Heart's desire.
She drove the getaway car.
She and two men robbed a bank in Alaska. One of them died, the other fled south and she came across the border in a light airplane. It was forced down due to weather, and the pilot abandoned her. I tracked her to a place called Fortitude Pass.
A storm had been blowing for days. The whole world was white. By the time I found her I'd lost everything. My pack, my supplies, everything. She was huddled in a crag on the lee side of a mountain. Almost frozen, very near death. I staked a lean-to with my rifle and draped my coat around it, and I held onto her while the storm closed in around us like a blanket, until all I could hear was the sound of her heartbeat. Weakening.
I kept talking to her to keep her from slipping away. It snowed for a day and a night and a day, and when I couldn't talk anymore, I took her fingers and I put them in my mouth to keep them warm.
I don't remember losing consciousness, but I do remember being aware that I was dying.
And then I heard her voice. She was reciting a poem, over and over. I couldn't make out the words, but I couldn't stop listening. She had the most beautiful voice. The most beautiful voice you've ever heard. It was as though I had known her... forever. Across a thousand lifetimes.
The storm finally broke and we were alive. A day later we found my pack and we ate everything I had in one meal, and it took us four days to reach the nearest outpost. We camped that night just outside the town, within sight of the church's steeple. I held her in my arms.
And she asked me to let her go.
You see, no one knew that I had found her. The police didn't even know her name. I could just... let her go. And she could walk away that night.
She pleaded with me, but the voice which had guided me back from the brink of death could not sway me from my duty. I was a Mountie, more than that I was my father's son. I convinced myself it was the only choice.
It simply was the easiest. I was terrified of what I felt for her. I was terrified of what I might become if I let her go, because I knew I would have no choice, literally none, but to follow.
And she knew it, of course. She warned me that I would regret the decision, as though I needed to be told. I regretted it from the moment I saw her. With all my heart I regretted it for the ten long years which followed.
When she was released from prison she took her turn to track me to the city of Chicago, and proceeded to very quickly and efficiently destroy everything I had, everything I loved. At first I was blind to it. She had come back to me, and all I could see was white, and her.
She burned my father's cabin to the ground and planted ten thousand dollars from the robbery in Alaska on the scene. With another two hundred thousand dollars in the same sequentially numbered bills she set up Ray Vecchio; Internal Affairs went after his blood with ferocious enthusiasm. She took my father's service revolver from the locked trunk in my apartment and shot Diefenbaker with it, killed a man with it and framed me to perfection for the murder.
You may call it revenge, but you don't know her. The things she did, she did out of love. Or her version of it. She was cutting my ties, eliminating my choices... she was doing all she could to make it easy for me.
"You don't have much to stick around here for," she explained when she asked me, once again, to let her go. To go with her. "You won't like prison."
The steps she took were, to say the least, unnecessary. I had no interest in saving myself. It was much too late for that. Ray Vecchio was my friend, certainly, my best friend, but I wouldn't have allowed him to stop me. From the moment she and I stood face to face again, I would have done whatever she asked. I would have followed wherever she led, and damned duty gladly. She was all I wanted, whatever that was bound to mean.
In the end she stepped onto a train bound for New York and I stood on the platform and watched it pull away. From one side I heard Ray Vecchio and our back-up, a calvary of our friends, approach. From the other I heard her voice, calling for me. I saw her hand, reaching out.
"Ben, come with me. Come with me!" God, her voice. The way she said my name.
I was frozen.
"You're going to regret it if you don't," she finally called out, and no other words could have made me run the way those did.
Where there was only an empty, outstretched hand, Ray Vecchio saw a gun. It would be an unspeakable hypocrisy if I were to fault him for his mistaken perception. Just as I reached her and climbed aboard the train, Ray fired. My body shielded her. To this day I'm grateful that it did.
I fell and as I lay bleeding on the platform I recited the poem with which she had saved my life, a decade earlier. I couldn't stop. Not because I wanted to live -- it was an uglier death than the one I should have had on the side of that mountain, but I would have welcomed it all the same -- but because it was all I had left of her, and I couldn't let it go.
The life that flashed before my eyes wasn't mine, but ours.
There was the rational version; crime, desperation, obsession and pain, over which I couldn't bring myself to feel guilt.
Beyond that there was the dream I allowed myself in my weakest moments. A cabin where no one could find us, blanketed by snow and hard white light on all sides, a fire in the hearth and a bed. We could have survived with less. We could have survived.
Since that night at the train station, I've often wondered how much of myself really did.
ooc: Fraser tells the Victoria story twice in canon, almost verbatim each time. In his head, that is just how the story goes, and I really couldn't have him tell it any differently. So everything before the cut is taken pretty much word for word from the show, and I left it out of the word count.
She and two men robbed a bank in Alaska. One of them died, the other fled south and she came across the border in a light airplane. It was forced down due to weather, and the pilot abandoned her. I tracked her to a place called Fortitude Pass.
A storm had been blowing for days. The whole world was white. By the time I found her I'd lost everything. My pack, my supplies, everything. She was huddled in a crag on the lee side of a mountain. Almost frozen, very near death. I staked a lean-to with my rifle and draped my coat around it, and I held onto her while the storm closed in around us like a blanket, until all I could hear was the sound of her heartbeat. Weakening.
I kept talking to her to keep her from slipping away. It snowed for a day and a night and a day, and when I couldn't talk anymore, I took her fingers and I put them in my mouth to keep them warm.
I don't remember losing consciousness, but I do remember being aware that I was dying.
And then I heard her voice. She was reciting a poem, over and over. I couldn't make out the words, but I couldn't stop listening. She had the most beautiful voice. The most beautiful voice you've ever heard. It was as though I had known her... forever. Across a thousand lifetimes.
The storm finally broke and we were alive. A day later we found my pack and we ate everything I had in one meal, and it took us four days to reach the nearest outpost. We camped that night just outside the town, within sight of the church's steeple. I held her in my arms.
And she asked me to let her go.
You see, no one knew that I had found her. The police didn't even know her name. I could just... let her go. And she could walk away that night.
She pleaded with me, but the voice which had guided me back from the brink of death could not sway me from my duty. I was a Mountie, more than that I was my father's son. I convinced myself it was the only choice.
It simply was the easiest. I was terrified of what I felt for her. I was terrified of what I might become if I let her go, because I knew I would have no choice, literally none, but to follow.
And she knew it, of course. She warned me that I would regret the decision, as though I needed to be told. I regretted it from the moment I saw her. With all my heart I regretted it for the ten long years which followed.
When she was released from prison she took her turn to track me to the city of Chicago, and proceeded to very quickly and efficiently destroy everything I had, everything I loved. At first I was blind to it. She had come back to me, and all I could see was white, and her.
She burned my father's cabin to the ground and planted ten thousand dollars from the robbery in Alaska on the scene. With another two hundred thousand dollars in the same sequentially numbered bills she set up Ray Vecchio; Internal Affairs went after his blood with ferocious enthusiasm. She took my father's service revolver from the locked trunk in my apartment and shot Diefenbaker with it, killed a man with it and framed me to perfection for the murder.
You may call it revenge, but you don't know her. The things she did, she did out of love. Or her version of it. She was cutting my ties, eliminating my choices... she was doing all she could to make it easy for me.
"You don't have much to stick around here for," she explained when she asked me, once again, to let her go. To go with her. "You won't like prison."
The steps she took were, to say the least, unnecessary. I had no interest in saving myself. It was much too late for that. Ray Vecchio was my friend, certainly, my best friend, but I wouldn't have allowed him to stop me. From the moment she and I stood face to face again, I would have done whatever she asked. I would have followed wherever she led, and damned duty gladly. She was all I wanted, whatever that was bound to mean.
In the end she stepped onto a train bound for New York and I stood on the platform and watched it pull away. From one side I heard Ray Vecchio and our back-up, a calvary of our friends, approach. From the other I heard her voice, calling for me. I saw her hand, reaching out.
"Ben, come with me. Come with me!" God, her voice. The way she said my name.
I was frozen.
"You're going to regret it if you don't," she finally called out, and no other words could have made me run the way those did.
Where there was only an empty, outstretched hand, Ray Vecchio saw a gun. It would be an unspeakable hypocrisy if I were to fault him for his mistaken perception. Just as I reached her and climbed aboard the train, Ray fired. My body shielded her. To this day I'm grateful that it did.
I fell and as I lay bleeding on the platform I recited the poem with which she had saved my life, a decade earlier. I couldn't stop. Not because I wanted to live -- it was an uglier death than the one I should have had on the side of that mountain, but I would have welcomed it all the same -- but because it was all I had left of her, and I couldn't let it go.
The life that flashed before my eyes wasn't mine, but ours.
There was the rational version; crime, desperation, obsession and pain, over which I couldn't bring myself to feel guilt.
Beyond that there was the dream I allowed myself in my weakest moments. A cabin where no one could find us, blanketed by snow and hard white light on all sides, a fire in the hearth and a bed. We could have survived with less. We could have survived.
Since that night at the train station, I've often wondered how much of myself really did.
ooc: Fraser tells the Victoria story twice in canon, almost verbatim each time. In his head, that is just how the story goes, and I really couldn't have him tell it any differently. So everything before the cut is taken pretty much word for word from the show, and I left it out of the word count.