Disclaimer: I don't own AMC's The Walking Dead or any of its characters. Wishful thinking aside.
Authors Note #1: This is a drabble response to the prompt post on the LJ community Beware of Walkers. The prompt was the word: "Weep not for the memories". The rules were to remain within a 100 -1,000 word limit. (Which I did minus the title and all the disclaimer bits). Woo!
Authors Note #2: Please read and review. I am excited to see what you all think. I am open to comments, advice, and constructive criticism. In addition, I wanted to send a quick thank you to my reviewers.
In Her Memory
He pressed his lips into the coarse fuzz of Duane's curls, letting loose a long splintering sigh as he took in the form of his sleeping son. He was finally sleeping soundly, his little arms wrapped firm and insistent around his own.
He shrugged his shoulders reflexively, letting an indulgent hand stroke down the curve of his son's small cheek, trying in vain to remove that small crinkling frown that appeared to have taken up residence in the smooth skin right between his eyes. Standing out like an ugly, neon reminder of how much things had changed.
It was something that bothered him more then it probably should have..
Because he knew that only a few short months ago, back before reality had become confused with nightmares, there had been no such frown haunting those young features. But now, everything had changed.
He had always told Duane that nightmares and monsters weren't real. Only now he wasn't sure what to say anymore..
Leaning back against the wall his eyes fell on the rumpled mattress that was still splayed across from theirs, pushed up against the edge of the couch. And unbidden his thoughts turned to the man who had rested upon it only a mere few days earlier.
He had told Rick that she had been the mother of his child. The 'mother of his child'…that phrase somehow didn't seem to do her justice. But he hadn't corrected himself at the time, and he regretted that now. She had been so much more; she had been more then just his wife. She had been his match. The only woman on this earth he had ever truly loved.
She used to sing along to Sarah Mclachlan, off key and obnoxiously loud whenever she was in the kitchen and they were off rough housing in the den. Only smiling when they would inevitably tumble in to complain, flicking her spatula at them warningly as hungry fingers inched towards the bubbling pots and half chopped ingredients idling on the cutting boards for supper.
But he hadn't been able to tell him any of those things. Not with the wounds of her passing still weeping, bleeding straight through like bad battlefield triage where the injury had been improperly treated, left to air out in the open, festering, poisonous and polluted.
He hadn't been able to face it. Not then.
He had been too busy trying to separate it in his mind, trying to cut away from the memories in order to get by. In order to survive. And for a while, he had figured they had been doing just fine. In forgetting.
And then he had come along. Lame as a newborn, and stumbling his unsteady way through the neighbourhood, blinking stunned and almost docile into the light like a man who cannot quite understand what he is seeing.
In his own innocently bumbling, yet terribly honest way, Rick, with his stalwart determination and unshakable faith, had battered down that ragged, hastily mended hole in his breast, and had forced him to face the reality of what he had lost.
It had almost been more then he could bear.
He wanted to hate himself for that, for not being able to find it within himself to put her out of her misery. Twice now he had left her like that... A shell, a wandering, empty husk of everything she had once been. That thing out there…It had her face, and her eyes.But that wasn't her anymore. She was gone.
And he knew she wouldn't have wanted that. Not like this.
He sucked in a long shaky breath. The kind that burned as it pooled in his lungs, writhing and pushing at the stagnant air until the urge to exhale was all but unbearable. It was time to set free the ghosts that haunted this house. It was time to let her go. They couldn't stay here anymore. Rick had hammered that point home all too keenly. They would never forget…He reckoned that they never rightly could…But perhaps, given time, they could learn how to live without her.
There were twenty four steps on that staircase, and he knew he would remember each and every one of them for the rest of his natural life. It was as if the insurmountable weight of his own fears and perceived weaknesses fell harder and more punishingly along the breadth of his shoulders the closer he came to that little room.
He remembered the first time he had seen her, she had been the prettiest thing he had ever seen, and he had been cocky, and just young enough to tell her exactly that. And predictably, like any proper, street savvy Brooklyn girl, she had elbowed him in right the spleen and took off across the playground blacktop; her purple high-topped converse sneakers blazing a neon coloured trail across the pebble strewn school yard.
That had been grade five and he hadn't stopped chasing her since.
And almost like a compulsion, the tears began to fall once again. They were erratic and all too damning, traversing down the lines of his cheeks until they fell, splattering across the sill.
"Come on baby..." He whispered grief and rising horror shredding his voice raw.
..Oh god..Jenny...Please..
And for a long moment, even as the sound of bare feet shuffling in the darkness below echoed fleshy and listless in his keen ears, and his thumb slid softly down the length of trigger, he could have sworn that for just for a moment, he heard the last dying strains that hallmarked everything they had lost floating up through the open window, the voice off tune but lilting and determined…
…."Weep not for the memories.."
And when he finally pulled the trigger, and the shot echoed out like a scream in the night, melding together in a dying cacophony of low, base sounds, he didn't quite know what to think when he raised his head, and realized that the tears had stopped…