Inspired by Bones Bird's Fanfiction Drabble Challenge over on Facebook. Her guidelines: 500 words or less without the lyrics and title.

07/01/2012 Lyrics

When our time is up

When our lives are done

Will we say we've had our fun

Will we make a mark, this time?

Will we always say "we tried"

- Rooftops, Lost Prophets

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Each week, twice a week, for the past ten years, she had made the journey to San Francisco, only for a large thick slab of bulletproof glass to separate her from her heart, her lifeline, her soul mate; the man she loved.

The hard grim line of his mouth would transform into a playful smirk within seconds of seeing her. His piercing blue eyes would start out cold, hard, and haunted, before those two windows to his battered soul would warm considerably and soften. His healing process would initiate with the tilt of her lips and the sparkle of her eyes only to derail at the end of each visit, when two guards led him away from the younger woman, his lifeline, to his life behind bars begrudgingly shared among the very men he had spent his life investigating and incarcerating. Irony was not his friend nor was it an enemy; it was more an irritation, like a buzzing mosquito at a summer picnic that would not cease until the life was squashed from it.

The conversation was mostly always one sided, her reciting what had happened the days since she had last visited, he added very little when he would. He was a convicted murderer whom would if given the chance to do over, would make the same choice to shoot his nemesis in cold blood, the man responsible for his friends' deaths. She was the mother of his only child. A child, he knew existed, simply because she could not hide a pregnancy from him even though separated by bulletproof glass and iron bars.

He had never laid eyes on the child, had never seen a picture, or knew whether the child was a boy or girl. He never asked. He had concluded that the child was born the third week of January 2013, because that was the only week she had missed a visit. She could claim that she had tried to make their fledging relationship work before and shortly after his psychotic break; that she had always believed in him, but he could not. He had not tried hard enough; he had not believed in her, in himself. He had shut her out, shut his family out. He had wanted to live, to have a family, to love her, and be loved by her, but his anger, his despair had manifested to something he could not ignore. He got his vengeance, but it had cost him his freedom.

The what-if's haunted not only him, but a broken makeshift family that after ten years still had failed to heal.

If they had all tried hard enough, they could have prevented the tragedy or at the very least prevented the consequences of that tragedy from invading an innocent life of a child whom would never know its father as a father, but as a man behind bars that never asked about it, because if he asked, what little sanity the former Special Agent had, would crumble.

Thank you for reading.