I've Noticed...((Rookie and Zarek))...

[light]

Jamie spent the first ten minutes in unconsciousness, but eventually fell into a healing deep sleep once her body was assured that she would not try and wake. She did not move in her sleep, for it required energy she did not have, but her face phased through the expressions of her dreams.

At first the dreams were of nothing but peaceful oblivion, but soon the dreams enticed her mind into the games they had devised. She would find herself doing silly and unimportant tasks, such as cleaning a stain on an already filthy looking carpet. Growing impatient, she would try to leave and find something more interesting, but found she could do nothing more than scrub the stubborn stain and sing nursery songs to a crying child she could not see.

The child’s pitiful cries were growing softer, as if growing too weak to sob. Jamie grew frantic; it seemed dreadfully significant to make the child happy before it stopped crying. With a colossal effort, she stopped scrubbing the floor, and looked for the child. Seeing nothing, she ran to the next room, there she found a maze of mirrors, all with her reflection. Not hesitating in the least, Jamie felt the mirrors with her claws, hoping to find her way through the impossible maze. She drew back immediately once she felt the leeching cold of the glass…no, not glass…ice. Growing more desperate as time drew on, the frantic teenager slashed at the walls with her claws. The walls, which were surprisingly thin, shattered and spitefully slashed her, leaving small ribbons of crimson. The pain made her cry out, but still frenzied beyond reason in her need to reach the child, she slashed, again and again, till there were no more mirrors.

Looking down, Jamie gave out a cry that spoke of agony lasting through eternity. The shards still gave her reflection, but it was no longer her. Jamie now crimson with blood, and giving off an inner glow that was flickering with the coming of death, held a child. The child she knew without a doubt was a girl, her mirror image in nearly everything, except for her fur, which was silver, much like the mirrors. Eyes tearing, Jamie clutched the still child closer. It was dead. She fell to her knees, cutting them on the shards, but uncaring of the pain.

Not dead, not her, anyone but her. “Wake up!” She shook the baby, crying all the harder as the moments stretched on with no response from the corpse. Raising her face to the blank sky, she screamed, “Not her, I will give anything, just not her! Please take me, just let her live! JAMIE!!!” With one last effort, she screamed out every last ounce of her will and agony to the heavens, screamed until she was spent. Even after screaming, Jamie felt her energy draining, not the exhaustion that came with a long day at work, but the sort one felt when they became deathly ill. She lay on the shards of ice, still holding the child close to her heart.

Time passed, and she grew weaker, but refused to let go of the child, even as the voice of the one she loved the most told her it would be for the best. She bled, dying there, willing the child’s soul to return. The time passed, and she stared at the shards that made her bed, and cried. Truth spoke to her in a comforting tone, though it brought bad news. She knew she was going to die, but there was still a chance the child would live if she stayed there. It grew dark, and all there was to see by was the light that seemed to pour from Jamie. With a patience only brought on by death, she watched her memories play by in the shards, like a show she could watch with unattached interest, all in black and white. Soon she ignored them in favor of the child’s dark, lustrous hair, the memories were not hers.

It grew darker with each passing moment, as her light flickered as if buffered by a strong breeze, and she grew weaker. The pain was undeniable, yet she still obsessed over the child, focusing all her remaining will on it. Towards the end, she grew terribly sad; the child would be left in the dark if it ever woke up. Defiant of the pain, but terribly delirious, the crimson woman sang to the love of her life, whom she knew could hear her, and kissed her baby. The end was terrible.

Endings were either happy or somewhat disappointing, but her death was an empty void as her light extinguished. The one good thing, she told herself to remember, was that she no longer felt the pain. And she died. With her death came a whisper of the song she had sang to those she loved, its melody grew and died away as the child’s light returned to its rightful place. With a sigh that spoke of pain much too ancient for one so young, the little girl opened her beautiful eyes. She saw mirrors.

All through this, Jamie only gave a twitch to indicate her dreams, before moving on to the next. These were not nightmares nor dreams, but dream-walking, and Jamie only felt sad and regretful for doing so…

[texas]

Giving Rook sometime with Jamie, Zarek started to clean up the food. His mind wander over the conversation the three of them had just had.

Do I really love Rook? That was what he told Jamie, but was that just skilled bull-shitting coming through that he had almost perfected over the years. And if he didn’t really love Rook then what was the Mutt to him?

Just another notch on my bedpost? Someone that I can brag about? I turned big, mean, Rook into a fucking fag, and made him fall for me after ten years of celibacy. If that was true then he was dead. Both of the wolverines in the next room would make sure of it. One way or another.

But if I do love Rook that means I will have to open up to him. That’s what I want him to do yet I am here with all my secrets. How the hell is this going to work?

Carrying all the dishes into the kitchen he began to scrub each one careful making sure that he got them spotless. Sure he could have just tossed them into the dishwasher and let the machine do it for him, but he need to do something. His mind was so full of questions that he just needed to shut them out for a while. He was hoping the manual labor could do that for him. It didn’t

Doing the dishes reminded him of home. His mom putting away dinner while his father helped all the little ones get ready for bed. Their family had been one big clock, the cogs moving perfectly together because the grease they used was love. He could almost hear his mother scolding him for trying to get the dishes done to fast so that he could go out with some of his friends. The kids all were telling his father what story to read that night.

Kids. Zarek had always been a big softy for them. In fact he had planned on retiring for the Angels when he thirty-five, but things had happened, plans had changed and the thought of kids had been pressed to the back of his mind to slowly die. Now with seeing Rook with Jamie, thinking about his family it had come back roaring like a maddened dragon for being left to rot.

What if you want kids? The dragon growled at the tiger. How are you going to have them with a man?

Trying not to listen the Angel moved over to the bedroom door and opened it softly, only a crack so he could just look in.

Look at him. He loves his kid. You’re not going to have that with him. You can’t have that with him. The dragon left knowing that it had planted a small seed of doubt in Zarek’s head.

[Rook]

Rook studied his child, his precious baby girl with calculatory eyes. He had seen her do this before, it was nothing new. Sometimes it had come with fever, and fear and sometimes she had simply looked...

Distant. Far off. He felt alone in the room, and her breathing was the only thing that gave clues to her presence, he could feel her heart beat thrumming like a frightened animal in a cage

Thumthumthumthumthumthum--so quick. So easilly estinquished.

Unsettled, he rolled his shoulders, feeling an unsatisfying crack in his tense tortured muscles, he gloved her forehead in his warm, rough paw, the pads, not the claws closing around her forehead, the tips of her right hand gently pulling back her ringed hair. She did not feel warm, but cold and clammy.

He felt fear coil in his belly, familiar fear he rarely felt so strongly. How long had it been? Three years? Six? He remembered those frightened days, haulting her in the tub, turning the water, freezing cold, scalding hot, panicking on the phone with the doctor, or Harley, and perhaps crying sometimes, in the early days when he had been so desperate and lost and alone with this small life he was in charge of.

He had had no one to tell him what to do, only friends that had slipped out of his life, like everyone else. He could count on three fingers the number of names he remembered, perhaps one or two people were still in his life that he had known from his old life, there had been so many..his friends at his college, Cleo's parents and siblings...His father...his teachers...but when Cleo died, unwittingly or not they had all abandoned him and he had been lost.

I wouldn't have wanted them anyway. I stopped answering the phone, I stopped taking my mail. Harley had to break in he...

Rook stopped, he diddn't want to remember or reminesce. He was ashamed of that year, and thankfully he had managed to spill some orange juice on it, and blot most of it out. Especially how he had neglected his daughter, refused to acknowledge her, left her with Harley....

..the that night I came home, and held her. And I never let anyone else hold her for months and months. I let myself fall in love again.

Then he had experienced a subdued version, a male version of what Cleo must have felt.

Ferocious, vicious love.

Sure it nagged in the back of his mind like a fly, but now he felt that familar stirring, that ferocious love and consternation. He'd die for her. Easilly. But what was that worth. She had already had a parent die for her, and perhaps he was never all there himself. But he tried very hard.

How... could he hurt her like this? It was like he was doing it deliberately. Rook felt doubt sink into him again, doubt and terrible terrible fear.

Scaredy-cat he heard her in his head. Come on ya big baby. Your not so tough.

He looked back into the room, suddenly feeling remarkably cold, despite the loving way he held his sick daughter.