DRABBLE: this will always be my memory (Todd/Blair, OLTL)

Title: this will always be my memory
Author: Regann
Rating: G
Disclaimer: I don't own anything; I just play with them. However, I care a lot more about them than their owners do.
Summary: Blair remembers what it's like to feel like Starr does now. (~260 words)

this will always be my memory;

She remembers.

As Blair watches Starr kneel at the hospital’s altar, as she watches her daughter bow her head and struggle to understand the latest hand Fate has dealt her — Cole, shot, maybe dying — Blair can barely hold back her own tears, her entire body shaking not just for her daughter’s pain that she shoulders with her, but from the force of the memories that consume her.

She knows how Starr feels, the grief that might wait around the corner of her; Blair remembers every torturous moment of the months she thought Todd was dead, lost to her forever, a wound that would’ve never healed, not if he hadn’t come back.

Somehow she’s forgotten it until that moment, forgotten those days when she would’ve traded anything to know that he was alive, no matter how much sorrow he might’ve brought with him, how she bowed her own head and thanked god for his return in those months afterward even when things had seemed impossible between them.

Somehow, Blair let herself forget that.

Blair staggers out of the hospital chapel to give Starr a few minutes alone with everything she must be feeling and she cannot stop her own grief, her own tears. She slumps against the wall, still shaking, fighting for control.

And then there are arms around her, warm and tender, echoes of promises in the careful way they hold her, comfort her.

Todd.

Blair makes her own promises to herself in that moment: she will never let herself forget again.