Also, somewhere along the way, I became addicted to angst. It’s not pretty.
Spoilers: Right up to Fallen
Disclaimer: I’ve petitioned, but apparently there’s a patent issue.
Rating: PG-13.
Summary: Cassie was not the only person in Colorado to cry herself to sleep that night.
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Grief
She knew she would be lost if he touched her. He would put his arms around her waist and lean over and she would remember how very well they fit together and how much she had missed him, and that would be the end of it.
Janet Fraiser wanted very much to be angry right now, so she stayed as far away from him as the furniture in her living room permitted, and the only sound in the room was the ticking of her grandfather clock.
He seemed to accept it, which made the small voice inside of her nervous. She stepped on it until it stopped talking. Inviting him over had probably been a mistake, but he’d remembered Cassie and a lot of his stuff was at her house and she wasn’t sure how long one had to be corporeal before one could go to one’s own house alone, so she had in spite of her misgivings.
Cassie had pounced on him as soon as he entered the house, badgering him with questions and eager to show him what she had been up to. Janet had excused herself into the washroom, where she’d turned on the shower and wept, trying desperately not to cave and wondering if that made her a bad person.
After a very strained dinner, which only Cassie’s non-stop chatter had allowed her to get through, the phone rang. It was for Cass, inviting her out for the evening. Though she’d offered to stay, Janet had shooed her daughter out the door, even though she was terrified as to what she might do left all alone with him.
And so here they were, and she wouldn’t let him touch her.
They sat in silence, each desperately trying to think of what to say. Janet was caught somewhere between flying off the handle at him and making him stew until he spoke first. She was about to crack when he finally cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry.”
So he knew, then. He understood that she felt he had left her for another woman, a better life. He understood that he had broken her heart, and that a part of her would never trust him again.
“It just…everything hurt. So much.”
It had taken weeks before she was able to sleep through the night without being interrupted by the macabre scenes of his death-bed. They had eventually faded from nightly frequency, but she had never heard his perspective before, so she steeled herself to live through it one more time.
“But you were there. I could feel you in the room, hear your voice. And I knew that I would be all right.”
She would not cry. She hadn’t saved him, but she was done crying over him.
“And then Jacob was there with the Healing Device, and suddenly there were so many voices. Oma spoke clearest of all of you, but I tried to hear you instead.
“I was dying. Even when Jacob fought for me, I was dying. So I asked Jack to make it stop. I could feel the radiation in every cell in my body, breaking them apart. It was killing me, and I wanted to go.”
Janet felt the pricklings of tears in her eyes and blinked them away, determined not to crack in front of him.
“And you were there. There was a light all around you, it was brilliant and white. I heard you call out to Jack, and then I heard you in my head saying ‘Let go, Daniel. Just let it go’.”
Janet froze. In almost four hundred nights of interrupted sleep, this was one scenario she had never once considered.
“I should have known. I should have known. You always tell us to fight it, fight it until there’s nothing left. But she looked like you and she sounded like you and I wanted to hear your voice before I died so very badly. So I let go.
“And then there was a time, I don’t even know how long, where I thought I was dead. But I wasn’t. I had Ascended, and I was angry. But they tempted me with knowledge and I took it hook, line and sinker. It took me so long to see through them.”
She looked over at him. He was playing with the fringe on one of her afghans as though it was the most fascinating thing he’d held in months. She wondered if he remembered reading her The Odyssey as she’d knit it, and if he had, if he too saw the irony. He looked up at her, and she saw the tears she had refused in his eyes.
“I’m sorry, Janet. I am so sorry.” He was crying now, and she clamped down on her heart with all her will, determined that it would not break for him again. “I’ll leave. I’ll leave Colorado, I mean. Just tell me – ”
“No.” Even now, she couldn’t send him away. “No, you can’t leave.”
He looked back at his hands.
“Are we going to be okay?” he whispered.
She looked at him for a very long time before she answered, weighing it all in her head, searching for a balance somewhere in the mess their lives had become.
“I don’t know, Daniel. I don’t know.”
When Cassandra Fraiser got home from the movies that night, she found the ashes of an afghan in the fire-place and her mother asleep alone in her bed. Cassie was not the only person in Colorado to cry herself to sleep that night.
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finis
AN: I need fluff, and I need it now. Help!
And yes, as a matter of fact I am not a big fan of the Ancients. However did you guess?
gravitynotincluded, November 28, 2004.