Revelations
by LL

Author's note:
Warning: Some of you may really *hate* this story!! If so, I apologize in advance.

The story is an experiment, originally started as a novel over seven years ago and abandoned basically because I lacked the skill to write it. I moved on to other fanfic and some original work, and every now and then I'd think back to the series and the piece that started me writing tobegin with, and wonder how I could have made it work. The answer didn't come to me until I stumbled onto the Conubic website and found "Robert's Reveries." Wham!! In the space of ten minutes, I knew how to write the story. So I had to do it. I hope it doesn't offend too many people, to see their favorite characters doing *this* to each other...

Robert-- The contents of this binder are truly for your eyes only. Once
you have finished with it, you MUST destroy it! It must NEVER fall into
anyone else's hands! Once you've read it, I think you'll understand
why.
--Control

The message piqued McCall's curiosity even more. He turned the page and began to read.

For the last 18 hours, McCall had sat, nearly immobile, reading page after page, trying to take in and absorb all the information they
contained. He only got up to get another cup of coffee, to heat and choke down the 'thoughtfully' provided C-rations, to relieve himself or to keep the fire blazing. It was fascinating reading!

But after about 150 pages, as the room got almost uncomfortably warm, and the chair began to feel softer and softer, he felt his eyelids beginning to get very heavy. He tried to fight off the sleep for as long as he could, knowing he must finish the contents of the notebook.

Finally, he said to himself, "Just a few minutes couldn't possibly hurt," and he let himself drift off. Almost immediately, his closed eyes began to move back and forth rapidly. Robert had begun to dream...

It was one of those dreams where, to his own mind, he was still awake. He looked down at Control's familiar handwriting, still seeing his own hands turning the pages. He reread the last three. The mission so clearly had to be done. Control had known he needed only to see it; Control had been right. But that was not all that was there.

The growth, the scope, of the SandStar concept in the eighteen months since Control's triumphant move to Langley simply astonished Robert. "Assistance" like this was something certain human rights organizations dreamed about, and indeed several names McCall knew to be connected with the largest and best known of those organizations cropped up now and again in the pages he had read so far. He had been pleased to see these leanings in his old colleague in the months before his relocation, but never would Robert have expected all this. Not from Control.

He could not quite escape the nagging feeling that it was not all the bureau chief's doing. As he held the pages, he could feel her hand in them, as surely as if her own writing were there with Control's. The pages blurred suddenly and he found himself inexplicably at the moment of meeting her. The chill and drizzle of a corporate parking deck in November swirling all around them, their breath misting their faces, her bright dark eyes like a startled deer's staring out at him from under a black fringe and a white beret. Poised for flight, ready to run from him; it took all his skill to convince her he wasn't a corporate hired gun.

Melanie Springer had been a pharmaceutical scientist at the time, a research veterinarian trying to pull the plug on a promising new drug that also promised birth defects. Billions of dollars had already been spent, and corporate headquarters tried to get her to reverse her position. She refused; they tried harder, and Harley Gage, who had gone into corporate security after leaving McCall's employ, had seen she needed help and tried to assist her.

Harley had ended up dead. A distraught Control asked Robert to investigate; it was one Company assignment he had been eager to accept.

Embittered by the experience, Melanie left the corporate arena and returned to private practice. Their paths crossed again when a Company dog was shot in the line of duty. The dogs cost thousands to purchase and train; surgery had to be performed, and Melanie was the one who saved the dog and retrieved the bullet. Control had driven down to sign for the evidence: "You want to take a ride with me, Robert? I think you'll remember the lady ..."

A thousand memories flowed through his mind.

Her beauty, her competence, her strength. Her fortitude. Her playfulness.

Her sensuality ...

Richard Dyson, joking with them on his deathbed between labored puffs of oxygen: "This is one heavy-duty lady here. You better hurry up and make an honest woman out of her, McCall, or I'm gonna get up out of this bed and marry her myself ..."

He hadn't wanted to begin an affair with her. He hadn't been able to stop himself. The memories flowed across his sleeping lids, as if he were experiencing them all over again ...


***

Four and a half years ago ...


He sits on his couch, his injured hand between hers; she kneels on the floor in front of him.

"That isn't fair, Robert, and you know it. Scott, Yvette, Pete, Jimmy...even Mickey who's never liked me knows I can take this just fine. I've rolled with every punch you have for two years now." She raises his stitched and bandaged hand before his eyes. "This is the only kind I can't take.

"I know how it is to suffer when things you do go wrong. Do you think I've never made a misdiagnosis, done something to harm a patient? How do you think I felt when some other doctor had to rush in and bail me out of a mistake I made in surgery? It's happened to me, too, Robert. You were here. You saw me crying for days ..."

"There is no comparison!" he shouts, enjoying it when she flinches. He snatches his hand from her, stands, retreats to the window to stare at the boards and the hastily taped plastic. "How can you -- how DARE you --compare that to a human life? To the life of a client who trusted me! It is not the same! It can never be the same!!"

"I have clients, and they trust me, too," she tries, and abandons that tactic.

She approaches him, tears gathering in her eyes. "Robert ... who can ever make you understand that you are not your yesterdays? How many of us have tried? Oh, what I would pay the person who could do that, if I could ..."she says, as the tears spill down her cheeks.

"I have asked you to do this before. I'm asking you for the last time. Elaine Grey died six months ago." She reaches forward and takes his bandaged hand between her own. "Look what you're doing to yourself."

"Melanie. This is my life -- "

"I am not asking you to discontinue your business. You know better than that. I'm asking you to at least attempt to reach the point where you stop cutting off your own nose to spite your face." She glanced pointedly down at his injured hand. "Or your hand, to spite your past. You're waging war upon yourself, Robert. You must do something about it. You need help."

She shudders and takes a great, sighing breath, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. "If you don't get help, I'm going to have to leave. I can't watch this anymore."

As she walks away he says, "I warned you about me. I told you you wouldn't be able to stay ..."

She turns, looking so tired. "Are you deliberately misunderstanding me, Robert? Are you?"

He tells her the truth. "I love you."

She says, "How can you possibly love me if you hate yourself?"

A sudden anger overtakes him like a flame. "Does that make it easier, Melanie? Do platitudes make it easier for you to leave me?"

She stops there behind the chair, tears glittering in her eyes. "If you think leaving you is easy ... How could leaving you ever be easy? Oh, Robert, if you only knew ... "

Everyone is upset, upset *for* him, it seems, upset on his behalf. They swim into view, like mirages. Pete and Alice, clucking their tongues and wagging their heads in a corner of the bar, worrying about him, and he knows they have made private appeals to her. Jeremy, reporting her leaving the bar one night, warding them off with upraised palms, shielding herself from them. "Look. It's just ... it's more complicated than you realize. If you're going to interrogate me about it I just can't stay ..."

Himself, telling everyone who asks that it's temporary. Thinking that it is. Hoping that it is. Planning ... planning what?

Mickey, grunting at the news, saying nothing. Mickey who had never liked her, Mickey whose instincts were as dead on as McCall's own.

Jason, standing before him. Ugly Jason Masur, whom Melanie had always disparagingly referred to as "Little Jason," bearing the photos and the personal correspondence that damn her. "I know you don't like to believe it, McCall. And I am a little behind on family gossip. But I think those dates are a little ahead of the last time she slept here. I mean, could it have hurt them to wait a decent interval ... like, maybe after she broke it off with you? I mean, let's face it ... you've been had. Royally."

Himself, hearing the unaccustomed politeness in that. Not one reference to his age, to the fact that he's been thrown over by a younger woman, for someone younger ... not much younger at all, but still. Knowing that Little Jason's biting his tongue, because he needs McCall to bite, because his stalled career needs Robert McCall's wrath. His wrath at the man in the photo ... and that is why he chooses not to believe.

The evidence is his own, on his answering machine. It can be set to monitor sounds in the room, and he had inadvertently hit the button during their shouting, raging at each other. Yet another of the wounds, more bitter with each passing year, that drew more and more blood with every battle. He turned and slammed out, left them alone together. And listened later as she approached him and said:

"I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry he said those things to you. He doesn't know enough to apologize to you, so I'm going to do it for him."

"Now, Mel, you don't need to do that. It's not like it's the first time..."

"But it's the worst time, and I've heard you two tear into each other before. He doesn't see you anymore, I think. He sees his past, not you. And he tears into it, and ignores that he's wounding a person. A person who doesn't deserve to be hurt."

"Well ... that might be going a little overboard, I think. I did deserve some of what just came my way. And I wouldn't worry about me." Robert can visualize the wan smile. "I've got a pretty thick skin."

"Would you just take the sentiment as I meant it, please?"

Again, McCall can hear the smile. "Thanks."

Rustlings; a coat being picked up and put on. Footsteps; coffee being poured right next to the mike.

"Wait." She approaches him again, shyly. "Can I talk to you for a minute?"

"What is it, Mel?"

"Please ... just sit down for a minute."

There is an awkward silence.

"Every time you two get into it, he's upset about the same thing. You know that, don't you?"

"Well, I can't say that I do know that. First it's Jimmy Tanarat, this year it's Gerald Lee ... wait, you don't even know what I'm talking
about." Tired mumblings muffled by a weathered hand passed over an equally weathered face. "Just as well. Don't ask."

"He has something you haven't got, and I understand why it frustrates him. It's something you are really starting to need, here."

Silence.

"You aren't going to like this, so I'm only going to say it once. But you are lacking a north star, here, Boyce, and you shouldn't go on without one. You can, but you shouldn't."

"Mel, why don't you just make sense here." It is not a friendly question.

"Somewhere along the way Robert examined his place in the world, thought about what he was doing, and what it meant. I think it was a long process, and it was painful, but Robert came out of it knowing what he thinks. He knows what he stands for. He knows, in any given instance, what he will and will not do and why.

"I've been watching this, and this is what I see. Langley tells you to do something. You say yes. Then Mickey, or Jacob, somebody, comes to you with something, some little bit he doesn't like. You ruffle and harrumph, waver, grumble, push. You change direction a little. Then Robert screams at you, and you change direction again. You don't know what you think, Boyce, you don't know what you think about anything. Your mind is a vessel that's filled up by someone else too often for where you are these days. You lack the courage of your own convictions, you don't have any convictions, and if you don't have those you are going to get blown all over the sea, whichever way the wind blows. You need to have that north star that Robert has, because you're too high up the ladder now not to. You're starting to get big reins in your hands, and you need to get serious and decide where you want to go with them. Otherwise you're going to be just like all the other people you and Robert have worked for that I'm not supposed to hear you complaining about, making all the same mistakes they did. You're too old now to be thinking over what you want to be when you grow up, here."

There was a long silence.

"You're right. Of course I know you're right."

It was the first time Robert had ever realized that Control had told her his name.



Himself at the telephone, two years ago, trying to track her down. In her case it was easy. All one needed was a copy of the new AVMA directory.

Except that there wasn't a single Dr. Melanie Springer in it.

He called the headquarters of that organization, wheedled someone into checking the database for her name.

"Ah, I see. Here it is," said the voice. "She isn't Dr. Springer any more. She's Dr. Boyce."

He had heard that there were problems, a ring she wouldn't accept. Colleagues frustrated with the venerable Control's distraction and
absenteeism. A second chance, an opportunity to put things right.

Not now.



His last, awful trip to Control's Manhattan brownstone. Control opening the door, his jaw tight, his mouth set in a grim line. His shirt open, his tie -- a long one, ever since Melanie had once told them she liked the long ones so much better than those frumpy bow ties -- hanging loosely around his neck. Robert has a sudden vision of her -- untying it, kissing that tender place between the clavicles -- with pain. An equally sudden vision of himself stabbing that place with all his strength, with a knife, the letter opener on the coffee table ... anything sharp and merciless.

At the sound of his voice, Melanie herself emerges from a back room, her hair down. Dressed, thank God.

He can barely contain the rage. "How nice," he says coldly, "to find you both at home."

Physically Control allows him in; only his tone says "go away."

"Robert, what do you want?"

He takes them both in with a gaze like blue daggers. She moves closer to Control to place a supportive hand on his arm, a gesture McCall just realizes is not new.

"How about a little information? Or have the two of you had enough time now to get the lies straight ... "

Melanie steps forward. "Ask me anything, Robert. I won't lie to you."

"Or do you mean, now that you've been caught, you won't lie to me? What is the deliberate obfuscation of the truth? A truth I had every right to know? Is that not a lie?"

Her dark eyes meet his look for look, as always never braver than when she or one she loves is cornered. "I suppose that is a form of lie, yes."

"You suppose. You suppose! For two years you watch this man lie to me, cheat, manipulate, every dirty trick there is -- you join him in the worst one of all, and you suppose! Tell me, how long were the two of you involved before I discovered it? Did you ever plan to tell me? When?"

Dead silence. He sees the quick glances: No, this is not a rhetorical question, meant to blow off steam.

"We were going to wait six months before we told anyone." It is Melanie who makes the admission.

"Six months -- !!" The mental slap to his face ... the mental staggering backward. He gasps for breath ... "How the hell -- ? How could -- ?"

Rage takes him firmly back in its talons. "You don't get to ignore the first half of that question. How long!" he roars. "I want to know how long!"

He hates how he must look; he can see it in their faces, their furtive glances of fear mixed with pity. "I. Want. To know. How. Long!"

Again they look at each other. That private language between a man and a woman, this woman, which he will never speak with her again.

Again it is Melanie who answers. As if they had agreed on it, ahead of time or, worse, just now. In that split, private second.

"How long had I had feelings for Con- For Boyce, I don't know. It was a long time before I was willing to think of myself as in love with him. To call myself that. But when we knew we ... " she choked on the phrase. "Knew we shared those feelings for each other ... " She turned her head slightly, a just-checked look to Control for confirmation. It was transparent, her wish that they not seem to be agreeing on a lie. "It was the night we were all at the hospital with Scott, and you and I argued in the waiting room. That ... that was the night we first knew, I think."

"Almost four months ago? Four months!" The shout rips his throat. "You pursued her -- you betrayed me -- ?" His tortured eyes turn from one to the other. "For four bloody months!"

Control takes over. "It wsn't like that, Robert. We couldn't speak to each other -- we couldn't even look at each other, for weeks -- "

"Oh, yes, I see that, that is very much apparent!" He rounds on Melanie, his throat constricting. "It must have made it easier for you, to have him waiting for you with open arms! How long did you use me while you waited for someone else to run to?"

"That's not the way it was," she says, drawing back.

"Not the way it was, hell! You're certainly finding it easy enough now!"

Control, very quietly. "No. No, Robert, it isn't."

"Isn't it? How long have the two of you been sleeping together?"

They close ranks then, his arm on hers. Control, miserably: "We haven't, Robert. We couldn't."

"No? Then what the bloody hell was that -- ?" He gestures at the empty hallway.

"You know I haven't moved out of my apartment. And, having spent time with me yourself, you know that I do use the bathroom on occasion."

The bitterness in her tone hangs in the air. She tries again: "We were trying to find the kindest way to tell you."

"The kindest way to tell me that the two people I trusted most in the world lied to me? Betrayed me? Abandoned me?" This last catches even Robert by surprise, roughening his voice with unshed tears. He shakes his head. "There is no kind way to tell me that."

"Abandoned you?" Melanie's voice is soft. "We haven't abandoned you, Robert. We still care for you, we always will. I love you."

"You'll forgive me," he chokes out, his throat tight, "if I don't see that from here."

"I know you can't," she replies, "but it's true. You will always be dear to me. It's just that that part of it just had to end. Living with you ... it was like trying to love a tornado. I couldn't watch you self-destruct anymore."

He advances on them, gesturing in the air. "Oh, this is my fault? In what way is this ... tawdry little scene ... my fault? Your disloyalty, your cruelty, is my fault?"

"You asked us for the truth," Control growls, stepping forward. "If you don't want to know, don't ask."

It is Melanie's turn to reach for Control's arm. "Don't," she says quietly. "Just ..." She doesn't finish, and McCall can see that this is
is a cue: She doesn't finish because she doesn't need to; he already knows how that sentence ends. They've already discussed this, down to the last possibility, and she is really saying, "Just remember what we talked about ..."

It is too much then, it all washes over him, and he is consumed with the simple desire to hurt. The desire to hurt back.

He turns on Control. "I was right about you. I can see that now, after all these years. All these years, sometimes I could trust you,
sometimes I couldn't. I'd catch you in the most abominable lies, the most glaring atrocities. Sometimes you changed your mind. Sometimes some 'good' reason would surface, some thing that brought me to heel, back to your side like a lost dog -- "

"Robert -- " Control interrupts. She stops him, her hands on him again. As if she had said, "Just let him vent."

His anger grows. "And sometimes you didn't. Sometimes you didn't change your mind. Sometimes there was no good reason. And I'd be left wondering who you really were. Which was the real Control."

He paused, sharpening his closing words like knives. "I should have listened to my instincts. Because I did know about you. All the time, I knew."

He finishes, and turns to go.

"Robert!" Control's shout over his shoulder. McCall has heard that tone before, in an abandoned warehouse, during another nightmare ... a lifetime ago, it seems. Against his better judgement, he turns around.

A plaintive note creeps into Control's voice as he crosses the floor, his hand outstretched. "Robert, you can't think that. This is the last thing I wanted, it's -- " He stops, wipes his brow, starts over.

"Oh, God. I've been in love with Mel almost as long as I've known her. Almost as long as you've known her. I don't need to tell you what I see in her, Robert. This lady ... " He turns halfway to Melanie and back, his heavy features frozen for an anguished moment.

"I love all the same things about her as you do! When she -- when this --"

He tries again. "I tried to back away from this, Robert, I swear I did. I didn't leave it alone because I couldn't. I just couldn't." He looks over at McCall from under his craggy brows. "You know what my life's been like. You of all people should understand."

Silence. Robert's blood pounding in his ears: He is not going to make me feel sorry for him!

Control lowers his furrowed brow into his hand. "I've tried to do the best I could, Robert," he murmurs into his palm, shaking his head. "I haven't even touched her, God knows that hasn't been easy - "

Instantly McCall is across the floor. Hearing himself slamming Control's body into the wall but not feeling the impact. Seeing a blur of motion --the white wall, pale skin, Control's white shirt like a flag --

"No!" Melanie's scream pierces the air. He doesn't see her, but her full weight hauls at his shoulder. Control hoarsely gasping, "Get back, Mel, you'll get hurt!"

He knows he wants to kill him, but his hands won't stay at Control's throat. He tangles them into the man's shirt instead, silently pouring his rage into the burning muscles of his arms, slamming him into the wall again and again. There is nothing to say. His mind becomes a blank.

Control says nothing either; he just stumbles there, limply accepting the punishment, until Robert drops him, turns, and flees. Running down flights of stairs, pushing past people on the sidewalk, running on and on until his bursting heart and lungs force him to stop.


****

He awoke to the same crushing shame that threatened to strangle him every time. He pushed dizzily to his feet, tried to open the door to flee the dreams and the memories, only to find a wall of snow nearly as high as his knees blocking the path. He blinked, catching his breath in the cold, and closed the door, defeated. Trapped with himself in the cabin.

The fire was waning. He put an extra log on and stirred the old ones with a poker, watching them break apart in a glowing red hiss. He stared into the flames as if at his own reflection.

The shame of it still threatened to engulf him whenever it entered his mind. The same thing that had shamed him so often before, erupting in the face of that ... as if to remind him that no matter how low they were, he was himself worse still.

He had forgiven them, of course, officially. Not to them -- he hadn't spoken to either of them since that terrible night. But to Pete,
Yvette, anyone who asked, he had done the right thing and forgiven them. It was the pure thing, the Christly thing, and the proper contrition for his wrath. Especially when their betrayal still churned inside him, and he felt that he would never understand it.

He stumbled back to the chair and collapsed into it, rubbing his eyes. After a moment he reached for the binder and browsed idly through it, thumbing the handwritten pages.

He could almost hear Melanie urging Control into this one. This would be dear to her heart, ever since she had read Jean Sasson's Princess books and come to bed several nights almost in tears, plying him with questions about Saudi Arabia. It was not the sort of thing Control would have put all this together for on his own.

He looked at the thickness of the binder again, thinking suddenly of Carla. Control was finally at a level to wield Holden's influence --
covertly, silently, but influence all the same. "He can do what we only dream of doing," jibed a memory. It was good for the world that
Control, having finally been given the power, had decided to step up to the plate.

He didn't need Jason's copies of their personal correspondence in front of him -- he remembered those, remembered some phrases by heart. But as he sat there, he admitted that his own life, as he had always described it to himself, was not exactly as he had always understood it to be. Mickey, Pete, Jimmy, Jacob ... all had become the truest sort of friends since his "retirement." And his son and daughter ... precious beyond compare. He had known clients who were good people, decent people, some of whom remained friends to this day. Who did Control have?

No one. No one at all ... except Melanie. Robert did know how his life had been. True, most of it had been self-inflicted. But then, wasn't Robert's own?

A passage came to him from one of Jason's pilfered e-mails. "It continually amazes me, Mel, that you could love me. I am forever
grateful for that. Even if nothing ever comes of this, if I never touch you or even see you again ... if I look back at all the rotten choices and bad luck over the years, it's as if God knew what one gift would make every minute of it worthwhile."

In that moment, something about it all looked different to him, and a measure of peace crept in. Suddenly he knew the difference between righteous forgiveness and real forgiveness, and he could own the true feeling. And some sense of pity and compassion returned to him ... and some understanding, then, too.

He put the binder down. He felt that he could take the mission. And perhaps a few others, too. If they were all willing.