PART: 1 of ??

RATING: R (Adult thematic material, adult content)

PAIRING(s): L/L; S/C; S/R; F/E;

DISTRIBUTION: To LW, Kai, Myself and FG so far; any other archives are welcome to ask, but disclaimers must be included, my email left intact. send a URL, and provide full disclaimers as well as credit me fully. Please inform me if you are going to submit my work to any sort of search engine.  Please do not submit my work to a search engine that picks out random sets of words and uses them as key words, such as "Google"

Please contact me in order for this story to be placed on an archive, or if you want know of a friend who would enjoy my works, please email me their address and I will mail them the stories, expressly for the purpose of link trading. MiSTiers are welcomed! Please do inform me that you'd like to do the MiSTing, however, and send me a copy of the finished product. I'd also love to archive any MiSTings that are made of my work!

CATEGORY: Romance/AU/Sci-Fi

FEEDBACK: PLEASE?!

SETTING IN TIMELINE: Post-Show, but Dark and AU.

SPOILLER/SUMMARY: Laverne is given a rare opportunity - to go back and re-imagine her life.  Is this new chance a blessing or a curse?

NOTES: This is occasionally wildly AU and may be dark at times.  I have, however, tried to keep everyone IC.  You have been warned!

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The last thing Laverne DeFazio - nee Laverne Carmichael, nee Laverne Corolla, and nee Laverne Cantone - remembered was putting down her bong. 

You blew it, kid.

Three weeks sober - a DeFazio record - shot to hell because Chuck had offered her part of his fix.  There was something for her to be proud of in that - at least she'd turned down his offer to share a line.  Hey, DeFazios were never one for the hard stuff.  Pot, however...

what about the vodka, Laverne?

That, too - the whole bottle, maybe? - and a can of beer, not counting the bottle of wine she'd consumed on her lunch break.  Lately alcohol had become her choice sedative - and she had been so drunk the night before that she hadn't really needed to get high - but Laverne never was one to turn down a joint. 

Not like you have anyone to be sober for.

Laverne came home to an empty apartment every evening, to sleep in a lonely bed because her flings never spent the night.  Life had become an endless march of work, one-night-stands, and reckless alcoholism because she had buried everyone she loved - or driven them away - in five short years.  First her Pop, who collapsed of a heart attack in Cowboy Bills' with a smile on his lips.  Then Carmine - shot in the head during an argument with a hooker in Bangkok on his way to Da Naang. 

Shirley had been the final blow.

She never could say no to more babies.

Babies that killed her - weakening her in a foreign country with poor medical care.  And that was what drove Laverne to the bottle, because if she had been there, if she had been able to keep in closer contact with her best friend, she would have talked Shirley out of trying for another baby.  Weren't three enough when her last son nearly killed her?  But she had always wanted four children, even if she had do deliver them alone in a Siberian outpost.  The same week Laverne got an announcement for her best friend's pregnancy, she received a hysterical phone call from Walter Meeney.  The final child had brought on a fever that not even her husband could cure, and there were Shirley's final moments on earth.  By God's grace, Laverne had been together enough to lead her delirious best friend through her final hour. on earth.  Shirley died clutching her child, insensible, a day from her thirtieth birthday and naked from the waist down in a Russian infirmary.

It was a girl.  She'd wanted a girl so badly.

Walter was trapped in Russia on orders with four small children in a foreign country- Lillian Feeney hadn't yet met her grandchildren, nor had the best friend of his late wife.  Laverne felt bereft due to this absence, this lack of closure.  The cold Russian winter held Shirley's body hostage - Lillian and Jack had been forced to unite for a memorial service, with the ever-present realization that they would have to go through another funeral in the spring.  They had expected Laverne to lead the congregation, and she had gotten through that - then collapsed afterwards in an alcoholic haze.  Lenny and Squiggy had tried to kid her out of the mood, but with anger and ineloquent fury she'd driven them away - in the ensuing five years she had not seen either of them. 

In those years, Laverne had married a cocktail waiter, a minister, and a writer - her father had barely lived through the first union, and after he died she had no one left to please.   Not one of those marriages lasted more than a  year - none of them had produced the children she wanted desperately.

And that's why you're a pathetic, thirty-three year old drunk in a dead-end job.  Wouldn't Shirl be proud?

An alarm rang, the jingling bell like a percussion section in her head.  She didn't remember setting it - in fact, she recalled pawning it for booze money weeks ago.  Blindly, she reached out from beneath the sheets, reaching out in the direction of the noise...

And met something warm, human and in her way.

Her scream was muffled by a pair of firm lips.  Eyes wide-open, she sputtered and cried out around the tongue invading her mouth.

What did I do this time?  No - WHO did I do?

She wasn't surprised to look over a pale shoulder and see some room that was not her own - or to feel masculine hands appraising her beneath the covers.

What did surprise her was the abundant curve of her stomach.  Though she had been a lush for years, she had never developed an oversized gut.  It felt just like she was pregnant...

And it looked just like there was a wedding band on her left ring finger.

She stared blankly at it - undeniably a wedding ring.

Oh, fuck.

When she sat up, she caught sight of herself in the dresser mirror - and the pictures on the dresser drawer.

You've never seen those pictures before - you have no memory of taking them.  Or those three kids in there with you....

But it was undeniably her face.

But not your life.

She looked behind her, into the smiling face of her husband.

The face of someone you never wanted to marry.

"Happy tenth anniversary, Missus Kosnowski."