Title: Into The Darkness
Author: Bert
Posted: 12-02-2004
Email: a href="mailto:therealalexcall@hotmail.com">therealalexcall@hotmail.com
Rating: PG13
Category: Angst, post You're Welcome.
Content: A/C
Summary: Set just after You're Welcome
Spoilers: Up to and including You're Welcome.
Disclaimer: The characters in the Angelverse were created by Joss Whedon & David Greenwalt. No infringement is intended, no profit is made.
Distribution: Just Fic
Notes:
Feedback: Yes please!
Thanks/Dedication:This was the moment he’d been waiting for. The moment that he knew would come. The moment he had prepared himself for every moment since he had made the decision that nobody else could make.
Half a year’s quiet reflection and thought, he’d been so ready. But then it was all ruined by half a day. It had seemed so real, it had been real, but then, if she was dead, how had she…?
That wasn’t the question to ask, he quietly told himself, the important thing was that she had. She was able to come back, to help him and he should be grateful for that.
God he hated her! Why couldn’t she have just died quietly? Why did she have to come back at all? He wasn’t grateful, why should he be? She had meant the world to him at one point and then she let that… that thing into her body, she let it take over, and manipulate them all and she hadn’t fought it off, she’d just let it happen. That wasn’t the woman he loved, he could never love a woman that weak.
Then, to top it all off, just as he was finally getting over her, she came back. She tricked him into letting his guard down again, into undoing all that he had done just to get by. She’d took him back to almost perfect happiness when’d he received the first phone call, and then, with the second, everything around him had plummeted down. Further down than he’d ever been, further down than he had ever thought it possible to be. But there he was.
It had fallen to him to arrange the funeral. Ironic, really, he thought, for a Vampire to arrange a Christian funeral, but he had proceeded to anyway. Her parents were unobtainable, and though one of the others could have done it, he’d felt it was a job for him, only for him.
She’d left no will, of course. Why would she? She was only twenty-one. She’d often talked with him, though, about what would happen if something would happen to her. She’d listed everything she wanted, right down to where each guest would sit and who each guest would be. Sadly, a large majority had been unable to make it. For someone who had always been so popular, so personable, it was unsettling just how few people there were at her wake. Of course, above everything else, she’d wanted a moonlight service, so that he could be there. He would be chief mourner, she’d joked, what else would he be, since he seemed to be practicing for the role every day.
He sat in the shadow of a large Oak Tree atop a small hill and looked down at the small group of people, dressed all in black, the sunlight glistening through their tears as the casket was slowly lowered into the ground. Californian sunlight warming everything, yet still a chill filled the air.
He’d thought long and hard, and in the end had decided – no – he’d felt that it was right to ignore one of her last wishes. He would not left her end her life surrounded in darkness, just for him. She was a warm bright person, and she didn’t deserve to be kept hidden away in a dank, murky corner.
Sure, she’d blossomed in that dank, murky corner, but he found that he couldn’t help wondering just how much would she have blossomed if she’d been nurtured, out in the world, in the sunlight. No, she would end her life, the way it should have been lived.
He’d kept her in the darkness too long.
***
This was the moment she’d been waiting for. The moment that she knew would come. The moment she had prepared herself for every moment since she had made the decision that nobody else could make.
They’d said to her that she might wake up and that she would probably be perfectly fine. Those were the words that they’d used. Might and probably. That was what had swayed it for her. She would do that one last thing, she’d get up, walk around, interact and say goodbye, and then she’d let have to let it go.
Except, she didn’t see it as letting go. She saw it as one last grasp to keep hold of it. Not for herself of course, but for everyone else. He was holding on for everyone else, helping them supporting them, but no one was there to hold on for him. That’s what she’d done, given him a tether, an anchor to keep him where he was supposed to be.
At least that was the plan. She watched him now and it seemed more like she’d tied him down with a frayed string. He was sat apart from the rest, for a good reason. But then, it was him that had put that reason in the way. He’d chosen to have the sun out, more as an excuse than as an explanation.
She’d been watching him the past few days, he was distancing himself further and further from the rest of the group and this was just the latest in a long line of his being alone in a crowd. It would pass. She’d seen him in these moments before, he would cope. But she wasn’t sure if she would.
She was going to be a witness for the rest of eternity, the sole observer of a play with a cast of millions and she wasn’t sure if that was what she wanted. It would be easier for him, for those that she’d left behind. They were going to grieve, sure, in one way or another, she hoped that they would always grieve. But in time, she would become unimportant, a thing of the past, they would move on.
She could never move on. She was going to watch them live, watch them grow and watch them forget. She was going to see their moments of pure happiness, and their moments of deepest anguish. She was going to guide them, and help them, but she could never interact with them again. They would not feel her in their lives, but they would be her life.
She sat down next to the biggest part of her life and watched the rest of them lower her lifeless self into the ground. It didn’t seem right for her to be there, for her to be a witness to that. This wasn’t about her pain, it was about theirs. And besides, though she was always the first to admit that she looked fantastic in natural light, this was where she felt more at home. Safer. In the dark shade of the tree.
There had been a time when she’d avoided the darkness, when she had stuck to the sunlight, to the safer place. But then, when she’d moved to LA in search of eternal sunlight, she’d been forced into the darkness, and it was there that she’d finally found herself. Finally been allowed to grow.
She’d kept herself out the darkness too long.
***
He turned and looked at her. “What are you doing here?”
“Just… watching.”
“You’re not supposed to be here, you know that.”
“I do. But I can’t go until you let me go.”
“And how do I do that?”
“I don’t have the answers. If there are any answers. But it’ll help if you spoke to someone.”
“I’m speaking to you.”
“But I’m dead.”
“You’re more alive than most people.”
“We can’t keep doing this.”
“I know. The last chapter’s been and gone.”
“Our last chapter together, yes, but this isn’t the end.”
“It’s not?”
“No. It’ll never end.”
“Never.”
Ends.