FIC: The carriage held but just Ourselves (Pt. 10/10)
Title: The Carriage held but just Ourselves (Pt. 10/10)
Author: blue_fjords
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Suzie
Word length: 720
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Warnings: Please highlight for warnings, as they give away plot points, but could be triggery for people. Nothing is in this story that you didn't see onscreen in season one TW. References made to child abuse and suicide.
Summary: Crime novel AU w/ alternating POVs from Gwen and Jack. Except for this bit. This is the epilogue, and it's Suzie.
A/N: Yeah. Been awhile. Or a while. A long time. Thanks to amand_r for beta-ing these last three chapters, and paragraphs for encouraging me to finish. Would not have been written w/out you ladies, and I really wanted to finish it, so thanks. Title from Emily Dickinson.
Epilogue
The stone wall was cold against her back, the chill seeping into her bones. She could imagine it filling up the porous spaces along the surfaces, flowing into the nooks and crannies the cancer had left behind. Slowly turning her to ice.
It was not how Suzie Costello would choose to die.
She could see them in her cell, all of the faces of the people who were supposed to die. All she had done was to complete the natural order. And if she had wanted to see them, their healthy bones, practice on them - what harm was it? They were already dead, sometimes for years, walking around like they deserved life. They didn't. You had to fight for your life, wrestle with the thing that moved in the darkness. Any fool could tell you that. Their lives were not their own.
She knew the truth of them. It was what she was, a searcher for truth. Each time one of them had cried, begged for mercy, she knew. Their lives were on loan, and she was coming to collect the debt and give it to someone more worthy. She deserved this power. She deserved to live on, always more life, more power. It was her right.
Harkness thought justice was his God-given right.
Suzie rose from her bunk and crossed three paces to the metal bars.
What was justice, really?
She looked to the left and to the right and saw only a row of bars, stretching into the darkness.
Could justice truly be boiled down to an eye for an eye, a life for a life?
She turned her back to the bars, her fingers on the button at her throat.
Harkness had wanted to kill her, she could see it in his eyes, but most importantly, he had wanted to be the one to do it himself.
She folded her overshirt and laid it neatly on the bed in a perfect square.
But wouldn't that rob everyone else of justice - Mark Brisco's widow, Jonah Bevan's mother, all the rest?
She stepped smoothly out of her loose prison trousers and folded them, as well.
No, Harkness had it wrong; he didn't crave justice, he thirsted for vengeance.
Her socks went, rolled up, into her cheap prison clogs, placed beneath the bunk.
He wrapped it up in stirring phrases and grandiose gestures, but when it came right down to it, what he wanted was to spill her blood.
She hitched her thumbs in the hem of her undershirt and pulled it up, over her head.
He was a fool, and she could prove it.
She slipped off her underwear, the dingy gray cotton thin from years of going through the prison's laundry system, some former inmate's stains permanently part of the cloth now. Her fingers flexed around the fabric of her undershirt, her lips barely moving as she tied it securely around her neck.
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
She could not reach the pipe bisecting the ceiling of her cell, but it was of little import when there were so many bars. She stood on the edge of her bunk and tied her shirt around a bar in her window.
Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.
It was cramped, being so close to Death at all times. He resided inside her, burrowing into her very cells, and she had fought him and loved him in equal amounts for so long, but it wasn't going to last. No matter what she did, she couldn't make it last.
A door opened at the end of the hall, the cadence of the voices definitely not belonging to Harkness - maybe one of the women, coming to collect her. It didn't matter. Her ride was here.
The cool air prickled her naked skin, blessedly free now from the filth and memories of all the former inmates. Not free from her ghosts, but soon they would no longer matter. She was ending it, on her terms - not on Harkness's or at the mercy of her ghosts, spitting defiance into the face of the dark - her terms.
She stepped off the bunk.
Author: blue_fjords
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Suzie
Word length: 720
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Warnings: Please highlight for warnings, as they give away plot points, but could be triggery for people. Nothing is in this story that you didn't see onscreen in season one TW. References made to child abuse and suicide.
Summary: Crime novel AU w/ alternating POVs from Gwen and Jack. Except for this bit. This is the epilogue, and it's Suzie.
A/N: Yeah. Been awhile. Or a while. A long time. Thanks to amand_r for beta-ing these last three chapters, and paragraphs for encouraging me to finish. Would not have been written w/out you ladies, and I really wanted to finish it, so thanks. Title from Emily Dickinson.
Epilogue
The stone wall was cold against her back, the chill seeping into her bones. She could imagine it filling up the porous spaces along the surfaces, flowing into the nooks and crannies the cancer had left behind. Slowly turning her to ice.
It was not how Suzie Costello would choose to die.
She could see them in her cell, all of the faces of the people who were supposed to die. All she had done was to complete the natural order. And if she had wanted to see them, their healthy bones, practice on them - what harm was it? They were already dead, sometimes for years, walking around like they deserved life. They didn't. You had to fight for your life, wrestle with the thing that moved in the darkness. Any fool could tell you that. Their lives were not their own.
She knew the truth of them. It was what she was, a searcher for truth. Each time one of them had cried, begged for mercy, she knew. Their lives were on loan, and she was coming to collect the debt and give it to someone more worthy. She deserved this power. She deserved to live on, always more life, more power. It was her right.
Harkness thought justice was his God-given right.
Suzie rose from her bunk and crossed three paces to the metal bars.
What was justice, really?
She looked to the left and to the right and saw only a row of bars, stretching into the darkness.
Could justice truly be boiled down to an eye for an eye, a life for a life?
She turned her back to the bars, her fingers on the button at her throat.
Harkness had wanted to kill her, she could see it in his eyes, but most importantly, he had wanted to be the one to do it himself.
She folded her overshirt and laid it neatly on the bed in a perfect square.
But wouldn't that rob everyone else of justice - Mark Brisco's widow, Jonah Bevan's mother, all the rest?
She stepped smoothly out of her loose prison trousers and folded them, as well.
No, Harkness had it wrong; he didn't crave justice, he thirsted for vengeance.
Her socks went, rolled up, into her cheap prison clogs, placed beneath the bunk.
He wrapped it up in stirring phrases and grandiose gestures, but when it came right down to it, what he wanted was to spill her blood.
She hitched her thumbs in the hem of her undershirt and pulled it up, over her head.
He was a fool, and she could prove it.
She slipped off her underwear, the dingy gray cotton thin from years of going through the prison's laundry system, some former inmate's stains permanently part of the cloth now. Her fingers flexed around the fabric of her undershirt, her lips barely moving as she tied it securely around her neck.
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
She could not reach the pipe bisecting the ceiling of her cell, but it was of little import when there were so many bars. She stood on the edge of her bunk and tied her shirt around a bar in her window.
Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.
It was cramped, being so close to Death at all times. He resided inside her, burrowing into her very cells, and she had fought him and loved him in equal amounts for so long, but it wasn't going to last. No matter what she did, she couldn't make it last.
A door opened at the end of the hall, the cadence of the voices definitely not belonging to Harkness - maybe one of the women, coming to collect her. It didn't matter. Her ride was here.
The cool air prickled her naked skin, blessedly free now from the filth and memories of all the former inmates. Not free from her ghosts, but soon they would no longer matter. She was ending it, on her terms - not on Harkness's or at the mercy of her ghosts, spitting defiance into the face of the dark - her terms.
She stepped off the bunk.