Fic: One More Gaudy Night Part 3/?
By the spring of the following year, David was back in the hospital, and this time Daniel could have bribed me with every rare edition of every book known to man - it would have made no difference. I was going to stay, as he had asked me to, endure this until the bitter end, whatever form it took.
I pushed them away. It was easy to do - I knew them too well by now, knew just how to act arrogant, uncaring, cold enough that it was too much effort to keep trying, that the only possible result would be to renew their own past pain.
David, I suspect, wanted a glorious death, a last two fingers up at his father, a last wonderful, brilliant defiance of all he was meant to stand for. It was not to be. He slipped into death as quietly as he had so often fallen asleep in our bed - but the final breath was never redrawn, even as the oxygen hissed its subtle doom into the room. The machines fell into lines, into thin wails - and I sat there, unheeding, waiting for the next breathe to be retaken, as nurses rushed around me and various machines were attached.
I waited. I waited, and waited, and refused to allow this to happen, because I watched, that was what I did, I watched for the moment when I could step in and correct things, and that time had not yet come because he was going to breathe in, and all this hurrying would be for nothing, he would show them how futile it was.
I kept listening for that next breath all the way back from the Radcliffe Infirmary, forcing myself to tune out the chatter that surrounded me, because I knew, above all things I knew, that if I concentrated hard enough I would hear it -
and all will be well -
- that if I blocked out the world, if I were a better lover, a better friend, a better man, he would phone, sit up with the blue tint gone from his lips and phone me, damnit, this was too bloody irresponsible for words, that he should leave me like this to deal with his father and the inevitable closing out from his life that was to begin. He had been my world, and what was I supposed to do with the crumbled husk of it now?
- all manner of things shall be well
- and this was wrong, this was utterly bloody wrong, when I had agreed to stay with him I had never thought that it would mean the sheer abandonment that would follow.
I realised, on that long, lonely journey home, that I had always assumed I would go with him, at the last, that in asking me to stay, he was in fact asking me to accompany him.
Never in all my bloody mindedness had I stopped to think that this would be the end for me, not because I, too, was embarking upon that last great adventure, but because I was to be left behind, not deemed ready to take that final step, not counted among those worthy of death’s gift.
I was, after all, only allowed to watch what others did. It seemed fitting that this should be my introduction to the way my world would always work.
David was gone, and I had cut myself free weeks before from all other moorings.
David was gone.