I Fall To Pieces

Last ep seen, "May Day", contains spoilers (thus, a few lines inserted), as it's set at the end of that ep. A quick write. Not particularly a "hanky-fest", but it may be a little disturbing for some. Title is that of the Patsy Cline song, but there's no connection with the song or lyrics intended. You know the disclaimer drill by now: ER and its characters are property of entities that could $qua$h me like a bug.

I Fall to Pieces

by EHursh

They were worried about Carter, but nobody noticed that Kovac had been slowly falling apart over the last few months. It wasn't as simple as a matter of Carol having broken his heart, it was that she had - however inadvertantly - brought him back from the protective deep freeze where he'd stored his heart, his emotions, for the last nine years. And the pain, especially of the thawing, was hurting like hell - but where Carter's pain was physical, and masked with stolen drugs, Kovac's pain was psychic... and there was just no mask for it but to grit his teeth and try to push past it.

He had been trying to push past it for a long time now. He had lied to Carol, when he told her that he had often gone to the lakeside to sit and look at the city. That is, he *had* gone there, but he had sat there and thought dark thoughts - of jumping in after a few drinks, swimming out a little ways, letting the cold water have his body. There was nobody to care if he didn't come home, after all. No wife to scold him if he left his shoes in the middle of the living room. No daughter, to bring home boys that he would hate, and no son to carry on the Kovac name. He was alone, had been since... well.

There had always been people around him at the lake, though, whenever he went there - he tried to vary his routine, to go there at different times, but there was always somebody. Somebody who could have called paramedics to drag him back out of the water - and while they might not pull him out in time to restore him to full health and consciousness, they might pull him out in time for him to live a sort-of life as a gork in some hospital until he died from infected bedsores.

He sometimes wondered if that had been God's way of looking out for him. But God was always falling asleep at the switch, wasn't He? It was so *easy*, wasn't it, for a person to survive hell, and say "God was looking out for me!" - but didn't that mean by extension, Kovac thought, that God had had some kind of personal grudge against those who didn't make it? And what could Belma, and Jasna and Marko, have possibly done to earn such wrath? Or anyone else, for that matter - any of the people who'd died that day. Or a woman who died, while her rapist lived? Kovac sat at the El stop, rubbing his forehead - partly because his head hurt, partly to cover his face: there were people here, and he wasn't sure that he wouldn't break down right here. Deep breaths, Luka, he ordered himself, and managed to hold on until the last person had got on the train.

Then, alone on the platform, the tears came. He sat alone on the bench, sobbing into his hands. Silent sobs that shook his body as he wept. A casual observer of his day might have thought that the day was not so bad, compared to what he had been through in his life. And really, it - by itself - wasn't. He was used to death... far too used to it, in fact. Being in the midst of all that shooting, the confrontation with Benton... even the woman who preferred killing her unborn baby to a simple operation (as deeply shaken as the experience had left him), that was all only a drop in the bucket. But drops have a habit of adding up, until suddenly the bucket is overflowing.

Besides his personal loneliness, he was alone at work. He had always tended to be reserved, closed off from others, and - while he had come to know the others a little - was still pretty much on the same awkward, hi-how-are-you level of semi-familiarity that he'd had with them in the first place. The nurses sometimes joked with him, but mostly they seemed warily fascinated by him. Sometimes he wanted to shout at them "Why are you staring? Have I got dirt on my nose?".

The other doctors... hah. Mark had eased up a little in his cold disapproval, but still rarely spoke to him. He'd hoped, briefly, that he and Peter might find common ground, but the man was so tied up with the color of his skin that Kovac had quickly decided that their earlier rapprochement had been only a fluke. He got along well enough with Cleo, but she was deeply into her affair with Peter. (He understood. He remembered how absorbed in each other he and Belma had been during their first year together, when every phone call had been an intrusion into their private little world.)

Kerry? No. He would feel too awkward, talking to her about this. He was still angry at himself for allowing himself to submit to Carol's emotional blackmail with that cancer patient, and still remembered the way his heart had sunk at the realization that he was interfering with *Kerry's* patient. (He had, after all, become viciously frank when she had interfered with his patient a few months back.) She had seemed to understand that Carol had dragged him into it (God damn it, his feelings for that woman had been so *obvious*?), that he hadn't done it to strike back at her. She was - *could* be - a caring, fair woman... but *his* problems certainly weren't important enough for him to bother her; she had something - or someone - else on her mind right now. And he sure as hell wasn't going to talk to Romano - the little man reminded him of a very petty, very minor officer Kovac had known during his military service, the sort who learned little things about people, then used that information against them later. (Besides, he had to admit, he was still pretty pissed about being shoved into all those extra shifts during Kerry's suspension. The experience had soured him on volunteering for extra work - he'd made good money, but he'd also needed a week to flush all that caffeine out of his system.) Elizabeth appeared to have developed her opinion of him from Mark's side of the story (whatever the hell *that* was), that was all he could figure. Carter was just... *out there*. Scattered, easily distractable. He suspected that if he dared speak to Malucci, the conversation would be all over the hospital within minutes - he hadn't noticed that the guy seemed to be especially discreet. And he didn't know anything at all about Chen.

He heard the rumble of an approaching train. Wouldn't it be easy, he thought as he stood up, swiping his eyes dry against the sleeve of his coat, for him to step out onto those tracks. There would be perhaps a moment of pain, and then he would be... erased. His body would become a stain for someone else to clean up, but *he* would be gone. His nightmares would be gone, his violent memories, his unending guilt over his past sins, everything. Gone in a flash of metal

he'd seen the remnants of people hit by trains. There'd be no bringing him back from *that*.

He stood there by the tracks, his hands shoved into the pockets of his trousers, as the train flashed by him. So when it came right down to it, he thought, I couldn't do it. Just three more steps, that's all it would have taken for this all to be over, and I couldn't even do that. He retreated to the bench, and sank down to stare into the night.