ♥)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-03 01:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-03 05:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-03 06:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-03 07:11 am (UTC)Dude, if I worked that quickly I'd be a tower of productiveness instead of the pile of lazy that I am. Thanks for reading it!^^