Stand By Me Chapter 1, a dr. quinn medicine woman fanfic

Stand By Me

Disclaimer: I do not own the characters from Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. The rights to those characters and to the show belong to the creators of the show, to CBS, The Sullivan Company and to A&E.

Prologue

I knew you had taken the job. It was not as if you said something, but then again you never do until the night before a trip, as though by not telling me and the children until we can't object, you are somehow saving us some agony and lessening the strength of our forthcoming loneliness., such a thing never does either one. In truth, perhaps you are lessening your own guilt over leaving us in order to appease your own need to provide for the family and protect the land at all costs. I admire you for your conviction concerning the land, but I know that there are things you could do to protect it which would allow you to remain in Colorado Springs. I have even tried to casually hint at this during one of the numerous conversations we have had about your work over the last few years and, yet, you never seemed to understand the depth of what I was saying.

I need you here to protect me, to stand by the children and I as you did when we first met and were courting. I do want you to follow your dreams, but you don't seem to understand that it pains me every time you take a job far from home just because you were offered it, even if we could have survived without the money. It seems that now that I am your wife, you feel that I don't need protection any longer. You assume that I am strong enough to handle everything on my own and that you can continue to do as you please confident that your absences from our family are acceptable.

I want so badly to tell you that they aren't and I had hoped that, after the reservation uprising four years ago, and Katie's kidnapping almost two years ago that you would have realized that you no longer was a wanderer and that your nature bound spirit would have to find a balance between wanting to do what was right and protecting our family from the consequences of those actions. I am afraid to bring this to your attention, however, because I don't want to make you think that you have to choose between the gifts that the Cheyenne have given you and your life with our family and with me. I am proud of who you are, and have accepted that nature is apart of your spiritual balance but you don't seem to realize that this balance should have altered slightly since we married. To be more honest, I fear that you have realized such a thing, and that you will not or cannot find such a balance, no matter how much you may love the children or I.

Even though you have repeatedly said that it our marriage is a partnership of souls, I have to wonder whether you really understands what such words meant and still mean to me

What should I do? What should I say? I don't love you any less than I did before, in factI love you so much more than when we married; I just have to talk to you about all of this. I just have to convince myself to be brave enough to share with you what I feel.

Michaela put down her pen, satisfied that she had been able to put her thoughts down on paper. Tomorrow she would look over them and decide what she was going to say to Sully before he left. Maybe, she could finally tell him what had been bothering her for almost four years now, and they could work things out before he went on his trip As long as she didn't lose her temper, she would be able to tell the man she loved just how she felt. Maybe she would blush while she did it, but, at least, he would understand what was in her heart, just as he always had been able to when she talked to him. She put the piece of paper in her nightstand drawer and turned over in an attempt to sleep. She was too tired and too saddened by her husband's impeding departure to wait up for him and risk crying more tears over something she couldn't try to change until morning.

Sully came into the bedroom after midnight; he had stayed downstairs as long as he could to avoid having to face Michaela's reaction to his latest job. She had put on a good face for the children when he told him all at dinner, but he knew that she was upset, perhaps more upset about this trip than she ever had been about his other trips before. She had been pulling back from him, they hadn't made love in at least two months and she hadn't even kissed him good morning for the last week and a half. He knew something was wrong and he wanted to mend it. He wanted to remind her that she and the kids were everything to him, she had known that once, but it appeared that she had forgotten…and that frightened him.

In the morning, was going to take want he hoped was the first step in reminding his wife that she was the most important person in his life, he was going to tell her that this would be his last trip, He understood that he had been stupid to think that he could travel like he was. He knew that he wasn't entitled to the solitude he had in his youth, and he had accepted that because he had a family that he loved more than life itself now. Tomorrow, he would tell her how foolish he had been and together, he was sure that they would figure out a way for him to find work closer to home and to be home every night. He hoped that she would give him a second chance and that she would see how much he needed and wanted her presence in his life.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of her opened nightstand drawer and moved to close it softly, so that he did not wake her. Upon reaching the drawer, he saw that there was a piece of paper sticking out of it and supposed that this had been the object that had caused the drawer to reopen after his wife had closed it. Taking the piece of paper in his hands, he pulled it gently out of the drawer and went to position it, so that that drawer would close correctly. As he did so, the words written in her delicate script caught his eye. He tried not to read it, but the lines that he was unwillingly privy to, as he went to place the note in its proper place, made his heart jump into his throat and his prying eyes scanned the message. It read:

I knew you had taken the job. It was not as if you said something, but then again you never do until the night before a trip, as though by not telling me and the children until we can't object, you are somehow saving us some agony, and lessening the strength of our forthcoming loneliness, such a thing never does either one. In truth, perhaps you are lessening your own guilt over leaving us in order to appease your own need to provide for the family and protect the land at all costs.. I admire you for your conviction concerning the land, but I know that there are things you could do to protect it which would allow you to remain in Colorado Springs. I have even tried to casually hint at this during one of the numerous conversations we have had about your work over the last few years and, yet, you never seemed to understand the depth of what I was saying.

Even though you have repeatedly said that it our marriage is a partnership of souls, I have to wonder whether you really understands what such words meant and still mean to me

What should I do? What should I say? I don't love you

Unbeknownst to Sully, the end of the note had become lodged underneath one of Michaela's heavy medical journals, and the last few lines of her journal entry now lay at the bottom of the drawer.

He re-read the message at least a dozen times, trying to make sense of what he read, but the only thing that his mind was able to register were the four words penned by his wife at the end of the note.

I don't love you

Chapter 1

"You're going away again! After all the discussion we've had about it, you're going away, again!" Michaela shouted, her eyes cold. Despite her best efforts, Sully's demeanor that morning had caused her to lose her temper.

"I told you, I got to make money. I promised that I'd take care of the family, and that's what I intend to do!" Sully shouted back.

"Taking care of this family implies being here, at least for more than a day at a time. It means that you don't just eat dinner with your children—you actually care about them! I'm surprised Katie even knows who you are anymore…"

"You know I care about the children!" he said, his voice raising another notch, along with the pain that threatened to tear him apart. "It's you who doesn't care anymore!" he added, snidely.

"What do you mean? I love the children! I spend all day with them! And certainly all night…most of the time alone," she shot back, hurt seeping into her tone at his inference that she didn't care about what was important, and possibly about him. She wondered how he could ever think such a thing, considering the way she pined for him when he was gone on long trips; longed for him to hug her, to touch her, to make her believe she was special to him again. She hadn't felt special in a very long time. Even the last time they'd been together as husband and wife had been more mechanical, more reflexive than romantic, more desperate than loving. She sensed that both of them were fighting desperately to hold onto something that was slipping away. She had hoped to begin to mend the problem this morning, and had braved her nerves enough to even attempt to tell Sully what she had written in the journal entry the night before, but he had been distant, as distant as a stranger, and she knew something was wrong.

By the look on her face, Sully knew that she was revisiting the last night that they had spent together and the time they had spent avoiding each other's hearts and bodies since then. He too had thought about all of it many a time during the last few months, and as his mind drifted to over all of it once again, he knew without really admitting it to himself that there was a distance between them, a distance which seemed insurmountable and that, truth be told, he blamed himself for, even more than his wife blamed him for it. He loved her; he knew it. He loved her sometimes more than life itself, but he had been beginning to really believe that she didn't love him and her letter the night before had been proof of it. Now, he only wondered when she would give it to him and he was frustrated that she seemed to holding it back, though waiting for the perfect moment in which to shatter his heart. He had to protect himself from getting hurt again!

"You know maybe if you'd married William, and lived in Boston where your ma wanted you to, you wouldn't be so lonely, huh? You'd have a husband with the perfect job, all the money you could ever want, and you'd have someone there every night to do exactly what you wanted. You'd have someone there who loved you, cause I don't!" he shouted coldly.

Michaela's heart stopped. She was sure that if she'd had her stethoscope with her at the moment she could have pronounced her own death with certainty and for a moment after her heart had started its regular rhythm again she still couldn't speak. Pain shot through her so deeply that she thought it would kill her. It hurt so much that had she not allowed anger to take the place of the agony, she would have collapsed on the homestead floor. Try as she might to voice this newfound anger, however, the first words that came from her soul and lips were still tinged with tears.

"You don't love me?" she accused, attempting to shout, but failing miserably, that last syllables of her sentence coming out as a squeak rather than an accusation.

Sully's soul cracked in two at that moment. Until that second, he hadn't realized the magnitude of the words he had just used, and he knew immediately that although he hadn't meant them, and never would, he couldn't take them back now—not when he was so angry and so afraid of hearing those words directed at him.

"That's right, I don't!" he yelled, before falling silent in order to hide the fact that he could not continue with the charade past those words.

This is my first fan fiction and I would appreciate any and all feedback, so please feel free to review the chapter and any subsequent chapters if you think they are of interest either here or be orginal and comment on the "Stand By Me" thread of the fanfiction section of the Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman forum The link to the thread is: http/forum.drquinn.us/viewtopic.php?t3949 I also want to give credit where credit is due and say that though I wrote this story myself, I have read so much DQMW fanfiction in the last few months that I feel my ideas were certainly influenced by the wonderful other fanfiction writers who write about the show as well, particularly Judith A and Becky Harkness who blazed a trail through the idea of an unhappy Mike and Sully! Thanks and enjoy!

Corinna