Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.
Author's note: I will do a fuller examination of Nightcrawler, separately. It's such a detailed episode. But please enjoy this actually tiny moment, for now.
Nightcrawler
He lost himself in the atmosphere of the house, looking around at the bits and pieces that made up the home Amanda had created with her whole heart and soul.
Here was the kitchen where she had raised her boys, kissing them on the forehead and caressing their little faces. This was the home she had made for them, despite a divorce which could have broken the family irrevocably.
The thought of her divorce brought back another memory, this one almost entirely buried for the past three years — making strawberry daiquiris by the sink in the Betsy Ross Estates, the first time they had played their cover as husband and wife. His heart broke all over again at the thought of what he had told her that day: "I hate this. I want a divorce."
What had possessed him to say such a needlessly cruel thing to her?
In three years, he had said and done an unbelievable number of things to and with her. He'd called her cookie face, sweetheart, honey, darling. He'd kissed her, said wedding vows to her, told her he loved her - though that one was for real - and asked for a divorce, all before he had even had the chance to ask her to marry him.
Would he have to live with that memory, without even the chance to remedy it, for the rest of his miserable, Amanda-less existence?
His agonized, sleep-deprived mind suddenly broke from the strain. It was almost as if she were really standing there, as ephemeral as if she were an answer to a wish made to an impotent genie.
"I'm okay," she said.
He realized that Dotty had stopped talking, and he was jerked back painfully to the present and to the horrific reality that was his life now.
