Chapter Text
Emptiness is heavy, he’s come to discover. The words seem inane when placed alongside one another, paradoxical in nature, and had he heard the phrase fall from the lips of another a few months prior, he wouldn’t have understood. War, he would have reasoned, is heavy. Having to relive the moment your best friend drops to the dirt when a bullet nestles its way into his brain, that’s heavy. Love, too, sometimes; looking into the eyes of the person you love only to see shame and pity peering back at you. The hopelessness that constantly scratches at the back of your skull when you lie down in a house that isn’t your home, that is too impersonal and frigid to be anyone’s home. Losing your father to cancer, then your mother to drink. These things are heavy.
The weeks following the explosion were anything but empty. The shock wore off quickly, leaving behind confusion and a nearly unbearable sadness. He launched himself into the investigation, commandeering those willing to listen and pressuring the more reluctant until they, too, became pliant under his fingers. The more he uncovered, the less he understood, and white anger congealed in his gut as the days passed without answers, clouding over the sadness and etching out a singular word over and over down the length of his spine: why?
“We don’t know why, David,” Anne Sampson had told him, teacup clutched in one hand and a report in the other, just barely managing to avert her eyes from the sheet of paper to bestow upon him a measly glance. She had seemed so utterly unperturbed, as if being no closer to locking down a suspect 2 months after the Home Secretary had been blown apart was a slight snag in an otherwise well-oiled machine. After arriving back in the apartment, he had been surprised to unfurl his tightly clenched fists and find smears of blood, crescent indentions carved into the palms of his hands, the nail on his right ring finger just sharp enough to pierce skin. The stinging was soon forgotten, however, when the momentary shock of the act dissipated and his steadily growing rage forced him to launch a half-empty whiskey bottle across the room, the shattered glass falling with satisfying tinks and dark liquid dripping down the wall.
3 weeks later, Anne telephoned to inform him of a breakthrough: they’d charged a man with the assassination of Julia Montague, and he would spend the rest of his life behind bars. “He’s a deranged man who wanted a way to draw attention to his anti-government, pro-bigotry agenda. And he found it.” His requests to speak to the man personally were adamantly denied, and the so-called “breakthrough” only succeeded in fueling his anger rather than resolving it. She said that they could all begin to move toward closure, that they should honor Julia’s memory by building a brighter future for the country, and David slammed the phone down so forcefully that cracks snaked across the glass.
This, for David, was heavy. Having no choice but to accept that some nutjob with a fucked-up head was single-handedly responsible for the assassination of the Home Secretary was heavy. But emptiness? Over the course of the first 3 months, there were but a few times when he wouldn’t have traded in the violent turmoil thrashing around in his body for a taste of relief, for an emptiness to slip down into.
That was where he had been mistaken, he thinks. You don’t slip down into emptiness; you submit to it. There comes a point when the sadness and the rage and the confusion have all been exhausted, when the body and mind cripple under the strain but the soul is not yet ready for acceptance. Live-wire emotions give way to a numbness creeping along the outskirts of the brain, until something eventually trips the breaker, and everything goes grey.
It sits like a stone on his chest when he tries to sleep, makes him dream of thick fog and the act of inhaling smoke from a housefire. He likens the feeling to what he imagines living on the ocean floor to be like, the pressure closing around him but him having no desire to swim toward the surface, to seek out the oxygen his body is so desperately pleading for. He takes up drinking, instead, every evening coming back to the empty apartment after another day working the mundane desk job he’d been assigned and heading straight for the liquor cabinet. He knows that the anger remains, that every heady emotion and reckless tendency he’d felt in the weeks following her death exists just beneath his skin, but he doesn’t feel them. He doesn’t feel anything, though he knows he should, so night after night, he drinks until intoxication fills him back up.
A few weeks later, he manages to convince himself to go to the pub, but every short-haired brunette with her back turned to him, every snarky, poshly accented voice floating through the crowded space only serves to remind him of everything he’s lost. He hasn’t been to a pub since. He leaves the apartment only to work and visit his children, and the day sweet Ella hesitantly pulls her attention from her reading assignment to meet his eyes and asks why he never laughs anymore, gravity hits him.
With a clenched jaw he tells her that something very bad happened to someone he was supposed to be protecting, and she considers this a moment.
“The lady who was on the T.V.?” she asks, and when he nods, she returns her attention to the book. And then, “Was she your friend?”
Such a simple question, one that he’s asked himself on multiple occasions, but it still brings David up short. Was she his friend in terms of someone with whom he could easily share a few drinks and light conversation? Not really. Everything between the two of them rarely resembled easy and, precluding the one or two moments lying in the afterglow underneath her sheets and sharing childhood aspirations, their conversations had been anything but light, nearly always on the verge of imploding from everything left unsaid, everything they couldn’t say. But shewas someone whom he’d grown to trust, to depend on, even. So much so that he had come to take for granted her constant presence, always two steps in front of him in the public eye and two inches beside him behind closed doors.
But how is he to explain this to an 11-year-old child? So he hums in the affirmative, and he’s just pushing the image of brown curls framing a pale face from his mind when Ella speaks again.
“Will you tell me about her?” Talking about Julia is the last thing he wants to do, he doesn’t even let himself think of her, but Ella is looking at him again, big eyes peering into his with curiosity etched across her face, so he sighs and tries to decide where to begin.
He tells her of ambition, how when Julia Montague decided on something, she went for it with everything inside her, how she never did anything in halves. He speaks of her intelligence, tells Ella that it didn’t matter which room he followed her into or who was in that room, Julia was the brightest one there, every time without fail. And her passion, while sometimes misguided in his opinion, was ever-present and inspiring. He tells her of an unexpected kindness, a goodness that she liked to keep hidden away behind stony expressions and clipped conversations but that stemmed from a desire to help people.
“That’s all she really wanted, I think,” he says softly, and he doesn’t know if he’s talking for the sake of his daughter or for himself. “To help people.”
The expression on Ella’s face is unreadable, and he suddenly wishes he could take it all back, or that she wouldn’t hang on his every word the way she is now. When she eventually opens her mouth, he steels himself for the question that he’s sure will tumble from her lips next: did you love her? Because from the way he’s just described Julia, that’s the only logical conclusion. He did love her, he still does, he realizes, and in that moment, he probably would have told Ella as much, but she asks if she can have some chocolate milk and picks her book back up instead.
He opts to walk home rather than call a cab, hands shoved into pockets as he makes his way through the London streets. For the first time in 5 months, he’d let himself speak of her. Telling his daughter about the enigma that was Julia Montague hadn’t been nearly as devastating as he thought it would be, the words falling from his tongue as easily as if he had been relaying something so mundane as what his weekend plans were. But now that the proverbial seal had been broken, he’s overwhelmed with an assault of all things Julia.
He thinks first of her smile, not the perfected one she’d constructed for the public, but the genuine one she reserved for quieter moments. How the right corner of her mouth would quirk up ever so slightly more than the left and the light crinkles beside her eyes would give her face a damn near angelic glow. How she was soft, in a way that he would have never thought possible. Her voice, almost always stern and demanding when speaking to the press or fellow members of the cabinet, took on an air of lightness when it was just the two of them. Never weak, he thinks to himself with a small smile, just soft. He had only ever been lucky enough to wake with her still by his side on a few precious occasions, but it was enough for him to be certain that mornings were his favorite: her sleep-rattled slow words, the breathy rumble in her chest as she hummed out quiet laughter, her cocooned in pearly white sheets and gazing up at him through fine lashes, the demeanor in those golden eyes soft and contented and acutely unbridled. This is the Julia he remembers.
And then it’s as if someone takes a blade to his wrist and slices his skin open, every emotion and feeling and memory pouring out and engulfing him, and he’s feeling again.
Oh God, is he feeling, and it’s all her.
He sucks mouthfuls of brisk London air into his lungs, struggling desperately to reign himself in and failing anyway, hot tears dripping down his cheeks so feverishly that he gives up trying to wipe them away. He ducks behind the nearest building, bringing a forearm up to press against the cool brick and tucking his head in his elbow, and he realizes he must be carrying on quite loudly when a man nearby asks if he’s alright (no, he isn’t) and if he should call David a cab home. He waves a dismissal toward the direction of the voice, grateful that the man takes it as assurance enough to leave.
He doesn’t know how long he stays like that, sobbing into the crook of his arm with an occasional fist slamming into the brick, but when a harsh light flicks on above him and sends him careening back to the reality of him weeping in a London alley in the dead of night, he manages to smear the tears with the backs of his hands and continue on his way.
It’s better this way, he realizes as he rounds the corner, the front of his building coming into view. Not feeling anything may have been easier, having the numbness as a cushion between his heart and the seemingly omnipotent pain, but it didn’t feel right. He needs to remember her, in all her enigmatic and consuming glory. He owes it to her, he thinks. He doesn’t know how many other people had been privy to seeing the true Julia, how many blokes she’d allowed to meet the raw version of herself that wasn’t groomed or polished, but he couldn’t bear if the only Julia Montague that’s remembered and mourned is the falsified, armored version of her. Remembering her, her smiles and her passion and her softness, allows him to breathe easier, too, and he figures that keeping her with him in memory, reliving the precious few moments they were given, is a hell of a lot better than wallowing in emptiness.
It’s with this thought swimming through his head that the elevator dings and he’s stepping onto his floor, foot barely planted on solid flooring when he notices it. The box is small, no adorning paper masking its cardboard simplicity or postage stamps signaling its origin. He lifts it tentatively, surveying it briefly before tucking it under an arm and using his other hand to fish the key out of his back pocket.
Locking the door behind him, he quickly flicks on a lamp and retrieves a knife from the kitchen, gliding it between the single line of tape sealing the package. He unboxes it carefully, until the four sides of the top are unfurled and the contents inside are exposed to the air. He studies it, gripping the outside so tightly that the cardboard begins to give way under his fingers, recognition dawning gradually. It’s white fabric, he notes, a blouse, more specifically. He reaches for it slowly, just barely allowing the tips of his fingers to skim it over when it hits him. The perfume. David Budd would know that perfume anywhere. He clutches it in his hands, brings it to his face and inhales until the only thing he’s cognizant of is Julia. It’s her, through and through, and he can’t find it within himself to give a damn that, for the second time tonight, he’s weeping like a child.
One hand still holding the blouse to his cheek, he brings the other back to the box, turning and flipping it until he’s sure there isn’t a note, any sign of where it came from or who sent it. There isn’t, so he lets it drop to the floor, shedding his shirt and jeans and slipping into the blouse, fastening enough buttons to ensure it doesn’t slip from his frame. The logical part of him knows he should be wary, that the explanation he favors for this blessed turn of events is almost certainly impossible, but when he slips into bed and closes his eyes, he can pretend that she’s lying next to him. And for the first time in 5 agonizing months, David doesn’t dream.