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Outfoxed

Summary:

After tragedy occurs, John du Pont tries to figure out where things went wrong.

Chapter 1: Waiting Games

Chapter Text

John du Pont trains his binoculars on the bleak winter landscape through a crack in the curtains and frowns.

Yellow police tape, cordoning off the crime scene, flaps and snaps in the wind. An ambulance has long since come and gone. Now things are quiet.

There are four cars out there, and he's pretty sure they aren't about to leave anytime soon.

He stands back up to check the window. Nothing's changed.

He turns away.

He has everything he needs right here. He can outlast them.

He imagines the authorities quizzing the staff, trying to gauge their next course of action.

Do you have any reason to believe that Mr. du Pont is still armed?

No, scratch that, they would certainly be aware of his - well, interest, in firearms.

Maybe something like, has Mr. du Pont been acting odd lately?

You mean, odder than usual, they'd be thinking.

He can't sit still. Maybe it's the silence making him agitated; it's as loud as any crowd at a match.

And it only opens the door to let the derisive voices crowd in.

Of course, you screwed this up. You had a chance to lead an Olympic caliber team, but no, you couldn't even manage that successfully.

What would Mother say, if she were alive?

I'm not surprised this happened. I always told you that wrestling was a low sport.

Sometimes it's hard to distinguish where the derisive voices end, and the memory of his mother begins.

His pacing brings him to the trophy room. It was here that he'd first met with Mark Schultz, when he'd been optimistic, full of ambition and plans.

"We, as a nation, have failed to honor you," he remembers saying. "I want to see this country soar again."

Had he really said that? It seemed so....well, grandiose. But he must have meant it at the time.

Fragments of memory begin to shift and form patterns.

Until he remembers firing the gun, then blood on the snow.

Everything else is a blank. But he senses he's in trouble anyway.

He's obliterated all of his respectable identities: ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist - and now, in the eyes of the outside world, will be seen only as a murderer.

He's tried to drive away the familiar demons - loneliness, insecurity, paranoia, but they'd wound up coming back and showed no signs of leaving.

From now on, the name Foxcatcher. would be synonymous not with excellence and distinction, but scandal and shame.

People would gossip. People would talk. I always knew there was something off.

Everything Mother would have loathed.

He's tried to convert any hint of "craziness," into more acceptable vices (as embarrassing as it might be to have a drunk son, it was far preferable to an insane one), but in the end, he'd failed at that, too.

It had looked so perfect on paper, and in his imagination. Put together a world class team of Olympic-to-be wrestlers, with himself - Golden Eagle - at the helm. But somehow, somewhere, things had fallen apart.

Maybe he should go out, confront the crowd, but they'll just want an explanation, and right now, he simply doesn't have one.

Confession is good for the soul, or so goes the adage, but what if you don't know why you did what you did?

To answer the question of "why", he'd have to go back to the beginning.

Before everything began to unravel.

Before everything fell apart.