Oh, I've written for Ronan, you can bet on that, Thedummie2!
It's not quite time to post it yet, but it is done. Thanks for
reviewing, peoples! Oh, I can't remember who it was, but someone wrote
a fic about Weir doing some nightly rounds, checking up on people... If
you read this, I hope you don't mind if I used the same. It fit too
well to pass up.
This concept is one of my favourites, I think; this and the first one.
Footsteps.
They echoed softly in the night, almost as mesmerizing a sound as the blessed silence that surrounded her. There was often so much noise; people talking, alarms blaring, guns firing… now there was only silence.
And her footsteps.
Take nothing but memories. Leave naught but footprints.
Why footprints? She had always wondered that. Footprints were as real as any rock or flower, just as easily seen, as easily noted for their existence. Footsteps would be better. Footsteps didn't last more than a moment, gone as soon as they sounded, leaving nothing behind.
Leave nothing behind… no one behind. How little that worked. How difficult that ethic was to uphold. Her heart so often cried out that it was right, but her mind had to decide between what was right and what was practical.
At least, on this occasion, it had worked. They had not left anyone behind. None of their own, at least.
But they had left footprints.
She came to the door and stopped, knowing there was nothing there but unable to beat the compulsion that if she looked inside as she had all the other doors in the hall, watching over her children, then something – someone would be there.
There was no one.
She sank onto the bed, listening to the faint echo of her footsteps fade away.
On this occasion, they had left an entire race to die at the hands of the Wraith. They had gone in intending only to retrieve their own people, save them from the hardship-toughened men offered as a sacrifice for the rest of the nation.
But their footprints… their footprints had doomed them all. Set in wet sand, irrevocable, until the surf of passing time washed them away to be forgotten years into the future.
Footsteps wouldn't have left such a mark… they would have sounded and faded in the same instant, leaving nothing behind, nothing…
Nothing but a memory.
This time she looked, really looked, at the shadowed walls, the unused desk. There were no footprints here. There were only footfalls. Footfalls that had the room remembering, a faint resonance of the person who'd once lived there. Perhaps in time it would fade. Perhaps not.
They were one in the same, she realized. Footprints. Footsteps. One left a physical remnant; the other left the whisper of a memory. Both of them left something.
Wherever they explored, wherever they walked, whether they changed something or not, it would not change the fact that they were there. It would not change the fact that the footprints had been made, that the footfalls had sounded; wherever they went, something remained.
Perhaps all they could do was watch where they stepped.
