Title: Fragile Thing.
Point
of view: Jack.
Time
frame: In the aftermath of Episodes 19 “15
Years” and 20 “Dust on the Wind”.
I
failed her.
I
promised her that I could be strong for her.
The first time I was tested, I broke like a twig.
I
knew the First would be after me. I
thought I could deal with anything it could come up with. There was no shame, no fear, no doubt.
God,
I was such a fucking idiot.
I
let her down, and it was another woman – two other women – that the First
exploited as my weakness.
I
thought for a while that Cass might be upset by my friendship with Magda. The idea
amused me, as Magda is gayer than a tree full of
monkeys on nitrous oxide; which seems to be not uncommon among witches. In her case it’s probably the icing on a
fairly horrible cake; a gay Wiccan in a country
that’s more Catholic than the
Which I betrayed.
First
there was Tanya. There was never even
all that much between us. We’d never
even been out as a couple, only in a group.
It was heading that way, and we’d have been a
couple soon if the Corsican Brothers hadn’t killed her to get at me, but it
never happened. So why did I have to get
so obsessed with trying to return her humanity?
Sally checked Tanya’s mouth, I saw her do it. I should have trusted her competence. If Jean-Paul and Gaston had turned Tanya,
they wouldn’t have bothered trying to hide the signs. They were just trying to make me rush into a
trap, too furious to be wary; if I’d seen that they’d turned her it would have
hurt me even more, so why hide it? They
wanted me dead that night, so what would have been the point of setting her up
as a weapon against me for the future?
Stupid. Weak. The Roxettes were
going into a major battle, and I made them promise to hold back, to try to take
one of the opposition alive. For
nothing, it was all a lie. A vampire I’d
never seen before in my unlife, given the appearance
of Tanya, and stealing knowledge from her captive soul to aid the
impersonation. There were two ways to
help the real Tanya, or rather her soul, and only two; breaking the spell, or
staking the vampire. And my stupidity
took away option two.
At
least that was only stupidity. I could
forgive myself for that.
It’s
what happened with the fake
I
love Cass. I broke up with
She’d
had
It
was probably the closest I have ever been to the final death. No Shadow within reach; hell, I couldn’t fucking move. Spinal damage. I was
paralysed, blood gushing from my throat like water from a washing machine on
final spin. I’d have died there and then
if Cass hadn’t made us all take the invulnerability potions before the
fight. I might have died even with the
potion if Dominique hadn’t slowed the blood-loss; the stuff seems to have
deteriorated a bit since we acquired it.
So I lay there, helpless, paralysed, as Dominique stopped me bleeding to
death, Manuelita fought and killed the fake Rosa, and
then Dominique saved my life again when another vampire targeted me.
They
saved my life. And I’m not
grateful. Not glad. I don’t feel I deserve to live. I feel like shit.
I
let Cass down.
I
failed her.
FIN