Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Nope
Summary: "She was fed up of talking – with one it was all she did; with the other it was all she never did."
Author's Notes: This is why I shouldn't be allowed to read poetry. Due my inability to write anything d+d related at the moment, and all the angst-y things I've been reading lately, this idea came to me when I read the poem below. It's different to d+d, but I always adored season 7 and all the angst of the triangle in a masochistic way, so this a reflection on it. Not that I'm saying this is what I think happened off screen.
Please, if you have anything at all to say – loved it, hated it, improvements, general criticisms or comments – review.
With hugest thanks to Anna (aka Charlie) for being generally fabulous and wonderful.
And to Kristi and Liz, who will never even know that this fic exists, not being ER obsessives, but just for being there even when they don't know they are.
********** Better by far you should forget and smile----------
'Remember' by Christina Rosetti:
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you
planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
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The city was bathed in the lights of the darkest hour, the streets deserted and the people silent. The river which flowed wide and deep, meandering as a silent passage through Chicago, was lit slightly from the golden glow of the streetlamps above on the bridge. The only living beings skulking through the shadows were the strays, those who didn't care enough and those stupid to believe that having a decent life made them invincible from the prey that stalked the hidden corners and lights of a city.
She turned from the deepest charcoal of the endless lake to the tall, dark stranger standing beside her on the iron-carved bridge from whose heights she had been tempted to leave it all forever the other night. He had spoken in his rough, gravelly voice but she had not heard him. Her thoughts, as they always were in those darkest, most unsure days, had been with the circle of murky, fatal passions she was trapped in. The haze of alcohol she had consumed which was washing over her brain had made her unconcerned of her situation, and through the mists obscuring her senses she had spoken firmly to him, at the time convinced of her path of her choosing. "Yes," she said. "I want to go. Can we go?"
He had looked shocked, almost paralyzed by the surprise that overtook him at her forceful words. Never before had a victim come to him so willingly, so clearly knowing the end result of her heedless, unconcerned actions. The dark haired, sorrowful-eyed, tiny woman with the air of grief and complications which should not be delved into had sat at the bar on her own, and the opportunity to take one who had a life worth so much more than the rest had overpowered him. That she had consented to this fate she chose over the confusions of her life, apparently knowing what he truly wanted, was to him incomprehensible. Yet he had figured that all the mysterious lady had done in her life was incomprehensible, and her psyche was not the issue that concerned him.
She was fed up of talking – with one it was all she did; with the other it was all she never did. With the present him it was not the concern, it was not why either of them were here. Knowing the hell her mental life had become she had chosen to go with him through the uncaring coldness of the night, to kill her pain and angst with the drug she always turned to, the drug which was her saviour and her murderer. He took her she knew not where and she cared not where – the end of the night, of this journey of hers was not what she wanted or was concerned about. The devil inside her, which had always demanded its instant satisfaction was continuing its loud cries, which she had become unable to ignore, and she followed him in her lonely, absorbed, silence through the shadowy streets.
The dark street corner scared her more than she had been prepared to show or admit, even to herself. There were no lamps in the streets of deserted blocks and buildings where she had been taken. The dull glow of pollution and lights in the far distance barely reached into the furthest depths of the city, where she had never been before, around her the air seemed to have thickened with a threat she could sense but not touch. His sudden rough push against her shoulder, forcing her forwards whether she wanted to or not now, startled her, and a rushing inside her head had made her plead for more alcohol, anything he could give her to numb the reality she was living which had begun to come back to her.
"There's no drink," he grunted in a voice which seemed to be growing harsher as the bottles she had poured down her throat in her blind panic at her life earlier receded further into the past. "The last one had it all. There's only some schmack – there, in the corner. Get it if you want it." She had known it was the clearest manifestation of how far she had fallen when she had crawled, so desperate to silence the yelling voices of torment in her head, to the darkest recesses of the room into which he had pointed. Scouring the floor with her hands she had found some needles and some bags on the cold boards amidst the dirt and dust covering the bare floor, and forced some of the influence into her veins. Tensely she had waited for the relief she craved to hit her, knowing the oblivion it would bring would be even harder to do without than the one she normally sought, yet unable to resist the ability to kill her pain, even if it was just for now.
It came to her, washed over her, and was the escape she'd always been aiming for; the avoidance of her life and her issues that she had fought for. The terrible mistakes she had made and the way she had fallen apart so recently seemed to fade away and not to matter any more. It didn't matter that she wasn't the person she ought to be, that she wasn't the person either of them normally there by her side thought she was. That she had hurt them both so much before now, and would have to continue to do so ceased to hit her with such force in the front of her mind. That there was no way she could create the idyll she'd dreamed of as a child, that there was no way for her to solve all their problems, all her problems, became something hidden by the drug she had pushed so fiercely, so desperately, into her veins. In that place, with that man, her present was all there was.
It had been clear to her that the memories they would hold of her for the rest of eternity would not be good ones. Her personality, her life, and her involvement in theirs had been too complex and too dark for them to be able to remember her and smile. She had wanted to vanish from them; from their present, their futures and their pasts. A sad remembrance of her was not what she had wanted them to hold, yet it was all she had been able to leave to them. Neither of them would have the lives they deserved, the life she didn't deserve, unless she left them – and it was this which had forced her into her current place. She knew that.
She had never been good at talking to fix things. She had always preferred to leave them broken if the only means of mending them has been to talk. Being screwed-up was how she had lived her life; it was how she had made her connections to both of them. The cause of the connections which are the cause of where she placed herself that night. But one of them had made her talk, was the only person she could have talked to. And the other gave her solace by letting her avoid it, by allowing her to manipulate him with sex.
As for the future … it had never been something she had planned for carefully. The sharp swift changes of her childhood, which had come at such short notice, had taught her not to count on anything, not to be sure things will happen. That she had such an all-consuming dread of things unknown and unpredictable she put down to the uncertainties that haunted her childhood. She couldn't even make herself think about how the future would be; she couldn't see how this could be resolved and leave them both happy. She didn't want to hurt either of them, but she never could save anyone. She had always tried. And the drug helped to forget that, to stop worrying about them and their future.
Though it was wrong, giving in was so much easier than going on. Her life had become so hard, too hard. The daily struggle to get out of bed, the daily fight against herself just to function, just so she could pass herself off to the rest of the uncaring world as normal was one she was prepared to quit. She had failed; failed to save both of them, failed to save herself. About herself she no longer really cared, but she didn't want them to grieve over her, to be involved with endless angst because of their entanglements with her. She needed to give them a way out as well as herself, she had to solve it all, she couldn't, she didn't know how and it haunted her every waking moment and tormented her every dreaming thought.
The hand that moved over her shoulder from the room empty behind her forced her back into the moment with a fierce jolt. She turned to face him, calmer and willing again now that the drug had overcome her, now that the world seemed a better place and the threats had ceased. With him it would be different, but he would force her to forget, take her to a place she didn't know and where all her reality would be irrelevant and forgotten. This would make everything better; the drugs and the sex and the knocking on the door to the hell she didn't have to live daily, the hell she had escaped from, would solve it all. They had to. She had no other recourse. Not them, she couldn't go to them, she couldn't force her demons upon them. They couldn't know, mustn't know any of this, any of her mental hell in which she was drowning.
The demons which had haunted her since her birth had become her closest companions since her father's frightened betrayal of the family so deep in her past. Together with pain and fear of the unknown that she could not control they had brought her up from her childhood to her present, her supposedly adult life, which seemed in many ways more uncaring of others than her real childhood. Or was that just her nature? Another against which she had always fought, and always seemed fated to lose against. Her nature which had dreamed of an idyll since she first read a fairy tale, an idyll that she kept forcing herself to admit didn't exist. Yet, though she was fully grown-up, she still dreamed.
Her ivory flesh was smooth, cold and hard. All the signs of recent dramatic weight loss were visible upon her body, though she was no junkie. He could tell that from her air, yet her eyes held all the conflicting torments of one who lived with the hell of an addict, the past agony she had lived through was reflected in the shadowy mirror of her darkest brown eyes. His touch against her paper-like surface made her move towards him and against him. Her reactions were automatic, the ones that came from deep inside her. Reactions that would allow her to escape her thoughts and their patterns and to obey her body's cravings and screams. Stimulated by actions she knew and a touch she didn't. Tonight she had drowned her inner voices with all the powerful drugs she knew; alcohol, heroin, sex; and yet she could still feel their minor nagging at the back of her brain. But the substances that overpowered her life were all the things which allowed her to face it as a routine event, all things which give her some control over the whirling cycle of passions that had become her life.
Control. The one thing she had fought for so fiercely, so convinced if she could only gain it, all her problems would have been solved. The only thing she had so stubbornly held onto until now. The one thing she seems to have lost all of a sudden, the one thing that could crack her so deeply and so irreparably. The resulting blurred mental vision of her life she seemed unable to shake, and it was this she needed so desperately to run from, to escape even momentarily for relief to allow her to continue to survive. The heavenly liquids gave her that control, but it was delusional, only momentary, it didn't last. She was a survivor, she had to be, but a survivor who fled from life, a survivor who couldn't function without help, but didn't know how to ask for it.
Her life was stuck in fight or flight, the adrenaline hormone seemed to course endlessly through her veins without a pause, not allowing her to ever face the complications of her existence with a calm heart and focused brain. The reason, she prayed, of the continual devastations which seemed determined to wreak her. Devastations which she had never been able to help or stop, just like she had never let anyone help or stop her. The resulting emotions and fears that she suppressed, repressed, all on her own. She didn't believe in forcing confrontations, forcing your problems to face you. She lived her life poised on raised tiptoes for flight, like a small, defenceless bird above a high rooftop in a heaving city.
Those who had preached at her, those who had tried to listen – none had understood what drove her continually to the precipice so often. She had dived off it to escape them, but their figures were omnipresent inside of her. Neither knew the depth of the problem she was facing with them, and all the words spoken by both them recently had been so wrong, all the times either had tried to communicate with her had left her feeling desolate and more alone than when the day had begun. The real meaning behind the words they kept trying to use to comfort, to probe, to understand eluded her, seemed to be eternally just beyond her grasp though in sight.
The merciless heat of the throbbing, smoky city in the blinding hours where night vanishes and light appears without warning hit her as she was left alone in the deserted estate of society's dregs. She collapsed, and the world seemed to rush past her, uncaring and heedless of the crumpled-up ball of despair huddled on the sidewalk beneath the notice of them, a person who did not impinge on their lives and could be left for destruction. That anyone could live their life normally while hers collapsed like Carthage in flames and rubble around her had always been one of the deepest mysteries to her soul, but she had learnt long away her unimportance to the world, to anyone, to anything. Her irrelevance to the jerky, never ending tracks which this unfathomable being some call destiny, others fate, and her life, seemed to have been heading along.
The tightness in her chest grew; she felt a pain like she was about to die, and all of a sudden she couldn't hold it in; she broke apart in the lonely silence she craved. She felt her lack of control over it all was symbolised by the uncontrollable fall of the tears onto her cheeks, weaving their way across her skin, burning a path that seemed like fire for the coldness of the salt water. The silent agony at it all filled her soul and forced her mouth open in silent agony, while the rest of her body clenched without her consent and her hands tightened into fists. The sobbing which broke from her let out the trapped voice she had suffocated beneath everything and seemed to scream across her landscape. Denial of the things she needed to do, those who she had to face had left her, and in that moment she knew the true mental hell of one who had no hope and no way forward. But now her denial of all emotions and events that she didn't want to deal with, which she didn't know how to deal with, had lapsed and she thought that this must be the end. She had to stop it all.
Her love for dead flowers came to her in this moment. Beauty and life, snubbed out to present an image of a softer, more eternal death than that of the vividness of their life. A picture that was almost soothing, but could not heal the tormenting whirlpool of her life which had made scars across her brain. The river beneath the pale glare of dawning, rosy-fingered sun was like glass, but like a grey glass which was opaque, like the wine glasses she and the first ever he had received as part of that day which had been supposed to be so joyful. Beneath her it flowed through the city, unconcerned with the people who came by it daily, focused solely on its winding path.
**********
Author's Notes: Thank you to everyone who read this far, I hope you enjoyed it. Please, again, I worship reviews. They are what I live for.