Tony and the Tattered Heart
He stared at himself in the mirror as he had done every morning since he'd sent her away.
As he had every morning for the last three months, he pushed down the sickened feeling drifting from his heart and reminded himself just why he had done so. But regardless of his protestations that he was better off without her, no matter how he tried to forget that she had ever been part of his life, it didn't stop him occasionally hoping that he would come out of his bedroom and see her standing there, waiting expectantly for him to give him a warm embrace and good morning kiss as she had done so many times before.
And if her shining, smiling face hadn't been there to greet him, he envisioned that he would at least have heard her cheery voice humming or singing the song he had never thought to ask her to translate. He'd enter the kitchen and watch her for a moment, the joyful flourishing of her sweet, pink outfit as she went gleefully about her morning preparations. He'd smile as she noticed him, his eyes flicking away from hers briefly as he casually played with the button on his shirt cuff. He would feel her warm eyes upon him as he sat at the table and enjoyed things as they had always been.
But that fantasy was uncomfortably distant of reality.
Each morning he would leave his bedroom and find his house devoid of life, empty and soulless without the brightness of her presence. Silent without the melody of her voice. He'd sigh outwardly, allowing himself to feel that pang her absence caused before he steeled himself once more. Reminding himself once again that she had tricked him, treated him like a fool and thrown his heart aside as easily as she'd captured it.
Straightening his tie, he closed his eyes. Inhaling deeply he tried to turn his thoughts to the day ahead. Tried to turn his thoughts away from the woman whose name he couldn't bring himself to say out loud. The woman who occupied his every dream, whose name he would find on the tip of his tongue as he bolted upright in bed, startled from the dream that tortured him incessantly. A dream that threatened to thwart his professional life.
A dream he couldn't allow to pervade his waking life outside of his house.
Especially since he and Roger had another space flight to plan and prepare for. It was a flight he was in danger of being removed from if he failed to convince Doctor Bellows of his stability. He had had already lost what he couldn't help but concede was a massive part of his life. He couldn't afford to allow it to destroy the passion he had held long before she had turned his life, and his heart, upside down.
Convincing himself that he was better off alone, free to live a life he had been held from for five years, free to forge a future towards a life far removed from the interference of magical nitwits was hard enough, to convince Roger harder still but not nearly as impossible as the task that faced him this morning.
Convincing Doctor Bellows.
The dogged determination of the base's psychiatrist to open the box of secrets he had locked deep inside had increased in intensity since he had strode into his office in the middle of the night three months ago, dejected and needing to be as far away as possible from the place where those awful scenes had played out.
A bitter certainty burning its way through his heart that this time she was gone for good. That he had thrown away not only what was a close friend that he cared deeply for, but a woman he had inadvertently lost his heart to.
His Jeannie.