Susan watched the plane gain altitude, grow smaller and smaller, until it was lost among the maze of contrails over the city. Then she turned wearily and started down the long corridors of O'Hare, back to her car.

She could have gone with him; accompanied his body home, and gone to the funeral. Part of her had wanted to do it. But she didn't know Luka's family. Except for a brief acquaintance with Gordana, she didn't know his Croatian friends. She didn't speak the language. They mostly spoke little or no English. She would have just been an outsider, among strangers. And there would be far too many questions; questions she would never be able to answer.

As far as they knew, as far as they would ever know, Luka's death had been sudden and tragic. A sudden illness. A stroke. No time to call them, let them know beforehand. No time to say good-bye.

There would have been questions about her too. How long had they been together? Since they were obviously so close (Susan knew she would never be able to hide the depths of her grief ...) why had Luka never mentioned her as anything more than a friend; why had there been no talk of marriage? Why had it still been Luka's wish, to the last, to be brought home to Croatia to be buried, to rest beside Danijela and his children in Vukovar?

He had left her some material things in his will, most of his real possessions, not that they amounted to much. Luka had never been one for material things; even after 9 years in America, his small apartment ... hers now ... was still quite bare -- but Susan knew that his heart had always been Danijela's, and he belonged with her. Before Christmas, she thought, he would be lying beside Danijela and his children again. After 13 years apart. He was home again now.

Tomorrow would be the memorial service at work. She could mourn with her friends, with Luka's friends. Tomorrow too she would have to go to the post office, mail a small package to Tata. A letter that Luka had written him just a few weeks ago. She had no idea what was in the letter. Luka wouldn't tell her. She could look now of course, but she wouldn't ... even if she would have understood the Croatian words. And a few small items; specific remembrances, and some family heirlooms that Luka had wanted to send home to them..

Suddenly blinded by tears, Susan had to stop walking. She blinked furiously until she could see enough to find a bench, then made her way to it and sank down, fumbling in her bag for a tissue. She hadn't cried. All these last several days she hadn't cried. Luka wouldn't have wanted her to cry, she'd told herself a thousand times. The end had been as he had wanted it, peaceful and without pain, in his own bed. She had dealt with all the arrangements, (while Luka had tried to simplify things for her in advance, arranging to transport a body overseas for burial was not an easy or quick procedure, she had discovered); the multitude of phone calls, arranging for someone to translate for her so she could relate the news to Luka's family; and she had never cried.

She had told Tata herself. The priest was there to help out, and he'd translated the more complicated information concerning arrangements and such, but she had told Tata that Luka was dead. And he had understood. He hadn't cried either. At least not while on the phone with her. " ... Luka died yesterday." she had said. None of the usual pointless stuff she usually gave to patients' families about how 'everything possible was done, but ...' He wouldn't have understood it anyway. She had just identified herself as Luka's friend, told him there was someone with her to translate if he didn't understand. And a worried, "Luka ... he is sick?" Why else, after all, would someone else be calling on Luka's behalf. "No. Luka ... he died yesterday. I am very sorry. There was ... no pain." And there had been a silence. "Do you understand?" Another beat or two of silence, then, "Yes. I understand."

She hadn't cried before, but now the tears came. Tears for her own grief, for the empty days ahead of her, and for all of Luka's pain. Then, a voice at her elbow. "Are you all right, dear?" An older woman, speaking with a faint accent that Susan couldn't identify. She offered her a packet of tissues.

Susan nodded and took the offering. "Yes ... thank you..." but a fresh flood of tears belied her words. The stranger sat beside her, put an arm around her.

"Have you just said good-bye to a loved one?" she asked.

"Yes," Susan whispered, wiping ineffectually at her eyes.

"I know how hard that can be, especially at this time of year ... you just go ahead and cry." The woman pulled Susan's head down onto her shoulder and rocked her like a child -- and Susan wept for a very long time.

------------

Susan walked slowly across the green grass. Far too many graves for such a small city, she thought. The attendant had told her, in his awkward and limited English, after consulting his map, where to find the ones she was looking for. When she'd booked her tickets and reservations in Chicago her travel agent had been surprised. Vukovar was hardly a usual destination for American travelers. Split, Dubrovnik. Even Zagreb. But not Vukovar. That was a forgotten name from the news over a decade ago. Why did she want to go there, and only there? It had been hard to wrangle much time off from Robert. She'd missed so much work last year, with Luka's illness, that she really had no vacation or personal time at all. But she needed to do this. And Robert, as he so often did when it really mattered, understood. So a quick trip. Fly to Zagreb, train and bus to Vukovar, spend two days, and fly home again.

There they were. Four graves. Two large, two small. Three of them very slightly weather worn, one very new. Susan couldn't keep from smiling.. Tata had shown good taste. Nothing ostentatious or gaudy. A simple cross. Luka would have approved, she was sure, though this was something they'd never talked about. The others were equally simple. The markers Luka himself had selected only a few years ago, he'd told her, to replace the very crude ones that had been placed after the hasty burials. Danijela. Jasna. Marko. Luka.

Susan lay the four bouquets of flowers down, one in front of each marker, and sat down in the grass, in the spring sunshine. She sat there for a very long time, enjoying the warmth and light on her face.

THE END

[Long Author's Note: First of all, a deep, heartfelt thank you for all of you who have stuck with me through all nearly 100,000 words of this. (125,000 if you read both stories in the series.) I know it wasn't always cheerful reading. Please feel free to review, (again, or for the first time) now that it's all done, and let me know how you liked it!! (It wasn't fluffy, I know. I don't write fluff. I'm allergic to the stuff. Makes me sneeze.)

Just a few (ok... more than a few...) comments on how the whole story (both of 'em) unfolded for me. "Darkness was, as the author's note at the beginning of that one stated, intended to be a rewrite of The Lost.. While I'd enjoyed the episode immensely, mostly for Goran's stunning performance, the storyline just didn't make sense. As a writer, it seemed to me to be full of holes. Why hadn't they killed him? The whole 'they thought he was a priest because he was praying' just didn't ring true for me at all. (Hadn't both he and Patrique already told them that he was a doctor? He was hanging around a medical clinic. Had they never seen a man pray before? The Congo is a very Catholic country! Come on...)

So I decided to see if I could do it better. (Don't just bitch about it, do something about it!) And the most logical reason I could come up with that they wouldn't kill him would be that they thought he was already dead, or nearly so ... because they had made him that way. Hence the beating. Originally there was no sexual assault in the story at all, but as I was writing that scene, it felt right to add it. (Don't ask me why. Ask my muses.) I tried it both ways, and, as difficult as the rape scene was to write, [the more astute among you may have noted that I have a hard time with explicit sex scenes] I finally decided to include it. The scene just played better (though certainly more uncomfortably) with it included. Then, as that story continued to unfold, with the help of the beta reader I was using at the time [I had no beta reader for "Light", you can blame that one all on me....] we found more and more of the story, and Luka's reactions to his experiences, focusing on that part of it.

The whole HIV thing though was a late addition, even to the first story. I realized eventually that I needed to address it, at least as a concern for Luka. So he asks Angelique about it, while still in Kisangani. But he was originally going to be negative. The negative test before he leaves Kisangani was intended to close out that whole plot thread ... because, at that point, (I'd written that scene before finishing the story -- I don't write my stories in order), I hadn't yet envisioned a sequel and didn't want to leave the readers wondering about it.

But I soon realized that I needed a sequel; that the story I was telling wasn't over yet. I had to continue to follow Luka's recovery once he returned to Chicago, bring Luka's experience to an actual close. However, as initially, envisioned, "Light" was to be just that -- a look at his physical and emotional recovery. No romance, probably some friendship with Abby (as suggested in the epilogue to "Darkness"), but mostly a fairly optimistic story of his recovery. Lots of therapy sessions, lots of ups and downs as he tries to rebuild his life again, but an eventual happy ending, probably closing with his return to work. And that was what I began to outline as I was posting the final chapters of "Darkness" onto the newsgroup where it first appeared. But it just wasn't working. I had lots of scenes, but I didn't have a plot. Until I woke up one morning with what eventually became chapter 23 in my head -- the scene where Susan finds Luka coughing in the on-call room. I grabbed my notebook and, within an hour or so, had that chapter, and the next 3 pretty much on paper. (And it only took that long because my hand only moves so fast across the paper!) I knew then I had to throw out everything I already had and start over. I had to devote much of the first portion of the story to slowly developing the Luka/Susan relationship so he would get to the point where he would trust her with this most painful truth about himself. (As Susan says herself in the story, they hadn't been friends before. I couldn't just throw them together because it was convenient for me as a writer, or because readers like to read Lusan stories.)

Even so, once I did decide to have him be HIV, I still wasn't going to have him die at the end of the story. I didn't want to kill off my character, and, with the current treatments for AIDS, I was afraid it would be hard to write believably. (At least not without having the story drag on for even longer than it already did, covering many years of story time.) So I thought I'd have the second portion of the story focus on his learning to accept his disease, and come to terms with living with it. But that didn't work either. Just didn't feel right. The characters wouldn't do it! Then I remembered reading that some African HIV strains are particularly resistant to treatment, so I could handle the medical end of it that way .... and, as for the rest, well, sometimes a writer's gotta do what she's gotta do. I've never written a story anywhere near this long before. The fact that it came so very easily says to me that I knew what I was doing with it, and where I wanted it to go.

I'm still amused though, as a writer, that the entire storyline of both stories really ended up hanging on a very brief scene early in the first story ... one that I almost didn't include at all!]

Thanks again, for everyone who read this far. Dedicated readers are much appreciated! (I'll be starting to post another older [much shorter] fic in a couple of weeks, and by the time that one is done, I may have something new ready to go. Who knows! Ideas are plentiful. Time isn't.)

Naomi