#it’s like. monica stress-smoking. making hellbound a little bit more like the field where i died.

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

memory is a strange thing

Monica Reyes/John Doggett | post 9x08 Hellbound | for @fortes-fortuna-iogurtum | vignette; 723 words | tagging @taleasoldastime-andspace and @cosmicmulder :)

She has done all this before.

She knows it like she knows the back of her hand or the cool tap of her ring against the balcony railing. The smoke in the back of her throat is familiar, the only thing she could think of to still the shaking of her hands. Maybe it’s just to occupy them, really, but either way, it’s comforting even though it shouldn’t be, with shaking hands and smoke in her airway and the memory playing on loop in her brain of Van Allen confirming and condemning her to failure. 

Monica has admittedly never given much thought to reincarnation. As a concept, it fascinates her — the way fate and freedom hold hands, how much will always remain the same in each individual life — but she’s never considered how it could apply to her. She thinks if she looked over her shoulder she might see a premonition of the life to come, so she just takes a long drag of her cigarette and holds it in her lungs, burning, for as long as she can. She wonders if she always has been and always will be a smoker; she’s tried to stop often enough and never fully succeeded, and that’s just this one life. 

Behind her, the door slides open and she doesn’t even turn. “You left your front door unlocked,” says John, and she huffs out a little smoky cloud into the night air.

“I know.”

“You really shouldn’t do that, you know. Crime rate here’s not as bad as New York, but still.” 

Monica shrugs. “I guess I’m still not used to being back up here,” she says. “I left it unlocked for you,” she adds.

He goes quiet, she can feel him watching her. “You knew I’d be coming over here?” He asks it, she thinks, as if he knows it’s true. “What is that, one of your premonitions?”

If the question weren’t a little too on the nose tonight, Monica might laugh at the blunt wonder in John’s voice. She just shakes her head. “I just figured you might stop by. Hoped it, maybe.” 

“You doing okay?” He asks, like she knew he would. It’s the same way she checks after him after a hard case, or after Mexico. 

Instead of answering the question, she says his name. “John, if you found out that… you’ve done all this before,” and she gestures vaguely with her cigarette, leaving a thin trail of smoke in the air encompassing them, “That everything, your life, the results of it, might be circular… would that change the choices you made?” 

She thinks of him reliving the pain of losing Luke and of the time he told her he’s afraid that he could have done more; thinks of herself trying to explain how she knew about these murders. There’s always a question of what could be changed. How much can be saved, or lost, in just one small decision. What could she have done to stop Van Allen, and what would it have meant for her? She won’t ask what could have been done to save Luke; even if John second-guesses, at least she can be sure for him.

He leans on the railing beside her, tightly-wound and silent in thought. She wonders if he’s making the same connections that she is and a part of her hopes he isn’t. It’s still a little too raw, but then, maybe it always will be. She lifts the cigarette to her mouth again, but his hand stops her and she lets go of it as easily as she’d pulled it from the box earlier. For the first time since he walked in through her unlocked front door, she meets John’s eyes. 

“There might be a few things I’d do different,” he says quietly. For a moment it’s almost like they’re holding hands. “But even if I knew where it all ended on the way, I think I have to embrace it. Only way to live with yourself, you know?” 

Monica thinks she does. She isn’t sure if he’s talking more about himself or her, or maybe both of them. There’s a fleeting moment where she feels that in some incongruously incompatible way, they understand each other.

He slips his hand from hers and tosses the cigarette three stories from her balcony.