fThe Beginning Of Everything

"It's not your fault."

He'd spent twenty years wishing it were true, but now that he's absolved of the guilt of one soul, it's fitting the universe sentences him with another.

"Kurt, it's not your fault."

Except this time it is. He curls away from the hands on his shoulders, desperately grabbing. He curls into himself and away from the blinding light that floods the room that had been dark for so long. He leans over her. There's blood on his hands. There's blood on his hands and his clothes and the ground and on her—

"Kurt—"

Oh god.

Running is mindless, but so are a lot of other things these days.

The leaves in Central Park are changing colors, fiery reds and vibrant siennas. The trees are dying. It's fall, just a few weeks before Thanksgiving. Has that much time really passed?

He runs early in the morning, when there are less people. It's easier to be alone with your thoughts when the only thing you have for company is the sound of your breathing, your feet on the ground. He breathes, in and out, filling his lungs with air while they scream in protest at the work he forces on them. He runs faster, determined to turn the entire world into a blur, to make it disappear, and maybe make himself disappear too.

That's how it should be, he thinks.

He's glad that the leaves on the trees aren't green, because it reminds him of her eyes.

Other things remind him of her too.

The green necklace that was hers, but not really hers, abandoned on his dresser at home. A picture from some ridiculous photo booth in the Metropolitan that she'd forced him to get into on their second date. The notebook he keeps on his bedside table of all her drawings that she never told him about (including the one of him). The black velvet box that remains permanently closed in the drawer next to his personal firearm that he never told her about. The files upon files of every picture the FBI had ever taken of her body—the last hard copy in his possession after the records at the bureau were mysteriously destroyed. The final autopsy report from the NSA. The nightmares. The whispers in the bureau halls that he hears when he passes by.

"How many weeks were they locked up down there?"

"Twelve, I think. Three months."

"Damn shame."

The two men, strangers, are just an arms length away, thinking they can't be heard. The split second it takes for them to pass each other in the narrow FBI hallway seems like an eternity. Kurt conjures up visions of retribution in his head; flying fists, hands wrapped around fragile throats as he throws them against the wall. It would be so easy. He's done it before. His hands twitch and ball tight, his nails digging into the palms, resisting temptation.

It's what she would want. Some days he's better at honoring her memory than others. It's been a few weeks since the incident in the bullpen. He can't afford to start another fist fight on federal property.

Kurt, please. She'd say it exactly like that, in earnest, anytime she wanted something from him. He'd heard those words a thousand times. Sometimes angrily, defiantly, in the office or in the field. Sometimes coyly with a smile, at home in their bed. Once in desperation, in that god forsaken room in that godforsaken place at the end of the world, at the end of everything.

He can still hear her, like she's standing there right next to him, he can feel her breath on his ear, a ghost. Sometimes he likes to think she is.

Three months is an eternity and no time at all.

It had been an accident, a mistake. Unforgivable by any measure. Unforgettable.

He wishes he would have listened to Reade when he tried to stop them, but at the time Somalia seemed so far away and so close all at once, impossible to avoid, calling them into the lions den under the pretense of promise. Never mind the political unrest there, the pirates and militia groups that ravaged the desert. He wishes he would have stopped her, but she was so desperate for answers, for explanations, and he'd never been very good at telling her no to begin with.

He remembers the exact moment the universe imploded.

They'd stepped off the prop plane and into a world of swirling sand and shocking sunlight. He could see her smile and his reflection in her sunglasses. He could hear her laugh, he had said something funny, and then her scream right before he felt the sharp blow to the back of his head.

"You know it's not healthy to drink copious amounts of alcohol alone."

Tasha finds him when he doesn't want to be found. She crawls up onto the barstool next to him and orders them another round. She has whatever he's having, as if it might help her understand him better, as if it might help her help him. He doesn't have the heart to tell her it's too late, he's beyond helping.

"It's not healthy period," Kurt peers down at the collection of empty glasses around him. He doesn't try to explain it, to give himself an out. It's wrong, and they both know it. Tasha peers at him in concern.

"We're all worried about you, you know," her hand grabs his shoulder, and the nerves and synapses in his body rally in a valiant effort, neglected with disuse, trying in vain to feel something. He remembers the time she grabbed them before. "I wish you'd talk to someone."

He knows he should smile, offer her some sort of acknowledgement, and he tries, but it falls short. The smile is weak, the acknowledgement weaker, and his eyes fall back down to his whiskey. He realizes his mistake too late. His forearms are exposed were the sleeves of his shirt are rolled up.

He tries to pretend he doesn't see Tasha's eyes flit to the skin that runs from his wrist to his elbows. He pretends the scars aren't there, that the burn marks melted into his skin don't exist, and in the same breath he's glad that they do. They're the last tangible thing he has left of the those last three months. They're the last thing he has left of her that can't be taken away from him.

"Oh Kurt, what did they do to you?"

Oh god oh god oh god.

"It doesn't matter, Tasha."

Nothing does, not anymore.

It had been a trap. They'd been ambushed. Tricked.

He woke up in a dark, windowless room, in a panic.

Then she was there beside him on the ground, arms around his neck, tears hot against his skin as she pressed her cheek to his. Alive. His heart hammered in his chest, fear threatening to suffocate him. He pulled her closer, wrapped his arms around her slender torso until she was flush against him.

"I think we made a mistake, coming here." When she spoke it almost sounded like laughter, but strangled, like it was some sort of joke. She spoke like they could open the barred steel door on the other side of the room, waltz by the armed guards and go home. He dug his hands into her hair, pressed his lips to her temple, only to hear her muted hiss of pain, accompanied by the salty tang of blood.

"It's nothing," she flinched under his touch. He tried to catalogue her injuries, but it was impossible. He could barely see her in the dark.

"Do you think you can stand?"

He thought he could see her bite her lip, the reluctant shake of her head.

"I think my leg's broken."

He takes short, quick showers, no more than five minutes at a time if he can manage it. He scrubs his body like a man possessed, washes his hair in a flurry of hands, the hot water scalding his skin. As long as it's not cold he can stand it, just long enough, to make sure he's clean enough to show up at work and be presentable. It's taken time, to get here. He remembers his first week home, how every drop of water that hit him during that first real shower had been like a knife against his back.

He can't sleep when it rains though, the tap tap tap of the water on his apartment roof enough to make him insane. He refuses offers to accompany Patterson to the beach, because the smell of the salt makes him ill.

The first time they took him, he tried to fight back. When they threatened to take her instead, he went willingly.

He was never sure how much time passed between the moment they dragged him out of that room, and the moment they brought him back. It could have been hours, or days, but he lived for the moment they would throw him back into the dark cell. Who are you? Who do you work for? Who is she? Those are the questions they asked him. He lived for the moment he felt her hands on his face, and the sound of her voice, calling him back. He would cough up the water they'd poured over his head, vomiting in the far corner until he would dry heave, his chest on fire.

She never left him, she'd wipe his mouth and pull him back to the far wall where they would curl into one another and stay like that until the men came to take him away again. She was clammy to the touch, feverish. Her leg was broken, and the infection was spreading.

"We're near the coast—" he'd cough, throat hoarse, words raspy "—they use salt water."

"You can't keep doing this."

"I don't have a choice."

He'd never had a choice when it came to her, he never would.

He attends his sessions with Dr. Borden because he has to.

He tells the man what he wants to hear, he engages in the necessary amount of conversation so that he won't be labeled as high risk like he was the first few weeks he'd been home. There are scars on his wrist that he gave himself, next to the blow torch burns and the residual scars of ropes and chains they used to hang him from the ceiling while they beat him, or tie him to a chair while they forced him to watch them beat her instead, or when they'd bind his hands behind his back and strip him naked before shoving him in a box barely big enough to breathe in.

"Kurt?"

He blinks, he immediately smiles, his first defense when someone realizes that he's not actually listening to them. That he's not actually there.

Dr. Borden isn't convinced. He writes something on his notepad, sets it aside and then leans forward in his seat.

"Sarah and Reade are worried about you," the doctor frowns, "I know you've made leaps and bounds, but are you sure there's nothing else you'd like to talk about? Nothing that's been bothering you?"

Kurt thinks about his sister, and how she had found him that night in his bathroom. He'd been home for seven days, a blink. He thinks about how he'd tried to drown himself, despite how terrified the water made him. He thinks about how he'd tried to bleed himself dry instead when that didn't work. The water had been so red.

"No, I'm fine."

When he's alone, he talks to her.

Sometimes it's during his late night walks near the harbor, where he sits on the bench at the park he never got to show her. Sometimes it's on the subway when he takes it to work like they used to do after she moved in, because she loved to people watch. He asks her what she thinks about the weather, or the Red Sox winning the world series. He tells her, with pride, that they reissued his service pistol to him after he passed his psych evaluation (he asks her to promise not to tell anyone, but he's pretty sure he tricked them into doing it, obviously). He tells her about Sarah and Reade's engagement, and about how he wishes he would have asked her to marry him. I got you a ring.

He pretends she's right there next to him, smiling, laughing. He pretends he can reach out and touch the bird on her neck. He pretends she answers back.

Kurt was sure they would die.

She had picked up bits and pieces of the Arabic and Somali their captors had spoken to one another when they'd taken her away the last time. They were running low on patience. They could martyr the two Americans instead and be done with it. They'd use their dead bodies to send a message. They were out of time.

She pulled him to her like she had done so many times before in the dark, but there was something inherently different in her touch this time. There was something final in the way she pressed her lips to his, something desperate. His hands skimmed the flat of her stomach under her tattered t-shirt, lingering on the ribs he shouldn't be able to feel. He imagined what kind of bruises accompanied the tattoos that littered her skin, what kind of caked blood from the beatings she'd endured. Her mouth tasted like iron as her tongue skimmed against his, hungry, and she settled into his lap with a muffled cry as she folded her broken leg underneath her.

He wanted to tell her that they shouldn't do this, not here. She would make her leg worse, she needed to save her strength—he had a thousand excuses. He tried to tell her, but she silenced him with her fingers pressed lightly against his split lips, her forehead resting against his. His fingers—possibly broken too, from the butts of guns, from hammers, from violent hands—curl softly into her hair. He was too tired to fight her. He wouldn't.

"Kurt, please."

He wakes up in the middle of the night and almost shoots out of bed, covered in a cold sweat, heart racing in his chest. The dream always ends the same way, with him reaching for her, but he's never close enough. She says it again and again. Crimson blooms around her neck. Kurt, please. She slips away every time, just as their fingers brush, and then she's gone.

He doesn't realize he's sobbing until his sister is kneeling beside his bed, light from the hallway flooding his room, her hands gathering his.

"It's ok, Kurt, you're going to be ok."

She slips away every time, and every time he wishes he could follow her.

"I was waiting to give you this, I was waiting for the right time, or something," Sarah tells him over breakfast. Sawyer is on a boys day out with Reade, at a Jet's game, with Tasha. They look at each other over the kitchen table, two siblings who have never been closer, or so far apart.

"Is there ever a right time?" Kurt asks her, but he's also asking the universe. He plays with the waffles on his plate, and takes a bite, and he tries to remember when his sister stopped burning things when she cooked. What else has he missed?

"No," Sarah slides him a manila envelope, with his name written on it in a swooping cursive he recognizes instantly, "I don't think there is."

Slowly, Kurt sets down his fork and reaches for the envelope. His fingers lift it easily and he inspects it, a current of energy, of wary excitement coursing through him at the idea of finding a piece of her still here. It's light, slender, and when he closes his eyes it's almost like it doesn't exist at all. Just like him. Just like her. He looks to Sarah for an explanation, and she tries to smile, but her blue eyes are sad, tired.

"I was helping her make it, for your anniversary, before you left. She would want you to have it."

There is a USB drive in the envelope.

Kurt decides to take a few days off of work, which Mayfair and Dr. Borden approve immediately. They see it as a win after months of begging him to take leave, only to be met with his refusals. He tells Sarah he's going to spend a few days at their family cabin, that he'll call her when he gets there. He packs a bag with a few things, including his laptop.

It's late when he gets there, nearly dark, it's the end of spring and he can see fireflies out past the trees. Kurt pauses on the cabin steps, and he thinks of the long weekends they spent here, together. He thinks about the first time they came, the early morning and how he'd found her sitting on the steps with her coffee. He thinks about how he'd kissed her, how he'd taken her coffee away from her and laid her down on the blanket they'd been sitting on, and all the things that followed.

The end of spring means it's almost summer, which means it's almost been a year since he's been home. It feels like it was yesterday. It feels unreal. Impossible.

He starts a fire once he gets inside, he lays out his sleeping bag by the hearth and sets his laptop bag, with the USB, safely to the side. He can't sleep in the bedroom, because the last time he'd been here was with her.

Gunshots were the first thing he heard. Gunshots and angry, raised voices. Panicked voices.

The door to the room that had become their entire world flung open, the masked faces of their captors barely visible in the shadows or the dim lit lamps they carried. There was a loud noise from somewhere outside the compound, and the world shook, dust falling from the ceiling, and the masked men began to scream in Somali. Or maybe it was Arabic. She had tried to teach him the difference, but they were speaking so quickly he couldn't keep up. Their voices bled together. One of them held a knife.

"Get up! Taagan!" One man gestured at them with a gun, eyes wild and white.

Kurt can feel the life draining from him, he can feel her hands tighten their grip around his neck, refusing to move, her shallow breathing against his chest. Somewhere down the long hallway more shouts erupt, and more gunfire.

"Fuck this," The man with the knife snarled, pushing the other aside, and he stalked forward, arm raised, "if they think they've come to save their friends, they're mistaken."

Kurt realized what was happening. Help had come, finally.

Somehow he found the strength to move, and before any of the men in the room could realize what he was doing he was up off the ground. He attacked the first man with the knife, dodging one strike from the blade, then another, missing a third before knocking it from his hands. He wrapped his arms around his exposed neck. It happened so quickly, so easily—he could feel his bones snap as he jerked the man's head to the side, and the body dropped to the dusty floor.

The two remaining men looked on, stunned. Kurt pressed his hand to his side and pulled it back to find it covered in black-red blood. The armed man raised his gun, prepared to shoot, and the voices from down the hallway drew closer, flashes of light from night-vision scopes sweeping the room from afar. It caused the man to pause, and it was the only moment of hesitation she needed. She was behind the armed man in an instant, having crept around the edge of the room, castaway knife in hand. The blood curling scream that erupted from the man's mouth, the blood, filled the dark room as she plunged the weapon into his back.

It covered up the sounds of the last living captor he drew his own knife.

Kurt's vision swam. He tried to warn her, to lunge forward, but it was too late.

The man reached for her, snatching her head back, drawing the knife across her throat just as the room erupted into gunfire.

Kurt wasn't sure if the screams were from him, or someone else, as she fell into his arms.

She was dead in under a minute. Her carotid completely severed. One minute her green eyes were so bright, smiling even, her hands balled in his shirt, and then nothing. She was gone and PMCs were swarming the room, lead by Tasha Zapata and Edgar Reade.

"Kurt, we have to move, Reade will carry her." Tasha is reaching for him, her dirt caked face from the desert dust streaked with tears from behind her helmet and tactical goggles. "You have to get up—Kurt, please."

Kurt didn't hear Tasha. His body shook violently in silent sobs. Her body was already cold, but he clung to her, cradled her against his chest, praying for the first time in years for it to have been him instead.

"It's not your fault."

He'd spent twenty years wishing it were true, but now that he was absolved of the guilt of one soul, it was fitting the universe sentenced him with another.

"Kurt, it's not your fault."

There was blood on his hands and his clothes and the ground and on her— Oh god oh god oh god, please.

"Kurt—"

It pooled in the sand around him, his and hers.

He sets the laptop on the old wood table in the kitchen. There are coasters under the legs that she put there to keep it from shaking. He places the USB drive in the port, and holds his breath. At first nothing happens, and the beginnings of disappointment begins to swallow him, until a single video file appears in the downloads folder.

He clicks on it.

She appears, sitting on their couch at the apartment, and she looks off screen for a second and then frowns.

"Sarah, is this thing on?"

It's the first time he's heard her voice in almost a year.

She starts out by talking about everything. Work. Sawyer's latest school play. A woman who stopped her randomly on the street one day to admire some of her tattoos. The video is over an hour long, stitched together from different times and different days. He watches her in seasons from fall to winter to spring to summer. She's in knee high boots and trench coats after a November rain storm, she's in an ugly Christmas sweater the night of their work party, she's in her running clothes covered in sweat bright and early in the morning, or curled up on the couch under a blanket with a book. She tells him everything.

Every now and then Sawyer makes an appearance, interrupting one of her daily monologues by jumping in frame. Sometimes Sarah passes by in the background, and waves. Sometimes there's a clip of him passed out asleep on their bed.

"Promise you won't think I'm creepy, but I like to watch you sleep, it's peaceful. Forgive me?"

All is forgiven.

Some of the video shows her walking in Central Park after it's snowed, or sitting at a subway station waiting on the train. Sometimes she's sitting alone at her work desk, the last one in the office after a particularly hard case with circles under her eyes. Sometimes she's upset, telling him something that made her angry that he'd done or said, other times she's like a teenage girl, giddy and unstoppable. He doesn't stop to wonder why she did this, he just drinks it in, because this is how he wants to remember her. Alive. Incredible.

"I love you." She says this dozens and dozens of times. It breathes life back into him.

He watches the video once. Twice. Three times. He replays the end over and over again.

"I know a lot about forgetting, and this way I can't forget," she explains in closing, laughing at her own joke, "but I could never forget you, Kurt. I think, after everything, if I've learned anything, even if I don't find all the answers about who I was, I know one thing for sure; the heart doesn't forget. There's no lifetime I wouldn't recognize you in. There's no place I wouldn't be able to find you." She's packing the bag that he'll carry out the door for her hours later, on their way to the airpot. She's wearing the same shirt he'd pull over her head when he made love to her for the last time. She holds up the picture of them, the photo from the Metropolitan that he still has, like proof, like a beacon.

"The end is the beginning of everything. Don't forget that."

He never will.

AN: I don't know where this came from, and I know it's sad, but I am pretty proud of it. Let me know what you think in the reviews, and thanks for reading. xo