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ducavalentinos · 5 years

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Hi, your blog is such a the borgias heaven. i enjoy reading your thoughts about them. what do you like and don't like about sarah bradford books? im thinking on reading them. thanks.

Aww, really?! I used to post a lot more about them, but thank you anon! I appreciate it! As for your question, I have a lot of thoughts, as usual, so this might get extensive. Her books were my introduction to the Borgia family, since then I’ve read other biographies and sources, and I have occasionally gone back to read her stuff again, so many of my initial thoughts changed and what I’m about to say here comes from there: Her writing is something I still like overall, there is no denying that it is engaging and passionate. She makes you fall in love with this family I guess, or at least her image of the family. I still like how she slowly situates you with the time period and the main families surrounding the Borgias, other scholars just assume you know what’s happening and who’s who and sometimes they even assume you know latin, french and italian lol. If you don’t know anything about the Borgias, she’s as good an intro to them as others, such as Cloulas or Johnson. She has some good insights about Rodrigo and Cesare’s political plans, but also about Lucrezia, especially at her time in Ferrara with the d’Este. What’s interesting about reading biographies, even if annoying too sometimes, is that when we read about a historical figure and their times, we are also, in a way, reading about the writer and their own times and their moral views on things and it clearly impacts on how they see and write about their subjects and their actions, like historian Anthony A. Barrett said: “In any period of historical writing there can be no such thing as an untainted judgement since, despite any genuine desire to be honest and precise, the historian will inevitably be corrupted by an inherited way of viewing the world.”Her Lucreza bio is the weaker of the two imo, but I don’t think that’s entirely her fault, writing about Lucrezia is one hard task, because she is, for the most part, an elusive, ambiguous figure, so keeping that in mind, I think Bradford made the best sketch of her personality and her life as she could. Of course it does not follow what she says in the foreword, giving the impression that she will not present Lucrezia neither as a femme fatale, nor as a poor victim of her bad family as previous writers and scholars have done over the centuries. It makes you expect a lot more that is actually given, she does give Lucrezia a little bit of agency, but the general picture is really a softcore version of sweet, good Lucrezia who was a victim of her bad family. She also has a sharp tongue for those around Lucrezia, like Caterina Gonzaga, or Isabella d’Este, and when it’s about Rodrigo’s or Cesare’s possible questionable actions, she is more than happy to write about that along with her judgements and commentaries, but when it’s about Lucrezia clearly benefiting from these actions and her seemily having no problem about it, she writes in a neutral tone, without any commentary or judgement.Her Cesare bio is stronger than her Lucrezia bio no doubt, but in comparison to other Cesare bios, is weak. Her writing, as I said before, is great, Cesare’s life in itself was so rich and exciting, and she makes it even more so, but as an academic work, it is lacking. She’s not an thorough historian imo, her assessments of his character and analysis of some of events are superficial and sometimes misleading, a clear example is how she writes about Cesare’s relationship with Lucrezia, in a way that honestly flirts with the unprofessional, and it makes me uncomfortable now. They were close, yes. They were loyal to each other, yes. But it was not as extraordinary as she makes it look, they were not renaissance’s Julia Drusilla and Caligula, you know lol, their relationship was normal for their circumstances and both of them did show attachments to other people and other family members in their lives, the whole ‘mental/emotional incest’ term that if I’m not mistaken came from her, or at least is the conclusion that was made by some people after her writings about them (me included) is a huge stretch, it’s the fiction/history line being blurred. Also, when it comes to sources, esp. primary sources: Sacerdote, Sabatini, Woodward, and José Catálan Deus all do a better job on that front.

She has a weird habit of only quoting certain parts of documents and not adding a note with the source she is using, so that if you want you check and try to find the whole thing later you can, and it drives me crazy. To this day I have no clue where some of the quotes she uses comes from! And she is the only one who mentions them too. Would it really be so difficut to add a note with the source? I personally find it very shady, it gives the impression she doesn’t want people to check or something.In addition to that I guess others things I don’t like are usually and sadly the same things I find on works by other Borgia scholars too. I don’t know why, and I don’t know if I’m alone in noticing this, but Borgia historiography has a lot of melodrama, moral judgements and opinions being written in tones of absolute certainly, but always very little evidence to support it, which really makes you question sometimes if you are reading a biography, a serious work or if you are reading fiction. Just to give some examples of what I’m talking about here, I’ll never forget Chamberlin’s: “if there was one person in all of Rome who knew Cesare killed Juan, that person was Lucrezia.” *dramatic mexican soup-opera song plays in the background*Or when an female author whose name I can’t remember right now says in all seriousness something like: “Rodrigo could not control now the monster he had created” the monster here is of course Cesare. Or “…what a murderous havoc Cesare was later to spread in the lands of the papal states.” And it’s just… it’s bizzare to me. I suppose is good for entertainment, but if you ask questions like ‘based on what? who say it? why? then it gets frustrating because they don’t give it to you. Are there actual concrete evidence behind these claims? It doesn’t look like it does.

There’s seems to be zero evidence to even claim that Cesare hated Juan or was envious of him. Or that they had a bad relationship. There’s not even rumors about it. Much much less that he killed him and much less still about what Lucrezia knew or didn’t.

There are letters, documents, and decisions that undeniably makes it crystal clear that Rodrigo Borgia was always in charge of the family’s politics, and Cesare was his trusted advisor and the tool he relied on to affirm his authority as pope in the lawless papal states since Rodrigo wasn’t really the warrior pope type like others have been. They had disagreements possibly (1502-1503 is where we see that a little bit of that) but time and again we have Rodrigo and Cesare working together, the events at Senigallia is a wonderful illustration of that, so unless we accept Capello’s words: ‘The pope love and fears his son’ as evidence, which would be unrecommended to say the least, there is nothing indicating that Cesare controlled his father nor that Rodrigo feared him.

We have Cesare’s ardent critics acknowledging his wise, good government in the papal states, which won him the fierce loyalty of the citizens there. Most of those cities fell to him not by force, but either by diplomatic agreements with the deposed tyrants ( the Malatestas is one example) or by him using intimation and deception as a tactic.

This unnecessary, unrequested detour is just to say that Bradford follows all of this. Not exactly these narratives per se and It’s not as bad as Chamberlin or Hibbert, but it is there and it also leaves me ?????????? when I read it now. I still think her books are fairly decent, more her Lucrezia one, because it is the most, if not the only tolerable one out there, that at least tried to give Lucrezia some humanity and complexity instead of insults to her intelligence and black and white approaches. It just should be read with a grain of salt, and like no biography is perfect. No biography is gonna tell you exactly who that HF was, you know? it’s just one study, one view of one author. There are positive things and there are negative things, regardless you will learn about the family, if you’re just starting now and even if you’re not, it’s still good to check different theories and so on.

#anon ask #borgia thoughts #sarah bradford #rodrigo borgia #cesare borgia #lucrezia borgia #i wish there was such a thing a borgia heaven #but it makes me happy that my blog is that place for you djsdjsds #this ask made me day #sorry it took me awhile to answer it #hopefully this makes sense and it's not too confusing or too all over the place #feel free to send more asks if you want #god knows i need the distraction #everything is just so awful ugh

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serenasoutherlyns · 3 years

Text

the lock that kept it dark

The first few times, it’s the smallest glimpses. A flash of dark brunette in the back of a courtroom that is gone as soon as he sees it.

I was very disappointed in how Alexandra Borgia's murder was handled on the show, so I wanted to write my own version of what it was like for Jack. TW for visions/ambiguous sanity, emetophobia/vomit, alcohol, and blood/gore. Title from "Ghosts" by Laura Marling. Thank you to everyone who listened to me complain about this story for three whole months, I truly hope it lives up to expectations-- dedicated to @dankspeare in particular <3.

read/more tags on ao3

There are things that are so horrible they have to alter realities. People die all the time. The people Jack loves die. They die too young or they die violently or they get sick and die slowly. But seeing Alexandra Borgia’s lifeless body flipped some kind of switch.

At first he thinks he’ll finally lose it, have the mental breakdown lots of people have predicted or wished on him. Because grief can drive a man mad.

God he thought he knew how mad grief could drive him. He’d once thrown himself head first back into work and chased the end of every day hoping to find forgiveness drowned in the bottom of a glass. He’d been wholly unable to escape the world Claire Kincaid had been ripped from so suddenly. He’d fought Adam, Jamie, Jeanne Georges PhD., Lennie, Danielle, Chris Thomason from his pickup basketball club, as they all tried to tread his weight, as they all tugged his arms to pull him out of it. But he’d gotten tired of the kicking, and the whiskey or the time or whatever grace he could afford himself eventually had frozen the liquid despair enough for him to walk on top of it.

He’d felt it begin to crack the moment he heard Alex had missed her morning hearings. And the dread rose up his body until he was struggling to stay afloat, but he wouldn’t let himself sink until she had justice. No. Justice would be Alexandra, alive, so scratch that, revenge.

Alex always hated the old-boy whiskey ritual. So when there had been something still to be done that he could do, direct revenge that was in his power to take, he’d thought to make his first confession in almost a decade. He’d crossed himself and said all the right things and none of the real ones. He’d gone to bed. And then he’d gotten himself kicked out of the arraignment, and Arthur hadn’t tried to keep him at work.

When he wakes up the morning after the special prosecutor arrives to take his spot in the courtroom, something feels, not wrong, but changed. It’s like the light is hanging in the air at a different angle, like the birds are chirping a couple Hertz higher. His coffee doesn’t taste bitter and his shirts have fewer wrinkles than usual. Good isn’t the word for how he feels. He’s still devastated. But there’s an out-of-place, reassured feeling in his chest. Maybe it’s knowing that if the heaven she believed in is real, Alex is there. Maybe the icy darkness he’s been hovering over for ten years has numbed his nerves instead of making him go hypothermic.

But he goes back to work. His desk is a couple inches to the right of how he remembered setting it and his calendar is four days behind. Of course it is, he thinks as he tears off the pages. Then he throws the whole thing away. What was he going to do, save the day his world had totally shifted, again? So, he sits back down at his newly-perpetual desk and returns to the same and different cases.

(Arthur gets sick of Jack coming in to look at his Fish of The Northeast calendar and does, eventually, buy him a iPhone that he tries to learn how to use.)

Then he starts seeing things, and that’s when he starts to really feel the inevitable mental breakdown coming. Liz would tell him he’s having very normal responses to grief and trauma. Maybe he is, but he never thought he saw anybody after they were gone. He’d had dreams of Toni Ricci whispering, bloody carpets and Abbie Carmichael’s tear-filled eyes, but he’d never been looking across a crowded room and seen her watching him.

He’d only ever wished he could see Claire (and then, tried with everything in him to forget he’d wanted to).

The first few times, it’s the smallest glimpses. A flash of dark brunette in the back of a courtroom that is gone as soon as he sees it. Jewel toned blazers disappearing around corners. He thinks he hears his name in quiet rooms. He shivers every time, but he lets it be, thinks, if I’m going to have a psychotic break, I’ll do it all the way. For now, best to be sane if he can be.

---

“Jack,” he hears, for what must be the tenth or twelfth time that day. They’re getting harder to ignore, the calls and flickers. The guilt hangs constant, draped in the back of his throat, but time passes and the lake stays frozen over. He doesn’t stop for long, keeps his eyes stuck to his notepad.

“Jack,” he hears again. And then louder. “Jack, look up. Please, I’m so tired of this.”

That is jarring. The pleading is new. Mind over mind, McCoy. You’re alone.

“I guess you can’t hear me, huh. I really hoped… I didn’t expect it to be like this. It is so unfair that this is one-sided...”

Does an auditory hallucination hope? Maybe if he looks up, maybe if he can’t see anything to match the voice it’ll go away. He has an opening to write.

A fuschia sweater. It will be funny to him many years later when it’s all over that the first thing he saw was her knitwear. Something transparent about it. Tall but slight, her dark hair brushes her collarbones and her eyes… are brighter somehow.

Alex just stares for what feels like an eternity but when she finally says something it’s “Can’t blame you for ignoring the dead girl, can I?”

Jack looks for even longer, with what he’s sure must be a stupid open mouthed gape. If anyone were to walk in they’d check for a pulse. There’s no script for this, there’s not something to say. She looks astonishingly real yet altered, on a level he can tell he doesn’t have the capacity to understand. She could be handing him a stack of blue backs or a fax for how normal she looks. Or he’s lost it. Maybe he’s dying.

“Alex?” is what he comes up with. He hardly registers it leaving his throat. She nods.

“I guess we have some catching up to do,” she says with her familiar innocent yet scheming smile as she sits in the chair across from him. She doesn’t quite sit, really, her form hovers and slides and sifts itself around. “Finish your opening. There’s work to do.”

---

When he can speak, the first thing he does is apologize. Alexandra, I am so sorry, so sorry, he repeats, and when he realizes how long he’s been at it he looks up at her and all she says is “Are you done? Can we move on now?” and of course, of course he obliges. What other choice is there?

He sees her every once in a while, after that, long and short periods in between. She explains as best as she can how it feels, how she isn’t real in the way that she used to be, how she hasn’t found another person who can see her yet. She steals his work sometimes, drafts parts of motions for him. Mostly, when he’s missing her: when he starts to feel like hell over letting her dive into the danger of deals and informants and the DEA, Alex will appear and make him feel normal and so far out of reality all at once.

It’s a balancing act, knowing what he does about insanity. He’s sure he’d be committed if he told anybody what’s been going on. Good thing the man knows how to keep a secret.

It’s more difficult in some situations than others. The first time he sees someone besides Alex, it’s a red french braid and a faded cynical smile. He’s always happy to see Abbie when he has the occasional unfortunate reason to bother with the US Attorney’s office.

Clearly Jack doesn’t do a great job of hiding his surprise, when, at a lull in conversation, Toni Ricci appears behind her and greets him, “Hello, Counselor.”

They’ve been talking about everything except Alex, though Abbie’s offered her condolences countless times. How Abbie’s been doing, her work on the task force, the whispers of a promotion in the Southern District or Washington, and as much as he can get her to say about the woman she’s been dating, a journalist, Eileen something. He zones out mid-coffee sip and tries not to appear unsettled while Toni’s dark green eyes stare into his.

“You OK, Jack?” Abbie says, after he doesn’t reply to a question of hers, her eyebrows raised.

“Yes,” he says, and she pretends to be convinced. She knows how crushing it is to lose someone so suddenly, ripped away, knows what it is to see them bloody and dead, senselessly. She’ll forgive him a bit of an absent mind.

“I’m surprised you can see me,” Toni says. Somehow he understands her, it’s almost like it isn’t words, not sounds, but their essences, transferred into his head. “Abbie can’t.” Toni is more ethereal, harder to see, than Alex is. She must be tied to less.

Abbie is still talking, something about a case. “And you’re comfortable with it?” Jack asks, directing it to both of them. Abbie shrugs.

“I guess so,”

“Only for so long.”

“That’s hardly enthusiastic.”

“It’s the best I’m going to get.”

“She’s moved on, Jack. Will you?”

Jack smiles that sympathetic half-smile he always has in his pocket. “I should be going. It’s always good to see you.”

---

It’s OK, fine with him, Jack decides, if all of these are just memories, an imagination in overdrive pinned down by grief. Alex would’ve told him he’s having spiritual experiences when she was alive but every time he’s seen her since she’s shied away from religion. He asks her, sometimes, if she feels like she’s in heaven, if she still believes.

“It’s not like that, Jack,” she tells him once when he’s awake and walking in the early morning hours. “I can’t explain how any of it feels to you.”

“Why me? Why can I see you but your parents, Ed Green, Sally Bell can’t?”

“Unfinished business,” she says, with a familiar little smile.

“Come on.”

“We were working on a case, Jack, if you remember.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Stop blaming yourself.”

“And if I do? Will I get to see you again?”

“How would I know?”

“Yeah,” Jack concedes.

“I think it’s because you’re vulnerable, Jack. I know that there are some people, places, that I can’t go to because some kind of energy, something just pushes me out. Or people don’t notice me, or they don’t want to notice me. I tried to talk to Arthur, actually,” she says.

Jack scoffs. “How’d that go?”

“About as well as you’d think. Like walking through a brick wall.”

“You can’t do that?”

Alex laughs quietly. Jack pauses to play with a leaf from a tree.

“Look, Jack. I can’t explain any of this to you. You can’t prove I’m here and you can’t prove I’m not. So you could just let it happen?”

Jack nods. “I can. You know you aren’t the only one?”

“I’m not surprised. Maybe you just know where to look, now.”

Jack thinks she’s right. He feels more open to possibilities than he used to be. “I wonder how many other people are like me and you.”

“I bet they just don’t talk about it,” she says, and, when it’s time for them to part, Alex waves and at once walks away and disappears. There’s always a moment Jack blinks and she’s gone.

---

Sally Bell, of all people, visits him. She certainly isn’t a ghost, though he has seen her a lot more recently. Usually it’s at work (though they’ve had drinks in groups, chatted at parties), but two months after Alex dies (and two weeks after he saw her last) Sally shows up at his apartment with a pot of stew. It’s a surprise. Jack’s glad he’s moved since Sally was at his apartment last, but it has been enough time, he thinks.

“I just wanted to make sure you were alright,” Sally says when he opens the door to let her in. “I know that, sometimes, people stop caring after a little while.” She’s her confident self, shows no signs of discomfort being in her ex-lover’s apartment with stew two months after their mutual friend was brutally murdered. Nothing like shared tragedy to heal wounds, he guesses. Jack is reminded of the sympathy card she sent him after Alex’s passing. Jack, I’m so sorry. Alex is missed. Call if you ever want to talk to another friend. - Sally. Alex used to tease him about her sometimes, how she’d been the one he’d cheated on Ellen with but they only saw each other intimately for a couple months, how Jack had been the hung up one. Alex had a way of teasing him that was innocent, almost cute, that never got too far under his skin.

“It’s a little selfish too,” Sally clarifies, her voice cracking slightly. “I found a note of hers in my bag today, and… nobody’s checked on me in too long, I thought you might be the same.”

Jack’s chest is warm and melancholy as he sees Sally grieving. He doesn’t know whether his experiences are actually making it easier to deal with, but he at least has the privilege of the possibility.

“Will you stay and eat with me?” Jack asks, as friendly and normal an interaction as he’s had with anyone recently. Granted, it’s been 16 years since they stopped sleeping together. Jack just holds on too tight to old feelings, he thinks he’s starting to realize, because Sally accepts without hesitating, finding some solace in someone who shared a friend.

It’s good stew. Jack admires, and envies a bit, how Sally’s always been able to cook. More than that, how she’s always been willing to share.

---

Jack tells Elizabeth a version of the story, once over dinner working on a case.

“I keep seeing Alex around,” he says, waiting to see how she reacts.

“That’s normal, Jack,” she says, reassuring him like she always can, like how she has over this specific worry many other grieving people. “You expect her to be there because she always used to be.”

“I guess,” Jack says, and while part of him wants to tell her everything— no, I mean Alexandra Borgia and I have had lots of meaningful conversations over the past few months since she was killed (and also I’ve seen other dead people since then) and she’s self aware about the situation and so if it’s a hallucination (which I don’t think she is because I haven’t never dropped acid) it’s an incredibly responsive and compelling one that has knowledge I couldn’t possibly have read or come up with anywhere— he opts to shrug and say, “It’s eerie.”

“Of course it is,” Elizabeth says as she cuts a piece of her steak. “It feels wrong, doesn’t it?”

“Wrong as in unjust, or as in incorrect?” Jack asks, knowing what his answer would be.

“Both,” she says. “But I think incorrect is stronger.”

“I feel like something’s missing,” Jack says.

“Something is,” is her reply. “Jack, I know I’ve said this, but I really am so sorry. It isn’t fair, after…”

“Claire,” he says, seeing Elizabeth wince. “It wasn’t fair then, either.”

“It wasn’t,” she says, definitively. “Jack, it wasn’t your fault,” which time, Jack doesn’t need to ask.

“In a way, it was,” he says, resigned. “If I hadn’t pushed her,” he coughs, surprised that Elizabeth hasn’t yet interrupted him. “I underestimated how much she trusted me, followed my lead.”

“Isn’t that a virtue?”

Jack nods. “Not when it gets her killed.” He lets silence build up around their table, then comes the closest to admitting the extent to which he sees her. “I never saw Claire where she wasn’t.”

Elizabeth sighs. “The mind is unknowable,” she says. “Who knows why it’s different this time around.”

There should never have been any times around, Jack thinks for the millionth time. “I know,” he says. “Thanks, Elizabeth.”

---

Once, it’s his baby sister. He goes back to his apartment late and exhausted and about jumps out of his skin when he’s opening a can of beer and out the window he spots Stephanie McCoy, age 16, sitting on his fire escape holding a cigarette that doesn’t smolder.

August 1967. Jack’s home for a couple weeks before his third year of law school and he’s watching his cousins so his aunt and mom can get away for the weekend and his sister has been sick for more than a month. Stevie’s the baby, and she’s always been sickly, but always pulled through. This time, though, they’re really scared. They’ve all been trading shifts staying up with her at the hospital but today Stevie had told Jack to go home, to take the little ones to a movie or something, that she really would be ok alone. “I’ll be fine,” she said, coughing the words out, but in the same snotty tone that comes naturally to all kid sisters. They’ve got her pumped full of painkillers, Jack thinks, and she’s been getting better slowly.

And then he gets a call at midnight. Suddenly through his sleepy fog he’s hearing a voice on the other end of the line saying words like cardiac, quick, sleeping, unexpected, painless, sorry.

It wasn’t the kind of thing he ever really got over, seeing her pale body in the hospital mortuary, scrawny and lifeless and finally out of pain.

He didn’t even take time off from school.

But now that little rocker of a teenager she’d been before she got sick (who looked so similar, back then, to how Jack did, the scruffy student. The resemblance is fading now.) is there on his fire escape with her eyes open and no oxygen tube in her nostrils, no IV lines coming out of her arms. Jack climbs out with tears in his eyes because he didn’t for a second think that Stevie was going to be one of the ones to come back to him. Jack half expects her to ask him to sneak him a beer.

“Hey, kid,” he says. “I missed you.”

“I missed you more.”

Jack shrugs, because who is he to argue.

“You look old. And professional.”

“I am professional.” Stevie nods and breaks out into laughter. “I love you, Stevie. I’m glad you’re here.” It’s the most he’s wanted to hug any of them.

---

“Alex,” Jack says, very quietly breaking the silence that’s fallen over his office. He’s made sure he’s the only one in the building, unless you count the ghost or memory or whatever she is of Alexandra Borgia who is sitting on his couch (on? Sitting? Her presence is, in a seated position over, translucently draped, a pencil floats), helping him finish some paperwork. She’d been there when Jack came back from his last late meeting, and Jack has stopped being surprised. Arthur is going to wonder, at some point, how Jack gets work done so quickly some nights. He makes a note to thank him for letting him work solo for as long as he has, and a note to thank Kibre for letting him borrow Sigurn and Ross from time to time. He makes another note to never to piss off any cocaine dealers. Alex has assured him that she has no problem with waiting until he’s ready to talk, that she wanted to help him get things finished. Jack needs to remind himself to ask, someday, how she always knows when he needs her.

“Yes?” She replies. It’s taken a while to get used to. When any of them look at him, they look past him, around him at the same time. She told him it’s because she can see things he can’t and he has to take her at her word. Jack braces himself, because he’s about to be more candid with her than he ever has been, than he ever was when she was alive and now that she’s dead, because it feels silly to withhold something from someone who exists (if she does exist) on a plane that’s entirely different to his, who couldn’t expose him if she wanted to.

“Do you talk to other dead people?” The question sounds almost juvenile as he asks it, but he’s just a smidge too tired to care.

“I… not in a sense that would be meaningful to you. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering,” he says, then takes a deep breath. “Why hasn’t she visited me?”

He doesn’t need to specify who he’s talking about.

“Jack…” Alex says, like she knew this was coming and still didn’t want to talk about it. “That’s not a question I have the answer to.”

Jack rests his chin in his hands. “Guess?” He asks her.

She tilts her head to one side, giving it her best effort for him. “You remember Mark?”

“I do,” Jack says. “He really loved you.”

Alex nods. “I loved him,” she says. “I can’t even stand to be near him for very long. I can’t do it.”

“That sounds like torture,” Jack says, imagining, against his will, Claire trying to get through to him; feeling whatever kind of pain or discomfort ghosts (ghosts?) do. Or, and the thought threatens to split him open again, the opposite-- what if she can’t stand the sight of him? She’d have every right to hate his guts, every reason. He swallows back a wave of nausea that’s been building since he asked.

Alex looks like she’s going to cry. “It is,” she says, “but maybe it’s for the best. I think, I think it would hurt him too much, to see me and know that he can see me but he can’t have me. To know I’m really gone.”

“It doesn’t always feel like you are,” Jack says, honestly.

“But I am,” Alex replies. “I am really gone.”

Jack nods and sighs and puts his pen back to paper.

---

For the twelfth night in a row, Claire Kincaid is in his bed.

Beside him, in sleep, she’s serene and comfortable and nothing they’ve said to each other means anything at all. The fighting feels so close to constant, sometimes. He wonders why she stays. Tim Bayliss, Margo Bell, the whole world out there of what’s-their-names are younger, more attractive, more fun than him, than the rule against perpetuities, than the rule of law and its ruthless protectors. She could have anything and anyone and Jack wouldn’t blame her, even though there’s nothing she could do or say to make him be the one to leave, fall out of love.

She is so worthy of devotion. He has her on a pedestal, sure. It stopped being only fun and settled into necessary, into oxygen and water so long ago he hardly remembers anything from the start but the burning need. Jack McCoy, the DA’s own Don Juan died when she said his name for the first time. He feels ridiculous, juvenile, being so profoundly head over heels until he sees her, breathes deep and feels her sleep warm skin under his fingertips. Not only irresistible but inevitable, destined.

Claire is a heavy sleeper so he doesn’t feel bad stroking her hair, the side of her cheek, up on his elbows in the deep night.

He registers something wet and when he startles, pulls his hand back, it’s bright red and tacky. The body beside him is cold and stiff and utterly still. He wakes up in tears.

He never used to dream.

---

It’s been a long week. A drug case. A family annihilator. A drunk driver. All back to back. Sigurn, Ross, Henrik, each of them second chair on one case because nobody can stand Jack for more than a case at a time, he’s ensured as much. He hasn’t seen Toni or Stevie, no dreams of Claire have been following him. It’s been a year, almost, he notices when he sees the date on the iPhone he still refuses to use for anything but the time. Alex hasn’t been there since she told him she was gone, which is a certain mercy. He isn’t crazy, thank God, and ghosts aren’t real, thank God. Not crazy, just… was suffering from imagination, was consumed with grief. He’s really OK most of the time.

Not this week. This week he wants to scream and cry and consume his body weight in whiskey. So Alexandra Borgia is back, though she’s more like Ricci was, harder to see, flickering. Maybe parts of her are moving on, maybe it’s selfish of him to wish her back, maybe the business needs to just be finished. Finish it, Jack, mind over mind. Let her go.

As hard as he tries, he lets her back in.

“How do you know,” Jack asks, his third scotch in his hand, “When I need you?”

Alex laughs at him. Not a good-natured chuckle or sympathetic sigh, not the light-up kind of laugh she used to have when something was truly funny. Alex’s compassion was uncrushable, her optimism defined her, her innocence (the deep one, the one underneath both the surface good-girl naïveté and the surprisingly sharp mind; her willingness to put herself in the way of pain in service of others, that innocence) made her extraordinary and it eventually got her killed. But she always hated to hurt feelings.

Alex-in-death looks Jack McCoy straight into and behind his eyes with an arresting darkness.

The laugh is mocking, bitter, incredulous, enraged. It knocks the wind out of him.

“When you need me? I won’t even answer that. You expect everyone to be there for your needs, at whatever cost to them, because you think you’re so important, so wise, so full of clarity. I’ve been trying to be patient, since yeah, you clearly need me, but, God, Jack you’re so sure you’re always right, does it ever occur to you to ask what other people need? Serena warned me, about you, about how you would just take and take and take whatever you needed and that I would learn but there would come a point that I wouldn’t be able to take it and you know what? I watch you with your new crowd and I can’t help but wonder how you’re going to drive all of them away. That point came and it killed me Jack. You are so hung up on your own hollow sense of justice that you actually think it’s about you when other people get killed. You’re a hell of a man.”

As she speaks, a stream of red that almost glitters pours fast from her nose, then her mouth. She coughs into it and Jack can feel it hit his face and hear it scatter around the room. Her words start to gargle and slur as she speaks through the blood. He tries to look away, to close his eyes.

“No!” She screams at him, louder than anything he’s heard before. It bounces off the walls of his skull, it echoes in the bubbling, heaving, sobs and unintelligible sounds she’s throwing at him.

Jack feels his head fuzzing with the alcohol and sleep deprivation. A ringing starts in his ears. He spends a little while in the men’s room, vomiting lo mein and Lagavulin. When he drags himself back to his office, Alex is gone. He leaves everything the way it is.

---

He gives up on whiskey and forgiveness. Alexandra doesn’t come back, and Jack thinks that he might feel better about that fact if the last time hadn’t been so miserable. Over and over again, he imagines what an apology would look like, sculpts their forms crying together on his couch, repenting. They’re hollow pictures compared to the full-fledged figure of her sharing his space, poor facsimiles conjured from desperation. He finds himself thinking, sometimes, of the fifth verse of first Peter and wishing he believed in something to turn any of it over to.

But there does come a point where it stops hurting like a wound, instead it aches like a tightened scar at the start of winter. There are balms for that, winning the cases, the admiration of his colleagues returning. He manages not to scare away Rubirosa when Arthur insists they keep her around, Jack wonders if it’s because he’s tired of leaving him alone scribbling manic in the evening only to return to the same sight at 9am. Connie ends up being quite tolerable.

And one day when Arthur calls him into his office, starts spouting some incoherent fable at him, its moral is, somehow, that the ones you teach become you. Jack is certain he can’t mean what he appears to, until Arthur is saying that he is retiring and appointing his successor Hang Em High McCoy, the man he himself has said will never be district attorney, scatterbrained over everything but his cases, a man utterly disinclined to the wishes of a voting public. At least it’s just an interim position, even if Arthur assures him he won’t be able to go back, which is true, no future DA will want him their assistant of any kind, which Arthur surely must know.

It’s not the kind of request he has it in him to deny, so before he knows it he is swearing on a bible and teaching Connie his old job and appointing Sigurn her second chair (surely the feminist magazines will have something to say about his office and its high ranking women). He doesn’t fit the role. It slouches off him like the uniform blazers his mother bought with growing room. Still, he is nothing if not a high achiever, and maybe he pushes them too hard but his ADAs get the best results the office has had in years once he has time to acclimate to it. He finds he can be bothered with campaigning when being the winner of the public’s favor would mean winning more cases. He doesn’t get better at sleeping.

Maybe it’s the new office, but there are no more visions. Ghosts, certainly, though he’s sure Norman Rothenberg wouldn’t like knowing that’s how he thinks of him.

---

A settled kind of spineless sting, the twinge of a healed injury.

That’s how he would describe it to Abbie if they were discussing his haunting. They are discussing her move to Washington, the new job. Eileen is going to be communications director for a mildly important congressman who Jack has already forgotten. He'll miss her, he's proud of her. She assures him she'll visit.

"Mr. District Attorney," she addresses him as she settles on the barstool, omitting the "interim."

“They’re still counting,” Jack says, eyeing the late-night local news playing on one TV, the other showing some painfully incompetent college basketball.

“None of them are going to close the lead,” Abbie says, smiling into her glass of whiskey. Jack sips his Pellegrino. He turns his head down. He’s never been good at hiding from her.

“Don’t you want it?” Abbie says, a touch of confrontation in her voice.

“I do,” he says, running his fingers through his hair. “I do. But I question my motivations.”

“I understand that,” Abbie says, “You’re a thoughtful man.”

Jack just shrugs as he lets the compliment smooth something over.

When he looks up at her, for the briefest second he sees Alexandra in her features, a moment where her smile is shy, a second her eyes are soft. A gentle feeling of absolution, a reminder, a statement: the ones who are here need him. He needs them.

“Look, Jack,” Abbie says, gesturing to the little TV. “They called it, it’s you.”

Awake, anew, a few tears on his cheeks, a brightness, a warmth. The days of pain crunching up into something solid, something that can roll away, the waiting is over. His world turning again.

Jack McCoy is at once plunged into the cold water and finds he can swim.

#sficx #jack mccoy #alexandra borgia #abbie carmichael #claire kincaid #law & order #sally bell #elizabeth olivet #law & order fanfiction #i AGONIZED over this i really hope it's not bad #kalfdhjkgasfglhjkd #srsly pls b gentle #*slaps this elderly man* this bad boy can fit so much trauma in him

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