Ever After
By Fewthistle

Author's Note: Written for Challenge Three, Prompt One at the LiveJournal community even_angels_. First and last lines by flying_peanuts.

Spoilers: Post “Loss” , Post “Ghost”. Given Alex's imminent return on Conviction, I took it and ran with it. Set not too far into the future.

As the sun fell into orange marble, I opened windows of sorrow on our weeping. There had been no bitter arguments, no faces white and strained with anger. No bright pink stains of indignation and recrimination on our cheeks, like the over-rouged face of an aging dance-hall girl. No shouted accusations, no brittle silences.

All that remained of the pedestrian motions of our lives was an awful lacking, the empty echoes that linger in a house after a death. It was as if we both lived with the flickering hope that love and longing would miraculously walk back in the door.

This, despite the fact that I think that we both knew that those two ephemeral things were gone, encased in a box, buried under an overgrown hedge in the back corner of our barren emotional garden; left largely abandoned, like the small stone that marked where, in joined grief, my parents and I had long ago buried Scheherazade, she of the thousand and one nights and the nine short lives.

Walking wearily into the house, the waning light leaving the sky a smudged canvas of blues and blacks, I found Olivia standing in the living room, glancing rapidly from spot to spot, an expression of confusion on her face. Her shoulders were slumped, and there was an air about her, as one bearing up under an unbearable weight, her eyes dim and unfocused.

She reminded me of an old woman I had seen once, staring out into the days or years that held a moment she knew, a moment she recognized, left behind a lifetime ago. She was standing in the boxy bay window of a nursing home in one of the nameless, purgatorial towns the government had decreed would afford me safety, and our gazes met for an instant; both consigned to a life of fruitless longing for a time when we were ourselves.

Now seeing the same air of bewilderment alter the smooth planes of Olivia's face, I asked what was wrong. I already knew.

“Everything. Nothing. Do you know where the remote is?” Came the reply, all as much question as answer.

I didn't respond, save to pick up the small, gray remote and hand it to her, turning to walk into the kitchen, the conversation we didn't have lost in the ritual of making coffee.

After the years in exile, it should have been so easy; waking from a slumber void of dreams to the dreamlike reality of this, of her. Happily ever after. Ever after. Ever. After. After what?

After the silken nights of passion yield to flannel and a book and bed at 10 o'clock each night? After the overwhelming need for the presence of the other, like a climber for oxygen high on a mountain, alters with a thinning of the blood? After love sheds its skin like a snake in the desert, leaving behind only the dry, cracked memory of the shape and supple form of love?

Later that night she glanced up from the flickering light of the television, her dark eyes even darker with knowing.

“Did you love me when you came back?”

I hesitated, my own eyes fixed on the screen, too much of a coward to watch her expression as the sharp, thin blade of the stiletto slid home.

“I loved the idea of you; the idea of you loving me, of you mourning me. I loved the you I still was when I looked in your eyes,” I answered softly, regret hanging like icicles in winter from every word. “But, I'm not me anymore. As much as I wanted to believe that I was, I'm not.”

There was no sound from her end of the couch. Glancing furtively sideways, I could see the tears slip unchecked over rounded cheekbones. My own fell just as silently.

Ever. After.

I saw Olivia a few months ago. She was walking out of a courtroom with Casey Novak, laughing at some shared joke. She paused when our eyes met, and for an instant I found it hard to breathe. Then, a half-smile touched the corners of her lips, lips I had kissed so many times, and she nodded slowly; a grant of absolution for my sins.

And she made peace with my cruelty.