This one's for Ailsa Craig because she asked for it and waited patiently and never whined even though it took its own time coming.

Certain episodes demand to be looked at more closely. In the fandom circles I've been in before, they're the ones that it seems like every writer has to try his or her hand at…here that doesn't seem to be as much the case, but still Falling Darkness is most definitely one of those episodes. I've been itching to get my hands on it since I first saw it, and finally, I've managed to chase it down. Not sure I've captured it and won't say I'm finished with it, but…

Waxing Light

The scream cut through the air and there was no question that something dreadful was happening out there in the dark. Something that he could have stopped…if he'd only been quicker and if he'd only trusted her as he should have.

He couldn't stop, couldn't be the one who pulled her out…it was his fault she was there. His fault.

"Get her out of there!" he shouted to Hathaway, leaving him to do what he couldn't and going on alone into the dark, crumbling building.

Her assailants had fled into the shadows, but as far as Laura was concerned the nightmare was far from over. Her screams and the cascade of falling dirt had obscured all other noises. She hadn't heard Robbie's shout to James, hadn't registered that the dirt had quit raining down on her.

She knew only her terror, the dirt in her eyes, her throat, nose, and ears, the weight of it bearing down on her, the tightness in her chest that might be the pressure of the dirt already overcoming her body's ability to continue to breathe under its horrible weight or only her own terrified screams robbing her of air…

Even after James had catapulted himself down into the grave with her, she was beyond recognizing she was no longer alone. He pulled her out from under the suffocating dirt and still she didn't know he was there.

"It's James…it's James! You're all right! You're all right!" he shouted in an attempt to reach through her screams, but she didn't hear him…the blood rushing in her ears coupled with the dirt clogging them made hearing impossible even once she'd caught sight of his pale face in the faint light. She read the words on his lips more than heard them and they took a long time to sink in.

The understanding that she was alive and staying that way took even longer…that wouldn't come until after the frenzied, frantic work of the arriving med team brought her shaking and slipping into shock out of the grave, after the hours spent sedated while casualty cleared her airway and other orifices of the suffocating dirt that had threatened to choke the life out of her, after losing the night and into the next day…only then did she wake to discover she was alive.

Her mother had arrived by then, nodding off in the chair beside her hospital bed, looking smaller and older than Laura thought possible. It had been to her mother's home she'd gone after the doctor arrived and released her. The thought of going back to her own, the site of her abduction, filled her with a fear and dread that she was not yet ready to face.