Usual disclaimers apply: I own nothing but the story.

EVERY DEAD THING by Jayne Leitch
2004

Alexis is glad her ghosts stay in her apartment.

They're almost tolerable there. If they strayed out into town, if they followed her into the courthouse or police station or Kelly's, Alexis doesn't think she could handle them. In her apartment, they're…manageable.

They're private.

Katherine Bell sits on the couch in a red power suit, red pumps, and red lipstick. She sips from her martini glass between arch comments on Alexis's cases, her clothes, the decor, the weather.

Stavros lounges and leers against the mantle, always watching with patronizing amusement and never saying a word. She can't stop him from crouching down next to Kristina as she plays; he stares at her avidly, hungrily, from only a few inches away, and the sidelong glances he turns to Alexis are far too knowing.

Cameron appears at random anywhere from the kitchen ("You know, if you didn't *buy* microwave popcorn, you wouldn't perpetuate the bad habit of *eating* it all the time.") to the baby's room ("She's growing so fast, Alexis. One day you'll look at her and wish you knew who she was.") to the threshold to Alexis's bedroom ("You never wanted me to go any farther, did you.").

She wonders if Cameron had known that when he was alive. She thinks he must have; even when he lived in her apartment he'd respected the boundary of her closed door, even when there was no dimension to their relationship that would have implied significance to his intrusion. Since his death, she's felt guilty for having kept that distance between them, but she's also felt relieved: now he'll never try to close it.

The distance was necessary. Is necessary. The ghosts in her bedroom demand a different quality of privacy.

Luis Alcazar lies in her bed at night, murmuring cruelties into her ear. He reminds her that he loved his daughter, loved her mother, loved his brother--that he *loved*, and was loved in return. He trails his fingers over her hair, her face, her arms, and talks about Hell, and says that he won't go until she comes with him. Over time, Alexis has become used to him; after more than a year, his presence and phantom weight pressed beside her are almost as familiar as a lover's.

Zander has taken up residence on the other side of the bed, his skin a trick of the moonlight through the window as he stands above her, his eyes constantly in shadow. He is much more subtle than Luis; he tells her that he understands why she didn't help him, understands that she couldn't. He thanks her for what she could do and apologizes for not doing more in return, and Alexis can find nothing in his face that lets her measure the truth in what he says. The first time he leaned down and kissed her jaw and breathed against her throat she was paralysed, and only managed to keep herself quiet as she sobbed by clenching her teeth until they ached.

She's never known if she actually feels their touches, or if the strange, pressureless sensations on her skin are just her mind's insistence that she's being touched. In daylight, she tells herself that she is a rational, logical person, and her mind ought to know when she's really alone; in the dark there's no place for logic, and phantom hands and mouths and breaths steal her reason.

Stefan, watching everything from the shadows by the closed door, has never touched her. Nevertheless, she feels his gaze like physical contact, and bites her lip against the ache of missing him sometimes more than the ache of having them all there.

Almost all.

The first Kristina, she can only assume, is at rest.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
For I am every dead thing, In whom Love wrought new alchemy. For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness; He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death--things which are not. --John Donne, "A Noctunal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being The Shortest Day"

End.

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