The Dresden Files/Codex Alera is copyright Jim Butcher. This story is licensed under the Creative Commons as derivative, noncommercial fiction.

Crossposted at the multi-fandom Day_by_Drabble community on Livejournal for the April Showers Drabblethon.

Prompt: Prompt #21, Wrong

A/N: This is one I've wanted to write for a while. Susan Rodriguez isn't a very loved or sympathetic character, mostly because she did stupid things that got her (and by association, Harry) in heaps o' trouble, but I like to think that at the end she kind of owned up for the all the hell she had caused and died with a little honor.

This vaguely references the mentioned soulgaze between Dresden and Susan (who fainted, IIRC).

Title is from 'Maria,' by Rage Against the Machine.

On the flight from Guatemala City to Chicago, there's a connection in Dallas-Ft. Worth.

A little girl had fallen down in the jetway and skinned her knee. She was five or so, whimpering softly as her father picked her up and started down the narrow aisle.

Both half-vampires stiffened at the scent of blood – faint and fresh, not the stale, rusty smell of the blood from earlier that day, scrubbed off by shaking hands in a cheap motel in Belmopan, where they had burned their clothes.

A beat passed and Martin calmly sat down and did what he always does on flights – pretended to read SkyMall. He looks like a fucking stockbroker or something.

Holding her breath, Susan sat next to him and reached into her messenger bag, fingertips brushing the cold nickel finish of the Colt M1911 her partner had somehow slipped past TSA. She pulled out a Dora the Explorer Band-Aid, handing it to the tired-looking young man across the aisle, now holding the girl on his lap. They looked very alike, with the same brown hair and dark, clever eyes.

Susan's outward calm abruptly gained a new fracture.

"Thanks," the man said with a conspiratorial grin –he knew Band-Aids on little scrapes were mostly for the placebo-like tear-stopping effect, and he stuck it on the girl's knee and kissed the top of her head. "Uh," he said, catching her gaze as she stared, transfixed. "Gracias?"

"De nada," Susan choked out. But it's far from nothing, and this, she thinks, is only the beginning of the karmic retribution laid out for her. She forced herself to look away as they had a painful, whispered discussion about how Mommy was still too sick to come home.

One more crack in the floodwall, but it's holding. She won't give the bastards who kidnapped her daughter the satisfaction of having pushed her over the edge.

Not yet. There will be a time for cutting loose, and it won't be tears she's shedding.

Having a breakdown thirty thousand feet in the air won't help find Maggie or bring her back, but somehow she feels like a horrible mother for not collapsing in hysterics. When she knows what the monsters are doing to her little girl. Might have already done to her.

If she were the praying type, that's what she'd be doing right now. Maybe somewhere inside her, something is praying, and should be – it's not her imagination conjuring up endless terrifying scenes, it's her memory. That makes it all the more real, this moment.

She had spent a very long time wishing Bianca had killed her outright instead of trying to turn her. Until the birth of her daughter.

…Who might already be dead, god forbid. She feels sick for even thinking it, but that might be a mercy when compared to the alternative. The cycle of terror and despair sublimating into rage began again.

Her nails are digging into her palms.

She jumped when the pilot's voice announced how far they are from O'Hare – she didn't remember taking off. She didn't even remember where they were going until the announcement shocked her out of her own head. But she remembers why they're going, and is dreading it even as she wills the plane to go faster.

The pair across the aisle made silly faces at one another until the girl finally fell asleep with her dark head against his shoulder, clutching a handful of his black leather motocross jacket.

Dread turns, in that leaden alchemy, to guilt.

It's befittingly cliché that the only person who could possibly help her is the last man she wants to see. She hasn't spoken to him for almost eight years, until today, and she'd given him twelve hours to stew about the fact that she'd kept the existence of their daughter from him.

From everyone, but from him, specifically. He's going to have questions about that and the answers are going to hurt.

It had been no less than traitorous to cut him out of their lives, but she had justified her actions for years, convincing herself that leaving the father of her child in the dark was safer for them all. That it was for the best. That it wasn't as cruel as showing him what could have been and then taking it away. But lies of omission are still lies, and Susan knew that sooner or later he would have found out on his own.

It's what he does.

Maybe she was wrong in not telling him. Probably. But it's too late to worry about that now.

What happens afterward is not going to be pretty; most good men would die for their families, but Harry would kill for his. Willingly, indiscriminately, until not a whisper of a threat remained.

Until there was no one left who would dare keep them apart.

She had known this from the first time he'd looked her in the eye.

As the plane banked for the landing, she can suddenly breathe again, overcome by a momentary feeling of peace – even though her name tops the list of people who have kept him from his own child.

Even though she knows, one way or another, there's no coming back from this.