A busted traffic signal, and crappy brakes.

That's all it took to take Maggie Blodgett from the world, and her friends, and the newest life she was so ready to try to lead. After war and loss and killing, after selling her soul and her body for the greater good, after being reluctantly hailed as a hero to humanity along with her equally reluctant comrades... after all of that, all it took to kill her was a busted traffic signal and crappy brakes.

The red light got stuck at yellow and the kid who was a good kid really, but new to the freedom of non-Visitor radio that he was fiddling with at the crucial moment, and trusting the guy who sold him this car cheap because the war had left him desperate and broke, tried his full-human best to stop when he saw the blonde lady race across the street against the failed signal. He really tried to stop, but the brakes didn't stand up to the sudden demand. He tried so hard but he couldn't, and the EMT's had to pull him away and sedate him because he recognized this lady as a Hero of the Resistance and knew he'd be dead by now if it wasn't for people like her. He was kneeling and shaking her, crying, "Wake up, I'm sorry lady, please wake up!" and he couldn't stop, even when they told him she was dead and it wasn't his fault.

"Angel. It's time to go."

"I can't."

Ham sighed and dropped his hand from her shoulder. He didn't want to rush her, for all of the same reasons she didn't want to leave. Their friends and comrades had gone back to town to Club Creole, Elias's improbably successful restaurant, to drink off some of the phantom pain. None of them could get over the feeling that she was there, just around the corner, behind your shoulder ready to smack you for being too slow or wiseass at you if you weren't quick enough on the uptake. Tyler felt it too. Losing Maggie was different than losing anyone they'd lost in the war, because the war was over now. What made them think that the dying was?

Angie was fighting the phantom pain by staying where she stood, staring at the daisy-heaped casket that a high-end funeral home had donated along with space for the gathering they never managed to plan. They'd come here instead, to the windswept bluff at the Coast Guard station where they'd managed to force the war around the corner. She and Maggie and Willie had forged the strongest part of their friendship here, had mourned their personal losses and celebrated their survival. Elias had already poured the bottle of Stoli's into the hole in the ground where Maggie would be laid to rest.

"Laid to rest"... what does that mean, anyway? Walking away. I can't. I can't do this.

It had been two days since the accident. Two days since Ham Tyler had answered the door to his and Angie's new and newlywed home to find Willie looking like he'd never looked before, not on the worst of the bad days of the war. He'd seen Willie's assimilation into human company, and at long last didn't doubt what passed for his feelings were genuine, as far as they could go. But that day, two days ago, Willie came to the door looking hollow, like he'd had his soul scooped out. It was the first time Tyler had ever considered he might have one.

"Something very bad has happened," Willie announced in a steady, if weak, voice. "I must see Angie."

Tyler watched from the door as Willie went into their opulent living room and sat down with Angie where she'd been reading on the sofa. He heard the word "Maggie", then nothing more, just saw Willie take both of Angie's hands in his and rest his forehead against hers, speaking in a sad,intense whisper. Angie shut her eyes tight and squeezed Willie's hands tighter, and nodded a little. He spoke a few more quiet words to her, then stood.

"Maggie was run into by a car," he explained to Tyler. "She did not survive."

"Huh?" Ham was unable to take his eyes off of his wife, who was shaking and hugging herself tightly, holding herself together. Stupid and clueless, he repeated, "Huh?"

"We have lost Maggie." The way Willie said it made it plain he was still becoming acquainted with the idea himself. "If it is all right, I will come back later and see Angie again. This will be very hard for her. Our... my beliefs may help her, if you will permit..."

Tyler shook himself from his fugue. "Yeah, of course, anything, you just let us know when. Hell don't even bother, just show up. Anytime." He gulped, recoiled a little. We have lost Maggie. It was no cliche, this felt exactly like a punch in the gut. "How?" Another stupid thing to say, people always said the same stupid thing. Willie's was the first answer he'd ever heard that made sense.

"It does not matter. We have lost Maggie, and must adjust our lives without her." He paused before reaching the door. "Please... take care of her."

Coming from anyone else that request would have insulted Tyler, enraged him, but not here and not now, and not coming from someone who'd been one third of the tightest wartime triad he'd ever witnessed. "I'll do that. You can come back and take care of her too."

Take care of each other. I never learned that language they spoke, but I bet you did.

When the door had closed again, he went to her. She seemed to have gone somewhere else.

"Here, Angel, I'm right here, stay with me," he told her when she looked up at him in blank confusion. Tyler sat next to her and pulled her into his lap, breathing in a gut-deep sigh and blowing it out again. "It'll be okay, Angie, I promise."

He damn sure didn't know how, but he'd figure it out if it killed him.

Willie returned as promised, later that evening and the day after. He politely declined the invitation to stay in one of their many guest bedrooms. Tyler didn't understand a damn thing about what was happening between Angie and Willie but knew enough to make himself scarce during those visits, spending the time with Reno and Farber. Reno had only met Maggie a couple of times but Chris was taking it hard. Truth to tell, so was Tyler, but too many years of habit and necessity kept things like that from outer display. Angie did the crying for both of them. Each time Willie visited over the next two days she seemed a little less confused, a little more grounded, even if the wounds were just as deep.

"I can help her understand and accept," Willie explained after his second visit. "But she will find comfort from you."

Tyler might have felt edgy that Willie, always pleasantly awkward, was suddenly so confidently... intimate... in his manner, but the fact that he was so completely right overwhelmed any other considerations. Ham was just goddamned grateful to have him around to help soothe Angie's desperation, and glad too to know that he had some kind of something to offer even when he didn't know himself what it was. Funny it took a lizard to tell him.

"We will adjust our lives without Maggie," Willie told gathered friends and former rebels at the beach side ceremony two days later. "We will honor the space she has left and will fill it with the light of who we are now, who we would not have been if we had never had her here."

When he had finished he dropped a daisy on the simple rosewood casket. A red eyed Julie followed suit. Mike Donovan was close behind, laying his own daisy gently among the others, and reached for Julie's hand to lead her away when she broke down.

Chris Farber held a daisy in one large, rough hand and a fully loaded carbine bandolero in the other, dropping the first and draping the second as if he were laying a wreath of roses. Elias and Caleb each scattered huge armfuls of the delicate white flowers, masses of them, donated by a florist whose owner had been a member of the L.A. Resistance.

Elias paused to kiss his fingertips and press them into the blossoms. "Say hey to Mark for us, baby," he murmured in a broken voice before following his father down the hill.

So many people, many of whom had never met Maggie Blodgett, stepped up to leave daisies and their personal expressions of loss. Rebels, refugees, or simply grateful survivors of the war, dozens of them, all of them knew who she was and came to pay their respects. They dropped their daisies one by one and wandered down the path to where a convoy of white SUV's were waiting to take them back to the city, courtesy of the City of Los Angeles in recognition of Maggie's contributions to the Rebellion and Liberation.

It had been barely two months since Maggie had stood up with Angie and Chris with Ham, with Willie standing up for both as "Best Lizard" at Tyler's insistence, and Reno as unofficial ring bearer "because you wouldn't have a damn ring if I didn't have the connections." All crammed into the clerk's office with their other friends for the appropriately ramshackle City Hall wedding.

It hadn't been much longer since the Liberation. Just long enough for "almost" to return and rear its ugly merciless head again. They'd all made it to that elusive Other Side and the chance to build new lives from the rubble. Maggie almost - almost - got the chance to do it with them.

Finally only Angie was left, clutching her daisy, Ham standing a bit further away. As much as Maggie's loss affected him, he didn't want to step in until Angie made the need apparent. He'd always stood back from the connection between them and Willie. There wasn't room there for anyone else. He could respect that, but sometimes it was so damn hard.

"I can't," she repeated.

"You can." Tyler stood close behind her and wrapped his hand gently over the one that held the last daisy. "You taught each other how. I never learned that secret language of yours, Maggie always told me I knew it already, just spoke a different dialect. But you taught each other things it took me longer to learn, and one of 'em is that you can't lose something important if you never had it to begin with. What you have left is more than you had before, because of that. Let her go, Angel, it's time."

He slid his other arm around Angie's waist and released her hand. She extended her arm, and dropped the last daisy on the top of the pile.

"'bye, Mags." It was barely a whisper.

Tyler hugged both arms tight around her and said quietly over her shoulder, "Adios, Blodgett. Second best woman I ever met."

They took their time walking back to the Harley. As Angie buckled on her helmet she asked in a hesitant voice, "Is it okay if Max sleeps in the bedroom again tonight?"

"Sure. If he jumps on the foot of the bed again I promise not to boot him off this time." He lifted Angie's visor and gave her a kiss. "You know I wouldn't do that for just anybody."

Tyler always saved that line for the things they both knew he'd do for her without a moment's hesitation, and it always made her smile. This time it brought the first smile from her he'd seen since Willie brought his anguished news to their door.

"You're a lot of what I got left, Tyler. That's as big as anything I could lose, and Maggie was the one who convinced me to grab it while I had the chance."

"Knew there was a reason I liked her."

Not bothering to lower his own visor, he mounted up and waited until he felt her slide up behind him and lock on tight, her hands jammed into his pockets, before dropping off the kickstand and roaring toward the city.

The wind dried his eyes out just fine by the time they got there.