Then The Morning Comes


Title: Then the Morning Comes (prequel to White Horse)
Rating: somewhere between PG and PG-13
Warnings: some swearing, angst, sexual situations
Characters/Pairings: Sheridan/Other, Luis/Fancy, Sheridan/Luis
Word Count: 3,070
Summary: She makes the decision to move on with her life, to carefully put the pieces back together.


A door slams, and Sheridan knows it is them before Marty has time to burst through the door.

Only Marty doesn't burst through the door in excitement this time. His footsteps are heavy, reluctant. His blue eyes don't lift to Sheridan's face as he passes her en route to his bedroom, and another door slams, this one with enough force to make the cottage's aged walls groan in protest.

"Marty, what…" She gasps when she feels a firm hand wrap around her upper arm, stopping her from following her son. "Luis, I didn't hear you come in."

"I'm not surprised," Luis answers, releasing her arm and raking his hand roughly across his face.

Tilting her head in consideration, Sheridan narrows her eyes as she takes in the edgy look of guilt that flits across his handsome features as he looks down and away from her. "Luis," she turns more fully to face him, wrapping her arms across her middle as her blue eyes zero in on a profile she'd recognize anywhere. "Care to explain? Because I'm assuming you know a little bit about what's going on judging from the way you can't look me in the eyes." Stepping closer to him, she feels her anger grow along with the dawning truth of the realization. "Look at me, Luis," she demands, her voice now flinty with fury. "Tell me why our seven-year-old son is so upset that…"

Luis cuts her off. "Fancy's pregnant."

Sheridan swallows hard over the sudden, painful lump lodged in her throat and blinks away the unwelcome sting of tears long thought gone. She turns from Luis and wishes she could follow their son's example, slamming her door on the outside world and the mocking love she still feels for the man witnessing her misery. But she knows she can't do that. For Marty's sake, she has to put on a brave face. But nobody said the brave face had to include a smile. "Congratulations." The platitude cuts at her throat like broken glass and a tear slips down her cheek when she feels Luis's hand on her shoulder.

"Sheridan."

"Don't you dare say you're sorry," she warns, bowing her head and shrinking away from his touch. "Fancy's your wife. It's hardly a surprise." Except that it is, her heart cries.

"Maybe it wasn't the best way to tell him. I told Fancy it should have come from me. I told her…"

"Wait a minute," Sheridan whirls to face him, positively seething. "She told him?"

"She was excited," Luis defends with a wince. "She thought Marty would be excited too, getting a new baby brother or sister."

"It wasn't her decision to make," Sheridan shakes her head, blue eyes flashing angrily. The answering antagonism in Luis's reply only makes her see red.

"Telling him or starting a family of her own? Because that is not your decision."

"Haven't we sunk low?" She hisses the accusation, wondering at the rapid deterioration of civility between them. "She may not see Marty as a part of her family, but he is, Luis, because he's a part of you."

"Come on, Sheridan," Luis holds his hands up in supplication. "That wasn't what I meant and you know it."

Sheridan ignores him and continues. "And, like it or not, he's a part of me. She stepped over the line, Luis. She had no business telling him something that should have come from his parents. You should have told me. We could have sat him down and explained the situation to him."

"The situation?" Luis scoffs. "Are you listening to yourself? The situation? My wife and I decided we wanted to add to our family. A family that includes Marty. A family that does not include you. And let's be honest here, because that's what is really bothering you. I think you need to take a good, hard look at who's more upset here. You or Marty?"

Sheridan is unable to hide her flinch when the bullet ably sinks into its target, and she feels its rough edges splintering on their way to her heart. She bites down hard on her lower lip and wills her voice to return to her, clear and strong. "Get out," she manages to order, and she doesn't wait for him to act. She's already on the way to her son.

"Sheridan," Luis sighs. "Look…I'm sorry. That was uncalled for."

She stops in her tracks but doesn't turn around, and her voice is steely though she has doubts about her own backbone, because she can feel the fine tremors traveling all over her body. "Damn right it was uncalled for," she acknowledges without absolving him of any of his audible guilt. "Now get out of my house."

Luis leaves, but not without a parting promise. "Marty will come around."

Later, holding her son as he cries himself to sleep in her arms, Sheridan prays he is right.


Things are awkward, understandably so, over the next several months.

Marty still isn't completely sold on the idea of a little brother or sister sharing the father he still sees far too little of for his liking, but the thought has gradually ceased to cause him heartbroken tears. Now, he utters endless, curious questions.

Sheridan's personal favorite sounds something like this:

"Mom, how can the baby be my brother or sister and my cousin?"

She gives up trying to explain the logistics of that one when he ends up shooting an arrow straight through her heart with an innocently spoken query.

"Were you not a good aunt, Mom? Is that why Fancy married Daddy when we loved him first?"

How can she explain something she still doesn't understand herself? She directs him to Luis for the tough questions; she figures it's the least he can do, explaining the tangled roots of their family tree.

Luis doesn't pick Marty up himself anymore. Instead he sends Pilar.

While the very fact that it has come down to this hurts, Sheridan finds herself thankful for the chance to re-connect with a woman she will always count as the mother denied her in her youth.

It takes time, but each woman eventually finds her footing.

It is Pilar that gently breaks the news to her that the baby Fancy is carrying is another boy, and it is Pilar that reassures her that the hurt she feels at the news isn't selfish but is all-too normal. "Shh, mi hija," she soothes while Marty stands still and quiet in the kitchen corner. "Shh."

Sheridan feels tears choke her when her son's little arms wind around her waist, and for the longest time, there is no talking. She's thankful when Pilar leaves them both with kisses to the tops of their heads and promises to talk with Luis about rescheduling the week's time.

They watch movies and play video games that entire weekend, eating pizza and treating themselves to ice cream whenever they feel like it.

Later, whenever she thinks back on it, Sheridan can't help but smile as she wonders just who was cheering up whom.


She makes the decision to move on with her life, to carefully put the pieces back together.

It isn't the hardest thing she has ever done—she has, after all, survived growing up a Crane—but it isn't the easiest either, and when Josh asks her out the first time she doesn't say yes.

As it turns out, her mouth plainly refuses to say the word no, and it seems, that is all the encouragement that Josh needs, and Josh, as she soon comes to discover, is a very persistent, utterly charming man.

His courtship of her is insistent but chivalrous.

He brightens her days with flowers, makes her son laugh, and there's a certain comfort in the knowledge that he knows her first and foremost as Marty's mother, not one half of two star-crossed lovers that were never really meant to be.

The history between them consists only of hyper, sweaty little boys exhausting their boundless energy on miles of unending green, band-aids and scuffed knees, lime Gatorade and pizza celebrations. There is no elusive drug cartel, no bodyguards, no undercover operations or Christmas miracles that maybe weren't so miraculous after all.

If being with Luis had been like rushing over a cliff-side waterfall, full of adrenaline and without a life jacket, being with Josh, she soon discovers, is more like drifting down a warm, lazy river, her toes dipping into the water from the safety of an inner tube.

It's a welcome change, or so Sheridan tells herself.

She lies.

Josh's eyes are blue and his smile is easy, not hard fought. His kisses (always polite, never stolen in the unbearable heat of the moment) don't make her heart race. His hand, when it coolly slides into her own, doesn't burn her with its touch. And when they dance, he's always a step behind.

But he loves Marty, and she's pretty sure her son loves him back.

Luis is busy with work and Fancy and planning for the baby. Sure, he steals whatever moments he can to spend with their impressionable young son, but too often, the reality of his new life, his new family, intrudes.

Josh, on the other hand, devotes every moment not spent wooing her not on winning her son's affections exactly, because he already has them, but on making sure Marty knows his importance in Josh's life, knows he cares, maybe more than he really should, and for that, Sheridan wants to love him, maybe just a little.

It's enough, she thinks, for her simply to be content and Marty to have the acceptance of that kind of love.

It's enough to make a life, enough to allow her to let Luis go, for once and for always.

It's enough, she wills herself to believe. It's enough, it's enough, it's enough.

But really…it isn't.


Fancy loses the baby.

Luis clings fiercely to the son he has left, asking for more time with Marty, and Sheridan doesn't bother with trivial things like who has what day and this weekend is really mine. She doesn't have the heart to deny him the comfort of their son's closeness. Still, there's a part of her, a very tiny, secret part of her that feels the bitter sting (now you want him…now Marty has your full and undivided attention). For her son's sake, she buries it, and sends him off with Pilar, his backpack full of lists and reminders, paltry written words of condolences she can't bring herself to deliver in person. She sends him away and hides behind her own guilt.

Always there, Marty's love for his father reawakens and strengthens, but he never lets go of the wariness in his heart (neither of them will, Sheridan knows), and his hero worship of Josh doesn't fade. If anything, it grows, because Josh is pats on the back and fun times, and Luis is desperate hugs and sad brown eyes that never let Marty stray far from his sight. Torn between the two, Marty makes a choice.

It's a choice Luis refuses to accept.

It's the choice Sheridan knows she should make for herself but somehow cannot, at least until Josh makes the decision easier (harder) for her and proposes. She asks for time.

Josh gives it to her.

Sheridan doesn't know how Luis finds out (maybe Marty? Perhaps Pilar?), but she isn't surprised to find him on her doorstep two days later. Marty is gone, staying overnight with Jane and Little Ethan, and it's just her, alone in the cottage with nothing but her thoughts to keep her company. She stands back to let him inside, and Luis edges past her, pushing the door shut with a forceful hand. His name is a protest on her lips. "Luis." Shaking her head at him, she tiredly asks, "What are you doing here?"

"I'm his father," Luis growls by answer. "Nobody can change that."

Sheridan runs a tired hand through her hair, and she finds she can't meet his tortured eyes. "Josh doesn't want to take your place," she defends. "He just wants a chance to be there. He loves Marty, Luis. Marty loves him," she says softly, gently, aware that this is a hurtful truth Luis doesn't particularly want to hear, but he must. Quite by accident, she's found a good man, another one anyway, and he wants nothing more than to make them happy. She wants to be happy. She craves it. Still, she craves Luis more. "You've given all your chances away, Luis."

Something within Luis's dark eyes shifts, and he closes in on Sheridan, trapping her against the door. He touches her face and he demands to know, "What about you? My own son loves this man more than he loves me. What about you?"

Sheridan can feel herself trembling within from his nearness, and she fights him as he turns her face toward him, seeking out her eyes.

"Do you love him? More than you love me?"

She can lie about a lot things but she can't lie about loving him. "No," she whispers.

"No, you don't love him, or no, you don't love him more than me?"

There's an edge of desperation to Luis's voice that draws Sheridan's eyes helplessly to his own. What she sees there has her drawing in a sharp breath and finding his face with her own hand. She blinks back the sting of tears as she seals her own fate with a single tortured word. "Both."

Luis's handsome face crumples briefly in relief and he reaches up to capture her tears with the pads of his thumbs. "Sheridan," he groans, softly dropping his head against the door and sliding one hand down to rest at the nape of her neck.

Sheridan grips his shoulder like a lifeline as he draws back, his eyes glittering darkly, his beautiful mouth parted as he stares into her eyes. Her other hand is shaking as it combs through his black hair, and she finally speaks the truth they both know. "Only you, Luis. Only you."


"Tell me you didn't sleep with him," Luis pleads with her, his palms pressed flat against the door, his forehead nestled against hers. "Tell me," he husks out, his mouth brushing against hers as he speaks.

Sheridan moves her hands restlessly across the expanse of Luis's broad shoulders, the hard planes of his chest and abdomen, the dips and valleys of his spine through the soft cotton of his black tee-shirt. "I didn't sleep with him," she promises. "I didn't," she murmurs into his mouth. She cries out when the gentle sweetness of the kiss morphs into something harder, more dark, more brutal, and her nails clench in the supple flesh of Luis's shoulders as he lifts her in his arms, pressing her body firmly against the door.

Luis breaks the kiss, his hands finding their way underneath her shirt and to her sides. "Promise me," he grits out, his hot breath against her ear making her shiver.

Sheridan wraps her arms around his neck, presses her lips to the juncture of his neck and shoulder, and repeats the oath. "I promise." She repeats the pledge over and over again as she kisses him, his neck, his shoulder, his face. She repeats it until Luis's mouth finds her own, and there is no more talking.

In the darkness of her bedroom, Luis takes his time undressing her. No patch of skin goes untouched, un-kissed as he rediscovers the wonders of her body. He holds her close when she is weak with passion, soothes her as more promises spill from her lips.

Luis makes love to her without saying the words, filling her body but denying her soul, and realization dawns long before the new day breaks over the horizon for Sheridan.

This is goodbye.

She clasps her sheet to her chest as she watches him dress. She curses the tears in her eyes and calls out his name. She swears Luis has tears in his own eyes when he turns to face her, but a blink of her own to clear her cloudy vision, and they disappear.

"Sheridan," Luis breathes.

I'm sorry is poised on his lips, but she doesn't let him say it. She doesn't think she could bear it.

"She needs me."

"I know," Sheridan nods tearfully. "You need to be needed."

Luis frowns, grows defensive, lashes out. His anger deflates quickly in the face of her sad acceptance.

"She just lost a baby. She can't lose you too." Sheridan covers her face with her hands. "Go, Luis. Just go," she sobs out when she feels his hand slide across her back, his arms draw her close. She clutches fistfuls of cotton in her hands as she cries, his steady heartbeat beneath her ear mocking her own breaking heart.

"It's not the right time," Luis tells her, regret in his voice. "Maybe it's come and already passed. I don't know. All I do know is right now Fancy needs me, more than you need me, more than I need you." Dropping a kiss to the top of her head, he appeals to her. "Don't make me choose."

Finally gathering the strength to push him away, Sheridan knuckles away her tears, unable to look up at him. Shakily, she says, "Marty will be here soon. He can't find you here, not like this."

Luis agrees. Gruffly, he announces, "I'll see myself out. Tell Marty I love him?"

"I will," Sheridan vows. She watches him move toward the door out of the corner of her eyes. Before he steps over the threshold, she stops him with her words. "I'm sorry. About the baby," she elaborates. "I never wanted…" she trails off.

"I know," Luis needs no further words. "I'll have Mama pick up Marty. From now on."

Sheridan nods. "I think that's for the best."

Still, Luis lingers. "We'll work out a schedule."

"Go," Sheridan softly implores him. "Don't keep Fancy waiting."

"I don't…" Luis hedges.

"Luis," Sheridan cuts him off wearily. "It'll be okay."

Neither of them believes the lie, but they're nothing if not great pretenders.

Sheridan listens until his heavy footsteps fade away into nothingness, and then she fumbles for her discarded phone, her fingers punching out the number by heart.

Josh answers, with a smile in his voice.


Per Shaun's suggestion, I've decided to post any/all stories that have to do with this particular universe (lol) here for easier access. In the order in which they were written.

Like it says above, this is actually the prequel to White Horse and both stories so far precede Pretty Things, which is more Theresa/Ethan-centered and is posted in its entirety alone. So...you don't have to read that one to understand these two stories (unless you want to cheat a little, kinda like turning to the last page of a book, lol).

Luis and Sheridan have gotten themselves into a hot mess, haven't they?

Want to read more in this series?

Just tell me by clicking on that little button at the end or sending me a message. Either are welcome. Feedback is certainly much adored.

Thanks for reading!