You glide ghost-like along corridors, hallways, across open spaces and through cramped mazes like a two-legged lab rat. You're definitely a lab rat; perhaps you're a ghost, as well. Perhaps you died there on that operating table, the ultimate betrayal of God and country. And blood.
Just that thought sends a stab of pain through you--do ghosts truly feel pain? Not Kevin's fault he was killed before his time, and God knows you miss him, but when you're tired and at your most defenseless, you still feel that betrayal solidly. He knew he wasn't ready...he shouldn't have recruited you. Shouldn't have risked you. Yes, it got you out of jail...but at what price?
Out of one jail, into another. From living to dead with the flick of a scalpel. Manifested to invisible with the flick of a thought.
Oh, your body remains solid, steady, enabling you to chase predator and prey alike, but isn't the definition of a *ghost* one who has unfinished business? Someone...something...unable to leave, because the soul isn't done yet?
They tell you that removal of the gland would result in your death. How can it kill what's already dead? Yet you cling to that last bit of your humanity, of your life, embracing stupid things like coffee, like the ham and cheese omelet you had for breakfast, like the glass of wine you had last night. Like bowling with Hobbes. You took on a pet, a true lab rat, unable to see something else become a ghost in the name of science. You've tried to learn your keeper's names--all of them, not just the one who wears that as a title--in order to feel friendship. To be not so alone.
Being a ghost is to be lonely.
Being a ghost is to be afraid.
Being a ghost is to be uncertain.
Trust no one.
But there is one you trust. The most unlikely person you'd ever have imagined trusting, in the past. When you were a real person. He makes your paranoia look like nothing more than occasional concern. He makes your loneliness look as though you're surrounded by hundreds of friends. He makes being a ghost just a little more bearable just by his presence.
There are days, still, when you'd like to throw him out a window, or wrap a piece of duct-tape across his mouth. Your brain cannot wrap itself around his perceptions of the world, most of the time; you cannot follow his train of thought without derailing your own.
Or, at least, at one time you couldn't.
Now you find yourself waiting eagerly to see him each morning. You find yourself glad of the company of someone who doesn't have a hidden agenda. In his own way, Hobbes is as invisible as you are--the only difference is he doesn't go see-through like you do. He talks of plots and convolutes things, but he's actually a simple enough man, beneath all the talk. He cares for you. He cares about you.
You watch him with invisible eyes, longing, yearning, wanting so much and unable to tell him, to ask him for it. You sense he's aware of it; he invites you in to his personal space, he comes into yours. He can finish your sentences and smiles when you start his. You play off each other like the Stooges used to do, though there are only two of you. Three stooges...three musketeers...two invisible agents. Hobbes and Fawkes. All for one and one for all.
You will never, no matter how much time passes, ever forget the look on his face when you plunged that needle into your leg. Does he have any idea how scared you were, doing that? Or how much you trusted him...how much you counted on him? The shock, the disbelief, the...*panic* that rolled through him makes you scared for yourself now, thinking back on it. You saw your own fear well up on his features; saw your own love glow in his eyes.
And afterward, when he was lying in Claire's office, the sweetest smile on his face, the love still glowing gently from his eyes, you knew you'd do it all over again. You, who have been dead for nearly a year now, would die for this man.
Because you know he won't let you die.
One day, you'll no longer be a ghost, but, perhaps be a man again. Because of this man, who came back from some lost place inside himself, for you. One day, you'll share more than personal space, more than jokes and half-finished sentences, more than luke-warm coffees while sitting parked in a slowly dying heap of scrap-metal. One day, there'll be more, built upon the foundation of trust you're forming with him. One day, you'll share everything you are, everything you want to be. You'll be alive again. You're more alive now than a year ago.
Betrayed by God, country and blood...saved by Bobby Hobbes.
One day, you'll thank him.
One day, you'll tell him.
And he'll smile.
~Finis~
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