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Fan Fiction: Endings and Closures: Part 2 - The Visitor by Peladon
- 23 Jan 2022
- Fan Fiction
- 7 Reads
Endings and Closures
Part Two - The Visitor
by
Peladon
I have lived my brightest and most glorious years in the shadow of my greatest mistake; and though it is true that time is a great healer, there are some wounds that do not heal but merely change. The scars are no longer there to be seen, but the knowledge of the flaws they leave behind them remains.
We won the battle in the end. Though I waded in blood up to my armpits and built fortifications with bodies, we won. In their memory we built a better world, the world of the honest man, and we held on to it; though it has not always been easy.
I have my detractors, those who will say that I was obsessed, or deluded, or simply that I didn’t care, but they are wrong. Every day I grieve for those deaths, every day I regret them, or so I believe, and the only solace is my conviction that they had a purpose, and that the alternative would only have changed who died and not how many. The dead of a hundred worlds were my losses not my sacrifice, for they were not mine to give, in life or death, and I would not demean them by thinking anything else.
But there is one who is different, one whose death is different, for that one I lost to my carelessness and not to force of arms. If the others do not rest easily it is not me that they visit, but there is one, this one, who does.
And so I wait in the darkness every year at this time for him to come, and he always does. At the edges of the lights of an ancient ceremony I see his shadow, in the mirror shine of baubles whose purpose has long been forgotten I see his face. Beside the deep green of the tree beside the fire I see the outline of a black coat. Whilst others stand around me, to laugh and drink and eat, he waits in silence. As the children run and play and shout he stands back and watches, when Jenna reprimands them I think I see him smile a little.
Only when they are sleeping and all is silent does he come forward to stare at me as if looking for something, some sign, in my face or maybe in my mind. Then, as if finding it, he nods and turns away and I think I hear him say, “Until next year”, before he vanishes into the shadows that are, somehow, always there when he wants them.
“Until next year,” I reply and raise my glass to where he was. Then I return to the present and leave the past to sleep for a night, knowing that if I live to see it, this time next year we will repeat the ritual.
He always was the most reliable of my allies.
***
Endings and Closures Part 1: Many a Slip
Endings and Closures Part 3: Monument
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· Posted by Travisina on 04 November 2014 2512 Reads ·