- Text Size +
Author's Chapter Notes:
Character death, written 9/11/01, morbid, strange, reflective.

The world was falling down around him.

It sounded like something out of a fairy tale, some dark succinct Grimm thing gone long unchanged in which the hero hacked out his eyes and the girl bore sickly skeleton children that languished away in pale shivering misery for the whole of their brief lives. It wasn't possible, shouldn't be probable, certainly shouldn't have happened, but it had.

It had.

There wasn't any way around that simple little fact.

Facts were supposed to be cold, supposed to be intangible... Now he was finding himself saying silent goodbyes, inside of the confines of his mind. The world.... falling, falling, fell...

Fell right out of the sky. He didn't see it coming; funny, he was supposed to have seen it coming. Weren't people like him supposed to see that coming? He'd not seen it at all, though. He'd never thought that it could, and maybe that was part of being a person like him, too. An inability to understand the incomprehensible, the impossible, the utterly paradoxical probabilities.

HE had been able to do it.

Of course, HE was the sort who was able to do just anything; lay a hand to it and it seemed to magically work, unless it was a gun, and then his hands would shake so bad HE was a threat to anything within range of the thing. Indeed, if he'd been a person like THAT, he would have seen it coming. If he'd been that utterly baffling unfathomable sort of thing...

But he wasn't, and that was another of those unavoidable facts, was it not? Yes.

The image of it was burned into his retinas, impossible to escape or ever ignore, the world cascading downward in a shower of golden flame, arching over backwards, so slowly. So slow. He hadn't ever thought he'd see it explode quite that way. He hadn't ever thought there could be an end to such a thing. The world, after all, was light and life, in a strange sense that made no nevermind to him. He had gone on being himself, being the man who should have been able to see it coming and who hadn't, all the same. He had never thought that spill of shimmering brightness could ever cause the world to end. He'd never really thought about it at all.

A striation in the night sky. That had been all that he'd seen, a single smear in the night's sky. It carried no payload, no bomb, no explosion.

Just a falling, tumbling streak.

It was amazing how fast everything could fall.

"Sir?" The voice seemed to draw him momentarily out of that strangely fascinating thought, that play-by-play-by-play horror of images that his mind simply couldn't stop visiting repeatedly. He was sick of them. He was so sick... "Sir, it's..."

"I know, Z," he sighed, standing to his feet as elegantly as possible. There was shame in that, too, in the crutch he had to use because he'd broken his foot; kicked a wall too hard when they'd told him... told him the impossible.

It wasn't as if he hadn't known. He'd hoped, perhaps. He'd felt stupid to have had so much sheer faith, reliance, in that illogical absurdity. He'd seen it, that glittering spill, the vicious smile on the face of the terrorist, and he'd fired before he'd truly thought, weapon in hand. For the first time in his adult life, he had missed.

Z had not.

That was the end of the end, really. That was the final blow of so many, the irrevocable mark. He was failing, he was old, he was a failure, and now he could no longer claim extreme competency as a shelter for his remaining there. He missed.

"You'll do well."

"I wish you could stay," the blond German told him softly, blue eyes gleaming with an earnestness that hurt terribly. "I wish that..."

But if wishes were horses, HE'd always said...

"I could," Klaus reminded him, in a stern, almost scolding voice that sounded... so tired. He hadn't slept in too long; best to keep going and going, though -- stopping meant death. "But it would be unwise."

The way that pale hair fell into fair face...

"The car is coming 'round, Major," A murmured from the doorway, peering at the two of them.

"Let me walk you down," Z offered.

"I can manage," Klaus told them both, leaning his weight onto the crutch to shift his good foot forwards. No, he couldn't manage... Not...

It was wisest to leave. Then perhaps the play and replay would end. Those few sad memories that he had no right to treasure, not with so much unsaid... "I'll be fine."

"Of course," and that was that. Truly, none of them would ever doubt that the man meant precisely what he said. He could manage, though none of them liked to watch him handle things for himself. Box under an arm, he hobbled slowly away from them, silence in his wake. Even after he'd passed, no noise started up, as if the building had fairly died around him, as if they had all died with him in that moment with that brilliant plume that seemed to him now like fairy dust glittering in the evening sky over Schloss Eberbach, a foppish thought if ever he'd had one, surely.

It wasn't really over, yet; the ceremony, a solemn pompous thing, was still to be held for him. Official release from service, the listing of his successes, his honors and medals.

He'd give every last one of those shiny bits of metal, all the credit ever given to him for anything, for a chance to change what had happened.

He'd say his goodbyes at the real ceremony. No reason to disturb what could be salvaged of his men's workday by disrupting them. He could wait that long, to thank each one for what he'd done in the years, release the pent up praise that he'd always assumed they'd known. He'd assumed a lot over the years, too much, and so many of them the wrong ones. Some of those could certainly be put to rights, and those that could be fixed would be. He was not such an infallibly proud man that he could never admit those things now.

Perhaps once he had been, it seemed so long ago now. Thirty years, at least, and the world had changed around him and fallen from the sky, landing almost at his feet, yet too far away to reach, too heavy to catch, weighty and round with unspoken words and need, heavy with deeds gone long since undone.

No. He was not so arrogant now.

Arrogance got him nothing. Arrogance only took, he was learning too late. There was a difference between arrogance and *strength*; they didn't depend on each other. One could be strong, and humble, or simply strong and tired. God help him, he was so fucking tired...

The box was shifted closer beneath his arm, and he closed his eyes for a moment as he waited for the elevator. He'd hail a cab, get home that way. He didn't want to take the car they were bringing round. Home for the first time in... a week? He hadn't wanted to go. He didn't want to go now, but he was the heir, the last of the Eberbach line, and there was in truth nowhere else left for him. Nowhere in the world and nothing, not even NATO, and no choices, either. Nowhere to go but there, the last place he wanted to go, where the world fell and fell from the sky, tumbling profusion of image after image and the terrorists in the sky... He never wanted to go back there again. He never wanted to be in that place where he'd sunk to his knees, freshly broken foot, and cried. No Dorian, they'd moved him out so very quickly that he'd been able to hope. Just the stain on the steps, the blood that his efficient staff hadn't lifted yet because it was 'proof'.

He'd missed his shot, and in those seconds between his shot, and Z's, his world had ended.

Fallen from the sky...

You must login (register) to review.