Copyright 1999, Lyta. All rights reserved. No part of this story may be re-posted in part or in full without written permission from me.
Disclaimer: Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict is copyright 1998, Tribune Entertainment Co. Its characters are used without permission, no infringement is intended.
Rating: PG-13
Title: Brief Candle
Author:  Lyta
Lyta_1028@yahoo.com

Summary: Sandoval deals with a recent loss

"Brief Candle"

"To-marrow and to-marrow, and to-marrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

-MacBeth by William Shakespeare. Act V, Scene IV

     Ronald Sandoval placed a single white rose on Siobhan Beckett's grave marker and another on that of Liam Kincaid. He stepped back and tried unsuccessfully to fight the tears than ran in twin rivers down his usually stony face. He'd failed Siobhan, and he had failed their son.
    He thought back to receiving a message that someone had used an old Resistance drop box. Sandoval had thought this odd, since the box had been discovered months before the crackdown began. Even more surprising was the letter addressed to him that told him where to find Liam's body. Never before had maintaining his composure and presenting the front that he was still an implant been so difficult. At home that evening after he had gone to identify the remains, a mere formality in these days of rapid DNA tests, he had stared at a bottle of scotch left over from his pre-implant days wishing he could get drunk once again. When he finally put the bottle back in the cabinet he noticed another note written and folded in the same manner sitting on his counter. As he opened it he belatedly recognized the script as Marquette's handwriting. This second letter asked him to have Liam buried properly, preferably by his mother, as she could not.
    Zo'or had not cared to involve himself in any aspect of the arrangements, which relieved his attaché. The Synod leader's prime concern was that he had lost his prize implant and he was still in a foul mood.  Sandoval wondered if the Taelons would try to clone him or use his DNA in another of their seemingly endless black projects, so he had Liam cremated. It seemed right, his family preferred to use that method of burial. He finally took the rosewood box with his child's ashes to Ireland to be buried next to Siobhan.
    Sandoval hoped Liam and Siobhan were in paradise together. He was not particularly certain as to his own religious beliefs, but he did believe that there was more to living than mere physical reality. He had to believe that: His own mother, Dee-Dee, Siobhan, Isabel and Liam were all taken from him.
    Now he only hoped to redeem himself enough to apologize to them in the next world.