Can't Last

"Not again!" Elizabeth glared in frustration at the mirror in front of her as she felt tears well up in her eyes for the second time in less than an hour. She swiped uselessly at her eyes with the back of one hand and continued to stare at her reflection.

The woman staring back was not her. She was broken and miserable and weak. She had given up. She was everything that Dr Elizabeth Weir was not and yet…

She took a steadying breath and ignored the way her body trembled without her consent.

…Maybe it was her. Maybe she had been hiding behind a façade up until this point, one that had managed to keep even her fooled.

"Elizabeth?"

She felt a hand on her back.

John's reflection joined hers and they seemed to meld together in a blur of colours. She realised that in actuality, her eyes had filled with tears once more and the result was that she might as well have been looking through glazed glass.

She blinked to clear them and each shape around her intensified, the edges sharpening so that she could see again.

"John…"

He pulled her into his arm sand this time she knew it wasn't her tears obscuring her vision, when they appeared as one in the mirror.

"I thought you were dead. Before your team brought you back home, I truly believed you were gone."

She can feel him tense at her words but he recovers quickly.

"I'm right here," he says softly into her hair. "I'm not going anywhere."

She wants to believe him – more than anything, she wants to believe him – but she knows while he's there now, it won't last. It can't last.

fin.