Author:  Eponine
Title:  Never More Than This
Category:  Story/Romance
Keywords:  Character Death
Rating:  G

Disclaimer:  Although I never used any names in this story, all 
belong to CC & etc etc etc.  Disclaimers are soooo pointless...they 
all say the same things...enjoy!  0.0


*********
     He was dead.  
     They had found his body lying on the cold pavement 
in a dark, windles alley.  His eyes were wide and staring 
when they found him, his chest a red, gaping hole, the earth 
beneath him painted red, a fresco that refused to leave my mind.  
     In the cold hours of the morning I was called to the 
mortuary.  They found a body, the woman's impersonal voice 
echoed over the phone, an unidentified body.  It was you.  Your 
wallet was gone, your badge, everything.  But you had a card 
in your pocket with my name on it.  
     They laid your body on the table, your beautiful limbs all 
stretched out as if for repose.  The dark hair, the grey eyes, the 
crooked nose-it was all you, only you, down to the mark where 
I had shot you on your shoulder.  Your face was sweet, careless, 
years of worry melted away, the haunted shadow of an unfulfilled 
quest faded.  I thought perhaps that you were sleeping, perhaps 
they had made a mistake.  Your eyes would open and they would 
alight upon mine in any moment.  But they remained locked in 
your dreamless, neverending slumber.    
      Then, my ice cold facade broke-I, your partner who had 
been on many a grisly case with you and each time my emotions 
so successfully hidden-I let down my mask.  So many years of 
hiding behind that mask, even to you, but you could always see 
past it, couldn't you?  
      I traced your jawbone, your lovely face that was always, 
I thought, handsome.  I touched your eyes that the fire had faded 
from.  I called your name out to the stars and covered your face 
with kisses, kisses that you would never feel.  Too late to wish I 
had done so in life, but I did, my regret a bitter poison of my own 
devising.  If only you could have felt the tiniest touch, the tiniest 
kiss...Forgive me, forgive me that I was never brave enough, and 
take this last kiss away with you...
	
      I remember the last time I spoke with you.  We had flown 
back from L.A. investigating another sun dream of UFOs-it all 
seems so unimportant now...You were light-hearted, joking, the 
shadow barely touching your eyes on the way back.  You hardly 
seemed to be upset that we had come to another dead end.  You 
dropped me off at my apartmen with one last joke and drove off.
      What happened in those last hours?  How had you come in 
so short a time from life to death?  What happened, to change you 
from that brilliant man you were into the cold corpse whose staring 
eyes bore into my mind?  What gods are so cruel as to tear you away
from me?
      Where are you, when I need you?  Where are you?

      I cannot eat, I cannot sleep.  I drift in one grey haze, 
one waking dream, one sleepless nightmare.  Your face haunts 
me down the corrdors of time, drugs me in a misty reverie, 
addicts me to dwell in the past...do ghosts remember?  Do 
spirits still love?  Do you recall every smile and every word as I 
do?  Our first meeting then, did you ever think that we would 
come as far as we have done?  Nothing is left to me now, but 
memories...
      Nothing can ease this dull ache in my heart, nothing can 
staunch my wounds.  No amount of tears could raise you out of 
the grave, my lost love...

      Today, they buried you.  I did not want to go, did not want 
to see you put into the cold earth, where you would be alone in 
the dark.  I could not bear to think of you shut away down there, 
your fair face forever forbidden the sunlight and the stars, to 
which you had looked so often, seeking the intangible.  
      But still I went, my heart a shard of black ice.
      I went as your friend and your partner, your mother and 
your sister, your support and your dependant.  But what else did 
those black clad throngs see me as?  Lover as well as friend?  
Even though we never touched, never opened the door between 
friend and lover, we both knew the only truth that could be found.  
Ours was a marriage of minds, a soul bonding so strong that we 
needed no physical ties, no tangible relation for all the world to 
see.  We knew what we were and that was enough.
      With silent tears, I watched your service.  I did not touch 
your face one last time, knowing, that the cold shape lying there 
with its sunken hollows and sallow skin was but the empty shell of 
your spirit.  Like a buttefly emerging from its cocoon, your spirit 
had flown to greater heights.
      Fly, fly free!  Fly alone till I can join you, but first I must 
finish the long road which first I begun with you.  Our path, which 
now I travel alone, has never been easy, yet with you beside me, 
somehow I always saw the sunshine.  You were my guide, as I was 
yours.  We kept each other warm, and gave each other smiles in 
the face of the approaching storm.  Together, we fought off the 
darkness that threatens to swallow the world.  And now, the lightning 
flashes and the wolves begin to howl.  I must finish the journey, for 
I can't let your quest remain incomplete.  And through the dusk and 
the dawn, your memory shall be my light, my guide, and my comfort, 
as you were to me in life, and never in my life will I find, or want, 
anything more than this.  
 

Well?  Didja like it?  Email me!  laterose6@hotmail.com  ^.^