Rumi and Shams V:  These Do Not Matter
by Merri-Todd Webster
(16 April 1999)


Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts
     in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.

***

It was risky.  He knew it was risky.  But he hadn't gotten where he
was by not taking risks, and at least now he had people to watch his
back.  He paid them well to do it.  They would be held accountable
if they failed.

And so it was that, finally, Alex Krycek paid a second visit to Jamie's
grave.

It was spring, and the crabapple trees at the cemetery were
blooming.  There was a faint smell of the fresh flowers other people
had put on the graves, but it was overpowered by the massive bouquet
cradled against his arm.  Roses, in every color he'd been able to
find.  Fragrant hothouse roses with the thorns still on them.  The arm which held them
did not feel their stings.

He had parked the car just inside the gates and walked alone to the quiet grave, a solitary figure still in the long black leather coat he had put on for London weather.  Now he knelt on one knee beside the simple white granite headstone marked at the top with a Celtic cross.
"James Robert Brendan Pendrell...."  Four words, and already his vision was too
blurred to read the dates.  It just didn't seem possible that he
was crying again. Alex Krycek didn't cry.  Thug, killer, traitor, player.   When was the last time he had been able to shed tears? 
Probably--no, he was certain of it:  the last, the first time he'd visited
Jamie's grave.

Alex laid the bouquet before the headstone, running his right hand
over the soft, creamy petals.  Jamie had liked flowers, had kept
windowboxes at his apartment, had labored over his sister's garden that time he housesat for her and Alex came to hide there.  Petunias, geraniums, begonias, ordinary flowers anybody could grow, nothing rare, nothing too exotic or delicate.  He
wanted to plant those ordinary flowers on Jamie's grave, to blanket what was left
of the man he'd loved with life and color, but the best he could do was to leave these
roses, raised in a hothouse and already dying.  The best he could do
was keep the florist from stripping off the thorns, because roses without thorns were a lie.

Moved by some impulse, Alex thrust his right hand into the roses, seizing them, crushing them. 
Feeling the thorns catch on his skin, he pressed his thumb against a woody spine, savagely, until he felt the skin give and the blood spurt forth.  He left a tiny print
of blood at the base of the tombstone, close to the earth, where no
one would ever notice it.  A reminder.  As he stalked back to the car, he was
already thinking of the next thing on his list, getting the Palm
Pilot out of his pocket.

***