Author: Trialia
Title: What Chances Taken
Rating: PG
Category: Angst, Tragedy
Summary: I could have loved you. Ambiguous vignette.
A/N: For my LJ flist.
I could have loved you. I could.
Instead he stood in the pouring rain, solitary except for the minister and the grave-diggers, dressed in his best suit and watching the smooth, dripping wood of her coffin- as slim as she had been- be lowered carefully into a yawning hole in the midst of the unforgiving earth. He had run out of chances as surely as she had, now.
The rain was slowing to a drizzle, still mingling with the tears on his face as he closed his eyes to remember her. Not the way he had seen her in the morgue, with blackened eyes and a lacerated throat, but the way she'd been the night before- her laughing brown eyes drawing him in, curly hair falling over her shoulders and her lips curving slowly upward as he bent to kiss her --
"Sir?"
He opened his eyes, returning to the present, to see the priest staring at him sombrely.
"Yeah?"
The other man gestured vaguely to the scarlet rose clutched in his right fist, and quietly elaborated, "If you'd like to..."
He nodded, and stepped forward. Crouching on the wet grass, not really caring whether or not he stained the tuxedo pants, he leaned over. Gently stripping thorns from the stem of the rose with finger and thumb, heedless of the scored slices they made over his fingerprints, he let the flower fall.
As it landed with a soft, damply rustling thump on top of her casket, he whispered words under his breath. He hoped that she would hear, wherever she was.
"I'm sorry..."
He turned away, and as he exited the churchyard, he left a piece of his heart behind with her.
fin