Author's website: http://unhinged.kixxster.org

Disclaimer: Not mine, never will be, but it seems a shame to just let them sit around gathering dust.

Author's Notes: Written for the DS Flashfiction Threesome Challenge (not THAT kind of a threesome, you perverts-get your minds out of the gutter!)

Story Notes:

Angels of the Silences
By MR

She watched him tonight as she had so many nights since her death, unseen and silent. In the beginning she'd wondered why it was he never seemed to realize she was there, never sensed her presence, but she'd eventually come to accept it as part of being allowed to remain behind when she should have been going forward. She was waiting for something, but she didn't know what it was.

So she comforted herself with the fact that he'd been too young to really remember, or perhaps that he remembered only too well and was unwilling to confront that knowledge. And she'd watched him grow from a vulnerable child into a solemn young man who had, as she'd feared, followed in his father's footsteps. Feared because he wasn't his father and would never be. He was too different, too isolated. He spent far too much time living in his head instead of the real world.

When Robert had died she'd assumed her waiting was over, until she realized he couldn't see her either. That their son could not only see him but talk to him had made her unaccountably angry for quite some time. Robert could sense her, she knew, and she'd gradually come to realize that just as she was waiting for some indefinable moment in the future, so was he. The Powers that controlled their destinies was not to be trifled with or denied, and in the end she had, again, resigned herself to waiting.

And she had followed him to Chicago, watched as he befriended Ray Vecchio, and had been happy that, at long last, he seemed to have found a friend, someone who accepted him as he was. That this wasn't always the case she'd been willing to overlook. She knew her perception of such matters were colored by how she felt towards him.

Then Ray Vecchio had disappeared from his life, to be replaced by another man who bore the same name but was as different from him as day is from night. And that was when she began to see something blossoming in him that she had, till then, been only partially aware of.

She supposed it should've made her angry or disappointed, though unlike his father she'd never had the time to harbor hopes of a daughter-in-law and grandchildren to dandle on her knee. She'd realized when he was still quite young that such a road wasn't his desire. The incident with Victoria had only further strengthened that belief. Something inside him cried out for love, true, but it wasn't the love that had drawn her and his father together. He needed the love of an equal, someone who understood him totally, good and bad, someone who would fathom the life he lived because they lived on that was similar.

She'd known immediately this Ray was such a man, despite the presence of an ex-wife, despite his short temper and the openness that made him, in every way, the antithesis of her son. Opposites attract, and never moreso than now. He was strong where Benton was weak, weak where Benton was strong and, most important to her, loved him with a fierceness that almost matched her own.

So she had watched as it bloomed, unacknowledged by either of them, though always present just below the surface. When Ray was in danger, her son was the first person he sought out. When they seemed on the verge of ending their partnership, it was her son who finally backed down, admitted he had been wrong. They're banter amused her, because she saw only too clearly that almost everything they said was a admission of their feelings for each other.

She had been thrown off-guard by Ray Vecchio's reappearance, confused even further by his ties to Muldoon. Things had happened too fast, much too fast, and she would never forget the look on her son's face as Holly threw the ugliness of what had occurred at him. She had wished, in that moment, that she possessed the power to kill him where he stood for hurting her boy in a way that would never truly heal.

It was odd that her next clear memory was the mineshaft, standing there watching as Robert had come so close to betraying everything he stood for and believed in. And wondering that, in the end, it was Benton who saved them both, who persuaded his father not to take a path from which there was no turning back, who subdued Muldoon.

It was when Robert began to fade that she'd known. This was what she'd waited for all this time; this was what had been left undone. The reason neither of them could move onward. The realization amazed her, even moreso when she realized that Robert saw her now as she came forward to take his hand.

And then she'd heard the word. A single word, one she hadn't heard in so long she'd almost forgotten how it sounded. The word spoken by the small, frightened boy that was still, after all this time, trapped inside her son.

"Mom?"

She'd turned to him then, seen the tears in his eyes, realized he could see her, knew she was there, and was flooded with such an overwhelming tenderness she believed for a moment she was simply going to break apart like a soap bubble. She wanted to speak, to explain to him how she'd been there all along, that he'd never been truly alone, but she couldn't get the words to come. In the end she had simply reached up and touched his face, marveling at how her little boy had grown into such a beautiful young man, letting that one, lingering touch convey everything she'd wanted to tell him.

And he'd understood. She saw that clearly in his eyes. He knew the truth now, and in knowing would be freed from the burden that had weighed on him so long and heavily. Free to live as he wanted.

She'd smiled then and turned to take Robert's hand, now as solid in her own as real flesh and blood, and together they had turned their backs on the world of the mundane and gone forward into...what? She hadn't really known, but she wasn't frightened. The long waiting was finally over, and she felt only a deep, abiding sense of peace.

But in the end she had returned for one final look. And so she stood, silent and unseen again, on the very fringes of the campfire, watching as Benton explained what'd happened to Ray. His Ray, she thought, and found herself smiling. From this moment forward, their lives were intertwined just as she and Robert's had been.

And Ray, God love him, Ray accepted it all, never questioned, never suggested (well, perhaps obliquely) that Benton had taken a harder hit on the head than he'd thought. He'd just sat there, solid and comforting, and when Benton began to speak of seeing her again, of feeling her touch him after so long, he tried to turn away, to retreat, but Ray wouldn't let him. Beautiful mercurial Ray, who instead pulled him close, wrapped his arms around him, and let him cry it all out; all the pain and sorrow and loneliness that were inside of him until finally he was quiet, relaxed and drowsy, in Ray's arms.

"Caroline?"

She looked at Robert standing next to her, marveling at the change in him since the afternoon. The weary careworn man in the mineshaft had been replaced by the man she'd fallen in love with so long ago. She wondered, briefly, how she appeared to him, but decided it didn't matter. Nothing mattered now. They had stayed the course and it was time to move on.

She smiled and held out a hand to him. He took it, and with one final glance at their son and the man he loved, they stepped forward into the unknown.

FIN

End Angels of the Silences by MR: psykaos42@yahoo.com

Author and story notes above.