a bleeding heart is an open one (river | chrissie + rosa, stevie, john)

[fiachairecht]

a bleeding heart is an open one. river, chrissie/rosa, chrissie/stevie, chrissie&river. post-canon chrissie on regrets and wishes. 800w, rated t. for fanchonmoreau and the prompt 'chrissie + do you ever wish things had happened differently?'.

Chrissie had never considered herself to be the sort of person who dwelled overlong on the past. It was, in her line of work, unbearably melancholy at best, and lethal at worst, depending on the case and the day.

So when she sat with Stevie in the pub right at closing, when she couldn't say what number the wine bottle on the table between them was, when she was just listening to Stevie talk about ... about anything, really — she wasn't dwelling. Wasn't lost in half-formed thoughts of what could have been, wasn't letting regret curl around her heart.

(Later she would look back at herself, lost in the sound of Stevie's voice, letting Stevie's fingers curl around her wrist, and almost want to laugh at herself. God she'd been blind, and only half-purposefully. Rosa would probably say that was the heart of it all, that she'd never let herself want, and Chrissie - Chrissie would probably feel something about that, if she wasn't so tired all the time these days.)

But. She's not dwelling, not anymore. DCI Read cannot dwell.

It would all be so much easier to believe if the past didn't have a habit of showing up in her office, in her living room, in her head. It's not Stevie, not like it is for John, but it's cold enough anyway that she still forgets how to breathe. Stevie's in the bent paperclips on her desk, in Grace's chatter about the latest episode of Doctor Who, in the glass at the bottom of her desk drawer that had never quite gotten put away and she's —

everything.

It shouldn't be a revelation but it is, and Chrissie nearly knocks her desk over with the force of it. Brushes off Ira's well-meaning attempts to help, her vision going blurry with all the layers of sepia-tinged Stevie over and over again, still like something real.

She blinks, and it's gone, laptop saved, pencil holder a casualty on the floor. Nothing quite where it should be, nothing different enough to have turned time around and brought Stevie, the real Stevie, not just the shape of her or her loss, back.

Chrissie goes home that night with John and he's not Stevie and neither is she, and they're both getting quite frighteningly good at accepting that.

When she wakes up in the morning, safely tucked into his couch pillows with the taste of stale wine on her tongue and the idle scratching of the record needle in her ears, she remembers Stevie smiling out from behind his eyes. She doesn't remember which of them had asked, for the first time in forever, do you wish things had happened differently?

She had said yes, she thinks, because there's no other answer that half does justice to Stevie, to who she was and what she deserved. But there's a part of her, something too ruthless or too hopeful for its own good, that learned too many lessons from too many dead bodies to not take something good out of the rubble.

She's glad she left Tom. She thinks that Stevie would be happy about that too, and isn't that something. Maybe, she thinks, laughing to herself on the Tube, maybe she could indeed have had it all in another life, rather than the half-pieces she has now in a life without Stevie in it anymore.

In a different life, on a different morning, she went to Costa with a Stevie who wasn't dead, and Stevie talked as much as she always wanted to do, enough that Chrissie — well, it goes blurry for a bit then, but enough that Chrissie can fix things, for her officer, her friend, for Stevie.

Maybe she's brave, after that. Maybe she asks Stevie to stay more nights, maybe she goes to the theatre with Rosa. Maybe she learns John's secrets, as long as walls are falling, and maybe the walls snap fewer thing along their way down.

Or maybe none of that. Maybe she just keeps watching Stevie, for moments too long, and believes herself when she says, silently and mostly by omission, that this is life and love enough.

But there would have been time, and even more than the different life, it's the time she wishes for, time, and the ability to want.

And in this world, she wishes she had learned how to want that life earlier. Holds her children and John and Rosa and even Ira a little closer and starts working towards the day when she'll be able to say that Stevie's memory is enough.

In this world she helps John cook breakfast without having to think about the motion of her hands. Leaves Rosa's coffee on her desk, an extra shot and half the regular amount of foam. Smiles when Marianne comes to collect Ira and the baby reaches for her hair.

Wishes, yes, that things had happened differently, from the very start.