Disclaimer and Notes: Top Cow owns the Witchblade characters and concepts. As always, I'm just playing in the sandbox. This is set during the first season.
The Scent of Roses
By Raine Wynd
Murder. To some, the word conjured up images of blood and violence and death. To Sara Pezzini, it just meant she had another case to solve, another criminal to catch. But this one was different.
How could it be murder when the victim had left behind a note explaining everything? Pleading with whoever would judge her and her husband that she'd made him kill her? There were no witnesses to corroborate the story; the husband had been so frail that the shock of the gun going off had stopped his heart. On the surface, the case was neatly classified, but Sara couldn't shake her sense of dissatisfaction over something so simple.
Rising to her feet after checking the body of the husband for any additional clues, she called over the coroner to take possession of the corpse. She should've been happy it was so easily handled; all she had to do was go back and file her report, and then there were the stack of cases she had on her desk. The problem was, she didn't feel very much like solving anything today. Her body on autopilot, she departed the scene as her thoughts continued to churn.
Her mood hadn't been good when she'd woken up that morning, and smelling roses from a street vendor on the way in had only served to make her mood worse. The roses reminded her of flowers both happy and sad: roses Conchobar had given her, roses she'd placed on Danny's and Conchobar's graves. The grief had welled up within her, grief she'd told herself she should be over with by now.
Death was a part of her daily life: she saw bodies every day, some splattered in pieces no human should ever be privy to, and their identities (at least the portion that was relevant to their cases) were in triplicate in files both electronic and paper. Death, however, was all too personal to Sara of late, and she wondered who would be next to fall to the unfeeling stroke of the Reaper's scythe. She didn't want to lose anyone else, didn't want to be alone, and yet, she knew she had to be.
Who would understand the power she now wielded? The destiny she'd been told was hers? Who wouldn't look at her like she'd gone crazy? It was a pretty bracelet, all said, and no one saw it shift into something else but her, and even then, she wasn't sure she saw it as much as felt it. The disparity between perception and reality was something every rookie cop was warned against when taking witness statements, and Sara was no rookie.
She wanted to trust, but everyone she'd trusted had come into harm's way or appeared to be out to gain something from her. Even Gabriel wanted to know the Witchblade, and he was the least likely to profit from it without her dying first, something he'd emphatically said he didn't want. Jake, her newest partner, was someone she was supposed to trust, but there was something she didn't quite believe about him. Maybe it was because she didn't buy the whole celebrity surfer-turned-cop story he'd told her; she'd done some digging, and found that while the celebrity surfer was true, no one would tell her where he'd gone to school for his officer training. It was as if he'd just become a cop one day, and she didn't buy that for an instant. Yet she was supposed to just swallow that and go on as if nothing had happened.
Something had happened, though. Something that had changed her life irrevocably, and she couldn't say whether it was for the better or for the worse. Knowledge was power, but what good was what she knew now to be true when everything in her life that mattered was either gone or hanging by a thread? She wanted to be a good cop, wanted to be loved by someone, wanted to believe, and yet.she couldn't.
The entire situation made her restless. Edgy. More stuff was going to happen soon, and it wasn't going to be good no matter what it was. It wasn't a feeling she liked. Nor could Sara tell if it was something she was sensing from years of finely honed cop instinct, or if it was driven from her own sense of frustration at the waythings had been going for her lately. She prided herself on knowing exactly where her life was going and how it was getting there. Until recently, she had a firm handle on that. Now she wasn't so sure.
Looking back before Danny's death, before she'd found herself wearing a bracelet she couldn't remember picking up, she knew she'd viewed the world a lot differently. There were shades of gray in every life, but she'd dealt with relative absolutes: she was a cop, one of the good guys, and it was her job to make sure the bad guys, the criminals, got caught. Now the world seemed like it had exploded in a thousand colors of pain, and all of it wrong.
It didn't seem right, somehow, that within a few short months, her partner was dead, and so was the man she'd loved as she'd loved no one else. It had been a month since her lover's death, and she still couldn't quite comprehend how it all had happened. Her life felt strangely empty.
She was tired of being a strong woman. Tired of being the only one to have possession of something that others wanted to control, tired of having answers to questions she'd never dreamed to ask, tired of having questions she desperately wanted to ask but couldn't, tired of having suspicions without solid proof. She knew she treaded the thin line between having her badge revoked and keeping it, and she knew, too, that she used to care more about the difference. Now that didn't seem to matter. How could it, when either way, she would still be alone?
Never alone, the Witchblade whispered to her, its strange voice sliding through her mind like the quicksilver way it changed form.
Sara knew, though, that she didn't need a mystical object to comfort her. Its razor-sharp blade would never cut through the loneliness she felt, the isolation its presence forced upon her. It couldn't surprise her with roses, though she suspected that if it wanted, it could orchestrate someone giving said flowers to her, but she didn't want that. The things - the people she wanted - would never again be, unless she could do some great rewind of time, and she wasn't entirely certain that was the right thing to do.
She had no more room for tears, and yet they slid down her face, unheeded, as she remembered how much simpler life used to be. It seemed a long time ago that she'd been young, and an even longer time since she'd been innocent. She'd never believed in the theory of "old souls" before - but what evidence she'd been presented with had left her with the indelible sense of having lived in another time, another place. It wasn't anything she could hold up to a judge and swear under oath, but the gut feeling wouldn't go away.
Someday, it would be right. She just had to believe that, to cling to that like a woman overboard in rough seas would cling to a life preserver. Her own silent words of assurance seemed hollow, and she wished she could believe them as much as she needed.
She wished for what couldn't again be: for Concobar to hold her, for her father to tell her she wasn't going crazy, for Danny to be anything other than a ghost. Through her tears, she saw him standing a few feet away, looking like he wished he could comfort her as he had when he was alive. Closing her eyes, she forced herself to calm, to call up the inner strength that had seen her through so much worse. She ignored the voice of her conscience that said she'd never been through anything as bad as this, that she'd never not had someone she could trust implicitly to help her through a crisis like she did now.
Never alone, the Witchblade repeated. Sara wanted badly to believe it, and yet. she couldn't bring herself to do anything but sit in her apartment with her arms wrapped around her knees, and let the tears she would never admit to shedding fall as she prayed for a better future than what she was currently living through.
your presence lingers like the scent of roses
in a crowd, I turn to find you
and my heart breaks every time
I realize you will never again be there
6.16.02 Raine Wynd Comments always welcome.