Disclaimer: These characters are not mine and I do not profit from their use.

Author's Notes: Many thanks to mondschien for an ages-ago beta. It took a long time for this story to appear.

Two Trains, Running

She was sick for a thousand miles.

The strange, sudden illness began even before the train left Chicago. It clawed at her stomach and turned her intestines to water. Food was impossible to keep down. She couldn't rouse herself from the narrow little berth and could only draw the blinds closed and lie on her bunk, watching shadows flicker on the ceiling. For days she rode the train, criss-crossing the country, locked in her dark little compartment and doubled up in pain as America slid by the darkened windows.

She vaguely remembers a river, a lake, an ocean, but she's not sure if it was something she'd seen or only dreamed. She does remember water, and a train change in Boston - was it her second or third time through? - and another one in Denver. Then a second ocean (this time she knew it was the Pacific) and yet another train. She spends everything she has on a ticket that will take her due south, as far as the rails will go. She knows that it won't be far enough.

She still sees him when she closes her eyes. That last, fleeting look on his face, when the bullet tore into him and he fell from her arms, plays out again and again across the thousands of miles of darkness. She thought she'd wanted to see him dead or in prison. But instead of feeling triumphant, or revenged, she could only lie awake in her bunk, twisted up in pain, and see the dying expression on his face as a continent rose and fell just beyond her curtained window.

Another ocean, this time at the very tip of Chile where waters blend together and lose their names. Passenger trains didn't run as far as she needed to go, and so she had sold her sister's ring and bribed a conductor on a freight line to get here. Staring at the coast of Cape Horn made things seem clearer, after seeing that last look on Ben's face for so many lost days and nights.

The nightmares started when her train crossed South America on its way back up the continent. And it was worse than seeing his face - this time he was bleeding to death on the subway platform in Chicago, his lips moving to form the words of a poem she'd spent a decade trying to forget. Snow was falling. She wanted to slip her fingers into his mouth and cover his warm, large body with her own, to protect him from the cold and gathering darkness. She spoke the words with him, the mad monk's poetry a rope she could use to tether Ben to the mortal plane. But it was a nightmare and so he was always slipping, always falling away from her. He had saved her, once, body and soul. And now she could never save him.

When her train finally bumped into Mexico City she stole aboard a coach bound for the coast. For the ocean. She'd grown up in Alaska, and all that empty space, be it snowfields or sea, had always frightened her. But an old man on the train to the Cape had told her that the ocean is warm and has no memories. It made her want to live long enough to see it again, wide and blue and endless. Like Ben's eyes. And so she went, huddled in a boxcar with single men and families making a desperate push for the borderlands. They ignored her. Her Spanish was so rudimentary that it only permitted her to understand that they thought she was cursed, or damned. She would have told them both were true if only she could have formed it into words they could understand.

Another dark train journey, this time as a fugitive in a boxcar filled with the stench of rotting produce and livestock bleating in the gloom. She sat unmoving in an empty corner and swayed with the train, wondering if she would die before she reached the Pacific. When the constant screech and rattle of the wheels stopped she thought at first that she really had died. The pain disappeared along with the noise of the train. For two months, three weeks and four days she had lived with the pain and the rumble of train wheels on their silver-plated tracks. Without them the world seemed so still and quiet; it was as if she was back with Ben in that makeshift lean-to on the mountain. There, it had been so silent that she could count every beat of his heart.

Dizzy with hunger, bedraggled and filthy, she practically fell out of the train and lay unmoving alongside the track. The stars were still bright in the first rosy blush of dawn, and she watched them spin overhead. Her eyes drifted closed, Ben's heartbeat pulsing in her ears. When she forced her eyes open again, the stars had faded. Their absence made her dizzy again, and a rushing noise seemed to fill her head.

"Como estas?" a man asked from somewhere above her. She couldn't see him very well in the dim half-light of early dawn. Perhaps he was one of the migrants, one of the men who eyed her uneasily in the freight train and made the sign of the cross. Or he might be the same old man who had told her about the Pacific. Victoria wasn't sure; his voice sounded like so many others, empty and faded like every voice but the one echoing in her dreams.

He said something else, something that sounded like "Necesitas ayudar?" She shook her head and laughed because she had traveled a thousand miles and still couldn't escape polite strangers who wanted to help. The man's next question was lost to the rushing noise that filled her head and her heart. That steady noise had been there all along, she realized. It had been her constant companion, like the pain and the sound of trains and that last look in Ben's eyes and the desperate need to see the Pacific again. That sound had lain beneath it all.

Victoria realized it wasn't the howl of the blizzard in Fortitude Pass or even Ben's heartbeat that had echoed in her ears for thousands of miles. It was the ebb and flow of the Pacific. Warm waters, with no memories.

She closed her eyes and put a hand over her swollen belly. She smiled.