AN: I know, I know. I have that other story that I haven't updated in ages. I am working on it; I encountered a few timeline snags. In the meantime, this took hold the other day and wouldn't let go. Feedback is welcome, as always.
In the back of her closet, past the racks of leather pants, past her boots and knives and dresses, is a box. It sits on a shelf. It is made of metal. It is plain and gray.
Once upon a time it had been a cardboard box. Bigger than a shoebox because that wasn't big enough, but smaller than a moving box. She remembers putting some of Lauren's things into that box right after the break.
But one night her closet caught fire. Faulty wiring or something the firemen later tell her, and she gave herself third degree burns on her hands and arms pulling the box to safety. Good thing there were firemen.
After that, she upgraded to a plastic milk crate with a lid fashioned out of a square of plexiglas attached with cable ties. She kept it in the trunk of her car, until it got towed one night while she and Dyson were in a warehouse fighting underfae. She pulsed her way through half a dozen workers at the impound lot before getting one of them to hand her the keys.
She couldn't have cared less about the car.
Now she has this steel file box that comes with a little key that she always keeps with her. It's not a safe, though she thought about getting one. But that would be too much to lug around and she moves a lot these days. But this box is safe. Water can't get to it. Fire can't get to it. Explosions can't get to it. And while someone who stole it could probably eventually pry it open, it will never come to that.
She's had this box a very long time now. She's carried it from one place to another, tucking it away in as safe a place as she can find.
She never looks inside the box.
Well, that's not true. She almost never looks inside the box.
Okay, once every decade or so, sometimes more, sometimes less, when the memories begin to slip out of the carefully constructed box she has in her head, she takes it out. She sits it on a table, and she stares at it for a day or so, not touching it, not opening it, and trying not to think about what's inside. Sometimes, after doing this, she puts it back without opening it.
Other times, the pull to open it become too strong. A box is an invitation. To put something in, close it up and keep it safe. Or to open it up and reveal its secrets.
There are no secrets in this box.
She knows each and every thing in it. She has taken them out and laid them on the table in front of her with almost religious reverence many times already. She knows she will perform this ritual a hundred times more. And a hundred times yet again.
At the top are photographs. At first, she kept them on her cell phone, but she tended to lose those back when they were in fashion. Eventually, she had them printed. She doesn't think to put them in frames, or an album, or anything. They just sit loosely scattered at the top of the box and greet her every time she opens it.
One or two of the pictures are of them, together, but it hurts to look at those because they remind her too much of the empty space beside her. Most of them are of Lauren. She lingers over the pictures, taking them out one by one and smiling at each, caressing them with the tips of her fingers. In some, Lauren is smiling; in others that little frown that creased her forehead when she was concentrating or annoyed or saying something really important is clearly visible.
Even though the pictures are strewn haphazardly about, there is an order to them, as if they each have learned when to be picked up. She can hear Lauren scoff at such a notion, and say that the order is there because she knows what the order is and her hands naturally find it.
Whatever the explanation, the pictures change as she takes them, one by one, out of the box. The little frown line on her forehead becomes more pronounced. The rivalry between laughter and worry is written on her face.
There's a chemise underneath the pictures, cream colored and slippery in her hands. She can't resist holding it to her face, pulling in long, deep breaths. She knows there will come a day when even her fae senses won't be able to detect the faint traces of lavender and vanilla that linger within the garment. For all she knows they're already gone, and it's merely her memories, her need to not let Lauren slip away altogether. And that's all right. That works.
Beneath that are stacks of letters tied together with ribbon. She doesn't know when Lauren started writing her the letters, but there are dozens of them. She knows their contents by heart, and yet she has lost days holding them in her hands, spreading them out before her, and reading every word, every sentence again and again. Lauren's voice echoes in her head as she reads.
I think we should take that trip to Egypt. I started planning it in my head again the other day. What time of year is the best for travel, where we will go. You can't not visit the pyramids and the sphinx, but there's so much more to see and do. I think we should stay for at least a month.
They had stayed for three months.
The letters are filled with minutia. Plans for a dinner party menu, Lauren's musings on sweeping reforms in funding scientific research, two letters commenting on her wardrobe, what she liked and didn't like about it, and how much she had loathed living in the Clubhouse, which she had dubbed a "filthy, disease-ridden rat trap" and documented in detail exactly why that was true across several letters.
She'd have preferred not to know that particular piece of minutia, truth be told.
What always struck her, as she went through the letters, was how normal their lives sounded in them, how perfectly ordinary and safe and relatively uncomplicated it all sounded.
It wasn't. It never is with the fae. But in a way, them, together, that had become normal, no matter what madness was around them at the time. Together, they were ordinary and perfect. They were safe. And, though it took some doing, they were relatively uncomplicated. Eventually.
Like the face in the picture, the handwriting changes. Precise lines give way to incomprehensible scrawl, words jumble together.
The last letter ends mid-sentence. It's the one she always dreads reading. But she can't not read it.
A dog-eared copy of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection is next. The book falls open to certain pages and Lauren's handwriting, familiar yet still with a child's self-consciousness to it, fills the margins. She runs her fingers across those notes, thinking about how Lauren's hands had traced over those same pages long before they knew each other. There is an inscription from Lauren's brother on the inside cover dated Christmas, 1989.
Next to the book is a flowerpot with a dried up stem poking up out of the crusted soil. She has no idea why she keeps this, except that it was Lauren's and at some point it went into the box and never came out. And now she can't part with it.
Only two things remain.
One is a long white box. She opens it, catching the thin chain between her index finger and thumb and lifts it out. The pendant, black with tarnish, dangles in front of her. She'd called it Lauren's dog collar back when they were just beginning, and it had nearly cost her everything. It had cost them time and that was the worst thing of all to lose.
There is a note is there, too. For giving me the freedom to love. And I do. Forever.
That necklace, the one the note is for, is long gone. Lost saving the world. Lost saving her.
The last thing is a manilla envelope, thick and heavy. It is filled with medical records. There is a death certificate inside.
She doesn't open the envelope.
Five days have passed, and she's not surprised. Slowly, methodically, everything goes back into the box. The envelope, the necklace, the book, the letters, the chemise, and the pictures. The little key she keeps with her locks it away. She carries it back to its safe hiding space, thinking about how, aside from Lauren's papers housed in Trick's library, this is all that's left of Lauren Lewis in the world, these worn artifacts locked away in a box.
It's sad, but it isn't. Because Lauren had been here. She'd been here. And she'd baked cookies and made love and did crazy science and loved a succubus. She saved the world and she lived.
It's enough. It has to be.
There were others. Lauren had wanted her to love again, to not be alone. She had honored that wish many times over in the decades since Lauren died.
But there is only one box in the back of her closet, past the racks of leather pants, past her boots and knives and dresses.
Only one.
The End