Burden
Rating: T
Spoilers: none
Summary: what happens after they're apart?
Disclaimer: not mine, don't sue
Author's note: I don't like it either.
Timeline: Written in 2005 and set in an unspecified future
I saw your face in a crowded place,
And I don't know what to do,
'Cause I'll never be with you.
- James Blunt, You're Beautiful
He saw her once, on scene, years later. She seemed on the edge of perpetual annoyance with a lanky, young redhead who himself seemed on the edge of ADD. He left his position at her left elbow to walk halfway around the body, then sharply turned to address a uniformed officer. Then, he seemed to wander off in the middle of a question or an answer, attracted by something Bobby couldn't see. He removed and replaced his notebook three times before making a note.
Her hair was shorter, and a more uniform color than he remembered. Her face wore the long intervening years well, but they did show. Although, aging wasn't a process to which he was immune either. A grey tide was slowly encircling his head, accompanying, he was sure, the pain that had crept into his joints.
It'd been, what, three years since…. Who was he kidding? He knew down to the day. The memory of her posture, even more than her expression, stung in his mind. Stung worse than his brother's resentment; maybe more than his mother's open casket. Definitely more than the tone in which his then-captain asked that he take a month's vacation. He didn't mind the one-man road trip to Canada, much, or the stack of articles and books he devoured; it was that its necessity was decided by everyone else, for everyone else.
Three years. It was less than the amount of time he'd known – worked with her. Three years which had resulted in one transfer and one partner for her. He was on his second transfer, and his eighth partner. Who was currently asking him whether he was getting out of the car or not.
He followed Taylor toward the mass of people; an odd-shaped crowd that had one of its external foci at the body. He concentrated on the thin crunch of snow beneath his feet, the white puffs of dissolving air he breathed out.
It was only when he stopped walking that he looked up. Most faces clearly reflected thoughts of coffee, children, boredom, and Christmas presents left to buy. Someone shuffled booted feet. Most had heard a version of the case-rending loquacity of one Robert Goren – and at least one at least had experienced it firsthand, which is to say, had been more often than not instrumental.
No one even looked at him. They knew better than to expect much more than a few sedate questions. These cases usually demanded little more. No animation. No sniffing of dead bodies. No poking. No gesticulated hypotheses on tenuous but later sound links. Nothing arcane. She knew it; she knew it all. He knew she knew more than anyone else there, except for maybe the girl frozen on the cobblestones between them. Yet, for whatever reason, she looked. Her eyes met his, eyes which contained and concealed everything.