Work Text:
Title: The First Christmas
Author: Poodle
Rating: PG
Summary: Just a snapshot in time. A glimpse into the inner pain of someone left behind.
THE FIRST CHRISTMAS
By Poodle~
She sits alone, knees drawn to her chin, eyes focused on a distant corner of the room as the colors of her life fade to black and white. Tensile and garland scatter around her feet like snakes of Christmas past. The tree awaits adornment.
She sighs and looks away.
Another year draws to a close. Year piled upon year, gathering dust in the boxes stored in a musty attic.
Christmas.
Laughter trickles through the window, brought crystal clear from the world outside by winter's stillness. Trees beyond the patio door stand stark, snow laden, against a pristine sky. Winter's valiant sentries...
Christmas.
She pulls herself to her feet and slowly gathers a string of lights, tangled from last year's hasty packaging, and moves toward the tree. Its branches prick her hands as she weaves the strands from limb to limb with quiet detachment. The house around her echoes silence. She pauses and turns as a thought occurs.
Music to fill the void?
Maybe an album played on the antiquated turntable, equipment long in need of replacement? The records will pop and crackle from years of use...and yet.
She crosses the room and bends beside the cabinet, drawing out a dusty album...White Christmas.
Glutting for punishment.
She watches it spin, mesmerized. Cosby's voice, mellow and strong, lulls her with holiday vagaries, promises of something...anything beyond the loneliness.
The tree sits alone, half finished, demanding her attention. Stately in its arrogance. Who invented these traditions, anyway? Cards line the mantelpiece. Disembodied greetings from afar. One sits apart at the far edge, propped against a Victorian Santa with rosy cheeks and glimmering eyes. A snowy silhouette, embellished by glitter and Santa's reindeer.
He always hated the snow.
The record skips, drawing her from her thoughts, and she pulls in her breath.
The tree waits.
She bends to draw a second knot of lights from the coil on the floor, shakes its cousins loose, and reaches for a branch. In her detachment, her slippered foot comes to rest on the staggered end of lights and a muffled crunch confirms her suspicions. The strand slips from her fingers back to the floor where it rests unattended.
Christmas.
Should she go? The thought plagues, nipping at the edges of her mind. It started as a whisper with the first signs of the season and grew into an unwelcome companion, dogging her steps.
If she went -- what then?
This is the first Christmas since...
The tree can wait.
~*~*~*~*
The sky is white and cold.
She gazes into the distance that overlooks the rows of marble sentinels, silent testaments of eternal rest. Empty platitudes in a world that shuns the truth of its own mortality.
Her cheeks redden with winter's chill. Her hands clutch, nails biting into her palms and she draws the air deeply into her lungs.
Granite, gray and voiceless, marks the spot atop the ground carpeted by winter's white. Somehow the reality is starker than her imagination could ever be as she gazes down at the stone. Words clinch in her throat.
What can she say that wasn't said in life? Nothing.
There is anger, yes. But something more. Something undefined, linking the woman she was to the woman she's become...
She bends and tosses a single rose upon the mound. Blood red in brilliant contrast to the washed out hues painted by winter's hand.
The world is silent.
Her family can't understand why she never comes. Some things defy reason. Her eyes trace the finality of a name chiseled into stone.
Donald Schanke.
The ghost of Christmas past?
Words die on her lips as she turns to walk away. Some things are best left unsaid. Some things...undone. It isn't for her daughter's sake or propriety that she holds her tongue. Words no longer matter. Perhaps they never did.
What if he'd left the force as they often fantasized? Moved to Arizona? Kissed good-bye these accursed Canadian winters, his partner's infuriating competitiveness. *Nick Knight always first on the scene.*
The partner who never comes around any more.
After the first few months, even he vanished from their lives, like the wind. A new partner, young, blond, attractive, slipped seamlessly into the caddie's passenger side seat, and Knight, the man of infinite mystery, was destined to remain ever so.
The past twists into a dark ambiguity of unanswered questions and what ifs.
Nick Knight & Donald Schanke.
Partners of The Month.
Empty words framing an empty description of someone neither kin nor foe -- yet somehow both.
The collar was Nick's, as usual.
What if?
Eyes squeezed tight, a chill wind whispers her name...
The ghost of Christmas past will never rest in peace.
~End