Henri Combeferre: Back From the Dead
(also see this)
"So here's my little cousin, suddenly back from the dead."
Henri Combeferre whirled around from where he was standing, staring out at the water on the lake that sat just on the outskirts of his family's property.
"Lucien. Nice to see you again," was Combeferre's quiet response.
It was his second day here. After six years of no contact, five spent in prison and one in his own personal exile, Combeferre was visiting his family again, now with his wife and six-year-old son in tow. In an attempt to get away from the questions, the shock, the painful memories that wouldn't stop resurfacing, he had escaped to this lake in order to clear his mind.
"We all thought you were dead," Lucien said after a moment.
"I'm well aware of that."
"You could have contacted us, written, done something."
"I was in prison, Lucien. Think."
"For the first five years," Lucien pointed out. "We all know you've been out of jail for over a year now, and yet you haven't had the heart to contact your mother. Or your son. Where the hell have you been?"
In place of a response, Henri turned his back on his cousin and continued to stare at the lake.
Lucien changed the subject abruptly. "I always knew something was up with you. I warned you to be careful, not to do anything stupid."
For a moment, Combeferre's face creased with pain. "Don't, Lucien. Just. Don't."
"What exactly were you thinking, throwing your life away to some vague ideal and leaving the people who love you to pick up the pieces? I always thought you were the practical one, Henri."
"You must have thought wrong." With his back turned, Combeferre's response was almost inaudible.
Lucien continued with barely a pause. "Do you know how lucky you are?"
Combeferre spun around again, his eyes full of anger, though his voice was steady. "Luck? Is that what you call it? To see your closest friends, everything you ever believed in, extinguished in front of you? To know you survived when they didn't? To have to live with the fact that it was all for nothing?" He shakes his head and looks down. "No, I'm the unlucky one. I'm the one left behind that has to deal with it all."
Lucien turned his head to the side slowly. He cousin, he knew, was acting extraordinarily unlike himself. He did not know how to deal with this rash, emotional, scarred Henri Combeferre; this Henri Combeferre who had been turned by the events into which he had thrown himself into a man different from the one that Lucien had grown up with. After a pause he said quietly, "And what about your fiancée and that child of yours that you would have left behind? It would have been worth making them miserable so that you could hide from your own guilt?"
Henri didn't meet Lucien's eyes. "You don't understand…you couldn't." His voice shook just slightly.
"That I may not," Lucien replied, as calm as ever, "but I do know that you cannot keep running forever." With that, he turned and walked back toward the house.
"Who says I'm running?" Combeferre called at the retreating figure, but there was no reply. No words needed to be spoken, for they both knew the answer.