Don't say goodbye

TITLE: DON'T SAY GOODBYE
AUTHOR: Felicity
CATEGORY: STORY
KEYWORDS: MPJ MPS
SPOILERS: I don't think so, it's up to fourth season but I haven't
seen beyond and there's no specifics so no.L
SUMMARY: Jarod has a difficult decision to make. Miss Parker is too
afraid to answer the phone. Yet sometimes what you most fear is never
going to happen.

If I could recapture
All of the memory's
And bring them to life
Surel I would

Here the distant laughter
Wasn't it you and me
Surviving the night
You're fading out of my sight
Swiftly

You're vanishing
Drifting away
You're vanishing

I was so enraptured
No sensibility
To open my eyes
I misunderstood

Now you're fading faster
It's getting so hard to see
You're taking the light
Letting the shadows inside
Swiftly

You're vanishing
Drifting away
You're vanishing

Reaching out into the distance
Searching for experience of the past
Just a trace of your existance
To Grasp
And if somehow I could recapture
All of the memories
And bring them to life
Lord knows I would
But now you're fading faster
You're getting so hard to see
Letting the darkness inside
Swiftly

You're vanishing
Drifting away
You're vanishing
YOu're vanishing
Drifting so far away
You're vanishing away

ARTIST: MARIAH CAREY
ALBUMN: MARIAH CAREY
TITLE : VANISHING

DISCLAIMER: The following characters don't belong to me.

Just a whisper of your existance. I chase you every day yet only this one shadow of memory is true. It's a subconscious unadmittable area in the dark recesses of my mind. Where I admit I love you, or loved you once. A memory of a love, maybe that is all I can claim it to be. I rarely dwell on such thoughts. So painful, so deep. I barely feel or realise their existance, so focussed am I on yours.

Sydney calls this an obsession. He's concerned the one mindedness I apply to my job, subsequently to you. Could cause more than an ulcer. The stress of you and the job, inseperable in nature could kill me, he insists eyes blazing with rarely revealed depth of feeling. Though I turn away in indifference, cut him with a sarcastic barb mocking his emotion. In my loneliness hours, it's all I'm holding on to. The momentary slip that communicated his care.

I am alone now, holding on to it and a glass filled to the brim with my favourite poison. The bottle's somewhere nearby, half empty as air replaces liquid. Rapidly evaporating, drowning all that's lost. The phone rings forgotten. I've grown accustomed to the tone and it fades with importance, with consiousness.

I'm not in the mood tonight. To talk to you or be tormented by you. Is it you? Or the fact we can't speak without an argument.A conflict of desired. Every word is hard and sharp. You only ring to bait me, not because you care. That's what hurts the most.

I wonder absently if I'm on the bed, the lounge or the floor. An irrelivant query til morning, when the stiffness will set in with regrets. I don't always sleep alone, though maybe more often than I used to. If I need it there is always someone, ever the bruises to prove he was there.

In a few hours through a haze I will open my eyes. Coffee improves visibility. Sometimes I wonder at the use in seeing where I am going. One of the keys to survival is to be blind. Don't ask, my brothers policy, mine is not too see.

I used to pretend I was on the right side,before I saw the benefits of being in the wrong. Power, control, intimidation. I've built myself around these quality's, succeeded through them. From childhood I could have materially whatever I wanted. Emotional poverty seemed a small price to pay. But What did I actually gain?

I was seduced by the philosophy one you cease to feel you cease to hurt. Sometimes what you can't feel hurts the most. My father would tell me love wasn't my destiny, that it wasn't a 'useful' quality. I would have to agree.

Emptiness was ordained for me from the minute of my mothers suicide. I doubt it was a mistake I was near the elevater that day, a mistake I saw her die. There is no such thing as a coincoidence in The Centre, everything has a hidden message. Wether obvious as the bullet hole, which still haunts that elevator to this day or obscure as the reason I'm persuing my former best friend.

Hate is destructive, yet a long drawn out disease. I doubt anyone could save me from this path of destruction now. I don't want to be saved, I don't wish to be anyones pet project, least of all his. I'm not a victim or an innocent, I'm a surviver. I'll never admit, he's stronger than I'll ever be. Because he knows how to say goodbye.

It is a dangerous game we play. Littered with unspoken rules, hidden clauses, cold fury. I've been close to death and I've been close to life, yet I never thought I'd be desolate. Until yesterday when all I'd cherished began to fade before my eyes. To vanish, to disappear. I never realised how dependant I'd become on the dance. On you, just out of reach. That my life hung on the assurance you didn't die or move on.

For 4 years I've been suspended, between the presant and the past. The future without you is a terrifying prospect now. If I could just recapture what we had. At first I fooled myself that there was hope, beyond the barriers of which side we were on. The times you saved my life, didn't they prove this? I never did say thankyou, it is a manner I've unlearned. For a pretender, you've always done a lousy job of understanding me.

Time no longer seems significant. As you fade from sight, so does purpose. Purpose to endure, purpose to get out of bed, purpose not to cry. Any other moment... Well there's always that claim. There's always been tomorrow, or the next day. All a blur of pace. I try not to stop long enough to wonder what I am running from or twoards.

I try not to stop!

The walls are closing in, enveloped beneath shady darkness they expand and invade before my eyes. Within their inky depths they hold nightmares. Like a plague of insects crawling over each other, crawling before my eyes or behind. Across the surface of my mind, feeding on imagination, turning my stomach. I slam my eyes shut but the image is still there, it is impossible to escape what is inside. I cannot quell the paranoia, I have a sense about these things.

The phone still rings through dillusion. There have been other nights, when I wouldn't answer, when I made him wait yet finally gave in. The blow you have to deal tonight however is much too lethal to halfheartedly ignore. I can sense the words, oppressing the atmosphere from the tip of your tongue. I will not her them, I willnot give you the chance you've long been waiting for. To destroy me. If I answer, these words will be the last I here from you. So I don't answer, safe in the knowledge you won't leave until you've said them. Until you've said goodbye.

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It is a dark room, where he sits and waits. The ringing tone chimes on his last nerve. Still he continues to listen, in no way poised to act. He expects her to pick up sometime soon. The more this annoys him the greater it would her. the thought creeps across his consiousness, like a scorpian stinging through his senses. That she's never taken this long before, to get annoyed and answer. He allows unsubstantiated fears for her safety to wash over him. Dripping with cold sweat through his hair combined with the late hour these thoughts magnify. Tentatively he sims alternative situations, all have about as positive an outcome as his black mood. He wants to see with his own eyes that she is ok, yet common sense demands he not test fate. What if this is a test? The accompanying suggestion that he must therefore care what happens to her due to this impulsive consideration of failure, is noticably absent from his reasoning.

He stares unseeingly past the sleeping woman stretched across his bed. neither do his eyes focus on the lantern lit view through the roof to floor window across the room. Deep thoughts disallow for him the peace she seems to have attained. Awake she makes him laugh, she makes him smile and helps him to forget. Yet there is constantly the mental barrier of the Centre preventing closeness with Zoe. He tries to place Parker and Sydney in the past and Zoe and his family in the future. Yet he is not ready to give away the past. This relationship as the few before lacks the connection and belonging he craves. That he can only find with Parker.

Impossibility is often overshadowed by overwhelming feeling. The practical jokes he has played on Miss Parker, the time of night which has become habit for him to call all have a purpose beyond annoyance. The adolescence he missed out on gives what he feels only the childish avenue as outlet for expression. For grownups they continue to tease like children.

Parker is both what holds him back and pushes him forward. Their situation leaves him with only two choices. To leave for good, or hold on to the chase which has brought them both closer and futher apart than they had been since childhood. In the time since they were cruelly pitted against one another and ordered to run like rats in a maze.

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Parkers pale reflection captures frail attention as she is steadied by the cold, tiled bathroom floor. Feverishly she pulls herself to her feet, attributing nausia to the inevitable hangover come early. Work is an intimidating prospect that invades the curse of consiousness she tried so hard and drank so much to avoid. He fills her mind again as the phone begins to ring. Has it been ringing all the time and she just did not notice or is her really inside her mind? She would have thought he'd have given up by now, has he nothing better to do? There's too much at stake to answer. Once again she allows the sound to fade into the early morning echo of background.

She should feel something, she decides raising a shaky hand and running it across her face. For one moment she allows every supressed thought and urge to invade in attempt. There is no significant reaction. The few tears slipping down her face and sparkling in her eyes could just as soon be attributed to her time honoured tendancy to cry when she was sick. The mental image of his face branded in her mind, at this point of realisation begins to fracture and fade. She felt nothing, and was incapable of anything more than indifference. Too accustomed to feeling nothing to conjure something more.

She tried once again in denial to simulate true feeling. Anger was the only such emotion in contention. Slowly thoughts like building blocks became missiles, vaulting together with a violent vrash in her mind. Blinding anger she'd been taught so often to avoid at all cost, images and memory sharpened as vision blurred, as she swayed and fell. 'It's not like I care.' Came dizzy, insistant thought. 'That I here her in his voice, his tone so much more carefree. That I see her in his eyes those momentary glimpses I've caught when I was too early or him too late. It's not that I hate her... Who am I kidding. She's the reason he'll say goodbye.

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Sydney sense a storm brewing. He feared with what fury and further path of destruction the force of it would force Miss Parker down. She was a danger to anyone near her, yet most of all she was a danger to herself. Sydney had met Zoe once. He imagined she'd be caught in the middle of this Bermuda love triangle. Bermuda as due to Centre involvement, one or all of the players was destined to disappear.

So much depended on misunderstanding. It was not Sydney's place to enlighten, only to councel when either of the two main players, jarod and Parker, sought comfort, advice. Unfortunately the one most in need of his guidance was the least likely to show up at his door. Parker's barrier of mirrors in only serving to deflect, could most likely lose her the game.

Love is like chess. Complex, drawn out (Or should I say longwinded, as critics may say this story is) Sooner or later somebody will call checkmate and end the game.

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The phone had stopped ringing. To parker it was the single most terri- fying sound she'd heard in her life. She took a deep, steadying breath, absorbed by early morning silence. It had been ten minutes now, since the comfort of his attempts to contact ceased to resound. Maybe this was how he said goodbye.

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His hands shook as he composed the words. With all his genius his mind was blank. Taking a long deep gasp of air, stifled by the stuffy suite and his own anxiety his eyes strayed nervously to Zoe's still figure. He had the sinking feeling to write a not was cowardice. As she slowly stirred however stilted, hurried words were forced onto the page. Something warned him if she awoke, he'd never have the strength to say goodbye.

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Desolation manifested, sending an open invitation to depression. She squeezed shut her eyes more tightly as light attempted alarm.

"An interesting place to sleep Parker."

Recognising the accented voice resonating gently from above she opened her eyes and stared upside down into Sydney's concerned frown considering, as physical feeling reinserted itself with awake. Why the bed was so hard? Sydney knelt down, pulling her to her feet. She winced , leaning against him and attempting to stretch herself into a more human position.

"What time is it?" She requested sleepily.

"Late." he expressed non comittedly causing Parker to raise her eyes to his.

"Will I always end up alone Syd?" Sydney concealed a smile.

"Broots has a promising lead on Jarod." Was his only answer.

Relief flowed, a tingling sensation, along with pins and needles.

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Jarod's latest laire was more luxurious than his usual style. Pushing her way into the miami hotel room she looked around, her gaze foccusing on Zoe.

"Where is he?" Parker demanded.

Zoe took in Sydney's familiar face and the tall stunning brunette before her. Ever since she'd awoke, anger was all she could manage to feel.

"He left a note." She replied tonelessly, staring blankly out the window, the view no longer holding any allure.

Parker breathed a deep held sigh of relief, not bothering o conceal it for the other womans benefit.

"Any idea where he was going?" She questioned gently.

"He can go to hell for all I care." Zoe exclaimed bitterly, gathering her bags and leaving. Sydney looked at Parker as she stared out at the blindingly beautiful view she never before would have noticed in broken thought.

"At least I know he leaves notes." She said, a gentle smile playing across her lips. Her cell phone began to ring, and she answered it.

The End

By Sarah Felicity