Flowers for Fred
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Shells and everything up to it.
Word Count: 601
Feedback: Makes my day
Disclaimer: If it was in the show, it's not mine.
Archive: At my site Checkmate (http://helsinkibaby.ahkay.net) , Fanfiction.net; anywhere else, please ask.
Summary: You learn a lot growing up on the streets of
Notes: For the LiveJournal Writer’s Choice “You Live, You Learn” challenge… and contrary to what I expected, not an Alanis Morissette lyric in sight! Especially for Nora, who was rather alarmed when on the phone with me, talking about “Shells” and suddenly heard me going “Ouch!” at the other end, victim of being eaten alive by this plot bunny.
You learn a lot of things growing up on the
mean streets of
How to be tough, a fighter, how to survive.
How to be a leader, to make your gang respect you, to make the girls like you.
You learn to be loyal, and you learn to be a lover, but you don’t learn what it’s like to fall in love.
You don’t learn that until Fred teaches you.
Not that you expect that to happen when you first meet her. She’s just a little too whacked out for your tastes, but sanity suits the girl, and before too many weeks of living in close quarters in the Hyperion, you’re thinking of her as more than just a friend.
But she’s smart and beautiful and smart and vivacious, and did you remember that she’s smart too? She’d never look twice a street punk like you.
Then you stand before her in a tux and she stands before you in crimson and she laughs at you, and you learn that maybe that’s not such a bad reaction. And later on that night, when her lips touch yours, you learn that maybe her being a little bit crazy is a good thing. Either that, or that miracles do happen, you don’t know which and you don’t really care either.
Not the way she makes you feel.
You’re together and you’re happy, but there’s always a part of you that’s worried that one day she’s going to see the light, see you for who you really are, namely someone who’s not a quarter as smart as she is. You’re worried that she’s going to find someone else, someone who deserves her more, someone like Wesley, and why not? You know English has a thing for her, has always had a thing for her.
Breaking up the way you do is a surprise, but it’s not a surprise.
What would she want long term with a guy like you?
She’s brains, you’re muscle, and they don’t go together. Brains go with brains, that’s the way it is, and you’re left out in the cold.
Put that way, who wouldn’t have taken the deal offered by Wolfram and Hart? An entire law library, downloaded into your brain, and all you have to do is sit there and say nothing?
Who wouldn’t accept that?
Who wouldn’t do anything to keep it?
Anything…
That last “anything” is always where your learning falls down. Because you know a hundred different ways to get out of a legal contract, a thousand loopholes you can exploit, and you know that most of them involve reading the small print.
But you didn’t read the small print, did you? You didn’t even look for it. A basic lesson you never bothered to learn, even with all these new smarts you have.
It wouldn’t be so bad if you were the one paying for it.
But you’re not.
You didn’t want to be Flowers-for-Algernon-Boy, so instead you find yourself buying flowers for Fred, the spring flowers she always loved, flowers for her grave. A grave that doesn’t exist, can never exist, because instead of her body lying at peace, a demon desecrates it, parades in its shell.
As the days go by, you’re learning that she’s not the only dead body walking.
So you tear the petals from the flowers, watching them float away in the breeze one by one. There’s a petal for every time you wished you could take it all back, one for every tear you’ve cried for her, one for every lesson learned.
There are never enough.