Title - The Dark Song of Mourning Doves
Rating - PG
Pairing/Characters - Claire, Nathan, maybe possibly Nathan/Claire
Spoilers/Warnings - Spoilers through 1.18 "Parasite;" character death
Summary - She wants to say something, to prove she is more than he thinks, but each time she tries to say something, apologize, tears trickle from her eyes and her sobs say more than words ever could.
Disclaimer - I don't own a thing; I'm just borrowing the characters. I promise to give them back some day.

Her memory of the day comes in spurts. She recalls the golden morning when mourning doves called, the hostile breakfast where she avoided Heidi's eyes for the last time, the sounds of screams as she panned the crowded New York street, the strong scent of mint aftershave and burning buildings as she fought free of his arms, and the wind through her hair as she flew for the first time in her life.

Her father stands amid the wreckage in her mind; glasses-less eyes scanning the horizon for his little girl he'll never again see. He seems so small from where she is (the air above it all), and she shouts to him -- offering the last bit of comfort she may, saying goodbye, but the air swallows her voice, and she turns back into the shoulder that holds her up.

The ground seems strangely solid and hard after her time in the air, and the smell of burning bodies and the sight of blood splattered across the ground leaves her heaving, doubled-over with his hand on her back, protecting her from the horrors they have yet to face. She wants to say something, to prove she is more than he thinks, but each time she tries to say something, apologize, tears trickle from her eyes and her sobs say more than words ever could.

Holed up for three days now, cold cereal, stale chips and him her only company, she contemplates the reason for it all. She hardly knew them all; Hiro's only a blip in her memory, the squat Japanese man that always made her smile, his friend, Ando, nothing more than the background in one of Isaac's paintings. The Haitian, forever a nameless black face in her memory, gone in the brilliant flash of light that consumed whatever was left of her life.

"We lived," she whispers, not to him anymore than herself, but he looks over at her, dark circles lining his deep chestnut eyes, and the three days' growth giving his face a grubby/sexy appearance.

"We survived," he corrects, softly, deadly.

And for a moment, she wonders what difference he sees between the two words. Survival is just a form of living, but the more she thinks about it, she realizes that surviving does not denote life -- not the type they had before, and she thinks she understands why her mind has erased all of the day except for snippets, moments frozen in time.

She wants to say they could make a life; the two of them, on the run from an enemy that is no more than a shadow right now. She wants to believe she'll have a life, that she'll see her father again (that the last image won't be him standing alone in a concrete grave of masses), that when he looks at her, she'll feel the heat she felt the first time (that maybe Heidi's looks for those weeks were never in vain), but the crackling of the small fire he built bespeaks their situation more than she cares to conceive.

They will survive together -- on the run from their past and scared to acknowledge their future -- and maybe if she wishes hard enough they can make a life of more than moments suspended in time.

Maybe she can make time flow together into a stream of thoughts, wishes and future goals some day, but the first step is to survive (just like he said) live to see tomorrow's golden sunrise where the mourning doves no longer call and his eyes shine with the heat she remembers and the future will be theirs to shape together -- away from the frozen tundra of the past where her memories are only spurts of truth amidst the black.

Feedback is love!