Fic: Grace - Chapter 16
Title: Grace - Chapter 16 (Part 1)
Rating: M
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
Chapter 16
So maybe this is where we flash to the future, to my present day, and I sit staring at a computer screen for too long, fingers clenched at the keyboard, because Catherine’s just died (even if it was a million years ago now) and I need to not fuck up writing the rest of this.
In reality, in this universe where I steal the show, where I’m the sun, and maybe Catherine is Earth, maybe I could end it, finish it here with this form of Armageddon. Leave it, say that was the end of it, because it’s not the end of me, but it sure as hell was the end of Catherine.
I could finish it here, apart from the fact that I can’t, because there’s so much more to this, and there’s so much more to Catherine and my life trails on, grows, stumbles blindly forward and as much as I wish writing this would be easier, it’s not, it’s hard, and it hurts like a bitch from hell. I’m ripping my heart out of my chest, crushing it into the scanner and watching the lights flash against it, copying it into a fresh Microsoft Word document.
Maybe this is when we flash back to my Hollywood apartment.
The phone breaks the silence of my bedroom like a knife across the throat of some hapless victim, but the nurse, her voice takes on no form that I can recognize. Default flashes across the computer monitor of my head, ‘the End’ rolls across the movie screen of my heart, and maybe I wish this was the finish, that there was nothing at the end of the credits.
Maybe a part of me died with Catherine.
Maybe that’s wishful thinking.
I breathe in so hard that my lungs scrape across my ribcage, my diaphragm splicing against the bone. I don’t even see Loretta, who slides beneath the door like smoke, like fog, like a spirit.
The nurse hangs up after a few hurried words, and a mumbled ‘sorry’, but my fingers are so tight on the phone that a part of me, something too easily silenced, it worries that I’m gonna break it. Smash it against my ear.
I breathe again, have to remind myself, because every part of me is suddenly hurting, aching, throbbing. I bite my tongue to stop myself from swallowing it whole.
It’s in these seconds that I hate Catherine so much, too much for my heart and my head to handle. There’s a pounding that courses through my body, and the words people die echo around my skull. People die every fucking day.
People are robbed of their lives, people give their lives, sacrifice them, let them go. They can’t just fucking take them, because her life didn’t belong to her. Nobody’s life belongs to them, because that, it gives them the right to end it, and nobody should be allowed that. People’s lives belong to the people who give a shit about them, everyone who has ever cared, because with that, knowing that, it makes suicide so fucking selfish, it makes it such a fucking crime. Catherine, she robbed herself. She robbed me.
Loretta slouches on the bed beside me, rocks back enough that the mattress creates groves, valleys, grottos beneath her. She rolls tired shoulders, and pries the phone from my clenched fingers. Loretta, she doesn’t ask questions, just presses her head into my neck, and digs a hand into my hair.
Me, I’m catatonic, some wayward coma-patient that escaped the hospital only to sit unconscious. Blood is staining my nails, my skin, as I sit there with my heart in my hands.
I won’t remember crying, but the wet imprint on Loretta’s shirt later will tell me otherwise.
*
The rehab clinic treats death as a rather unfortunate, but common occurrence.
The nurse behind the counter is nothing like the one on the phone; she’s almost coarse around the edges, half-lidded eyes in the middle of a sharp face that cases an even sharper tongue. She has a paint-by-numbers smile that doesn’t waver as she offers faux condolences.
“I am so sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks,” I mumble back, and dig my hands even farther into the pockets of my too-tight jeans.
“Miss. Urie was a troubled soul,” she says, and her fingers taptaptap at the keyboard in front of her. “Good company to those who needed it though. Some of the younger patients here had become rather fond of her.”
“Nice to know,” I reply, and I can’t make eye-contact with this woman, not because I don’t want to, but because she seems far more absorbed in the computer screen in front of her than with the person (with me) behind the desk.
“Yes, I suppose so.” She prints out a few pages, rolls her chair over to pick them up and places them on the countertop in front of me. “You’ll need to fill out these forms for the death certificate and the life insurance. There’s a funeral home down the road if you have made no prior arrangements.”
“Right,” I say, and the nurse brushes dark hair off her face. She can’t be older than fifty, grey hair pokes through above the shells of her ears, and the wrinkles loosen the flesh around her eyes, her forehead, her cheeks.
“It’s very unfortunate that she chose to end her life,” she continues. “But perhaps some people can see no better option.”
And it’s at this point that I want her to shut up, to stop talking, to just, to not talk about Catherine, because this woman knew fuck all about her. I knew fuck all about Catherine, at least the one that lived, however pitifully, in these dying days. I want to know why I was robbed, I want an answer, and I want one better than no better option.
The nurse doesn’t look at me, not now, but her eyes are almost as grey as her hair. I see these things sometimes, and it’s the sort of bullshit my mother would’ve noticed. She ducks behind the counter, comes up with a box full of meager items; a toothbrush, a hairbrush, a notebook, the bracelet that I made for her out of pasta shells when I was seven (and fuck, that one hurts), and an envelope.
“This is addressed to you,” the nurse says. “It was on her bed when the night-watchman found her.”
“Oh,” I say, and the envelope, it says ‘Brendon Urie’ in Catherine’s familiar scrawl, loopy letters that fall off the page, and maybe, for once, maybe I should take up a religion, coz I need to believe in a higher force for this, for answering my want so directly.
Instead, I thank the nurse, coz in these moments she’s the only higher force I have. She smiles in response, and it looks a little different, it hesitates, and her forehead creases, eyebrows twitch, and she puts a hand over mine. “You’re welcome,” she murmurs, and the smile is an artwork all of its own, it’s heart wrenchingly sad, but it’s real and it’s genuine and I appreciate that more than this woman will ever know.
I finish the forms in silence, and head back to my car. I don’t look at her body. Instead, when I get back to my apartment, I pull out a photo album that I haven’t looked at in years, pull out a hundred photos of five-year-old, ten-year-old, twelve-year-old Catherine, that has a head full of dark hair, and a face full of bright eyes. I take the one of her, the one that my Dad took on her fourteenth birthday, the one where she smiles like nothing could taint her, and I leave it on top of the cabinet in my bedroom.
I feel down my pockets and pull out the envelope with shaky fingers and a brain that swells in my head. Open it too slowly, and pull out a folded piece of paper that only has an address on it, and the words ‘go get him, tiger.’
I stare at the photo, of her fourteen and in a summer dress covered in sunflowers and leaves, and my eyelids explode, and my tear ducts swell and my heart bursts in my chest.
This is not the Catherine who clung to me at the clinic yesterday. This, it might be the Catherine that I loved.
*
Continue to Part 2.