Disclaimer: I do not own the Dresden Files. I am in no way making money from this. Spoilers for a single part of Turn Coat. The song is Three Dog Night, with a few changes I made.
I flopped onto one of my secondhand couches, still numb after talking with Anastasia. Game night had been good for us, even if Andi couldn't play for more than a few minutes at a time without crying, but I still felt strange that the woman I had shared my life with for a year, hadn't really loved me. As I sat there in silence, I thought about all of the women I had been close with over the years. Elaine. She stopped loving me.
Who could blame her; after all I killed the closest thing she ever had to a parent and left her to die in a fire. When I did find her years later, I ended up having to kill her best friend and forcing Elaine to have to hide once again from the council. Susan. Susan can't afford to love me. Eight years ago when she was almost turned and then she left, I thought that I had gone through the worst, but when she came back a couple of years later it was even worse. In her condition, our emotions are a weakness for her, they're something that threaten to turn her into a bloodthirsty monster, so there goes that relationship. Murphy. Stars and stones, my relationship with Murphy is complicated, but it really all boils down to: she won't let herself love me. She likes me, and maybe could love me but we're so different that anything between us wouldn't work, and while I sometimes think about that and don't really care, Murphy doesn't want to walk away from me with a third set of divorce papers in her hand, and/or die before I'm middle aged. Anastasia. Hell's bells. I don't know that I had loved her, but it was certainly growing there. For a whole year I had had a surprisingly uncomplicated relationship with a woman two hundred years my senior who had also happened to be my boss, and now I found out that it only happened because a mad man had decided to rearrange her mind and make her think that she liked me. God, I'm depressed, I thought. When people are depressed they have this wonderful little phrase: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I can't help but think sometimes that life doesn't give me lemons, it chucks rocks at my head. I shook my head, forcing my thoughts away from the very unhappy place that they had been headed and grabbed my guitar. I got up, stood on the hearth of my fireplace facing my living room like I was on a stage, and began to softly play my own version of a Three Dog Night piece I had revamped when I had first started dating Ana.
One is the loneliest number that you'll ever see.
Two, it's not as bad as one
It's the only number that you'll ever need.
I stepped down from my impromptu stage, and put my guitar away. It could be worse than just being lonely, I told myself, I could be dead.