Because I've always loved Chip Esten's cover of 'Blue Christmas' but then after what happened to Rayna, it started to ring slightly more true and suddenly became a tearjerker. And I didn't take what happened well, took a long time to get over, and certainly wasn't ready to write this last Christmas – it was still too raw for me to write any sort of decent fic. And now, with the finale, the show being over and stories tied up everywhere, I suddenly had a whole lot more to say. I've probably got some sort of closure I'm finalising with this piece.
No matter how many years went by, for a long time, he always felt a little bit segregated at Christmas. From love, from joy, from family. Because somehow it was at Christmas that Rayna seemed closest. And it wasn't even that Rayna had been a particular Christmas enthusiast – in fact, since the girls had been older than about 3, the stress she'd undergone on the run up to Christmas had increased year on year, and he'd always heard her at least once confessing some sort of almost impure thought, given the time of year, that she wished Christmas never happened. But somehow, amongst the mulled wine (he has some strange fruit juice concoction he thinks Scarlett invented), the teeming families and the genuine, heartfelt smiles, Rayna's right beside him.
And in a way, that's worse. She's like one of those images in a fairground mirror, she's so close yet, as always, forever out of reach. Almost… taunting.
And so he feels detached. Like no else quite knows how he's feeling, like no one quite understands what it feels like to still feel the closest in the world to someone who isn't by your side anymore. Like he still wants Christmas to be him and Rayna, and maybe that's what the universe wants too because it's determined not to let him enjoy it or truly spend it with anyone else. She's like an invisible anchor, tying him to something that isn't really there.
Those first few years without her, Christmas can't be over fast enough. He exchanges presents with his daughters and his niece and his good friends and forces smiles and kisses cheeks and the whole time feels a nausea rising in his throat, a feeling like he has almost been falsely placed. Because he doesn't have a right, not any more, to be around these wonderful, loving people, to be surrounded by happiness. Happiness is somehow something he's not even entitled to be in the same room as anymore, it seems.
He tries to talk about it once, and he makes the mistake of having that conversation with Scarlett, who, newly married and insatiably, disgustingly content, sounds too reasonable and logical for arguing with her to be easy. She feeds him something about Rayna 'not wanting him to be unhappy' and 'she would hate to think she's holding you back from enjoying Christmas' and suddenly a rage that he hasn't been familiar with in a lot of years now rises up in him and he has to grit his teeth and clench his fists and look away from his niece. In that moment, the only thought that rushes through his mind is that Scarlett couldn't possibly know what Rayna would be thinking, and Rayna wasn't thinking anything anymore, hadn't been for a long time, and life just isn't fair.
He doesn't talk to anyone else about it after that.
Both his girls are incredibly successful, and before he knows it, there comes a year where they're both on tour one Christmas and he finds himself invited out to Avery and Juliette's country home for the holiday season. He considers refusing, but only for a moment, when he remembers how stubborn Juliette can be, and how well she's always been able to read him. He has no doubt if she wasn't eight months pregnant with baby number three, a long awaited little brother for Cadence and Stanza, she'd been at his doorstep prepared to drag him out west.
He sits in somebody else's perfect world that year, and he watches the little girls tearing around the floor, eyes full of joy and excitement and that innocence being completely sheltered from the adult world gives a child. His heart tugs slightly less, and he smiles a little wider, as he concludes that she would have loved to have seen this. She would have loved to have seen where Juliette wound up.
As the years go by, it's the little moments that creep up on him. The smile on Juliette's face as she watches her children open their presents, the rag tag bunch of family members he has around the table in his cabin, ever changing, the year Maddie comes barrelling into his hallway without invitation one Christmas morning with a brand new engagement ring on her finger and those warm, happy tears flooding her eyes.
And he suddenly realises life is ticking on around him, and happiness doesn't seem so distant.
She's still somehow there, somehow close to him every Christmas, but she's smiling in the corner now, watching what he's watching, eyes welling with pride or joy or love. His family grows, and the years seem shorter each year, and without allowing him to even realise it, Christmas becomes something other than a chore, something other than a dread – a time for family, a time for peace.
And the sands of time just keep falling.
That year, she's somehow stepped out of the corner again. It's like she's right beside him, with her hand on his shoulder, but that doesn't cut deep like it once did, but reassures him. Cushions him, soothes him. All these years, and she's still so close.
He talks to her that Christmas Eve night, like he hasn't in years.
I've become an old man without hardly realising, Ray.
It's been a goddamn long time without you.
The next day, as he watches his daughters and his grandchildren, all smiles and joy and love and everything Christmas is supposed to be, in the warm, by the old fire in Daphne's Nashville mansion, he doesn't for one moment doubt that she's right there beside him.
The next year, two women meet in the cold early Christmas morning by the side of an old Nashville church. They're both more stooped than they once were, joints creaking and aching with each step. They've both been cautioned by various members of their family as they went to leave their houses before sunrise, by bleary eyed half-awake husbands and sons and daughters sleeping in their spare rooms for the Christmas season, told that they shouldn't be going out alone, they'll get cold this early in the morning. They both, in ways more similar than they'll ever know, gave tiny, all-knowing smiles and dismissed all concerns, with mutterings like I have to do this, I wouldn't be anywhere else when the sun rises and we promised him before he died.
And that was what it was all about, really. As Maddie and Daphne walk up the hill towards the two gravestones, one's stone decaying and crumbling, the other fresh and glazed and shiny, they take each other's hand. They made a promise, to a dying man on his death bed, that they wouldn't waste their Christmases as he had done for so many years, staying close to someone that wasn't there anymore. They'd take one Christmas morning, this first Christmas morning, to make their Christmas goodbyes to their father, and after that Christmas would be about the living. They'd promised.
As the sun rises behind the two stones Maddie squeezes her sister's hand a little tighter, because for the first time in so many years, the shadow that starts from their mother's stone is side by side with another shadow. Side by side, almost close enough to be touching, and in a uniform formation that's almost beautiful. Daphne's breath catches as the shadow from Deacon's stone with the sharper edges seems to fit so perfectly with the shadow of their mother's, like it was never not there. Like fifty plus years haven't gone by, and Rayna's never been on her own.
The sisters watch the cold air cloud in front of them with their warm breath in the early morning winter, and both offer their own silent prayer.
Somewhere, there's the soft twang of slightly out of tune guitar strings, and it sounds like the start of one of those old Christmas songs he hasn't heard for years. He turns the corner – he's moving with a fluidity he barely remembers – and sure enough there's a woman with an old, familiar guitar in front of him, frowning in concentration, plucking at the strings with a familiar old pick, hair of a soft red falling from the haphazard bun she's used to pull it away from her face.
When he chuckles, she looks right up at him, and those eyes, when they meet his, are more familiar than he can even begin to quantify.
"You never did take to the guitar, Ray." He laughs, reaching out tentatively to take the instrument from her. She acquiesces, and as she hands it over, he wonders where she got hold of it in the first place, it's his first guitar, and it's been in a locked cabinet at Maddie's house for year now, it had gotten so fragile and 'too old to play'. "And this guy needs a good tune."
She scowls half heartedly at him, but there's a smile dancing behind her eyes and she looks like she's not sure whether to argue with him or keep hold of him and never let him go. She settles for leaning in and kissing him gently as he tunes the guitar slowly, stroking the strings like he's misses playing the instrument just as much as he's missed her. He's certainly missed playing this guitar by her side, and as her lips make contact with his, he feels young again. Like he has a world ahead of him and every possibility that he had that first moment Rayna Jaymes walked in and listened to him play. Like no time's passed at all, like all of a sudden whole entire lifetimes with or without the love of one's life are insignificant.
She pulls away, resting her forehead against the side of his face and he smiles slightly as he tests every string and the notes ring true. He goes to hand her back the guitar but she shakes her head, smiling softly as she looks up into his eyes.
"Play me something." She half whispers, "It's been so long since I've heard you play something.,, something for me."
Everything I've played since the day you died has been for you, he wants to say, but he swallows that thought. She's smiling in front of him, and they're not in a world for thoughts like that. Not anymore. He readies the pick.
She looks almost shy as she waits for him to start, as if for a moment she fears he's going to play. He almost chuckles to himself as he starts strumming the chords. As if he'd ever been anything but her guitar player, as if he hadn't been waiting more than fifty years to be able to pick up a guitar – any guitar, but this one's always been both their favourite – and play something just for her with her right in front of him.
As the notes start slip into the silence, he watches a smile light up her face.
It only seems natural to sing, too, and within a few words her light, melodious voice – that familiar sound that had become almost impossible to hear – joins his.
I'll have a blue Christmas without you
I'll be so blue just thinking about you
Decorations of red on our green Christmas tree
Won't be the same dear, if you're not here with me…
Fin
I would love to hear what you think! Hope I didn't break any hearts, and although it was very sad, and dealing with all the tragedy Nashville threw at us towards the end, it was something other than bleak… Just a few words, letting me know, would be most appreciated.
Thank you, and Merry Christmas!