This is the final chapter of this story. Thank you all for reading.
Chapter 16
It had been too easy, of course.
Life was never that easy. She'd never hoped to have him out of the apartment without a meltdown on both sides. Tears, pleas, screams, threats, the whole package. They'd shared too much, both of joy and of heartbreak, to have it end – or even tamed, lessened – so easily.
Of course it couldn't last that way for long, and Daphne knew it. She credited Niles' initial, relatively calm reaction to shock, waited for the phone calls she knew would come. Therefore, the passionate outpouring of pure denial she received courtesy of Sprint didn't surprise her in the least. He understood what she was feeling but this was all wrong, he tried to tell her, choking over the words. He knew he'd hurt her but this wasn't right for either of them. For both of their sakes they needed to move on together. He could be strong, he repeated at least half a dozen times. He could be strong for her.
Daphne could barely bring herself to answer him, as biting her lip and shaking her head didn't translate through the phone line. It wasn't that way, she tried to explain. He couldn't be strong for her because he loved her, that wasn't the way it worked. If he loved her less, she tried to tell him, there would be less danger; if he loved her less he would be more capable of seeing her through the hard times he'd inflicted on her. He'd flee – he'd done it before. The fact that he loved her argued that he would not be able to handle it when things got really difficult. Loved her with his brand of love, that was.
And what brand of love was that? he asked, voice shaking.
She didn't have the heart to answer "the weak kind." On inspection, it proved the wrong answer anyway. She amended what she'd said.
The problem, she told him, isn't how you love me, but that you don't have the strength to back it up.
She'd already said that and she knew it wasn't going to get through. He hung up there. She suspected he didn't want to cry on the line. He probably thought she would have construed it as further proof of weakness. She wouldn't, but by then he was already gone, and of course she wasn't going to call back.
He called again the next day, as she'd known he would. He was into his analytical phase by then; she didn't much like the hard edge to his voice, but she had to admit he was easier to deal with this way. He wanted to know how this was going to play out. Were they dating? Yes, she answered, they were. With what frequency? How seriously? Were they allowed to hold hands, to kiss, to join one another for a nightcap at the evening's end?
"You'll forgive me for the specificity, but I really don't have any idea where to start," he said with a short, barking laugh. "After what we've shared, I'm finding it hard to hit the rewind button and stop us at that exact point, six months or so back, when we were exactly as serious as you feel we should be now."
Of course she had no answers for him, and she had a feeling he didn't really expect any. Part of the problem was that they'd never *been* at that stage, she tried to explain. They'd gone from being friends to being the most passionate of lovers with no interim stage whatsoever. (He tried to object that that was precisely why they'd put off sleeping together for so long; she resolutely squelched her suspicion that that had more to do with her rapidly expanding body than his desire to know her better, and told him quite honestly that that was beside the point – they'd treated one another as the most devoted of lovers from the moment they'd put that Winnebago into gear, and the sex had nothing to do with it.)) They needed to sloe down, she told him, and she might have come to feel that way even if it weren't for the current crisis. In that conversation, she was the one who ended on a vaguely pleading note, which is probably why they hung up on civil terms.
They adjusted. Over time. There were many, many variations on those two calls before they managed it – Niles was quite naturally swinging from love to anger with a bipolarity and frequency which was mildly surprising even to Daphne. But it lessened, over time, with Frasier's help. Frasier, Niles learned very early on, was not as satisfying a confidante as he'd usually been in the past; he was firmly entrenched in Daphne's camp on this one. But that was ultimately more helpful, and eventually things began to play out roughly as Daphne had envisioned.
They did begin dating, if dating was any term to use for people who'd known each other so intimately in some ways and in other ways not at all. There was a good deal of shyness and some suspicion when they began this arrangement, but eventually they began to discover the pleasure of talking to one another, and to rediscover the friendship they'd almost lost when they began steeping in sexual tension. Their conversations were at first deliberately light, neither one willing to broach more serious topics. Paradoxically, this only kept the wounds fresher.
But over time, they began to be able to discuss deeper hurts – and there were plenty of those, underlying their whole relationship, quicksand ready to shift at the slightest provocation. Talking about it helped put it to rest. A little. Niles couldn't talk about his guilt, certainly not to her, and that was a problem, a major one. But they talked about how it felt to be facing a drastically foreshortened future – in short, how it felt to be facing death in a way most of us are hardly ever reminded to do. He was a better confidante for her than Mel, Daphne had to conclude with a little rueful smile one day. There was a reason she'd always loved him so.
The always wasn't accidental, and she supposed, in moments of sentimentality, that it had to be linked to a forever. But it wasn't enough, she kept reminding herself. He had to prove himself. She had to know that he was not going to run out on her before she could consider being with him again. She loved him but the self-help industry was booming with mass-market paperbacks on how to get over loving men who were not worth loving, and if driven to it she could buy one and get on with her life. (Or so she told herself.) Love wasn't enough, she told herself, contradicting thousands of years of romantic notions. Love was not necessarily enough.
God, it was hard to believe.
The good news was that he was staying. He was staying and he was seeming to be stronger. Day by day he was talking a little more openly about what he'd done to her, how they could deal with it, how to make the best of the rest of their lives. Day by day she saw him facing up to it a little more. Day by day she trusted him a little more. He was on probation but he'd shown nothing but exemplary behavior so far.
And the fact that she was in love with him probably ought to be taken into consideration at some point, beyond its not being enough. At some point she probably ought to weigh that in in his favor, see where the scales lay then.
Their first kiss post-breakup had been awkward initially, then sweeter as they found one another again. They'd broken apart for a short second, and then the mutual smile had been enough to send them over the edge again and they'd relaxed into another, longer, deeper kiss.
Maybe the rest of it all could work out that way. These brief moments of trust – just the prologue to the real thing.
At least, with Niles around, Daphne could think in terms of some kind of a future. Whether they came together as a couple or remained in this shy half-joined state for the rest of their lives, he got her thinking outside of herself and beyond her disease. She did the same for him, she knew. In the end, that was all that mattered – making whatever was left of their lives more worth living.
THE END