This one is based on Inspector Morse Second Time Around and Lewis The Dead of Winter. I hope I've managed to convey my love and appreciation for those who made these two shows so great because the sort of similarities woven so beautifully and fully into them don't happen by accident.

The Dead of Winter is another one of those episodes that I've known sooner or later would have to be stared in the eye and wrestled into words. A job not for the fainthearted even if Hathaway finding the little girl didn't draw a straight line back to Morse finding little Mary. It's a story with a scope I'm not sure I'm up to doing justice, but one that wouldn't leave me alone all the same. I've dreaded the day it demanded to be written, and I've loved it and hated it and everything in between in the process of getting it down. It 's been too emotionally-fraught a journey to even say at this point whether I'm pleased with the thing, but here's hoping it's not as bad as I sometimes fear it might be…

Disclaimer: Purely for fan purposes; no copyright infringement intended…

Prologue:

The cases, for all they were close to twenty years apart, bore more than a few uncanny resemblances to each other. Perhaps not the cases so much, as their investigations…at least to the man who'd lived through them both. (Or was that 'whom had lived through them both'? He'd never quite gotten it down to Morse's everlasting frustration. )

There'd been the children, of course. In the one case, Mary Lapsley 18 years dead before the case was ever even opened, as far as Lewis was concerned, and Barbara Redpath and Terrence Miller grown to adulthood in the shadow of her death. And in the other, the kids from the estate: Paul Hopkiss, Scarlett Mortmaigne, Briony Grahame, and James Hathaway himself. All but Briony grown into big lads and lasses but all still touched by a murder from nine years in the past, and a time much farther back when Butch and Sundance had ridden over the hills of Crevecoeur while Morse and Lewis had chased about Oxford reinvestigating Little Mary's murder.

Little Mary had been killed almost by accident by one sad, confused lad, and Linda Grahame very much purposely by another for all he'd been trapped in a grown man's body. Horrible acts had been covered up in the name of love and family; one bad decision leading ever onward to the next. And more murders committed to keep the first buried.

Along with the children had been the parents: John Mitchell and Linda Grahame both attempting to protect their children and both being killed in the process. There'd been Mrs. Mitchell valiantly and pathetically trying to carry on for her son's sake under her crippling load of guilt, shame, and grief. Patrick Dawson sacrificing his beliefs and career to avenge his daughter and getting it all terribly wrong. And there was Mortmaigne who didn't deserve the loyalty and love of his daughter or that of the boy who killed for him. Who had in fact stolen their innocence and twisted their lives beyond repair.

In addition, both cases had exacted a horrible price from Lewis' partner of the day. Morse, struggling to fight through the memories of finding little Mary, wrestling with the horrible knowledge that her death had created a monster in a man he'd counted as a respected colleague. And Hathaway… Lewis couldn't even begin to know just how hard the case had been for him. His childhood memories had been overshadowed by Mortmaigne's evil—whether or not that evil had touched him in the past; that girl had messed with his head and stomped on his heart; and all of it had been tangled up with the horror of the Zelinsky case coming as it did when his sergeant had been reeling from that trial.

As for Lewis... besides the price he couldn't help but pay whenever his old chief inspector or his current sergeant took an emotional battering, both cases had carried with them a hefty price for him as well. He'd come close to losing his career in the first and his sergeant and his life in the second.