Disclaimer: Dom's not mine. Even if she is stuck in comic limbo at the moment. Certainly not making money off this... that would require someone wanting to read it. Notes: Set in current continuity. Not that it was hard to do, or matters significantly. Also, this makes two two-page G rated fics of mine in a row. If not for the angst I'm sure the world would have ended by now.

Falling Down
by Timesprite

It's funny how you can trick yourself without even noticing. Though, I guess if you noticed, it wouldn't be tricking yourself. It would just be willing self-delusion. I'm pretty good at that, too, of course. I've had to be. Or I've told myself I had to be. That I needed all these little lies built up around myself as shelter. I think I thought they'd make the hurting stop, somehow. It didn't of course. It just meant that all the bleeding was internal, and that no one could see how much hurt there really was. Except when I winced, flinched away from a touch or a look. Then, of course, I ran.

I've spent so much time running it seems impossible. How can one woman run for so long, never stopping, never pausing to think there might be a better way? Part of me knows it's because I always felt the cure would be worse than the damage. That I'd rather live forever with these scars that held me down than to rip them all open again to heal properly. As fearless as I always tried to seem, on the inside I think I was just scared to death.

Scared of everything. Of gaining, of losing. Of being loved twenty years too late for it to really make a difference. Of discovering that everything I've ever believed about myself was a lie. Of finding out it was all true. I wanted to be nothing. To exist in the world without feeling or being felt for, because anything else was torture. Because I know inside that I can love as well as I hate, but that knowledge--that there's a loving, living woman still buried in there somewhere--was too precious to ever let out, because revealing it meant it could be destroyed.

I could never let people see my pain. Pride, maybe. More likely a survival instinct gone awry. Never let them see you injured, and for me that went beyond the physical. I had to be strong twenty-four hours a day because if I stopped, if I let that guard down, the fifteen year old girl who still huddled in a corner of my brain would start screaming and she'd never stop.
I'd never stop.

So I had to wall it all up. And when I felt it cracking, I had to run off to patch it up. I made sure no one could see, just in case I slipped. Because it was always for them, I realize now. All my life I've thought myself a selfish person, and in reality, I have nothing. I gave myself away in pieces to anyone who wanted it. Willingly, more times than not, but all those vultures over the years took their pieces too.

One day I just realized I had nothing left to give. I'd had one piece too many taken unwillingly--Gryaznova had taken the last little piece of who I was--the good part. The part that still loved despite carelessness that was never really Nathan's fault. It was just there, and I was probably as inattentive as he. She took the part of me that was hope, and smashed it. Left me bleeding and broken in more ways than one, and it's something I don't think I've really recovered from. I don't think I will. It's like a broken bone that still aches years after it has healed. And that's something, I suppose. It reminds me I'm alive when I've lost a lot of other reminders... all the scars I'd accumulated over the years, the physical ones, gone. And oddly, I miss them like old friends. I'm not comfortable in this younger skin. But that wound she left me with, ripped me open and left me with, still aches. There are days I tell myself that's a good thing.

It means that maybe one day, this won't be all there is. Because if I can hurt like that, maybe I can still do other things as well. For a long time, all I could do was hate. X-Force took me back when they didn't have to, more than once, they cared, they were concerned. I knew it but none of it penetrated. Life was all grey and red, apathy and anger.

It was anger at something I couldn't name, a god who'd never been mine. And apathy for everything else because my life was empty. You can't have that golden moment without missing it afterward. If life is just crap, and never gets any better, that you can live will. Sure, it sucks, and it makes you bitter. But I managed to get a long way living off my bitterness. That and my luck kept me alive even when I sometimes wished I would die. You can live with the crap life throws you. It's the light that kills. It's that place where everything it good for an instant--maybe longer than an instant. Maybe it's a few months, maybe it's even years, when you find yourself beside the person who, while no less flawed than you are, manages to make those flaws you have okay. And you love their flaws as much as you hate them.
And then something happens. Maybe it's tragic, maybe it's not. I suppose it doesn't always take being torn bloody to fall from that place in the light. I was, but that's almost secondary. The real pain comes in knowing that you had that--that it had been so much better, and that you've lost it all. Lost more than you ever thought you could have to begin with. That's what kills you, slowly, day by day as the cold realization that what you had is gone sinks in, gets under your skin and into your blood, and sinks down into your bones where you know it will never leave you. It's a heaviness there, and a bitter taste at the back of the throat. It's loss. I'd never imagined that loss was something you could taste, but it is.

And here's where I started tricking myself. Because a part of me was actively hoping to get that light back, not realizing how impossible that was when the world had been torn to hell and people have been broken down. It didn't matter. My eyes were on the past, on how good it had been, how good I'd felt, how good Nathan and I had managed to be. It was golden, pure and simple, and like an addict, I needed that. Needed more of those days and hours and minutes, not caring that the world was blown to hell, and that the days that lay before me were grey and cold, unfeeling. Outwardly, I got lost. I was a shell that did what it had to, while the rest of me was screaming for those days to just come back, not realizing that life like that happens by accident and never by design. You can have it, but when it's gone you can't go back and actively try to regain it.

I was starting to realize it. I was starting to thaw from the ice. And then life got out of my control, and there was more loss there, loss as bad as the first time, unimaginable loss, again. Something in me knew the numbness and trickery was beginning to fail. And somehow, I positioned myself here. So I'm standing at the window staring down on the lights of Hong Kong, alone. Utterly alone for the first time in so long, which seems a strange realization. I'd always thought of myself as alone. It's only now that I really am that I realize otherwise. And I know that I'm not the one I need to be telling this all to. I should be finding that fallen, battered angel that managed to bring gold to my life in his own bruising way. And instead I'm standing here hoping he'll just fall into my life again like he did years ago so I can finally show him all these scars, show him the one in particular that we share. Show him so that maybe we could tear each other apart so we can heal this time. Because now I'm seeing that as scared as I am of that pain, I'm more scared that tomorrow, I'll wake up and feel nothing at all.

End