Post by Brytain Montgomery on Sept 11, 2013 22:59:18 GMT -5
My name is Brytain Montgomery.
And today… I died.
More specifically, I am dying. Right at this moment, there are three doctors circling me, applying pressure to my torn open throat. Trying to stop the incessant flow of blood.
But I’ve lost a lot of blood and Jordy Tyrell is stuck in traffic eight blocks from the hospital. I’ll be gone before she makes it through the front doors. After another half hour of hemorrhaging blood, I’ll have lost too much. One of the many benefits of being an unusual, rare blood type. If Jordy were a few blocks closer… if Jordy had been in the ambulance with me… she could have given blood and I would have survived this.
I know this because the voice tells me this. It’s neither male nor female… nothing I can place, anyway. No matter how often I quickly turn my head, I can’t see it. Just hear it, slightly to my left and behind me.
They pronounce me dead just ten minutes before she bursts through the doors, blonde hair flying and her face as pale as I’ve ever seen it.
It feels strange to look down at my limp, bloody and broken body. To know that finally, someone succeeded in killing me. After all of those years spent actively hunting death, without a single care as to what would happen when I found it, it had found me. It had found me just when I no longer wanted to be found.
It had been my last match in PDW and Zack Lifer had made good on his promise. He’d killed the unkillable. My blood would forever be on his hands.
“What now?” I asked, my eyes lingering on my pale, expressionless face. Below that, the torn and ragged edges of my throat. Below that, my still, unmoving chest.
“Now, we watch,” said the voice. I scowled. I didn’t like that answer but what could I do? I didn’t see any lights around that I should be moving towards. No flames of hell licking at my ankles, come to claim me.
“Can someone at least close my eyes?” I muttered, staring down at myself. My blue eyes were dull, open and staring at nothing.
“You’re handling this well,” the voice said, sounding a little surprised.
I shrugged my shoulders, watching as a team of interns cleaned me up as best as they could. Finally shut my eyes.
Death is not pretty, I realized. It’s not kind. Closing my eyes didn’t help with the abject strangeness of looking down at your own corpse.
“I’m probably a little shock-y,” I muttered. “Let me process.”
The voice was silent and for that I was grateful. How do you process your own death? How do you comprehend that this is not some dream you’ll awaken from. There was a finality to this, the realization that I would never breath another lungful of air. I would never see the people that I loved again.
A shrill scream tore my attention from my body. Out into the hallway where Jordy was screaming, her fists beating at the chest of a guy in a medical scrubs.
A doctor, maybe.
“Fix it,” she screamed, grabbing onto the front of his scrub shirt. Her face was contorted in a dozen different emotions. “Fix her!”
When a nurse finally pried her away from the man, Jordy slumped to the ground. She buried her face buried in her hands and her shoulders shook violently. I watched with a strange emptiness inside of me. A hollow place where all of my feelings should be but instead, there was a void.
"Over there..." the voice said and I instinctively turned to the left. Dom Harter's large frame filled the hallway, a stricken look on his face as he processed Jordy's reaction. Besides Jordy, Dom was one of the only people I truly counted as family. He was my best friend, the little brother who would follow me blindly to the gates of hell and back if I asked him to.
He didn’t need any further explanation. Jordy’s brokenness told him everything he needed to know. He slumped down in the closest chair, his head in his hands.
I frowned slightly, or at least, I think I did. The whole thing was still so bizarre to me. As though I were watching a movie. None of this was really resonating with me. I knew I should feel something but I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried.
I stood there, numbly, watching it all unfold in front of me but incapable of feeling a goddamn thing about it.
“Still nothing?” the voice asked, indifferently. “Usually by now people are screaming about the injustice of their untimely deaths.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said.
“Maybe this will help you tap into a little bit of that emotion…” the voice said and my attention was drawn over to the elevator. The doors slowly groaning open.
He was leaning against the wall of the elevator, his face pale and ashen and the cane clutched tightly in his hand. He looked as though he was just barely remaining upright as he stepped into the light and I could see the blood stains on his clothes, a spattering across his knuckles that he’d forgotten to wipe away. I felt a flutter of something in my chest, something that I might have been able to put a name to once.
“They’re about to tell him…” the voice narrated and my left eye twitched, the closest thing to a flinch I could manage in my numbness.
I watched him with difficulty into the hallway, his eyes dull and lifeless. It was like in some way he already knew. It was like maybe he’d felt it when I died… some severing of the connection, the bond that we shared.
I know I’d felt it when he’d died… even if it were for only a few minutes. I’d felt something deep inside of me snap and break. Something that had never fully been repaired. Something that had stayed broken.
I watched with trepidation as a doctor and three interns approached him. Asked him if he were Michael Rollins. I saw his face blanche paler than I’d ever seen it when they told him. I watched as he shut down, the spark of hope in his eyes died and he froze.
I winced, something inside of my chest twisting painfully.
In the blink of an eye, he lunged at one of the interns. The first one went down easily and he turned to the second, who had tried to restrain him. There was a murderous, blank rage in his eyes and his hand twitched towards his cane. There was a long, wicked blade hidden in it’s shaft.
Fortunately, Alex reached him first, moving in two quick steps over to grab his brother as Michael lunged for the third intern.
He fought Alex for a few, painful moments before he sank down to his knees. The voice was right, I was feeling something. The tears streaming relentlessly down his cheeks made that sharp knife twisting in my chest intensify. He didn’t cry. He especially didn’t cry in front of people.
And now, here he was looking far more broken than I’d ever seen him and it was my fault. I’d broken the only man I’d ever loved.
“I want her,” he rasped, his voice sounding foreign to me and I realized with a sudden start that I would never hear that voice again. I would forget what it sounded like. He would forget mine, over time.
The pain in my chest was like a living thing, scraping at the insides of my rib cage because I was not big enough to hold it all. It was too intense. Too all encompassing.
“Michael…” I whispered, taking a few cautious steps towards him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to comfort him.
“He can’t hear you. He can’t see you,” the voice said. This time it felt like a taunt.
“Fuck you,” I hissed.
Alex helped him up and for once, he didn’t shrug off the help.
Once he was inside of my room, he locked the door behind him, jamming his cane against the doorknob so that it couldn’t be opened and we were alone. Just he and I and the body I once had called home.
He moved towards the body-- I was having a hard time identifying it as mine anymore-- and with a shaky hand reached down to scrub away a bit of the blood that they’d forgotten near my temple. He grabbed a cloth from the bedside table and gently set about scrubbing the blood away from my face, my throat, my hands. When he was finished, he silently climbed into bed with me.
He gathered my body to him gently, pressing his cheek against my unmoving chest. I don’t know how long he stayed there, time didn’t mean a lot anymore. He cried, his tears soaking the hospital sheets and me as he alternated between silence and mumbling my name over and over again.
It hurt. Each tear hurt me. Each repetition of my name was like a punch to the gut.
“I don’t want to watch any more,” I muttered.
“Too bad,” the voice replied.
I sighed, turning to my left but of course, I saw nothing. “Fuck you,” I hissed again. “I’m not watching this any more.”
Turning on my heel, I stalked towards the door, twisting the handle and wrenching it open. And…
...On the other side of the door was a dark room. Where a hospital hallway had once stood, now we were standing in a pitch black room. I blinked a few times, my eyes slowly adjusting to the lack of light after the harsh fluorescence of the hospital room.
“You’ve been dead for a month,” the voice said, quietly. “This is how he spends the moments when he isn’t wrestling.”
When my eyes adjusted, I could make out Dom, sitting silently at a small table. I recognized it as his place only because the painting I had done for him shortly after we met was still prominently hung on the wall.
“Sitting in the dark?” I asked, curiously. I moved closer until I could see what his hands were doing. He was petting Scar, who was curled up on his lap, absently. That’s when I realized that Mooshka was sleeping in a ball underneath of the table.
Something told me that Mittens was somewhere nearby.
“...Why does Dom have my babies?” I demanded, searching for the tiny ball of fluff that was my kitten, probably lurking somewhere in the shadows.
“You’ll see,” the voice said.
“I don’t want to see,” I muttered. “I don’t want to see any of this.”
“Too bad,” the voice said again, “You have to see this.”
Even though a part of me knew what I would find on the other side of Dom’s front door, I tried it anyway.
This time, it did lead me outside but I knew almost immediately that we weren’t in Massachusetts anymore. I glanced around, shielding my eyes from the harsh sunlight.
“Where are we?” I muttered.
“Amsterdam,” the voice said.
“Of course she went back to Amsterdam,” I mumbled under my breath.
When Jordy needed to lick her wounds, she somehow always ended up here. For me, it was Mexico. For her, it was Amsterdam. Although, this time looked more permanent, if the tattoo shop in front of me were any indication. It bore her name in gold lettering on the window and inside, I could see her slumped over a bottle of Jack Daniels.
I sighed, pushing through the door. The bell didn’t chime, but of course it didn’t. She couldn’t see me, feel me, hear me. I watched as she poured herself another shot, downed it in one quick movement.
“She stays just sober enough to make a living. Once the shop closes, she downs at least a bottle and a half of that stuff,” the voice narrated.
I felt a pang of sadness as I reached for her, my hand ghosting over her long blonde hair but I couldn’t feel her and she couldn’t feel me either. I wanted nothing more than to be able to stroke her hair, hug her tight.
For the longest time, Jordy Tyrell had been the only family I had ever known. She was my mother, father, sister, brother. We shared a bond that most people would never understand. A bond that went deeper than blood.
It killed me to see her hurting like this.
“Why are you doing this?” I demanded hoarsely.
“I’m not doing anything,” the voice said evenly, not even a single shred of emotion in it’s mechanical voice. “I’m just a guide. I’m not in control of this any more than you are. These are things you have to see.”
Anger burned hot inside of me. “Yeah? Because I’ve already seen this stupid fucking movie… so if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to just skip to the end where you send me back and I suddenly have a renewed lust for life or some shit.”
“This isn’t a movie,” the voice said. “This is no elaborate scheme to convince you that life is worth living. This is what everyone sees when they die, Brytain. This isn’t fiction, you’re not going to see all of this and fall to your knees crying I want to live! and magically be restored.”
I fell silent, the enormity of the situation weighing heavily on me.
“Show me…” I said, finally. I wanted to get it over with. I wanted to see him one last time. I wanted to stop the pain. Seeing my pets with Dom had filled me with a sense of foreboding. He’d given away the two kittens and dog that we lovingly referred to as our “children”. I knew in my heart that that could only mean one thing. He’d fallen back into the darkness that had consumed him before I’d spent six months slowly coaxing him into letting me inside.
When I opened my eyes again, I was on an empty street in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico. It only took me a few minutes to recognize the building that we were standing in front of. It loomed up against the night sky, all of it’s occupants gone home for the day.
It was where I’d first met Michael Rollins. Even as my heart ached in my chest, a small, wistful smile twitched at the edges of my mouth. We’d both been here for the wedding of Jesse Lewis and Willow Swaine. Jakob Alexander and I had been standing just where I was standing now when a barrage of water balloons had soaked me through to the skin. I still remembered the playful smirk on his face as he and Jesse had leaned over the edge. Every single one of his balloons had hit their mark… me.
The night had seemed so innocent, but it had sparked something… a need. The beginning of our strange, painful, stumbling, beautiful, amazing relationship. When he’d finally used up his water balloon stash and climbed down off of the building, I’d jumped on him. Playfully spider monkey attacking him, this man that I only knew from a few casual interactions here and there.
And then, I’d kissed him.
I still don’t know why I did that.
I heard him before I saw him, the thud of his cane echoing in the empty streets. I watched him make his way silently towards the building, something that looked too much like despair in his eyes.
I’d never seen him like this.
I’d never seen him broken before. His face was pale, his eyes dead. He shuffled along listlessly, as though he were halfway between two worlds.
I watched as he disappeared inside of the building. I wanted to follow him but something kept me rooted to my spot. It felt like an hour passed, but I knew it must have only been minutes. When I saw him emerge on the roof, I gasped.
“No…” I muttered, “No… no, no… he’s not going to…” I trailed off. He’d always sworn that he would never “take the coward’s way out”. That he wouldn’t do something like this. But there he was, standing on the roof, alone in the middle of the night. The very place where our love had first taken root. I could see the poetry in it, the way he would. The symbolism in ending himself at the place where we had began.
“Just watch,” the voice said, automatically.
He stepped onto the edge of the roof, his face turned up towards the stars in the night sky. I could see his lips moving but I couldn’t hear the words, he was too far up.
“He’s telling you that he’ll see you soon,” the voice supplied.
A scream tore from my throat, though I knew he couldn’t hear me. When he closed his eyes and let himself purposely fall forward, I felt something inside of me break. I fell to my knees and buried my face in my hands, still screaming.
I couldn’t watch but it didn’t matter, I heard it, felt it through the pavement. Listened to his bones breaking and the last ragged breaths of the man who was my heart.
------------
When I woke up, I was in the hospital bed with morphine humming in my veins and his very real, warm hand in mine. It took me a few moments to realize that I was here. That I was alive. That it had been an intense, too real dream brought on by the swelling in my brain and the painkillers in my blood.
“I’m alive,” I whispered.
“For now,” a soft voice somewhere behind me and to my left said quietly.
And today… I died.
More specifically, I am dying. Right at this moment, there are three doctors circling me, applying pressure to my torn open throat. Trying to stop the incessant flow of blood.
But I’ve lost a lot of blood and Jordy Tyrell is stuck in traffic eight blocks from the hospital. I’ll be gone before she makes it through the front doors. After another half hour of hemorrhaging blood, I’ll have lost too much. One of the many benefits of being an unusual, rare blood type. If Jordy were a few blocks closer… if Jordy had been in the ambulance with me… she could have given blood and I would have survived this.
I know this because the voice tells me this. It’s neither male nor female… nothing I can place, anyway. No matter how often I quickly turn my head, I can’t see it. Just hear it, slightly to my left and behind me.
They pronounce me dead just ten minutes before she bursts through the doors, blonde hair flying and her face as pale as I’ve ever seen it.
It feels strange to look down at my limp, bloody and broken body. To know that finally, someone succeeded in killing me. After all of those years spent actively hunting death, without a single care as to what would happen when I found it, it had found me. It had found me just when I no longer wanted to be found.
It had been my last match in PDW and Zack Lifer had made good on his promise. He’d killed the unkillable. My blood would forever be on his hands.
“What now?” I asked, my eyes lingering on my pale, expressionless face. Below that, the torn and ragged edges of my throat. Below that, my still, unmoving chest.
“Now, we watch,” said the voice. I scowled. I didn’t like that answer but what could I do? I didn’t see any lights around that I should be moving towards. No flames of hell licking at my ankles, come to claim me.
“Can someone at least close my eyes?” I muttered, staring down at myself. My blue eyes were dull, open and staring at nothing.
“You’re handling this well,” the voice said, sounding a little surprised.
I shrugged my shoulders, watching as a team of interns cleaned me up as best as they could. Finally shut my eyes.
Death is not pretty, I realized. It’s not kind. Closing my eyes didn’t help with the abject strangeness of looking down at your own corpse.
“I’m probably a little shock-y,” I muttered. “Let me process.”
The voice was silent and for that I was grateful. How do you process your own death? How do you comprehend that this is not some dream you’ll awaken from. There was a finality to this, the realization that I would never breath another lungful of air. I would never see the people that I loved again.
A shrill scream tore my attention from my body. Out into the hallway where Jordy was screaming, her fists beating at the chest of a guy in a medical scrubs.
A doctor, maybe.
“Fix it,” she screamed, grabbing onto the front of his scrub shirt. Her face was contorted in a dozen different emotions. “Fix her!”
When a nurse finally pried her away from the man, Jordy slumped to the ground. She buried her face buried in her hands and her shoulders shook violently. I watched with a strange emptiness inside of me. A hollow place where all of my feelings should be but instead, there was a void.
"Over there..." the voice said and I instinctively turned to the left. Dom Harter's large frame filled the hallway, a stricken look on his face as he processed Jordy's reaction. Besides Jordy, Dom was one of the only people I truly counted as family. He was my best friend, the little brother who would follow me blindly to the gates of hell and back if I asked him to.
He didn’t need any further explanation. Jordy’s brokenness told him everything he needed to know. He slumped down in the closest chair, his head in his hands.
I frowned slightly, or at least, I think I did. The whole thing was still so bizarre to me. As though I were watching a movie. None of this was really resonating with me. I knew I should feel something but I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried.
I stood there, numbly, watching it all unfold in front of me but incapable of feeling a goddamn thing about it.
“Still nothing?” the voice asked, indifferently. “Usually by now people are screaming about the injustice of their untimely deaths.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said.
“Maybe this will help you tap into a little bit of that emotion…” the voice said and my attention was drawn over to the elevator. The doors slowly groaning open.
He was leaning against the wall of the elevator, his face pale and ashen and the cane clutched tightly in his hand. He looked as though he was just barely remaining upright as he stepped into the light and I could see the blood stains on his clothes, a spattering across his knuckles that he’d forgotten to wipe away. I felt a flutter of something in my chest, something that I might have been able to put a name to once.
“They’re about to tell him…” the voice narrated and my left eye twitched, the closest thing to a flinch I could manage in my numbness.
I watched him with difficulty into the hallway, his eyes dull and lifeless. It was like in some way he already knew. It was like maybe he’d felt it when I died… some severing of the connection, the bond that we shared.
I know I’d felt it when he’d died… even if it were for only a few minutes. I’d felt something deep inside of me snap and break. Something that had never fully been repaired. Something that had stayed broken.
I watched with trepidation as a doctor and three interns approached him. Asked him if he were Michael Rollins. I saw his face blanche paler than I’d ever seen it when they told him. I watched as he shut down, the spark of hope in his eyes died and he froze.
I winced, something inside of my chest twisting painfully.
In the blink of an eye, he lunged at one of the interns. The first one went down easily and he turned to the second, who had tried to restrain him. There was a murderous, blank rage in his eyes and his hand twitched towards his cane. There was a long, wicked blade hidden in it’s shaft.
Fortunately, Alex reached him first, moving in two quick steps over to grab his brother as Michael lunged for the third intern.
He fought Alex for a few, painful moments before he sank down to his knees. The voice was right, I was feeling something. The tears streaming relentlessly down his cheeks made that sharp knife twisting in my chest intensify. He didn’t cry. He especially didn’t cry in front of people.
And now, here he was looking far more broken than I’d ever seen him and it was my fault. I’d broken the only man I’d ever loved.
“I want her,” he rasped, his voice sounding foreign to me and I realized with a sudden start that I would never hear that voice again. I would forget what it sounded like. He would forget mine, over time.
The pain in my chest was like a living thing, scraping at the insides of my rib cage because I was not big enough to hold it all. It was too intense. Too all encompassing.
“Michael…” I whispered, taking a few cautious steps towards him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to comfort him.
“He can’t hear you. He can’t see you,” the voice said. This time it felt like a taunt.
“Fuck you,” I hissed.
Alex helped him up and for once, he didn’t shrug off the help.
Once he was inside of my room, he locked the door behind him, jamming his cane against the doorknob so that it couldn’t be opened and we were alone. Just he and I and the body I once had called home.
He moved towards the body-- I was having a hard time identifying it as mine anymore-- and with a shaky hand reached down to scrub away a bit of the blood that they’d forgotten near my temple. He grabbed a cloth from the bedside table and gently set about scrubbing the blood away from my face, my throat, my hands. When he was finished, he silently climbed into bed with me.
He gathered my body to him gently, pressing his cheek against my unmoving chest. I don’t know how long he stayed there, time didn’t mean a lot anymore. He cried, his tears soaking the hospital sheets and me as he alternated between silence and mumbling my name over and over again.
It hurt. Each tear hurt me. Each repetition of my name was like a punch to the gut.
“I don’t want to watch any more,” I muttered.
“Too bad,” the voice replied.
I sighed, turning to my left but of course, I saw nothing. “Fuck you,” I hissed again. “I’m not watching this any more.”
Turning on my heel, I stalked towards the door, twisting the handle and wrenching it open. And…
...On the other side of the door was a dark room. Where a hospital hallway had once stood, now we were standing in a pitch black room. I blinked a few times, my eyes slowly adjusting to the lack of light after the harsh fluorescence of the hospital room.
“You’ve been dead for a month,” the voice said, quietly. “This is how he spends the moments when he isn’t wrestling.”
When my eyes adjusted, I could make out Dom, sitting silently at a small table. I recognized it as his place only because the painting I had done for him shortly after we met was still prominently hung on the wall.
“Sitting in the dark?” I asked, curiously. I moved closer until I could see what his hands were doing. He was petting Scar, who was curled up on his lap, absently. That’s when I realized that Mooshka was sleeping in a ball underneath of the table.
Something told me that Mittens was somewhere nearby.
“...Why does Dom have my babies?” I demanded, searching for the tiny ball of fluff that was my kitten, probably lurking somewhere in the shadows.
“You’ll see,” the voice said.
“I don’t want to see,” I muttered. “I don’t want to see any of this.”
“Too bad,” the voice said again, “You have to see this.”
Even though a part of me knew what I would find on the other side of Dom’s front door, I tried it anyway.
This time, it did lead me outside but I knew almost immediately that we weren’t in Massachusetts anymore. I glanced around, shielding my eyes from the harsh sunlight.
“Where are we?” I muttered.
“Amsterdam,” the voice said.
“Of course she went back to Amsterdam,” I mumbled under my breath.
When Jordy needed to lick her wounds, she somehow always ended up here. For me, it was Mexico. For her, it was Amsterdam. Although, this time looked more permanent, if the tattoo shop in front of me were any indication. It bore her name in gold lettering on the window and inside, I could see her slumped over a bottle of Jack Daniels.
I sighed, pushing through the door. The bell didn’t chime, but of course it didn’t. She couldn’t see me, feel me, hear me. I watched as she poured herself another shot, downed it in one quick movement.
“She stays just sober enough to make a living. Once the shop closes, she downs at least a bottle and a half of that stuff,” the voice narrated.
I felt a pang of sadness as I reached for her, my hand ghosting over her long blonde hair but I couldn’t feel her and she couldn’t feel me either. I wanted nothing more than to be able to stroke her hair, hug her tight.
For the longest time, Jordy Tyrell had been the only family I had ever known. She was my mother, father, sister, brother. We shared a bond that most people would never understand. A bond that went deeper than blood.
It killed me to see her hurting like this.
“Why are you doing this?” I demanded hoarsely.
“I’m not doing anything,” the voice said evenly, not even a single shred of emotion in it’s mechanical voice. “I’m just a guide. I’m not in control of this any more than you are. These are things you have to see.”
Anger burned hot inside of me. “Yeah? Because I’ve already seen this stupid fucking movie… so if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to just skip to the end where you send me back and I suddenly have a renewed lust for life or some shit.”
“This isn’t a movie,” the voice said. “This is no elaborate scheme to convince you that life is worth living. This is what everyone sees when they die, Brytain. This isn’t fiction, you’re not going to see all of this and fall to your knees crying I want to live! and magically be restored.”
I fell silent, the enormity of the situation weighing heavily on me.
“Show me…” I said, finally. I wanted to get it over with. I wanted to see him one last time. I wanted to stop the pain. Seeing my pets with Dom had filled me with a sense of foreboding. He’d given away the two kittens and dog that we lovingly referred to as our “children”. I knew in my heart that that could only mean one thing. He’d fallen back into the darkness that had consumed him before I’d spent six months slowly coaxing him into letting me inside.
When I opened my eyes again, I was on an empty street in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico. It only took me a few minutes to recognize the building that we were standing in front of. It loomed up against the night sky, all of it’s occupants gone home for the day.
It was where I’d first met Michael Rollins. Even as my heart ached in my chest, a small, wistful smile twitched at the edges of my mouth. We’d both been here for the wedding of Jesse Lewis and Willow Swaine. Jakob Alexander and I had been standing just where I was standing now when a barrage of water balloons had soaked me through to the skin. I still remembered the playful smirk on his face as he and Jesse had leaned over the edge. Every single one of his balloons had hit their mark… me.
The night had seemed so innocent, but it had sparked something… a need. The beginning of our strange, painful, stumbling, beautiful, amazing relationship. When he’d finally used up his water balloon stash and climbed down off of the building, I’d jumped on him. Playfully spider monkey attacking him, this man that I only knew from a few casual interactions here and there.
And then, I’d kissed him.
I still don’t know why I did that.
I heard him before I saw him, the thud of his cane echoing in the empty streets. I watched him make his way silently towards the building, something that looked too much like despair in his eyes.
I’d never seen him like this.
I’d never seen him broken before. His face was pale, his eyes dead. He shuffled along listlessly, as though he were halfway between two worlds.
I watched as he disappeared inside of the building. I wanted to follow him but something kept me rooted to my spot. It felt like an hour passed, but I knew it must have only been minutes. When I saw him emerge on the roof, I gasped.
“No…” I muttered, “No… no, no… he’s not going to…” I trailed off. He’d always sworn that he would never “take the coward’s way out”. That he wouldn’t do something like this. But there he was, standing on the roof, alone in the middle of the night. The very place where our love had first taken root. I could see the poetry in it, the way he would. The symbolism in ending himself at the place where we had began.
“Just watch,” the voice said, automatically.
He stepped onto the edge of the roof, his face turned up towards the stars in the night sky. I could see his lips moving but I couldn’t hear the words, he was too far up.
“He’s telling you that he’ll see you soon,” the voice supplied.
A scream tore from my throat, though I knew he couldn’t hear me. When he closed his eyes and let himself purposely fall forward, I felt something inside of me break. I fell to my knees and buried my face in my hands, still screaming.
I couldn’t watch but it didn’t matter, I heard it, felt it through the pavement. Listened to his bones breaking and the last ragged breaths of the man who was my heart.
------------
When I woke up, I was in the hospital bed with morphine humming in my veins and his very real, warm hand in mine. It took me a few moments to realize that I was here. That I was alive. That it had been an intense, too real dream brought on by the swelling in my brain and the painkillers in my blood.
“I’m alive,” I whispered.
“For now,” a soft voice somewhere behind me and to my left said quietly.