Title: The Blue-Eyed Child of Longing
Author: Ellen
Summary: How the episode Hero could have, and should have, ended....


You are the blue-eyed child of longing,
The sum of all our yearning.
The promise was made long ago
And all we ever have to know
Is that we wait for you to show
The way out of the darkness.


Prologue

"Tell me the story again."
"You have heard it too many times, child."
"Tell me again about the promised one."
"It was foretold long ago that in our hour of greatest need, one would 
come to us to lead us to safety, one who is both like us and not like 
us, one who is of our kind and yet not of our kind."
"How will we know the promised one when we see him?"
"We will know him when the right time comes."
"And what happens when the promised one arrives?"
"Someone will die, my child, but all the rest shall be saved."



My name is Rieff. I have very few friends.

One of them is the man I met today.

I thought that I could save my own life by running away. I was wrong.
When you look like I do, there is no safe place in the world, and no
place to call home but with my own.

He brought me back to my own, to live or to die with them.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to show us what is necessary.

In a way, I've always been an outsider, too. But he made me a friend.

Tonight, whether I live or die, I have learned that it is time for me to
face all that I am.



One of the things I learned a long time ago was to look around at every 
wall, at every door, at every window, in any place where I may be.

Living a life in fear, always running, you learn these things. You learn
to find every place to hide, and every way that there is to escape from 
wherever you are.

Seeing these things, knowing these things, has become part of who I am.

I looked up, and I saw.

One man knocked the other off the platform. One man fell, hard, to the 
floor. The other took a moment, just a moment, for a goodbye.

I saw, and I understood.

There was a ladder, and I was climbing it. I didn't know if there would
be time. It was a long way up, even for someone who moves as fast as I 
do. But I had to try.

I'm young, I'm strong, and I'm agile. I'm just as much a demon half-
breed as he is. These were my people. But most of all....

I owed it to him.



I ran headlong into him just as he was about to leap.

We both staggered. But I was younger, and I was expecting it, and I 
moved faster.

In that moment, she threw herself down on top of him, yelling, "No!"

That was all the time that I needed.

From underneath her, he yelled, "Rieff, no! Don't throw away your life,
man!" 

I called back to him:

"You showed me! It's what I have to do."

The other man had reached the platform now, and helped her hold him 
down.

"It's too late, Doyle. There's no more time. It's Rieff or no one, now."

When the pain began, I could hang on tight to the thought of what he had
been willing to do for us.

We'd found our promised one. Someone must die.

But not him.

Not today.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Doyle: You're fast.
Rieff: I'm walking. You're just old.

-Hero 

Here's to wishing he could get older....