Silhouette

A Mirror, Mirror fanfiction

Although a better likeness, a real painting which captured her exactly, did exist in a museum in New Zealand (which he made the effort to visit whenever he was visiting from Sydney, usually right after stopping in to see Mandy and Fergus), entitled True Friend, Daniel wanted – especially as the years went by and her face grew less clear in his increasingly busy mind – a piece of her he could keep closer.

There was the photograph, once haunted by a ghost, before they solved that trouble and put the unhappy spirit to rest, Violette de Lutrelle & Daughter, but Mandy managed to track it down first, before Daniel could, claimed it, and subsequently had the misfortune to lose it in a freak fire while she was away at university. She cried for a week, so in the end he'd had to forgive her for being careless as well as selfish. Sometimes these things just happened. Oddly enough, Fergus held a grudge over the loss of that picture far longer than he succeeded in doing. Daniel had a softer spot for Mandy, even when she was being bratty, than her natural brother did.

There were no more bottles stopped up to keep a message safe in the tree – their tree – Constance had stopped using it as a means of trying to talk to him across time.

Whatever her reasons were, it meant he could take no solace from a new note after they'd been separated. No last letter to tuck under his pillow. His last time being near her really might have been that visit to her gravesite.

So, Daniel sought out her silhouette. The one which had nearly gotten poor Mai Ling the sack when Aunt Lily pinched it. This was, perhaps, a frivolous use of funds from the Crown Foundation, but as it was the only time he used the money for anything for himself, for anything less than charitable, even Fergus was decent enough to turn a blind eye – just the once, of course.

In the end, after many phone calls and letters and disappointments, he acquired it, and her framed cut-out, the shadowy shape of her head on paper preserved for more than one hundred and thirty years, graced every bedside table he ever had throughout his life.

Her silhouette was the first thing he saw when he woke in the morning, and the last before he turned out the light at night and lay in the dark, whether waiting for sleep after a slow evening or else dropping off exhausted after a full day of managing the Crown Foundation.

In dreams, she took on full life. She wasn't just a dark head-shape behind oval glass, but as much of herself as Daniel could manage to remember.

There, Constance spoke to him.

There, he hoped.

After all, she lived to be 93, and her name was still de Lutrelle.

In the 1800s, a woman keeping her own name wasn't a mark of feminism. As far as Daniel was concerned, it could well mean something else.

It could mean she waited for him.

He hoped she had.

~July 21st, 2077~

The hotel maid who came in to clean the room got a nasty shock. The old man who'd checked in the night before, Daniel Mcfarlane, had died in his sleep. The police came and consoled her as best they could.

There was no foul play suspected.

Still, it was only natural she was in shock.

One of the officers passed her a hot cup of tea. "The bloke was eighty, and in failing health for some time. We telephoned his nephews – they've been expecting to hear the worst for quite a while now, but apparently he never was one to take it easy."

Her eyes drifted from the steaming paper cup, far too hot – scalding – in her ammonia-chapped hands, to a little framed silhouette on the table.

In front of this silhouette, the hotel room's much-thumbed Gideon Bible was left open.

To the book of Daniel.

A coffee stain margined the words "...remained no strength in me, neither is there breath left in me."

The old woman, seated upon the bed with her hands folded in her lap, turned slowly to face the newcomer in the glaring white light of this false mirror-attic.

"You waited for me," said the old man.

Daniel & Constance, in this one moment, together again in death.

~fin~