Unnamed Melody
By Fewthistle

Author's Note: Challenge Two, Prompt Three at the LiveJournal community "Even_Angels." First and last lines written by Flying_Peanuts.

Spoilers: After Episode Two, Series Two, “Shit Happens”.

March sky, barefoot in blue: Helen stood on the damp cement of her back stoop, coffee cup clutched tightly between fingers chaffed from the cold. Her mind was too anesthetized to even be aware of the numbness seeping up into her legs through the rough concrete. Her unfocused gaze swept over the untended brown of her garden, the hedges gone riotous, the weeds that overran the flowerbeds.

Overhead, the sky was an overturned ash-tray, dank and leaden. The clouds crushed down on her, smothering the London skyline in a blanket of dirty gray wool. Yet, it wasn't the oppressive sky that stopped the air from filling her lungs, but the weight of her guilt, like a stone on her chest, pressing down.

She couldn't believe that she had left Nikki like that, crying quietly on her bunk. “Shit happens” , she had told her resignedly, the back of her fingers tracing the smooth contour of Nikki's cheek. Callous. Uncaring. Selfish. Terrified. Helen knew that she had been all of those things, and more. She just didn't know how to change them, how to change herself. Or even if she could.

A wisp of fabric, a small piece of white lace, floated slowly down from the sullen sky, followed soon by another and yet another. The flakes descended, deliberate and measured, a languid waltz through the chill, damp air. As they fell all about her, Helen could have sworn she heard in their swirling descent the music of remembered words, murmured in the low, urgent tones of Nikki's voice; knowing words, words of longing, words of love.

Your voice is a whisper of snow.