A/N: Though this site has been one of my daily haunts for quite a while now, I haven't gotten around to writing Fanfiction until recently. I'm not sure if I'm entirely pleased with this piece, but tell me what you think!


Mary intoxicates his mind, whispers of her arched geisha eyebrows and porcelain complexion filling him. Her face is forever etched into his eyelids, startling him whenever they flutter shut. The burnt sienna of her soft locks, the fathomless chocolate of her piercing eyes, the smooth ivory of her skin. She isn't just beautiful - she is striking.

Her name repeats like the ringing of distant church bells. When it graces one's tongue, so gentle and sweet, it is like the treacle she so enjoys. He sees the way she tilts her chin up just the slightest bit when her lips curl up into a tentative smile, how she convulses with laughter at the dinner table, the intelligence and articulation she possesses, more so than any other woman he knows (and most men too).

She fascinates him, she haunts him, he can't escape her.

He fingers the coal black glass eyes of the dog in his pocket, pressing the cold into his palm. It burns into his skin, igniting a fire in his pulsating veins, soothing his fraying mind. He lets himself fall into something of a waking dream, where the fragile line between reality and dreams is blurred. He welcomes the clear blue sky, the screeching creak of brass hinges, the gilded chandeliers, and on the stairs, the prize he has awaited for so long - Mary.

She is tall and pliantly slender, like the birch trees and freshly fallen snow that builds the England of his mind, the one he tells himself he is fighting for. Not the broken England of ash and shattered wineglasses, of delayed teatimes and men sent off to the front, of uncertain marriages left unsecured and country estates turned to convalescent homes, a society on the brink of unwelcome change, where war is thought to be of a healing quality but proves to be the exact opposite.

Though they stand apart, he can imagine the unblemished polish of her skin, the delicate feel of the bones beneath. The fragility of her bones makes his breath catch. The last time he kissed her, or she kissed him - he isn't sure, perhaps it was mutual - he can only remember the perfection of their melding together. It is that, above all else, that he cannot get out of his mind: the brilliant flawlessness of their togetherness. The sliver of happy memory is what fuels him to keep going when everything seems to be lost, his want - no, his need - to caress her again, to simply hear her laugh, her voice.

The Mary of his waking dream is not surprised to encounter him, but rather wears a grin of assurance and satisfication. She has known all along that he will come home unscathed, knows in some inexplicable way that it is her own certainty that has secured his fate. Her confidence practically radiates from her. He reaches the bottom of the steps and kneels before her, speechless, save for the one word that has been rhythmically drumming in his mind all this time.

"Mary," he says, escaping from his lips in a quiet gasp, more of an afterthought than anything.

He needs her more than ever. He has always known it would happen; it was inevitable. He has been denying it to himself, but now it has ascended upon him and the other men on Death's doorstep. Guns are readied and filthy men rush to their posts. He clenches the dog in his fist, channeling Mary's grace under pressure and mask of stone. He swallows. The whistle sounds. Gunshots splatter the air.

Mary.