{Fic} Madness Into Method
If one was interested in plotting the course of their relationship, the point of transition was clear, and it could be described in two words: "after April."
There was another world that followed, and Suzie never said it. Sark, for his part, just never said it sober.
After April died.
In the microcosm of the two of them, that was when balances started shifting, the universe tilted, and holding on became necessity more than comfort.
Let go and you fall off the world.
Suzie held on because if he fell, it was a long way down with no way to stop and no chance of redemption. Because if he fell, there was no one left to hold her steady.
It wasn't inevitable. It wasn't fate. One thoughtless moment, one night clinging to each other, and the inevitable consequences of thoughtlessness. Everything else was planned, calculated with a cold efficiency driven by need and loneliness.
Suzie wasn't the first woman to use a baby to attempt to keep a man in her life, though she might well have been the first to do so with those motivations. If nothing else, she made no bones about the fact that she was doing it. They knew each other too well to bother attempting subtlety in their manipulations.
Not that she was unsympathetic, or uncaring. Not that she didn't want this, purely for herself. Everyone's coping mechanisms were different, and even if it balanced no scales, even if one life never replaced another, it was something else to hold on to, one more line to sanity.
He'd always had a choice, and she told him as much.
Who are you planning on becoming, Julian?
When an accident became a girl, they -- they, one gamble that paid off in a place where so many didn't -- decided not to name her April.
Some wounds needed time to heal.
Time passed. The world turned, and sometimes Sark had the look of a man who was both dizzy and desperate, the look of a man who might just let go...
And Suzie would reach for his hand, place it carefully on her swollen abdomen, and say nothing.
It wasn't a perfect solution. There was no miraculous healing. But neither of them fell.