The guilt hurt more than the axe wounds. That's what surprised CT the most in the end. As the world started to blur, as she slowly lost control over her legs, as the blood trickled out of her body and the realization was upon her that this was the end, what hurt the most was the guilt.
He held her tighter than ever as she slipped from his grasp, his eyes looking into hers for the last time, full of the ardor and devotion she could never have for him. He called her name, as if saying it enough would delay the inevitable.
"Connie! Connie!"
Would he have trusted her if she hadn't swallowed her pride and let him call her that? She never told him how deep that name cut her. He probably just thought it was short for "Connecticut"; everyone except the Director probably did-that bastard and his sense of humor. That was the name she was born with though, and however she might have fought to shake it, that was the name she would die with.
His eyes were the worst. They were pretty eyes. They didn't take hold of her the way Wash's did, but they were the kind that would turn other girls' insides to jello, and they were glistening with tears. This was her just rewards, wasn't it? This sweet, idealistic young man, who would be her knight in shining armor if hers were only that kind of story... he adored her so, and she used him.
The thing about guilt is that it has a way of making even your most legitimate intentions seem like petty excuses. A small part of her still tried to assert that this was all necessary to bring the Director down, that there was something going on that was bigger than the two of them, bigger than his love and his heartbreak and his life, but on this side of her own life, it felt like a cop-out. Maybe all that was true, but it was never the point. This was just about her need to run away. Again.
Connie started running at an early age and never stopped. How the hell else does someone end up involved in a thing like Project Freelancer? They all had stories, and they wouldn't be were they were if any of them were happy.
Even Carolina's.
However much Carolina might have twisted Connie's stomach into a hundred knots, she was a runner as well. But she and York, they were running to-adventure for him, glory for her; Connie and Wash were only ever running from. They never needed to talk about it. She could just tell. They were the same. He would have listened, he would have cared, and he might have come with her. He was the one person she might have finally felt safe with, if she hadn't run away. It would have gotten them killed, perhaps, but then, look where they were now.
Joke's on you, Connie.
Sometimes she would look into Wash's eyes and swear he knew everything there was to know about her. And then the moment was gone and there was nothing. The moment was gone and there was no way he could know about everything she was running from, about the siblings who were always better, about the parents who never smiled, about the feeling that each and every person she met seemed to want something from her, about the crippling loneliness and the overwhelming and inexplicable knowledge that she would live her entire life where she was born and never feel like a person.
That knowledge never became untrue, though. No matter how far she ran. She ran half-way across the galaxy, to a new home and a new family and she felt no more safe at the end of that long, long journey than she was at the beginning. She ran herself right into this madness.
Now she never would find out what Wash was running from.
Her instinctive struggle to keep conscious was all but past now. The black was creeping in all around her, and the will to fight was gone. In the face of everything she had ever done and not done, she had nothing more to say except a feeble "No! Not yet!" She knew even as it echoed through her mind that it was pointless. Her body stopped, her mind sank into the black, and little Connie lay her head down at last.
Finally done running.