Snowflakes danced through the air, soft and delicate, blissfully unaware of the tortured souls on the porch to which they glided so softly down. They began settling in any available surface; the concrete steps, the soft fabric of the jackets, the weave of a tasteful scarf, the curls of hair as dark and smooth as fresh coffee. The flakes brought with them a chill, a chill augmented by the painful, bittersweet memories echoing in the minds and hearts of the two figures in their path, the figures huddling closer and closer together as the wintry winds that carried the unique dusty travelers picked up speed around them.
He hadn't been fond of the cold; perhaps as a child in carefree play, but that was centuries behind him. As the snow began to form a fine layer of accumulation on himself and his broken partner, Henry gently and wordlessly persuaded Jo to rise from the stair and re-enter the home. She didn't brush the snowflakes from her hair, and with all that had happened, he didn't feel it was his place to do it for her. Jo, in fact, seemed to have been frozen. Not physically, but emotionally. Her chocolate eyes focused out, out beyond anything one could visibly see, out into the realm of memory.
Not even when she was staring again at the paused image of him on her TV screen did Jo return to the moment. She failed to notice the way the couch cushions moved to accommodate another person, she barely felt the hand gently laid on top of her own, barely heard the words he spoke as he gently rubbed the warmth back into her fingers.
Him. All was him, all was Sean. The image on the screen, the masculine hand holding her own fragile one. The words he spoke, the long lost "I love you" blending with the proximal "This is the worst pain, I should know." The words somehow bridged times and speakers and accents and blended into some concoction in her mind, a concoction leaving her with the most horrible, most astounding, most truthful thought: Love is the worst pain.
"Abigail and I, we were more than a couple, more than husband and wife, we were best friends. She knew how to unchain me from these morbid coils of our profession and soar out, up and out into the open world. She was kind and loving and gentle, yet spontaneous and spirited and free..."
after a bad day, he'd always be there. He'd take you out for Chinese, to your restaurant, the place where you'd first met over a mix-up of dum sum. You and he would sit in the rickety folding chairs and eat the swimming-in-soy-sauce food. You'd pick at the vegetables, not wanting to talk about the tragedy you had to witness the aftermath of. He'd catch your eye, say he was finally going to learn how to eat with chopsticks. He'd try and try, never picking up anything beyond a grain of fried rice that just so happened to stick to the sticks. You'd find yourself starting to smile as he struggled to eat. He'd finally give up and would end up skewering the food with the chopsticks like an Asian kebab. Depending on your day, you'd just laugh as he failed again, or perhaps you'd make kebabs of your own.
"She was my light, my rock, my cloud nine, so to speak."
Henry paused, both in speaking and in his absentminded caress across Jo's hand. She was still frozen. His words and her memories were slowly being absorbed by her subconscious, being fitted and connived into slots where they didn't belong, creating a momentary mosaic of consciousness, a glittering prism of viewpoints and experience, of full truths forming into halves of their original unadulterated selves.
She heard, but she did not see. She listened, but did not comprehend. All was Sean. The voice beside her, the hand on top of her own.
"What happened?" She asked, something prompting her that it was only the right thing to do. But this was Sean, her love, her everything. Shouldn't she know the answer already?
"One day she was there, and out of nowhere, she was gone."
Now they were both frozen. Jo in her mind's delusion that the man next to her was her lost beloved, Henry only beginning his mental journey to a much similar state of thought concerning his lost love.
Even in sharing with her this most precious and private detail of his life, he'd taken no chances. Depression made one a horrible liar, so he'd chosen a truth that he knew she would hear as the lie he didn't dare tell. It was ethereal, saying that one's love was simply gone. 'Twas as if they could at once reappear and all would be well again, all would be perfect and whole and beautiful. Such was not, nor would ever be the case, but if euphemisms make it easier to fall asleep in that empty bed, to come home to nothing but dust and echoes, to simply go on living and breathing, then by all means use them.
She let the fatigue take hold. Facing both her dead and her death in one single day had been entirely too much to handle. Jo found rest for her weary head on the uneven surface of a shoulder cushioned by an outdated shoulder pad and a scarf of the most dismal gray-blue tone.
She wasn't at all startled to realize it was her partner in homicide solving and not her husband on whom she rested. She'd known it was Henry the whole time, she just kept the futile hope that if she imagined he were Sean, he would truly become Sean.
And she was fully aware, fully cognizant of the fact that he had just admitted to her that he knew her pain. And in that, there was hope. Commiseration lent itself to community, the words' ancestry notwithstanding. Another piece of the Human puzzle known as Henry Morgan fitted itself into place, the piece that explained the distance he put between himself and others, the reluctance to form bonds and relationships. Jo had in herself a matching piece, the same shape and size, perhaps a different pattern of events decorating it, but it would fit him as much as it fit her.
She didn't need to say anything else. Henry knew she had heard, had understood. And so they commiserated in silence, staring vacantly at the pixels of the TV screen, not paying any mind to how the dynamic colors ebbed and flowed through the plasma to create the image of a human being.
This was how I wanted the episode to end, or rather, what I think happened after the episode ended... Sorry if it sounds ridiculously philosophical, I do my weirdest thinking at midnight... Thanks for reading and I hope my twilight thoughts made sense to you(: