Disclaimer: I do not own 24 or anything affiliated with it. It is owned by FOX, et al. No infringement is intended and no profit is being made.

Spoilers: Season 7 casting spoilers, season 5.
Time Line: Pre-season 7, mostly speculation. Not related to 24: Redemption.
Characters: Tony Almeida
Pairings: Tony/Michelle
Author's Note: Gift!Fic for stop_theworld. She prompted me with: 24, any character, "erase the rights and the wrongs." The title is stolen from the Tool song Lateralus. This fic is probably further proof that I should never, ever write anything while listening to Tool.

Summary: The stone is cool beneath his fingers, the letters scarred perfectly into the marble.

Drawn Outside the Lines of Reason

by: chopsticks
pg-13

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He hates the weather in Los Angeles now.

Life should be more like the movies, he thinks as the sun bears down upon him. The weather should match my mood, the dramatic moments punctuated by thunderclaps.

(She loved the sun, loved the heat, and he loved the smile it brought to her face.)

My tears should be mixed with the rain, not evaporated by the heat.

(She would drag him out into the sunshine, pieces of hair falling out of a messy ponytail to be blown around her face by the wind, a light dress clinging to her every curve, and a smile that never failed to stop his heart for the briefest of moments.)

The stone is cool beneath his fingers, the letters scarred perfectly into the marble. He traces her name with the tip of his finger and remembers the little moments.

(Picnics in the park,

(stolen kisses outside the office,

(smiles across the bullpen of CTU,

(nights on the couch with take-out and cheesy movies,

(the way her eyes would crinkle around the edges when she was angry,

(her fingers tangling with his when he was stressed and needed a quiet moment,

(laughter as they prepared dinner together,

(her expression as he entered her,

(the way her head tucked neatly underneath his chin,

(the way she chewed her bottom lip when she was concentrating.)

His fingers slide to the other side of the marble, and he traces his own name in the same way he traced hers. He's supposed to be dead--he certainly feels dead; even his soul doesn't ache anymore, so used to the incessant pain inside--but his heart is still beating. Hers is silent beneath the grass.

He should be spread out beneath the grass and the dirt and the worms next to her, but he's not. He's not, but he can't bring himself to kill himself, yet. Every time he holds the piece of broken mirror, gun, sleeping pills he remembers that this is not something she would approve of. He doesn't end his own life, for her. Always for her.

He's doing this now, for her. He should be dead, thought he was dead, was happy for it. Instead, he died in Jack's arms, then woke up in a coroner's van, CTU vanishing into the distance like a childhood memory.

These people let him scream and rage and kept him in a nicely-furnished room. Then they showed him that it had never been terrorists behind the death of his wife, but the U.S. government to the highest levels. They pointedly suggested that it was time for a revolution.

Let it come, he thought, plucking the petals off of one of the flowers he'd set before the gravestone, the blue fluttering away in the breeze. I hope I'm among the first casualties.

He wishes it would rain.

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the end.