Grey Clouds On The Horizon

A Life He Let Go

"Years later, she is drunk when she tells me 

'Loving you is the kindest thing I almost did' 

and how impossible it is to train the heart to sit."

- Blythe Baird

Christian's POV

I woke up with my throat aching for the relief of tears and found that my bed, much like Emilia's in another life, was blatantly empty. The glow of the bathroom light under the door and the flush of a toilet told me that the night nurse must have taken Ana to the bathroom. If she was already up then they'd likely bathe her. I had some time.

Barefoot and shirtless, I walked through the empty halls of Escala and feared that they'd someday be just as empty as they'd been before my beautiful wife. After all, life after her would not be worth living and I knew I'd use Leila's gun to follow. My dark thought churned my stomach and I resisted the urge to throw up, instead choosing a double cognac and meandering into my study.

It wasn't until I found my hand on the brass drawer pull of a dusty history that I realized what I was looking for. I pulled out the frames, shards of shattered glass still remaining tucked around their edges, and tried to find evidence of addiction in the young girl's eyes. I could see her inner darkness the same way I'd known it when I pushed myself inside her for the first time but addiction was a demon I couldn't imagine possessing her. The self control she had exercised in everything she did was too much a part of who she was.

Together, we'd been like a motel matchbook set on the stoop of a gas station pump. Coexistence had been possible but one wrong move, which was simply following my own nature to erupt in flames, had destroyed us both.

Anastasia was not her. My wife's gentle touch healed me and her feisty nature was the rope that pulled me from the hole of deception I'd been lead to believe I had to live my life within. It was because of Ana that I had survived my own path of self loathing and destruction. Perhaps if, someday, a person could reach out to Emilia and do the same thing she would be able to move on from her own evil as well. The evil she'd never earned but that disgusting teacher and myself had paid her anyway.

It was time to admit what I'd blatantly ignored while my life fell into pieces. There was no possible way that I, the person who so selfishly had torn Emilia into pieces, could be the one to put her back together. Someone who loved her needed to reach in and heal the battered babe that lived within the wild beast. That place in my heart, to love that completely and fiercely, was already taken. 

I threw Em's photographs in the garbage can by my deskside and stalked towards my bedroom to hold the woman who was my hold to the earth even if gravity gave way. I stepped into our room, hoping that she'd been put back to bed to fall asleep and was stopped by a most unpleasant sensation.

Fuck!

Wetness seeped between my toes on the carpet of our bedroom. "Damn nurses, what did they spill!" I trudged forward another step and was again met with the familiar swish of wetted plush. "Ana..." I called.

There was no response.

Where the hell is all this water coming from?

I took a few more steps forward and realized the entire floor was saturated. Soon I picked up on the familiar flow of running water from the bathtub and I trudged towards the master bath to turn it off.

Where the fuck did this nurse go leaving the tub running?! She's fired!

Too forcefully, I flung open the bathroom door and my heart dropped into my stomach. Ana's still clothed legs hung out of the side of the tub and her pregnant belly stuck up towards the ceiling. The contortion of her body had forced her head under the water.