Letting Go

It's easier to talk in the darkness.

In the day there's so many damn distractions, the doctors coming in to read Fraser's chart, nurses adjusting his IV, other patients and their visitors going past the door - for all the talk of rest there's no peace in the hospital, and that makes it easier to talk about other things. Easier to change the subject. Because Victoria doesn't belong here, it's hard to even fit her into the same thoughts as the bland normality of the hospital, and that makes it easier to veer the conversation away every time it goes in a direction neither of them are ready to deal with.

But the darkness makes it different. It's not full dark, even this late at night, he can still see Fraser's face in the pale glow from the hallway and the eerie green tint of the monitors. But it's dim and it's still and it feels like it isn't real, like this is just a dream that will vanish with the dawn. It's enough to lower their defenses, and stop them edging around this like it's a bomb they'll set off if they say the wrong thing.

"I was going to go with her," Fraser says, like that's the secret that's hanging over them and driving them both crazy. Like Ray didn't know from the first time he saw them that Fraser would follow her to Hell if she smiled at him pretty. Like that's the thing that matters.

"I know," he says, because Fraser needs to hear it, even if it won't make him stop blaming himself. Like a guy can help who he falls in love with.

"I wasn't going to let you," he doesn't add. He's been not saying it for weeks, ever since the first night when Welsh dragged him away from the waiting room to get his statement and he didn't tell him. He didn't say it to Internal Affairs and he didn't say it to Frannie and he's not saying it to Fraser now or ever. But in the end, he knows where he aimed the gun, and he knows what he was thinking when he pulled the trigger. He knows what people are capable of doing for love.

Even in the darkness, some things are just too hard to say.

*rage*

Dr. George Tiller, pro-choice advocate and one of only a handful of doctors in the country who perform late-term abortions, was shot and killed today while attending church.

I'm horrified, and I'm disgusted, but I can't say I'm surprised. Not when all the right-wing rhetoric I've been hearing for the last 4 months has been a call to violent rebellion. Not when the "pro-life" movement has made a decades long history of using these kinds of tactics - assualts, attacks, bombings, murder - to scare doctors, and scare women, away from even medically necessary abortion. People like this are terrorists, plain and simple.

Dr. Tiller provided a vitally necessary service to thousands of women. Most women don't get late-term abortions for kicks - you don't carry a fetus for 7 months and then decide 'oh hey, I'm sick of this, abortion time!' Women get late-term abortions because their babies are dead, or dying, or have such severe birth defects they won't live after they leave the womb. Women get late-term abortions because THEIR PREGNANCY WILL KILL THEM. And even if they did do it because they just don't want to be bothered anymore...well, that is their choice. No one should be forced to have a child they don't want, and no child should be unwanted. But now those women have one less option. And since Dr. Tiller's clinic was in Wichita, Kansas, there are few enough options to begin with. What will happen to all those women? Why doesn't the pro-life movement care?

Dr. Tiller was a hero. He did a difficult job, despite the fact that he was harrassed, that he was sued, that he had to work in a clinic shielded by bullet-proof glass and hire a bodyguard to accompany him when he left. Despite the fact that he has been shot before, in 1993, by the same kind of person who killed him today - someone who doesn't really care about life, but about sex and controlling women. RIP, Dr. Tiller.

Abortion is murder? MURDER is murder, you ignorant bigoted hypocritical fucktards.

ETA: Feministe has a list of pro-choice charities you can donate money to here. I usually give to Planned Parenthood, but given the nature of this murder I'm donating to Medical Students For Choice, which funds the training of med students and residents in abortion and other reproductive health service, so that we actually have doctors who can perform the medical services we have a legal right to receive.