Challenge #: 51
Author: Afton
Title: Secrets in the Dark
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers/Warnings: A Character Death. And well, this is just really... odd. I really did mean to write something more normal, but it ran away with me. So here it is!

The Burg will keep its secrets. It seems so peaceful, so calm; a community of family, faith, forthright in its appearance. If dinner is on the table at six and all the windows washed; if all the floors are polished and the steps are swept, it blinds you, doesn't it, Mother?

So blinded by the gleam of the polished silver, hypnotized by the reflection in the china, you can almost forget the shadows. You can almost forget the darkness lurking just beyond your view. And you've all done it so well, Mother, so very well. You've almost forgot it exists.

But it hasn't forgot about you. The Darkness is looking back now, Mother. And it is creeping closer, swallowing everything in its path, grinding it to nothing. But you don't notice. You don't hear the screams.

Sloane. Stark. Comstock. There are so many, so very many...

But that's nothing new. You never heard mine, why would you hear a stranger's?

It is the not hearing that you cannot forget now. But do not think that it is my doing. The half-heard screams echoing in your ears, the pleas for release, they are your own, Mother. I do not scream now.

I am in the smooth curve of the trigger as the finger wraps around it. The gleam of light reflecting off the silver knife as it escapes its sheath and the man in black draws it across the throat of the other. I am the shadow now. Watching you all gather below dressed in black, the color of shadows, a fitting tribute...

You all stand there begging me, your daughter, your sister, your lover, your friend, your loved one, for release, but I am no creature of flesh and blood and I have no reason left to judge.

For I am the shadow now, the glimpse at the edge of your vision. I am your bad child redeemed for when a child dies they were only good. My victory, your loss, for you see now the might have been, the greatest possibilities. Funny, you never liked them when I was myself, but it matters not. If I had lived I would have been ordinary in the end, you would have made me thus. Maybe the tampon factory, maybe the button factory, would have been my end. So do not weep for me.

I'll never have to suffer those purgatories you yourselves so often cursed, you may never trap me in your little boxes. I live now in a land of somewhere else, where no bullets slay the heroes, no love is turned away and it is all the way it never could have been. You have set me here. My victory, your loss.

Down below the night-clad crowd begins to disperse as the sun descends, save for a few. You were all accomplices in my fall, it's true. A harsh word here, a forgotten memory there. You were all a second too far away, a moment past recall. But I do not hold it against you, it is done and I am gone now. Do no seek to find me, for I'm gone away. Forever away, and yet I am all around. You've already discovered that, I think.

You've seen a girl with my face, my curls. Caught a glimpse of her as she rounded a corner or drove past in a car. You've chased after her, haven't you my lover? And you, my darkest knight?

You have seen her too, Mother. She has walked by the house, passed you in the supermarket. But she isn't me, you know. I am gone forever.

You are not so easily satisfied, my darkest knight. You never were. You never will be. That is your curse, I think, even as it is your gift. The one time you gave up is haunting you now forever. Or rather, you are haunting yourself with it. The guilt gnawing at you is your own. The pain of the might have been is yours, forgiveness is yours. Ask of me where you will, seek me as you will, but on a still and boring night when your phone rings to a familiar tune, let me save you and remind you it will not be my voice.

Mother, do not ask the priest to say a verse for me. There are others who need it more- no heaven shines in the dark. Make the most of that other daughter you have left, the one standing beside you too uncertain to reach out to you. She has tried so hard to be good and she knows she's failed. But she loves you. She is with you. Take her hand, keep her close so that you can hear her when she cries. Learn from this gray day, from the forgiveness you cannot give yourself just yet.

Listen, all of you: being dead is not worse than being alive. But you cannot hear me. Then, even when I was alive you didn't listen. So it is not so very different, only the view has changed. Oh yes, the view has changed. I can see the shadows now.

I can hear the secrets. Some are secrets of love, some of envy. Secret mistakes, secret fears, secret battles, secret tears. So many secrets whispering, it is no wonder you could not hear me.

It all happened as it must, history is like that. Death is like that. Even now as the smallest girl screams and tromps on a spider, it is present. She is reprimanded and will not go to the movies next weekend, so she will not have the idea of trying to fly like the hero, she won't jump off the roof. At least until the movie appears on video. She will not be at the hospital when the bomb goes off that will be planted by the young man, and so she will live to meet the young scientist and inspire him to find the cure. It will save countless lives... But do you not think the spider would have lived if it could?

And while the mourners below whisper their good byes to the piece of stone above the flesh that once was mine, not so far away dark men move in dark places, tracking. tracing, trapping those who spilled my blood. My knight has never been forgiving of such things, nor my lover either.

Now those hands that held me, that silenced my screams, that ushered me on to my new home, now they will join me here. Are even now joining me here. Some of them are little more than children, some little less than human. Their deaths will go unannounced, unmourned. But here in the Dark they change as I have, into what might have been.

And in the light, around us, below us, what could have been is this instead. That is my secret, the Darkness' secret.