as heroes are - This was a request from aheartfulofyou, and is really a character examination of Mary, the little girl from Kids. She's older, in this. I chose to set it at least in part at the 2012 Olympics which London will host. This is the first time that I've written Foreman. For some reason, he's harder than the rest. This feels like the start of something longer, which I might write, eventually.



Underwater, she still dreams of him. When you almost touch the bottom it's like dying, a little. It's like leaving the world. She never thought about it like this when she was younger. Everything changed when she was twelve, when life almost killed her, didn't kill her, was persuaded away by the soft, clipped way he said words. Life had pushed its way out into her skin, but his hands had been cool and soft. He had sat and talked to her, in the quiet moments after her parents had gone away. He'd asked her to tell him the things which she liked best. Seven, nearly eight years later she still remembered exactly what she'd told him.

"Diving, more than anything. The little bottles of shampoo in hotel bathrooms. Maroon 5. Orlando Bloom. A new swimsuit after I've been wearing it for a week."

You.

In England, in summer, its rains. She walks in the rain, silver between her shirt and her skin and she thinks about that doctor, heroic in his gone time when she was just a child and he gave her a whole life to live. It wasn't just him. She remembers the others. Even now, she doesn't want to see ungrateful, so she keeps them close; Chase who was very handsome, House who had scared her, even though he'd never hurt her. And Foreman, who had been handsome, so handsome. Handsome and hers. Him, she thinks of most fondly. In the rain in London, she walks, knowing that silver isn't gold but also knowing that she isn't twenty yet and second chances are plentiful. She has silver and their names written on her skin. She'll fly home tomorrow, but she'll carry London with her. The pool which she had dived into had been new-built, virgin, blue like waiting. With her chin tucked low into her chest, she had said her usual thanks. At the bottom of the pool, it was him that she had dreamed of.

-
Glass makes a strange sound when she taps it with her knuckles. A woman in a white coat is sitting at a desk. She has beautiful hair. Unconciously, she pushes her hand through shorter hair; it was never the same after they had shaved her head (after her brain had wept blood). It's easier to keep it shorter, easier to push it under a cap. Still, it makes her self concious, ot around the other divers, the girls who try too hard, but when she's faced with a woman like this one, just a woman with no braids or ribbons in her long hair.

"Hello?" she says. Its been years since she spoke in this place; her voice is deeper now. She knows her own mind. She rubs her fingers across the scar under her hair.

"Hello?" says the doctor, from the desk where she's sitting. "Can I help you?" You did. You have.

"I was...I was looking for Eric Foreman."

"You look familiar," says Foreman, from the doorway of the other office, handsome hero, doctor who never forgets a face. Maybe he remembers every patient? Maybe. Some hearts are big like the ocean. "Mary," says Foreman, nearly eight years away. And there it is.

-
He is as handsome as she remembers, but heroes are. They sit in the office with the record player and the tv. Behind glass, House, looking no older than ever and Cameron are talking, bent heads close (lovers? Her rambling mind fills in the blanks). She doesn't pay any attention to them anyway, not after he brings her her coffee and sits down on the same side of the desk as her.

"Still living in Chicago?" She shakes her head.

"New York." he nods, tells her that Chase went to work in New York for a years a while ago, after his father died. They'd lost him then.

"We don't know where..." he tells her, and she knows that it's hell to lose someone, that there was a baby once and that she has clung to him with her fingernails for so long now. "Still diving?" She shows him her silver, and, when he sips his coffee all of the warmth in his eyes spills and dilates and warms her too. How is this man so warm, so much warmer than her underwater dreams of him? If he asks her to dinner, she'll go, and they'll drink wine in memory of Chase and that baby and all of the ones who went wandering, and she'll tell him the thing which she likes best, now, now that Orlando is washed up and hotels have lost their charm. What she likes best is that moment in a dive where you hang in the air like a star, when you fly before you begin to fall.

"I still like new swimsuits that have been worn for a week too," she says.

And you.