20/20
+++Insert usual boring and pointless fanfic headers here, you know the drill+++
She had in fact loved him. He didn't know. He couldn't have known. Together on front lines hours had spun into lifetimes. Between them had been a closeness forged stronger than family or caste and perhaps even love. A dozen battles had built them seamlessly into each other - where one ended and the other began was irrelevant. With a thought, a will, they could move each other like second limbs, fluid and magnificent.
And now she moved him. She moved him more than he had ever thought possible. She had returned him.
Marcus looked down on her lifeless body and could only feel the loss. Her loss. His loss. The loss of a universe without her.
Once, long ago, someone wrote that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Critical review? Marcus' slowly warming right- hand exacted his opinion of those words on the drawers by the Medlab bedside. They fell on an unconscious Medlab staffer.
Another person hurt. Because of him.
Opportunities had slipped by in his life, always ignored. Always so easy to believe that something is too good to be true, so easy to believe that only the pain is real. The pain that continues, that endures, split by light moments of frivolity with streamers and music that only make the darkness starker. Only split in the way of a tooth cloven to the nerve.
Inside he ached with the sickness of the soul. As the Minbari called it. She had had so many opportunities too. She had been a leader, a hero and but for him could have been anything. What was he? A Ranger. Trapped somewhere between the candle and the star.
No, he was the candle. And she was the star. Her light had been extinguished to continue his, but in her death, all the light he ever cherished faded away. Now a night descended, from which there could be no dawn. How alike they were. How easy to think that it could have been him next to her deathbed. How easy indeed. So much easier than imagining them building life together. Such destinies are for others.
Not for people like us.
+++Insert usual boring and pointless fanfic headers here, you know the drill+++
She had in fact loved him. He didn't know. He couldn't have known. Together on front lines hours had spun into lifetimes. Between them had been a closeness forged stronger than family or caste and perhaps even love. A dozen battles had built them seamlessly into each other - where one ended and the other began was irrelevant. With a thought, a will, they could move each other like second limbs, fluid and magnificent.
And now she moved him. She moved him more than he had ever thought possible. She had returned him.
Marcus looked down on her lifeless body and could only feel the loss. Her loss. His loss. The loss of a universe without her.
Once, long ago, someone wrote that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Critical review? Marcus' slowly warming right- hand exacted his opinion of those words on the drawers by the Medlab bedside. They fell on an unconscious Medlab staffer.
Another person hurt. Because of him.
Opportunities had slipped by in his life, always ignored. Always so easy to believe that something is too good to be true, so easy to believe that only the pain is real. The pain that continues, that endures, split by light moments of frivolity with streamers and music that only make the darkness starker. Only split in the way of a tooth cloven to the nerve.
Inside he ached with the sickness of the soul. As the Minbari called it. She had had so many opportunities too. She had been a leader, a hero and but for him could have been anything. What was he? A Ranger. Trapped somewhere between the candle and the star.
No, he was the candle. And she was the star. Her light had been extinguished to continue his, but in her death, all the light he ever cherished faded away. Now a night descended, from which there could be no dawn. How alike they were. How easy to think that it could have been him next to her deathbed. How easy indeed. So much easier than imagining them building life together. Such destinies are for others.
Not for people like us.
