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Disclaimer: Pretender characters are property of MTM, TNT, NBC, WB, Steve, Craig and all the others.

Ill-Fated Providence


It had nothing to do with Luck. He wasn’t a lucky person; never lead a lucky life. He never found a four-leaf clover, never picked up pennies off the street, never bought a rabbit’s foot. Not that he believed they would bring him his fortune anyway, but he wondered sometimes if maybe they would have helped, even a little.

When he coughed he could feel in his chest and throat the cobwebs Time had weaved inside of him. It wasn’t about Time either. Well, maybe it had a little to do with Time; everything was related to it, everything set it motion by it, ceased by it; people lived by it, died by it. It controlled everything, even the Powers.

They had everything to do with it. Time may have controlled The Powers, but The Powers controlled the Lives; of everyone and everything that passed under them, they were the Masters, and the Lives the Puppets. Dance, Puppets, dance, The Powers said, and so they did; like marionettes on tangled strings they danced their Lives away, twirling and twirling until they fell in an exhausted heap, unable to spin anymore. That’s when They would cut the strings.

[snip, snip, snip]

Just Lives Luck.

The blame was like a ladder and each rung an individual. As on a ladder, each step is important, none more so then the others, as it was with the fault. There was no one person or event he could point a finger at or pin his sorrows on.

In the middle of a nowhere park in a nowhere city off another nowhere road, it was the first thing that came to his mind:

Everyone’s to blame. Everyone was responsible.

Time ran out and betrayed them all.

The Powers gave up and abandoned their strings, leaving the Puppets tangled and alone.

The Lives refused to surrender. They fought and fought until the very end, until they’d fought everyone and everything and there was nothing left to fight but themselves and they fought them too. They fought themselves to the grave.

They were all survivors, leaders, fighters. They were trained for it, bred for it. None would go down without it, without the last word.

Forgive me had been his last request, and they all did silently.

Goodbye had been his last word though he’d never said it before in his life. It seemed fitting, at the time as he disappeared forever into the shadows, into the world to lead his so-called normal life. But in retrospect, it was the worst; it broke her heart.

She had no last words, verbal, anyway. But her voice had always been the loudest, the strongest, the most defined. Ironic, but true- the stone would always fall harder than the teardrop. She fell hard, but never broke. She went down with them, held on til the very end, refusing to let go of what she’d known all her life. She was born their, raised there, and she died there, several times. In the very back of his mind, no matter how gruesome and tragic her life was, he could admit to himself the end was almost fitting. It almost suited her.

Part of him believed she knew what she was doing, holding on like that. Part of him was convinced she didn’t. No one really knew. Maybe it was just Fate. Maybe it was Luck, playing her card at the last minute, turning off all the lights.

He’d never learned to see in the dark like the rest of them. And maybe that was why, in the end, Broots outlived them all.

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