Title: Normal (is what you get used to) or pattern of an (extra)ordinary life
Written for the writers_choice community on LiveJournal in response to prompt #286, pattern
Notes/Warning: Character Death
Disclaimer: i do not own Jericho; no infringement is intended, and this is just for fun, not profit. I'm just taking them out to play for a little while.
When Heather was a child, her grandmother taught her to knit. The first time Heather looked at a knitting pattern, it was another language, a seemingly random collection of letters and numbers that made no sense. Heather couldn't understand it, and had to take it on faith that the instructions in front of her would make the scarf the picture promised.
Her grandmother solemnly assured her that the instructions really would make sense eventually, and that the scarf really would look the way it was supposed to. But, like life, it was only looking back at what had gone before that revealed the true pattern in all its glory.
But patterns are fragile things, Heather thought. They shift. They change. And then they settle and become routines, until the next change. The next shift.
The first time Heather and Beck made love, it wasn't making love so much as it was making a claim. Beck told her later it was the way she was teasing him as he was chopping wood; the way she looked, smiling in the sun that finally made him pull her into his arms and kiss her. They were as safe as they ever were, outside the limits of Jericho, and they made love in the grass beneath the trees. Afterwards, she traced the dappled shadows on his skin and watched over him as he slept.
And the routine of her life changed, breaking apart and reforming around this new aspect of their relationship. In the days and weeks that followed, she learned the pattern of his muscles, of his skin, of his scars. She learned the pattern of his moods, of his personality, of his thoughts. And each time Beck went out on a mission, he came back a little harder, a little colder, a little more broken. Heather would relearn his patterns and loved him a little more in spite of them – or perhaps because of them. She was fascinated by him, as if he were something exotic that she would never fully know or understand.
They had been together for a year before she truly realized that he had been learning her patterns as intently as she had learned his; that she was as fascinating to him as he was to her.
But they never learned the pattern of making love with each other. Each time was different, and each time was a surprise.
She called him Edward only once, when she recited her wedding vows. He was Beck to her, always Beck, only Beck. Edward belonged to another woman, belonged to the time Before. Before the Attacks. Before the war. Before every day was a true blessing, and every night a true miracle. Beck was embedded in the pattern of her life; Edward was a distant relative who was remembered, but never seen.
When the children finally came, the pattern reformed to include them. The end of the war and Beck's retirement from active duty changed the pattern again.
Moments in a life.
And now, Heather thought, another one. She stood with her children at the grave site, with her friends surrounding her. She was thankful that he had never died in battle (her fear); instead he died of old age and illness (his) – it meant that she had had years with him. Years in which Beck was an intrinsic part of the pattern of her life.
And now, she would need to create a new pattern – one without him.
She gave a half-smile as she listened to the service, her youngest daughter holding her arm, and thought that, like knitting, it was only when you looked back at what had gone before that you saw the true pattern in all its glory.