Disclaimer:
Author's Notes: The characters and stories of Due South are Copyright © Alliance Communications, and are used here without permission or license.
These works are for non-commercial use ONLY, and are produced for sole enjoyment of fans.
Story Notes: This is another person's take on the same events in my story 'Freedom Ain't Easy'. There a major spoilers for 'Victoria's Secret'.
Holy Love
by Shirley Russell
By way of introduction: Even though several people asked me to write a sequel to 'Freedom Ain't Easy' this isn't it. This is more of a companion piece to that story. Number three in the GtDaB Challenge. There are major spoilers here for 'Victoria's Secret'.
Another person's take on the same events:
Today is an anniversary for me. It's not a date, or even an incident that I would ever have planned to commemorate. In fact, I usually make every effort to ignore it. But lately I find the date, or more accurately, the event is more and more on my mind.
It was six years ago. Six years to the day since my friend and partner put a bullet in my back. And six years since I was left alone. But not by my friend. No, he left later.
I suppose I should explain. On the surface and in retrospect it seems rather an age-old story. Man meets woman; man falls in love only to find out that she is not the person he believed her to be. But stories are what happen to other people, this happened to me.
I had never really loved a woman before. I was always rather afraid, I guess. Afraid of loss. I had lost my mother when I was very young and my father was rarely in attendance. I found myself alone much of the time and though I learned to live with the loneliness, I longed for the closeness of another human being, someone with whom to share my life. So when I finally gave my heart to a woman I also gave her my soul.
Because, you see, I thought I had found my soul mate, the one person I could trust with that part of me that was most precious and most vulnerable. She returned my love, I am positive of that. What I felt for her could not have been so all encompassing and transcendent if it had not been reciprocated. It was a kind of holy love, the kind of love most people are never given the opportunity to experience, and those that are given that chance only experience once in their lives.
Our love was like a narcotic to me, heightening my senses while clouding my reason. Taking me to places I had never been, showing me things I had never seen. For days after first finding her, near death on the mountainside, I was lost in a world completely satiating a man starving for intimate connection with another human being.
Have you ever met someone that you felt you had known all your life? And longer? That's the way it was for me, for us. Across a thousand lifetimes. A connection beyond life and a connection beyond death. Holy love that is meant to last for all eternity.
But I was, and am, first and foremost an officer of the law and she had committed a crime. She never denied that. I assume she believed that our love would be enough to save her.
She was wrong.
I knew my duty long before I ever knew her, and in the end I sacrificed everything to do what I believed was right. Even though she begged me and offered me the world, I did what I had to do. And I have suffered every day thereafter.
In the years that followed I learned to live without her but never learned to live without the thought of her. Even though I could never totally banish her from my mind, I never spoke of her to anyone, except my friend and partner. In an uncharacteristically unguarded moment I tried explain to him why I was so incredibly uneasy around women, and about the woman. But I was unsuccessful. It's probably just as well.
And then one day, quite out of the blue, she returned. As I discovered much too late, she was intent on my total destruction. She had no idea that the best part of me had already been destroyed, or that she was the cause. More accurately she was the catalyst that initiated that destruction.
I thought - I hoped that we could resume our relationship. But my love for her and my guilt for what I had done blinded me to what she had become. Or what she had always been. To this day I am not sure which is true.
To make a long story short, Ray Vecchio shot me. Because she had a gun or to keep me from going with her. One or the other, or both. It is debatable and it is unimportant. What is important is that she left me to die on that train platform. She watched as Ray's bullet found its mark and I tumbled to the ground. As the train slowly slipped out of the station she watched as the life slowly slipped out of me. She watched and she did nothing. Because she did not care. And that, above all she did or tried to do, has caused me the most pain. Pain that will last across a thousand lifetimes.
It is said that time heals all wounds. That is just not true. Time may heal physical pain, but spiritual pain is only dulled. It is always there, lurking in the background to be revisited upon seeing the curl of brunette hair, or a long fur coat hurrying of in the distance. Oh yes, this day is an anniversary that I try with all my being to ignore.
Most everyone who knows me now knows little or nothing of those events six years ago, and if they do know they would never think to mention it. That is fine with me, I am able to remember it - her - well enough without anyone's reminder.
On this particular day it seems to be all I can think of.