The Life Of A Lifetime
Title: The Life Of A Lifetime
Pairing: Adam / Jamie
Genre: romance, angst
Lenght: 3,759
Disclaimer: I do not own Jamie Marks is Dead nor One for Sorrow, only this story.
It is advised to have seen the movie and/or read the book to understand this story, as some parts are often mentionned vaguely and would not make much sense to someone unfamiliar with the original story it was based on.
The first time Jamie notices Adam, it’s the second day of their Sophomore year. Adam had apparently missed the first day for a reason even unknown to the teachers, but Jamie notices right away that Adam had been absent. He knows he could’ve never missed someone like Adam in his class, even though he’s not sure why. Adam doesn’t really stand out that much; he’s not tall -Jamie is actually a few inches taller than him, even; his clothes are boring, sure he’s a bit good looking but nothing extraordinary like Marty Chapman, the guy everyone knows and loves, the type Jamie has a hard time dealing with.
Jamie thinks Adam must be like Marty. He’s talking a lot (well, he’s talking casually, but that’s already big from Jamie’s perspective), he’s smiling, he’s socializing. He thinks Adam’s the kind of person he’d have a hard time dealing with, too. The type to laugh when everyone laughs.
_____
Jamie finds out Adam is not exactly like he’d imagined. They’re sitting next to each other in computer lab; Adam had come in late and the only seat left had been the one next to him. He glances to his right to see Adam squinting his eyes at his screen, playing with the cursor but not actually doing anything. Their eyes meet.
Adam tells him he’s not really good with computers. He likes video games though, but they’re not the same. They’re easier. And more interesting. Jamie tries to explain the assignment, only to have Adam furrow his brows at him, then at the screen, then at him.
Jamie laughs. Adam laughs too.
Adam might be different than Marty Chapman, he thinks. It’s the first time he wants someone to continue laughing.
_____
Adam runs in the track and field team. It suits him, somehow. When he runs, he looks like he has a place he wants to go to. When Jamie runs though, it’s to get away, to escape. It must be nice, he thinks. Having somewhere to run to. Knowing your steps will lead you where you want to be. He wonders how Adam does it; he doesn’t even know where he’s going, even when he’s just walking.
One day after first period the teacher silences the class to announce the track and field competition is the following weekend, telling everyone how Adam will be representing them, praising his abilities. The students cheer, hyped up. Jamie feels a bit proud, somehow. Like he’s the one being praised. Like he’s the one the whole class will come to school on a Saturday for.
On the day of the competition, Jamie debates on wether he should go or not; however the moment he sees Adam, on his mark, with a serious look on his face like he’s running for an olympic medal, he’s glad he pushed the extra effort to be there. He’s standing behind the crowd, up on a hill along the running tracks. He sits down on the grass, hand shielding his eyes from the blinding sun, while Adam runs and runs. It makes him think about many things that aren’t necessarily related to sports, it’s beautiful like a good line from a novel, or like the last words of a poem. He laughs a bit at himself. Only a moment later and Adam finishes the race, in first place. Everyone cheers and his teammates lift him up in celebration. He’s never seen Adam smile more than in this moment, sweat dripping from his forehead. Their eyes don’t meet once.
_____
Watching Adam run becomes part of his routine before he’s even aware of it. He starts to take his time going home on school days, taking a detour by the track field. He lies to his parents on weekends, making excuses and walking all the way to school to watch the team’s practice competitions. Although Adam never looks at him, he decides this one-way thing is good enough. He’s used to it, anyway. When Adam runs, Jamie pictures himself running with him. He has no idea where they’re going but for some reason he trusts the other boy to guide him. He closes his eyes and sees Adam’s face up-close, his hair a bit damp, his sharp jawline, his smile a bit unsure. When Jamie opens his eyes, Adam has stopped running. He’s sitting in the grass, taking a sip from his water bottle. The sun sets behind the school building, drowning everything in orange light.
_____
It’s not the first time he has to go through this, but he never wants to say he got used to it. Locking himself in a bathroom stall, curled up on the toilet seat with his knees under his chin, eyelids shut so tight his head hurts, and banging on the door with laughter mixed in, it scares him this time just as much as it did the one before. He wonders if his other classmates have all left the locker room or if nobody dares standing up for him. He prefers thinking everyone has left. He doesn’t want to imagine the possibility that Adam would still be there and stay silent. Jamie knows Adam is different. He wouldn’t laugh when everyone laughs. Even though the whole school is aware of what’s been happening to him. Even though nobody has said a word about it.
_____
Jamie thinks that’s how it probably is, in real life. It’s not always the ones people will miss the most who go first. Sometimes it’s the ones nobody cares about, and they leave suddenly, for no reason, unnoticed. God chooses them and they disappear. He tries to guess how long Marty Chapman would’ve stayed in a hole dug on the riverbank near the forest if he’d been in his place. Probably not as long, he decides. Maybe a day or two, at most, then he’d have been dug out, a nice funeral ceremony would’ve been held, they’d have hung a picture of him smiling at school with candles and lots of flowers student and teachers would’ve bought in his memory.
It’s a girl that finds him after what feels like a week, but even when they pull him out, the ground sticks to his back, the tree stumps weigh on his legs and arms, as if his body wanted to stay there, as if this hole had become his place in the world. He doesn’t want this, though. He doesn’t want a hole. Jamie watches the body get dragged away, until he can’t see it anymore.
He walks for a long time, through the forest, until he reaches the railway. He walks along the tracks for a while, trying to reach the residential area, hoping to catch the sight of someone, but the fog erases the horizon, enveloping him more with each step. A silhouette emerges from the fog ahead, but when Jamie reaches it finally he finds a man struggling to walk, indiscernible whispering surrounding him. The man has no skin, muscles raw and a heavy steam escaping from his joints, his mouth, his head, as if he’d just been burned alive, even though Jamie has never seen someone burned alive, but he supposes this is what it would look like. He slows down as to not attract the figure’s attention, but as he turns around there are two more of them, maybe three. He knows then that the tracks won’t lead him into town. Wherever these creatures are headed, he doesn’t want to follow them. He’s not ready. He’s too scared.
_____
Jamie sees Adam for the first time after waiting outside the house of the girl who’d found him for a few days, hoping she could be the help he needs, but she isn’t. She had seen him, but had ignored him. She avoided any contact, and only sometimes looked down at him from her bedroom window, afraid and angry to be haunted by a dead classmate. She hadn’t asked for this when she’d found him. She hadn’t asked for anything.
One night, Adam appears between the curtains at her window, and when their eyes meet despite the darkness, Jamie feels the cold on his skin for a brief moment. If the girl won’t help him, Adam will. Adam would help him no matter what.
He follows Adam back to the river, where his hole is. « Don’t be scared. » Jamie tells him. « I don’t want to hurt you. » Adam answers that he’s not scared, but Jamie already knows. When he glances at the hole, he thinks about Adam lying in it, his pale skin glowing with the moonlight, how beautiful it would look. When Adam removes his t-shirt, his tank top, his sweats, and lies in the hole, it fits like the last piece of the puzzle. Adam closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, and Jamie feels the chill of the wind on the nape of his neck. He’s the one, he thinks. « I knew you’d be the one. » he says. He always knew.
_____
Jamie calls the fog « dead space ». He knows what it is, but even that’s not much, because the dead space is a crossroad, and understanding an intersection can’t tell you anything about where it will lead you. He learns how to use it though, tries to remember the paths to take and the ones to avoid. The dead space links forgotten places together, roads, cities, but also old sheds and a good amount of closets. This is how he ends up in Adam’s closet. How they start talking, a little bit at first. Adam gives him some of his clothes. And Jamie comes back, day after day. Adams shows him his computer games. There’s this one he really likes but he doesn’t memorize the name. He doesn’t really recall much about computers anyway. When Jamie is with Adam, he feels. Almost like he lives again. He feels more alive than how he remembers feeling before being put in the hole, and he clings to that sensation more than to anything else.
_____
The more time Jamie spends with Adam, the closer he feels the both of them become, almost as if they’d always been that way, even before everything. Jamie’s vision clears up, his memories don’t leave him as quickly, and his skin warms up, even just a bit. What he doesn’t notice, or maybe he just chooses not to acknowledge it, is that Adam’s skin gets simultaneously colder, his vision more blurry, and his mind confused. He only sees Adam hurting, the contours of his body defined, clear in the thick fog floating in his home, or was the word house? He looks at Adam and he knows the other boy wouldn’t call it home anymore. This place is falling appart, but he needs to keep Adam whole, he needs to keep Adam with him. He says « let’s go. come with me. » so easily, as if Adam himself had said those words. Jamie knows somewhere, that he thinks Adam will like, but that night shows him that the living aren’t exactly as he thought.
And as he watches the flames tear open the night sky, he realizes that he is not part of this world anymore. Despite the faint warmth on his skin, he sees the wind blow smoke into him, but he doesn’t feel any of it, neither the weight nor the scent. Jamie isn’t sure if he’s mad at Adam for what he did or at himself for not understanding it. He’s not sure if he’s mad about this at all or at the cruel realization that no matter how close he pulls Adam in, he will never be able to give him what he wants.
_____
After time passes, a while even though he’s not able to quantify it, he realizes he has no idea where Adam is. Why had they not seen each other for so long? What was Adam doing right now? It fills him with a sort of panic, an uneasiness itching at the nape of his neck. Jamie knows, somehow, that he’s losing some of his memories, and he worries he’ll eventually forget something important.
He ends up finding Adam in the forrest, near the dead space, somehow, even though it doesn’t really have any definite boundaries. It’s like the dead space is positioning itself around Adam. « I’m sorry for what I did. » Adam says. Jamie isn’t sure what he means, but accepts the apology nonetheless. The word sorry fills him and a shiver runs down his back. He wonders if Adam might be referring to what had kept them appart, since he has the presentiment that it had been on purpose, like he’d avoided him. They lie down together in the worn down shack Adam had been hiding in, their arms touching, the heat from Adam’s skin feeling like his own, like nothing had changed. Maybe as if Jamie was still alive, even. Both of them, like this, it’s something he would have wanted then, so he could’ve given Adam warmth too, instead of taking it all from him.
« Let’s play a game » Jamie says, quietly. « I tell you a story, and then you tell me one. It’s fun, you’ll see. » And Jamie just empties his mind. He wants to tell Adam something, but he doesn’t remember the words. He knows it’s the words he had always wanted to tell the other boy, but he just can’t recall what it was, so he says something else, anything else that could be similar. He tells Adam about the regional tracks and field competition, about the running practices he used to come and watch a bit too often. « It was so beautiful, like a line in a poem. » Adam smiles, and the sight sends another shiver down Jamie’s back. It feels warm in places where their skin doesn’t even touch. Their lips are almost touching, and Jamie watches the air come out of Adam’s mouth to enter his, like in the movies he used to watch as a kid, where the villain inhaled the hero’s soul to become stronger.
_____
Of course Jamie has, after a while, picked up that his memory is failing him. It’s not really hard to notice, because it gets worse with time, but the tough part is to make out what was real and what wasn’t. So when he finds himself in Adam’s closet, he’s afraid. Although it’s a familiar place, in this moment, he doesn’t remember why he is here, nor what he was doing before this instant. He hears a loud noise, something between a crash, like an object breaking violently, and a low scream. He opens the door so fast he almost loses his balance, eyes locking on Adam’s back. He hears the noise again, this time it’s definitely a scream, and notices the gaping hole in Adam’s bedroom door, pale hands clawing at the wood from outside in an attempt to find the handle. The memories flood back all at once, and when the door finally opens for the form to stand up and enter the room, he doesn’t even think before shouting « Frances! No! » and gripping Adam from the back by his shirt, taking a hold of the girl’s wrist to stop the hand holding a kitchen knife. She screams and cries and sobs, dropping the knife on the carpeted floor and shouting at them that she lost everything, it’s Adam’s fault, he stole her purpose away from her, she doesn’t have anything for herself anymore, it’s unfair, so unfair.
« Leave him alone, he’s not yours. » Jamie says, unwavering.
« So what, he’s yours? » Her voice is full of disgust and resentment and other things Jamie can’t grasp.
« I’m his. » Adam says, so quietly Jamie could’ve missed but he doesn’t. The words flow through his spine like warm water, and he looks at the other boy behind him halfway buried in the closet, trembling fingers on Jamie’s back.
« You have to go. » and Frances argues that she doesn’t have to, that she knows more about the rules than him. He knows it’s true, she was here years and years before him, but he also knows that she just doesn’t want to consider it. He reaches out a hand to touch her cheek, and another one to her shoulder until she relaxes and follows him into the closet. He looks at Adam with an expression that hopefully translates to I’ll be back, but doesn’t say a word. He turns around without looking back and enters the dead space holding the girl’s hand in his.
_____
Seeing it from so close, almost touching it, he could’ve lost himself, Jamie thinks. He would’ve followed Frances and never come back. But he can’t go now. Not when Adam still needs him. And so he walks through the dead space a little bit faster with each step, until he finds himself running. He runs for what seems like a lifetime, the word sounding funny in his mind because he forgot a long time ago what a lifetime meant, in terms of time but also in terms of life. In terms of feelings, and emotions, and every other small detail that seems trivial now. He recalls faintly an image of Adam running, his skin painted orange by the setting sun in the summer, and another word emerges. Purpose appears in fuzzy letters in front of him. Purpose. It sounds foreign but somehow fitting.
Jamie opens the closet to an empty bedroom. It’s dark out, and he tries to estimate how long he’d been gone, however he finds himself struggling to sort out the hours from the minutes, even the days from the seconds. He finds Adam sitting alone in the living room. He sits next to him, thighs touching. It makes Jamie shiver.
« Give me words » The whisper replays itself in his head. He has not opened his mouth but Adam slowly turns to him. His skin is white, almost grey, darker under his eyes, and it doesn’t sit well with Jamie, he wonders if Adam had always been this pale. It makes the boy in front of him look distant, slowly fading.
« Please. I’m ready. » Jamie closes his eyes. He hears a murmur and guesses it’s Adam trying. « Say it, in my mouth » When Adam shifts to face him completely, and he feels air filling his lungs, the cold envelops him and fills up his insides. It scares him but he doesn’t dare move.
« Sunset. » Adam says. The vision from the dead space reappears, only stronger, clearer, more vibrant. Jamie remembers a hill and grass under his fingers, a small breeze softening the heavy summer air. The sun casting an orange hue on everything its rays touch, and Adam’s face in the distance, sweat dripping from his hair as he runs along the racetracks.
Jamie opens his eyes after an eternity that didn’t last one minute, probably.
« You still see me, right? » He just wants to make sure. Adam says he sees him. Jamie can still feel his breath entering him and he still feels scared. Even after the words.
« Promise me you won’t leave me, Adam. »
« I promise » Jamie hears the boy say, but the words don’t reach him. They’re not said into his mouth. Adam has pulled away, and Jamie finds himself pondering on the significance of the word.
_____
He’s still trying to figure out the meaning of the word promise. Adam doesn’t say it again, so Jamie is left thinking about it too much, digging up every last fibber of memory he can possibly find. As he looks at Adam’s eyes, he sees something he’s never seen before, and he knows the word promise is not this. It’s not grey skin, it’s not tired eyes and a voice laced with sadness, with patched-up resolve, made-up confidence. « Promise » is not « you have to go », that he’s sure, but still, the words leave Adam’s mouth as if he’d rehearsed this moment hundreds of times, until he could say them exactly like he wanted to, without wavering, without hesitating. Jamie remembers himself saying this exact sentence to someone, and wonders if the words had scared them as much.
« Is this how you want me to remember you? » Adam says then, because Jamie is kind of putting up a fight, even though he knew this moment would come eventually. He hoped they could make it work. Adam needs him. Adam doesn’t have anyone besides him.
He looks at Adam’s face up close, then behind him at the mess he made of the girl’s room, at the broken window and various objects he doesn’t recognize littering the floor. He hopes Adam would reconsider, change his mind and go home, leave the girl and share his words with him, share his life, share his breath, but when he looks at Adam again, he has the feeling that this is where it ends, and even though living is important, remembering is just as much. It’s two things he doesn’t have anymore, but Adam does and maybe it’s enough for the both of them.
_____
When they get there, Adam is holding his hand and he forgets almost that he’s going. He wishes they could have done that sooner. « You can come with me. » leaves his mouth before he catches himself. It’s selfish but he can’t help it, despite knowing it won’t change a thing.
He wants to say something else, one word he has to give Adam before leaving. The word he had always felt he needed to say but never found, as if it was missing from his vocabulary from the start.
Adam presses their foreheads together, and as it leaves the other boy’s mouth to enter his, it feels like his last breath.
« Love. »
And Jamie sees Adam sitting in the computer lab, laughing. He sees Adam running along the racetracks after school. He sees Adam running by his house, their gazes meeting through the window on the second floor. He sees Adam winning a race, eyes shinning like never before. He knows that this is it. This is what this word means for him. He wants to say it back, but afraid of losing it, he takes a step back, and keeps it to himself.
« I’m glad it was you, Adam. » Jamie says, and it holds all of what he’d ever wanted to say.
I’m glad it was you who spoke to me.
I’m glad it was you who looked at me and smiled.
I’m glad it was you who helped me.
I’m glad it was you who understood me.
I’m glad it was you I loved.
A/N: Writing something is always an extremely fun but hard experience for me. I started this last fall, after I saw the movie and finished the book, it took me several months to write less than 4K words. Anyhow, I'm glad it's done, and I'm satisfied with the outcome, although I would have loved to make it more of a love story. Along the way I found myself going with the flow of the original works and going against it felt out of place. I wanted to write something in Jamie's perspective, I hope this isn't too out of character. Anyway, for this, I used different elements from both the movie and the book, so I guess knowing both would make it easier, although not necessary, to understand the whole thing.
Like always, this was not beta'ed, so feel free to point out any mistake. Thank you for reading! See you soon, hopefully, for Ursa Minor chapter 5, which is on its way.