[FIC] All of our mistakes.
Title: My Skin
Word Count: 446
Summary: What followed after Rachel and Alfred find each other and discuss their timeline, the events transpiring in The Dark Knight that Rachel never got to see.
A/N: It wouldn't leave me alone. :| But yay first rift fic?
The darkness of the night is inviting, and with it comes a question. It's a question she will know the answer to when the light of dawn bleeds through, when the loneliness leaves and the logic she clings to remains.
But not yet.
How is it you can try so hard and still fail?
Rachel knows true failure isn't the same as having made a mistake, and of the latter she's made plenty. Admitting failure, a weakness, it isn't easy for her but the darkness is inviting, you see. She'll admit to those mistakes and clutch them with her bare hands, gnaw them to the bone until they're mistakes no longer. They're lessons she'll carry with her to do better next time.
Only there is no next time for what Alfred has told her. It's an ending, her ending and there's no going back. Never will she see Bruce again, Bruce as she knows him, and it doesn't fully hit her until Alfred says the words and the words create a meaning and the meaning nestles into her chest with a cold and hollow feeling that doesn't leave her.
She has always been aware they both took different paths that would never lead back to each other. She'd made her peace with it, walked away and only looked back once to make sure she knew what it was she was walking away from. She isn't sorry for that decision. You make the decisions you can live with, the right ones, and it breaks your heart and it builds you up but you'll do it anyway.
Rachel writes a letter that night. She doesn't know what she hopes to accomplish with it but she writes it all the same. The man it belongs to, the man she loves, is worlds away and she is dead to him, but the sentences form as if forced from her fingertips.
I'm sorry. They're only words, often used to lick the wounds and ease the conscience and it makes them empty. They feel empty now, but she doesn't write them for any other reason than it hurts to know he is alone. It hurts to know she took steps that led further away from him.
I hope I was brave - brave till the very end, brave when it mattered and even when it didn't. There were oil drums and a warehouse that only left ashes in her wake. There was a good man she believed in and a bad man with a scarred smile and Rachel simply doesn't understand.
Love now and always -
Rachel stops, and she keeps stopping.
She strikes through the last three words.
Always isn't hers to give.
It never has been.
Word Count: 446
Summary: What followed after Rachel and Alfred find each other and discuss their timeline, the events transpiring in The Dark Knight that Rachel never got to see.
A/N: It wouldn't leave me alone. :| But yay first rift fic?
The darkness of the night is inviting, and with it comes a question. It's a question she will know the answer to when the light of dawn bleeds through, when the loneliness leaves and the logic she clings to remains.
But not yet.
How is it you can try so hard and still fail?
Rachel knows true failure isn't the same as having made a mistake, and of the latter she's made plenty. Admitting failure, a weakness, it isn't easy for her but the darkness is inviting, you see. She'll admit to those mistakes and clutch them with her bare hands, gnaw them to the bone until they're mistakes no longer. They're lessons she'll carry with her to do better next time.
Only there is no next time for what Alfred has told her. It's an ending, her ending and there's no going back. Never will she see Bruce again, Bruce as she knows him, and it doesn't fully hit her until Alfred says the words and the words create a meaning and the meaning nestles into her chest with a cold and hollow feeling that doesn't leave her.
She has always been aware they both took different paths that would never lead back to each other. She'd made her peace with it, walked away and only looked back once to make sure she knew what it was she was walking away from. She isn't sorry for that decision. You make the decisions you can live with, the right ones, and it breaks your heart and it builds you up but you'll do it anyway.
Rachel writes a letter that night. She doesn't know what she hopes to accomplish with it but she writes it all the same. The man it belongs to, the man she loves, is worlds away and she is dead to him, but the sentences form as if forced from her fingertips.
I'm sorry. They're only words, often used to lick the wounds and ease the conscience and it makes them empty. They feel empty now, but she doesn't write them for any other reason than it hurts to know he is alone. It hurts to know she took steps that led further away from him.
I hope I was brave - brave till the very end, brave when it mattered and even when it didn't. There were oil drums and a warehouse that only left ashes in her wake. There was a good man she believed in and a bad man with a scarred smile and Rachel simply doesn't understand.
Love now and always -
Rachel stops, and she keeps stopping.
She strikes through the last three words.
Always isn't hers to give.
It never has been.