OMG! It's Kuruk!! And he's ALIVE!!

Yup, I am. And with a new oneshot to boot. It's quite sad and depressing and I just wrote this while quite feverish and with a sore throat and maybe sore ears... T.T

It's about Eli and the lies she tells herself and makes herself believe and about the mistake that takes up most of her life. Many pairings here, so... Eli/Jack, Eli/Jack onesided, Jack/Claire, Eli/Doctor Tim and some tidbits and mentions of Rod/Lilia... There ya go. Hope you like it and I also hope its sadness doesn't make you too sad :(

Disclaimer: Unfortunately, throughout my hiatus I have not yet acquired the rights to own Harvest Moon. Dang it!!

Lie to Make it Better

I hate lies.

I hate it when someone can just look at you and tell you something so untrue; and that you believe it. It's a deception that can bring your hopes up or down or shatter you or worse, make you think something of someone that is so untrue that it alters your perceptions of them.

At the Clinic, I remember the day Lilia and Rod came in for her diagnosis. I had just been a novice nurse, my gown clean and unstained, my knowledge that I'd gotten from Tim's textbooks untested and the skills I had practiced on unfeeling human-shaped dummies never put to use.

Lilia had recently been feeling weak back then, so her husband Rod had brought her to the Clinic. After the Doctor and I ran extensive tests, we learned Lilia had an incurable disease; terminal.

I remember wondering back then what I should tell her when I saw her pale yet determined face and the her husband's concerned face that had seemed to age over the past season. Should I lie and give them a little happiness, or should I tell the truth and shatter them?

In the end, I didn't have to make the decision; Tim made it for me, telling them the truth.

A season later Rod left town in search of a fabled cure and Lilia seemed to grow sicker and sicker and yet more and more determined to live to see her husband one last time.

It crushed me.

Lilia loved her husband so much that she clung to life no matter how bad the quality was and Rod had left his home in search of something that could cure the love of his life, leaving her and his precious children in the process.

The truth had done that to them; had put them in such positions that they were so far away from each other...

Maybe lying wasn't so bad when it was for the right reasons...?

Over the next few years when I truly became a nurse, I remained kind and caring; I couldn't help it, my grandma tells me its in my nature, just like her. I know that maybe that being so attached to patients left me open to heartbreak, but I did it anyway... because offering your patients a little love and empathy can do more wonders than even medicine sometimes can.

The Clinic became my life, as it was Tim's. I wanted to become better so that I'd never have to be faced with another lie again, that I would be able to cure my grandmother and Lilia and everyone else that needed...

And then I met Jack; the stranger from the city. The cocky, intelligent, strong city-slicker that had come to run the old abandoned farm...

I fell in love with him at first sight. After that, I could no longer focus on anything but him and medicine took a back seat to him...

And the thing was that he seemed to feel the same way.

After a year of courtship straight out of a romance novel, we married. And I was happy.

I didn't care that I had to do a few chores at the farm before I went into work at the Clinic or that sometimes Jack and I were so busy we hardly saw each other. At night, when the day's trials and tribulations could no longer reach us, I'd lie in his arms and think to myself that I could do nothing else but love this man.

After a couple of years nothing happened. Even though we both wanted a child and Goddess knows that we tried, I could not get pregnant.

And so it was me and Jack this time in the examination room, more terror than determination on my face and nonchalance on Jack's, as if the barrenness inside me had seeped between us and he no longer cared. I was losing him and I knew it... so I prayed with all my heart that I wasn't broken, that it was just harder for me to get pregnant and that maybe after a fertility treatment in the city I could finally start a family...

When Tim walked in I read the look on his face in an instant; it was the same he'd given Lilia and Rod the day he'd given her the death sentence she carried over her head. I reached for Jack's hand but he slipped out of my grasp, refusing to look at me or the Doctor, instead looking at the curtains.

"I'm sorry, Elli," Tim had said, looking very sad, "You're completely infertile. There's nothing that can be done..."

I had nodded and hid my tears and after Tim told me to consider adoption or surrogacy I left with Jack trailing idly behind me, his face a statue, his walk rigid and controlled.

Jack stopped caring, stopped showing me the love he'd shown me before. What he did now was an act. In the weeks after my diagnosis he had not even given me the act that would later come to be the way we lived and interacted; he'd just ignored me, as if I was nothing to him.

The nothingness around me and the nothingness within me were crushing me, and I was suffocating by the time Jack came up with his act.

He began to show me hollow love, hollow care, hollow empathy. At the dinner table, when I served him his food he wouldn't speak to me unless it was about the farm, money or the weather. His touch felt cold to me, his smile fake, his eyes dimming when he would see me...

And after a few seasons of that, as I laid down to sleep, I smelled a perfume that was not mine on my pillow.

I wasn't angry or vindictive; it had been my fault, after all... I was just broken. Jack was never there anymore and when he was he'd give me a beautiful gift that felt like a bribe to me... The sheets were changed a lot, the second room in the Inn mysteriously booked when I visited Ann, who's eyes could not meet mine. I felt like I could hear the rumors, the chatter...

I knew who she was. Claire. The beautiful, blonde city-girl. The young, smart, witty, city-slicker that had come to Mineral Town looking for work. The same blonde Jack had given the job of rancher to and after just a few weeks she was promoted to partner of Dragonfly Farm.

She was a fitting replacement, I thought. She was beautiful whereas I was old and beginning to lose the childish qualities that had made me appealing. She was witty and sneaky while I was filled with kindness and not a deceitful bone in my body. She could work the farm by his side while all I could do was offer a patient false hope and cry my eyes out at my situation that I could not fix...

My womb was empty while hers wasn't.

A wife notices these things... Claire had become pregnant, I could see that much. Inside her was the baby I'd failed to give him, the little child that had been produced of love, the little child that would finally have Jack throw me aside...

Jack was happier, face alive for the first time ever. Claire was radiant, glowing with that special light only an expecting mother could have. The town was alive with rumors that scathed me and ceased whenever I was around...

And I would cry to myself alone at night. Jack never slept by my side anymore, he never saw me that much. He had built a house by the seashore and that's where he slept now. It was all too noticeable that the small house he'd built Claire when she started working at the farm was empty as well...

I was expecting Jack to walk in any day and tell me he wanted a divorce. I often sat at the kitchen table alone with my plate of food half empty while the place across was me was adorned with only an empty plate, and the place to my right where our child might have have sat was empty as well...

But it wouldn't be soon.

Claire would have my place and their child the empty place; the placeholder for my child... the one I still wished I could have no matter what, even if it belonged to the man who had tossed me aside.

Work was my solace.

In the Clinic the medicine did not chatter, the charts I filled out did not grow bigger and bigger each week, the sterile whiteness never judged, never called me barren or useless or poor or unfortunate.

Tim had been sending me out every two weeks on a menial errand, and even though he thought I didn't know I did. They were going there; Jack and Claire. To check on their baby, to receive good news instead of bad, to watch their baby move on the monitor while Tim rubbed cold gel on her bulging stomach... and I knew Jack would hold her hand then; because she wasn't broken like I was.

On the day the baby was due I didn't bother putting Tim through the trouble of sending me away. I called in sick and told Tim I was very sorry I hadn't warned him the day before. Then I hung up and closed my eyes to the room and wondered how Claire would feel when she held that baby in her arms... I wanted to feel that so badly...

I decided to go sleep at grandma's house; Jack would want his proper house to welcome his new child with. Perhaps he didn't deserve it, but the baby did. The baby had done nothing wrong and I felt it deserved the best.

As I wrapped my coat around me and took my clothes out of the closet and put them in my suitcase that I had used that night so many years ago to move in; so excited and happy at the promise of life together.

When I was done I stood in the house that had been the stage for the play I had put on for so many years and that would now be the home for a family.

When I closed the door I didn't look back.

I moved through town, grateful for the emptiness of it. I didn't want anyone to see me this way; the proud, silent wife making way for her replacement, stepping aside for the woman that had given him a baby. There would be enough of those stares for the rest of my life.

My grandmother's house was the same as always; timeless. Grandma slept in her rocking chair and Stu was nowhere to be seen. Before the motherly instincts I used to have for him busted out of me I reminded myself of the present... He was sixteen after all; why would he be at home when he could be doing something else?

The emptiness of my childhood home did nothing to comfort me.

So after I quietly placed her suitcase against the wall, I just left. I walked listlessly through town... It was cloudy, as if the heavens were foretelling my future. Dark and bleak with no husband to hold me through the nights and no child to fill me with unconditional love.

I had wandered into Rose Square by the time the rain had started. I didn't care much, I just let the rain soak me through. Childishly and naïvely, I wished that it would fill the void in my chest; instead it did nothing but make me shiver with cold.

"Elli?"

I turned and saw Tim looking at me from the path leading towards the beach. I nodded in response and he approached me, concern in his dark eyes. "You're going get pneumonia if you stand out here-,"

"What's her name?" I interrupted in a monotone that silenced Tim immediately. When my dull brown eyes met his he looked away ad gave me the answer.

"They called her Elizabeth," he told me, and I nodded in recognition. Elizabeth; what a pretty name...

"Thank you," I said and bowed my head and walked away. He followed me.

"Elli, stop, please!" he cried after me. I tried walking faster, only my legs wouldn't respond; my feet kept dragging at the same slow pace as the rain splattered all around me on the cobblestones, "Elli, please!" his hand made contact with my shoulder and I pulled away immediately.

I could feel that he was hurt, but it didn't bother me anymore. It seemed that all the care and empathy I'd had in me had evaporated away and I didn't have the strength to act like Jack had done with me.

"Elli," he began, "I... I... you deserve better..."

That surprised me, but I knew he was lying. "You're lying," I stated simply.

He shook his head and spoke over a deafening roar of thunder. "No, I'm not," he said, staring straight into my eyes with such intensity that I flinched despite myself, "You are the most amazing, caring and beautiful woman I have ever met and you deserve someone that can see past one flaw and love you no matter what."

I shook my head, trying to tune him out. "Stop lying to me!" I screamed.

He grabbed me by the forearms and held me still; gently... lovingly. "Stop lying to yourself!"

I froze. Had I... been lying to myself?

Yes.

The answer was there, right in front of me.

I had lied to myself every night when I told myself he'd get over Claire and come back to me, I'd lied to myself when I refused to believe that I could not bear a child and that all it needed was work, I had lied to myself when I had fallen for Jack's vaunted love; his conditional love that had dazzled me all those years ago and had thrown me aside when I could not give him what he wanted.

And I had lied to myself when I had told myself that I deserved all that happened to me. Just because I was broken it didn't mean I deserved this... I had made myself believe I did because I had hated myself for not being able to have something I had needed with all my heart and soul...

Funny, I had become what I hated...

Slowly, I leaned into Tim and rested my head on his chest. He'd aged; just like me. His hair was graying, he seemed less powerful and in-command to me... I croaked so low that he shouldn't have been able to hear me. "Lie to me," I murmured, "Lie to me and make it better..."

Tim did not protest. He held me there, in the rain whispering what I wanted to hear in my ear lovingly, such a foreign feeling since I had not experienced it in over three years.

And then, when he ran out of things to say, he pulled away and gazed at me with such love in his eyes that I thought they were alive with a black flame... "I meant every word," he told me truthfully. I began to cry. I couldn't tell which were my tears or the rain... "I love you," he said, I did not react, "Marry me."

I accepted his proposal. And the hole in my heart filled when he finally kissed my numb lips and I surrendered myself to him, relinquishing all the cynicism within me...

And then the rain stopped and we could see the sunset. It was the end of the day and the start of night, but it was still beautiful and one of the many wonders in the world... and I thought that maybe the skies were telling me what my future would be; colorful, beautiful and wondrous.

And I was happy...

A/N: Eww... so sad and depressing and stuff... SIGH, well, that's the product of a mixture of being sick and unrequited love S

Hope you enjoyed it though! You know I love reviews... ;) So if you would, would you please review? Thanks!