Tell Me There's a Heaven

TELL ME THERE'S A HEAVEN

A birthday fic for my dear fellow Josiah fan Jeanne, it kinda got took over by a favourite song - Chris Rea's achingly poignant 'Tell me there's a Heaven'. It's not really what the song is about, but I always think of Josiah when I hear it. Go figure.

The story is set in Mog's magnificent ATF Universe, and is technically one of the 'Rosie Chronicles', where Josiah is married to hound-dogger Delancey Cowper Morgan and has a small daughter, Rosamund Delancey Sanchez.

UPDATED 27th April 2003 - after requests for the conversation between Rosie and her daddy, I finally got my act together and wrote it.

My heartfelt thanks must go to Heather M. for giving me the idea in her magnificent ATF story The Road Not Taken , and also to my dear friend and fellow Ronaholic Val for helping me create Jonathan Becks Weller.

The drawing, entitled 'Hands', is by Lynn Wright, who, bless her heart, did a magnificent job of drawing Josiah and his Rosie.

CHAPTER
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Epilogue

Tell me there's a Heaven

Chris Rea

The little girl she said to me
What are these things that I can see?
Each night when I come home from school
When Mama calls me in for tea
Oh every night a baby dies
And every night a Mama cries
What makes those men do what they do
To make that person black and blue

Grandpa says they're happy now
They sit with God in Paradise
With angel's wings and still somehow
It makes me feel
Like ice.

Tell me there's a heaven
Tell me that it's true
Tell me there's a reason
Why I'm seeing what I do
Tell me there's a heaven
Where all those people go
Tell me that they're happy now
Papa tell me that it's so

So do I tell her that it's true
That there's a place for me and you
Where hungry children smile and say
We wouldn't have no other way
That every painful crack of bones
Is a step along the way
Every wrong done is a game plan
To that great and joyful day

And I'm looking at the father and the son
And I'm looking at the mother and the daughter
And I'm watching them in tears of pain
And I'm watching them suffer
Don't tell that little girl
Tell me