It's certainly been awhile, hasn't it? No worries - it's ficdump time! First up are my entries for the 5Ds 100 on LiveJournal, where I picked up two pairings (Rex/Martha and Crow/Yuusei), and am currently plowing my way through the first of those two for . . . NaNoWriMo. Did I mention I'm batshit insane?
Please leave a review at the beep, and remember, rarepair is good for you! (Please take note that these stories will be posted as I go, so neither the story nor the prompts will actually be in order until the end.)
Title: How Far We've Come
Character/Pairing/Group: Rex/Martha
Prompt: #95 - How Far We've Come
Rating: Hmm. PG-13?
Genre: Romance/slight angst
Pairing: Rex/Martha
Summary: After fifteen years, he comes back. For the last thing.
This is the last thing.
He's completed his other obligations; the Directorship is now – in all likelihood – in Jaeger's capable hands, the city already well on its way to being rebuilt. He wants to work on one of the teams that's building his dream at the same time – the Neo-Daedalus Bridge, the one that's being built as his initial wooden structure was built – by Satellites with dreams. He does not want to take the work from them. It is because of him, after all, that they must do that work now, instead of its having been done years ago. And in the end, he solved nothing.
He was wrong. He knows that now.
Once upon a time, in the town of Trieste, Italy, a young man met a young woman. They courted, they fell in love, they married . . . she returned to his home with him, leaving the world she knew and traveling halfway around the planet to be with him. And in the end, he left her to her fate, let himself be misled, drawn astray.
He no longer blames Martha for what she did all those years ago; he recognises it now as a product of the same hurt and fear he wanted to get her away from. As things turned out, she, with her tiny corner of the world, did more good than he with all his sweeping power and resources. And that, he supposes, is as it should be.
Still – there is this last thing.
He gets on the boat with the construction workers, no longer flying high over the channel in a private helicopter. Even had his home survived his own folly he would take this boat, this boat that should have taken him home fifteen years ago. It isn't home any longer; Martha made that clear when they last met. But he has nowhere else to go – no home, no possessions but the clothes on his back, and even they are charity-issue.
He is now as he was seventeen years ago. And that is appropriate, fitting. Because this is the last thing.
He gets off the boat, looks at the jeeps ferrying people to what is no longer a black market but a thriving gigantic open-air marketplace – still, he has no doubt, with its shady corners, but no longer with the need to hide the majority of what is bought and sold, from cards and radios to cigarettes and peppermints. He looks at the Security officers, checking papers, signing on the line, giving directions, some of them glancing curiously in his direction. He looks at the empty gaps in the ruined skyline, the places where old buildings have been pulled down, leaving spaces like rotten teeth extracted from the gum.
He looks. And then he turns his feet toward the last thing.
The walk is long; he knows it will be. An hour passes, then two, then three. He drinks from the water bottle he has brought and keeps walking. He passes places where people have started bringing out the items they have salvaged over the years, items that will fetch a high price now that they are available to city folk. He passes places where twisted bridges span large crevasses, where ropes have been strung to stabilize them. He passes a young man helping an old woman across a road that is torn down its middle, a place where bulldozers will doubtless soon rip up the shattered pavement and replace it with fresh, with new, with unspoiled.
He passes the rose garden where he and Martha exchanged their vows. He passes the churchyard where they dug a grave, the two of them, by hand, the churchyard where they dug a grave by moonlight in which they could lay their son, the one where Michael still lies. He stops long enough to find the stone they put there – a large one from the garden, his name and two dates once scribbled on it in a permanent marker that has since faded to a simple gray ghost on white limestone – to touch his fingers to his lips, and then to the stone, not trying to keep himself from shedding tears.
Then he keeps going toward the last thing.
He passes through the belt of trees that surrounded the house, and it is there.
Some of the windows have been carefully covered with plywood. It needs a fresh coat of paint. The garden has gone to seed, his wife's leisure hours replaced by hand labour and dozens, if not scores, of children. The chimney is in dire need of someone whose legs and hips are now more mobile than his.
And she is there, hanging shirts and skirts on the line that was once reserved for bedsheets, one end tied to the beam of the back porch, the other looped around a tree. She is hanging clothes as though it's the most natural thing in the world, as though he hadn't promised her that she would live like a queen in his home, as though the wince and the hand against the small of her back when she stands is no more than she ought to have expected out of life. She calls behind her to a pair of children, one a tall girl maybe ten years old, the other a boy still in biballs, and pushes her hair back from her face, and she looks not sixty or even forty but still the girl of nineteen he met in an Italian café. Then reality sets in – the lines that have burrowed into her face in the last fifteen years, the windburnt and water-chapped hands, the long dark dress with its high neckline, heavy to protect against a winter chill that no central heat will keep at bay.
Her wedding ring is gone. And that is all right, because this is the last thing.
If asked, he would not know what he is seeking; forgiveness he knows he cannot have, redemption is forever beyond him, peace will always be just a step out of his reach. He cannot fix things. And he thinks that when he is done here, he would like to sleep. There is nothing dramatic about the thought. It's been a long fifty-eight years, and the last fifteen of them have seemed even longer, and he would like to sleep. To be done.
Then he sees the rows of vegetables she has planted by hand, the ones that feed the children she still cares for, and he knows he will not sleep. Not that way. Not now. He is a fool and quite possibly now an outcast, but he is not a coward.
He steps into the yard. Still going toward the last thing.
Her eyes meet his, dark, tempestuous brown against cool green, and he has to fight not to look away.
He owes her this.
She is the one who turns, hoisting the empty laundry basket to hold against her hip, heading for the stairs. He doesn't think he makes any sound – does not speak, does not call – but maybe there is something, because she turns back, standing in front of the stairs, her basket against her hip, as he crosses the yard, one step at a time, feeling as though he is fighting his way against a gale-force wind in spite of the day's calm. It is hard to breathe, a little, and he has to force himself to keep moving forward, but force he does. He's good at making paths where there were none.
He moves past a swing set. He moves past the apple tree in the middle of the yard. He makes himself move, one step at a time, to the stairs, where she is standing. And when he is there and they are face to face – as face to face as they can get when there is literally a two-foot height difference between them – he has no idea what to say.
It is the last thing, and he has failed again.
At last he gets slowly to one knee, then bows his head. It isn't as easy now; fifty-eight has a way of stealing mobility that a crash into a ragged metal pylon cannot compete with. He says nothing. There is nothing to say.
Her hand lands on top of his head, square dark fingers threading into his hair, weaving themselves in place, running through time-bleached silver strands to find the back of his neck.
He promised himself he would not cry. He's given her enough grief. But at the first touch of her fingers, rough and calloused and incredibly gentle, he feels his chest hitch and the first tears run down his face. He keeps it tilted toward the ground, not letting her see, hoping she will not feel, will not know.
This is not her last thing.
She threads her fingers through his hair again, this time cupping the side of his head with one hand, pressing it against her stomach like the mother she is, her other arm sliding around his shoulders as he finally gives himself over to tears, unable to stop himself when placed under the onslaught of that feather-light, so prosaic touch. He feels himself shaking, feels her plant her feet and pull him close, hears her say something to someone behind them – more children, perhaps. It doesn't matter.
She sits on the back steps, the ones he built, and guides his head into her lap. His hair spills over the heavy dark skirt like a mercury blood stain, and he rests his head against her knee like a child, his good hand pressed against the aged and work-muscled swell of her calf through the fabric. She runs her fingers through his hair again, smoothing it, not stopping him, no trace of the anger and hurt that passed between them a decade ago remaining in that hand. The realisation soothes him, although he does not rely too heavily on it; among his many reasons for marrying her, her ability to look past basic emotions to help those in need came close to the top of the list. That much, he thinks, has not changed in the past decade and a half.
Her fingers trace down his jawline and touch his lips, and that is the first thing.
His tears slow, and stop, and still he sits with his head in her lap, here in this place where the last thing was not the last thing, and he thinks of how very much time and space has passed, and how they are here, together again, and how perhaps she will grant him a second chance after all.
He thinks of how far the two of them have come, and closes his eyes, her fingers still running through his hair, and he rests.
Status: 3/100
Total NaNo Word Count: 3644