Composition of Grief
By Rita
A slow sorrowful melody could be heard from the front stoop of the warehouse apartment. Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini was the chosen piece to play continuously. The music became louder and more mournful. The notes hit chords of memory within the passerby's of love lost and people long gone. Those rushing home slowed down and the music filled them with a longing to see their lovers and children.
The player sat alone in his concert of grief playing his cello. The solitude and sorrow shimmered and undulated around him. It stretched its tentacles to reach those around him. Thankfully he was alone.
He hoped that playing would distract him from his thoughts. Yet there was no where to hide the thoughts were building to a rising crescendo of torture. Recalling back to his days at the Universite to his class in psychology. An American psychologist whose name eluded him now but she wrote a book Death and Dying. In it she described the 5 stages of grief. He had experienced almost every stage at this point. For that is what he was dealing with death not of the body but of the spirit. A delightful fierce and whimsical soul transformed into a walking functioning automaton.
First stage he experienced was denial. Every meeting with her deep inside he knew that something was absent from her. Yet he continued to offer up opportunity after opportunity to prove him wrong. That her strong spirit still roamed this earth unfettered and that she was merely concealing herself to prevent anymore harm from visiting upon her. An unloaded gun brought him to earth with a strong thud. He finally registered her loss. He believed her will was strong enough to fight the Gelman process. She had successfully fought he effects of previous manipulations of her mind with the Phasing Shell and Peruze mission.
Whilst in denial he was also experiencing anger. The two emotions were sharing time together. Anger caused a change in his thought processes what was once thought of as impossible became possible. Declaring war on Section was going against all the protocol that had been indoctrinated into him for more than a decade. Whatever he did he had to do it well and that turned out to be a search for a cure for Nikita. She became his cause, his job, and his motivation. For she was his muse and without her there were no new compositions to create.
The discordant notes that played through his system rose to a peak that he valiantly suppressed when Adrian informed him how she escaped being completely erased. She clung to something she cared about absolutely.
He had believed he was that for Nikita. She was certainly his ballast. He used the memory of her to get through the torture at the hands of Garsha and Zalman, who took such pleasure in causing him pain. How could she not find the same shelter in him? This question played in him in an unbreakable and endless loop.
His fingers plucked at the cello causing the strings to break. He looked at it and paused in his playing to repair the broken chord. The answers still were not in sight. Noting that it was the universe's cosmic joke that Nikita was not here to see that he was putting her ahead of Section and anyone else for that matter.
The bargaining stage. Ah, how he had bargained, cajoled, threatened, played on peoples loyalties, emotions and weaknesses all for one woman. He made promises and bargains a plenty with no concrete results thus far. Nikita's cure seems farther and farther away. What he had experienced was Adrian's swan song and he had no desire to experience Nikita's. Yet if she was herself would she not prefer death to the life she was living? Yet he refused to consider that option until he had no hope left.
The final bargain was his return to Section unscathed to the surprise and shock of every operative in One. He and Nikita were creating the stuff of legend in this place. These rumors would long still be swirling when he or Nikita was no longer there. It would not be the first time he had carried Nikita barely conscious into Section. Operation and Madeline agreed to his return believing perhaps that he had given up. Particularly when he requested that Nikita be placed on maintenance.
He had reached acceptance of Nikita's lifeless condition but not of its irreversibility. Her song was far from over. He was playing a duet piece solo for now but he believed this would not be for long. The consequence for failure would be the last stage from which recovery would not be possible for him. She would not be there to show him, which notes to play to gain release from the darkness that threatened to swallow him.
The end
This story ©copyright Rita, 2000