Author's Note: To help me break out of my original-fiction writing slump, I'm doing this. Suggestions for characters you'd like to see explored, even ones not appearing in the show, are welcome. As it stands there's room for this to be a lengthy series, but I live to please. Let me know if the past-current tense mix worked or didn't; I'm experimenting a bit here. Hitting up all the colors on LJ's challenge list, too. And then some, if need be.
Dash can't identify a dandelion from a rose. But he can always remember what orange arum lilies are.
He sets them down almost gingerly by the tombstone, kneeling down on the ground beside it. The flowers are tied with dark orange ribbons. This time of year the ribbons blur into the fallen leaves of autumn. Orange petals stand out, like the thick old sweater she wore around the house. Dash's mother had been a woman of contradictions, with a petite, flat chested profile, taller than her husband and eternally clad in baggy clothes around the house. She was always in that orange sweater, lounging on the couch to watch soap operas or football.
Her blonde hair was never put up when she was at home; it fell freely to her hips, and he had played with it as she held him, watching TV together or talking about his day. When it was fall she'd make big leaf piles for them to jump into. Her hair caught leaves and twigs like a net, and there would be a good twenty minutes of picking them out later, but she belonged outside. She was like a flower out there, orange and blonde and wrapped in leaves, laughing a quiet little laugh that made his father's eyes go soft.
She was a good mother and a better police officer. She was swift and agile and moved like liquid, a blur of motion, a uniform and a gun. Like an apparition, she appeared before people, and took them in. Dash was proud of her every single day of his life. He was proud of her when she put her hair up with a few plastic orange-brown haircombs and tucked it under her hat, when she came to school when he was in kindergarten to talk to the class, when she emerged from his parents' room in casual clothes to bake white chocolate chip cookies with him. She was harsh and gentle, bigger than life and plain, as constant as the tide.
He reaches out and touches her tombstone. He needs no rock to tell him the day his mother was shot.
That was the day he found out that red blood diluted to sickly orange in the rain. The day he realized that she was too good for this world. Maybe there were flaws to her he didn't see, or get to see. Maybe she would've hated how he turned out, one of the bullies she warned people about, but he would never know. He would never get to see her get misty eyed at his prom dates or cheer at his big games or tell him what to do when he messed up. When he dropped his backpack by the door, he still could shut his eyes and hear her tell him to pick it up, envision her lounging on the couch, gray pants and oversized sweater, curled up by the TV. In the fall it was the sharpest, most painful sensation he knew. He could smell her, pine scented cleaners and leaves.
Dash doesn't cry anymore. It doesn't scratch the surface of what goes on inside him when he sees her pictures or comes here. He has to come, though. His father won't. His father refuses to acknowledge the woman's existence, threw out every picture, every possession of hers, until there was only what Dash hid under his bed. And the soap operas, and football, which never really changed. These were the things he hung onto then and does now. He can't let himself just forget her. She was his world, she shaped him into who he was, and he never even got to tell her how much it meant to him, never got to be old enough to articulate everything she was.
Her name was Blythe Dash nee Wakefield, she liked sweets and football and fall, and she's still his mother, even if she's not here to see him through life. When he sees Phantom, once, he tries to ask about getting a message to her and is informed she's not a ghost. It's comforting, soothing. She's moved on. She's in Heaven, not trapped in some in-between state forever, yet some guilty part of him would've liked to just get one last word in. Dash gets up, leaving her favorite flowers behind, recognizable in their funny shape, and shuts his eyes briefly, hoping she can hear him.
I love you, Mom.