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Seralis
Author of 26 Stories |
Author's Note: Okay, so I apologize in advance for the completely random piece of crap this is. Don't ask me where it came from. It's totally OOC, and random, and screwy...I'm not even sure what it's doing here. But hey, we all have our off-days. Today can be mine. Apologies. And "Do you think less of me?" Oh, whatever.
As for unfinished fics:
Update on Sixteen Degrees of Separation soon, hopefully, but when school starts in another week or so, updates on that will be quite slow. Update on Jaded Elysium should be coming sometime next week. Update on Watch the Sunset...well, we'll see.
Warning: Character Death
Good People
Good people don't have other people murdered. Good people don't even know how.
- Temperance Brennan, The Titan on the Tracks
His gun rested just above her hip; she wouldn’t use it unless necessary. She preferred a quiet kill. And if she was honest, a little part of her liked to feel the life slip beneath her fingers, even as the terror in their eyes tore at the pieces of her heart.
For them. She did it all for them.
The Jeffersonian Institute. Well, more of a dump than an institute now, she thought dispassionately. It had once been her home, a place where she found satisfaction in her work. Now her satisfaction was just a little different.
She didn’t want to think of that, the dull ache inside wanting to think of another time, another life entirely. Where she’d been painfully oblivious, but happy. Idly, she wondered where her old colleagues had gone, if they’d even survived. Somehow, she didn’t really care. She didn’t care about much, but she’d always been a single-minded person anyway.
Wandering through the crumbling building, something inside of her stung to see the wreck it had become. Then she reached the former gardens, and it was gone, replaced by another, far more powerful pain.
In the far north-east corner, where bits of black metal fencing still stood, she brushed away the dead undergrowth, to reveal a tiny metal ring. Pulling it up forcefully, the dried earth around it gave way to reveal a neat square hole in the ground. She slipped in quickly, yanking the covering back down, her torch lighting the way.
He’d been requisitioned for a team working on uncovering a rebel uprising group. The Hand. She was just happy they didn’t send him away.
Until they found him.
She came home, just in time for the government curfew, only to find their door ajar. Her heart pounding in her ears, she entered slowly, cautiously.
What she found changed her life completely.
He was dead. Beaten, and shot. And beside him, their six year old daughter. Dead. All dead.
She didn’t remember much about what followed, her memory limited to flashes of bloodstained hands, of shed tears, a scream she knew to be her own, and a pain that had not lessened since.
She buried them, beneath the gardens of the Jeffersonian, where they would be safe. And she thanked him, for teaching her everything she needed to know.
He taught her to fight better, to shoot better, to be silent in the hunt. That was what she needed. The rest…the rest she left behind, in the tiny room. She would feel nothing but the rage and hurt that pulled the trigger, clenched the fist, plunged the knife, until she was with them.
For them, she hunted their killers.
But sometimes she wondered. They were in heaven, she was sure of it. And there had to be a heaven, had to be a place where they lived. And this…was this hell? Was she condemned to live without them, because of her revenge? Sometimes she cried, when the pain of separation grew too strong, when she wanted to hold them so badly she wished she would die. And sometimes, it was worth it.
“Do you think less of me?” The dirt walls absorbed her words, her tears, her screams. “Do you think what I did was wrong? I killed people, but that doesn’t bring you back. I just…am I a monster? One of those deranged murderers we used to catch? I love you so much, and I can’t…I want to see you again. I want it to be over.”
“Seeley Booth.” Her voice was calm, even, and dangerous. “You ordered his death.”
“Now calm down there.” He was starting to look nervous. A little belated, she thought coldly. “I didn’t order anyone’s death. And even if I did, you can’t know I was involved with your guy’s death.”
“I have found everyone who was there that night. And everyone they worked for. They’re all dead. And they all gave me your name.”
“That doesn’t mean anything!”
“No?” she asked, her words coming out a little sharper. “I am a scientist. A great scientist, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that you are the last person responsible for the deaths of the two people I loved most.”
“Two?”
“Didn’t you know that? Didn’t you know that there were two fucking people you had killed? Huh?” She shoved him against his kitchen counter, the barrel pressed hard against his forehead. “Seeley Booth. My husband. You killed him. And my daughter. My six-year-old daughter. You killed her.”
The click of the safety.
“And I’m going to kill you.”
An explosion sounded somewhere on the surface, the shocks vibrating the ground. A single photograph, the frame’s glass cracked, rested between the two graves. She’d spent hours staring at it, the two people who were the world she’d lost. And her. She looked so different. And she wondered if they could still love her, despite all she had done.
For her, it was over. She brushed the crumbling dirt back, covered it, protected it.
If she was killed before the war’s end, then that was that. And if she lived to see the end, and if they decided to charge her with something for the lives she had taken…well, that was that. Either way she didn’t care.
Either way would ultimately end in death. And in death, there was escape, there was the mysterious hope that she would see them again.
In death, she would find peace. Until then, she would wait.
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