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“We were to be married,” Francis said to his coffee, “in the spring.”
“Shame,” Gilbert muttered from across the table. “Damn shame.”
“Gilbert, you- you do not think it is too late, do you? Do- do you still think I could- is there anything left that I can do?”
Gilbert looked at him, red eyes circled with the shadows of the sleep-deprived. “He’s dying, Francis,” is what he said, “and that’s something no one can do anything about. Not even us. Not even you.”
-
Francis’ house (or their house, or just Francis’ house, now, but he’ll always think of it as their house) was filled with clocks.
Back when Arthur was healthier, he was a clockmaker. He’d take the clocks he didn’t sell or the ones he liked too much and hang them in the space he shared with Francis- their apartment, then their other apartment, then the half of a house they’d rented, then their home. The silence and the spaces in the commodious street-corner home were filled by the ticking of clocks, and they’d look at them and figure they had all the time in the world to do everything.
Things were different now.
Francis came home to an empty house, every day, after spending hours working at the hospital (even if he called it working and Gilbert called it obsessing over one single case he couldn’t change at all). His returns were greeted by the sound of ticking that haunted all the hallways and corners, the ticking that wrapped around his brain and settled there, the ticking that whispered you’re running out of time.
Every night, he curled up by himself and said I know I know I know.
-
The room was filled with the static of a radio, a radio tuned by trembling fingertips. It was the only noise amongst the white silence- the white sheets, the white curtains, the white walls and the white trays and the white everything.
Arthur knew that one day he’d simply be another stain in the mass of white he had to call his home. He tried to figure out whether or not it’d be easier if that day came sooner or later.
That was the thing about dying in hospitals. Or maybe that was just the thing about death.
You never knew. It slid into lives and contaminated everything and everyone it touched and spared no one.
Not even Francis and Arthur.
Perhaps it would be different if everyone knew what was wrong with Arthur to begin with. They’d all come up with their various explanations- Arthur had his I should have bloody quit smoking when I’d first intended to, Francis had his I did not take care of you enough, Gilbert had his the universe just likes to screw with anything awesome. Scores and scores of faceless doctors had their opinions and their files and their well-formulated explanations, but none of them had managed to fit. The damn thing was a puzzle, and none of the pieces they picked up snapped in.
Gilbert and Arthur had long since stopped thinking that the right one would be found.
Francis decided he wasn’t giving up on looking for it until it was all over.
Arthur felt sorry for Francis quite often. He’d tell the Frenchman things like you don’t have to do this and really, Francis, go out and live and you’d be bloody well fine, shut up. The look Francis would get on his face, though- the look that spoke volumes for being such a simple construction of facial features- would tear Arthur apart on the inside.
So they settled back into their old banter, as much as they could, as much as anything could allow, and didn’t talk of medical things or hospital rooms or sentences along the lines of you are dying and I can do nothing and do you know, Arthur, how much I will miss you?
They were good at that, pretending nothing was wrong, building up walls and blocking everything out. Arthur did his best to pull on a brave face and scowl at Francis like he always did, and Francis found it in him to laugh sometimes, like he used to.
It was perfectly clear to them that they were acting like children. It was perfectly clear that they were trying to hold on to everything they could before it was gone.
-
“Do you think if he knew what exactly was going on,” Roderich inquired one day, sitting in the break room behind a wall of coffee and medical files (because Roderich, being Roderich, brought his work everywhere), “he’d act any different?”
Gilbert shook his head. “He wouldn’t,” he began, “because Francis is desperate, and he’s always been desperate to hold onto everything he loves, and he’s going to keep trying anything he can to keep Arthur alive. I honestly can’t figure out which is worse- watching them destroy themselves like this or the fact that I’m seriously hoping for some damn cliched happy ending.”
“We take solace in the prospect of happy endings, Gilbert,” Roderich said, “because sometimes they are all we have. I think, in their eyes, they are all each other has. It would be like breaking up a set if one of them died. They fight- but they fit.”
Gilbert returned to his coffee and Roderich returned to his medical files at the moment the radio in the corner flickered to life.
Janet I swore
if you walked through the door
I won’t call you tomorrow
And in your mistake
forgot in your haste
your pills for tomorrow
-
You never know how you’ll react to a situation until it happens. You change to fit the situation- the universe isn’t kind, after all, so the situation would never change to fit you.
Death is no exception.
Everything warps. Everything changes. Everything becomes different.
-
(Francis, at one time, had prided himself on being one of the top doctors in the hospital he worked at.
This was no longer the case, in his eyes. All the diplomas and the certificates and the awards were put away, removed from his office, gone, because he couldn’t stand to look at them, couldn’t stand to see everything he’d learned and everything he’d worked towards thrown back in his face.
The case with Arthur was never a matter of trying to live up to what he had already achieved. It was a matter of keeping the only thing that ever mattered in his life close and alive. It was a matter of working for all hours to try and figure it out.)
-
Francis woke up every morning wondering if it was the day he was going to have to say good-bye.
Arthur went to sleep every night wondering if seeing Francis’ face and hearing his sobs in the hallway would be the last thing he experienced.
They kept this to themselves.
-
Arthur sat and tuned his radio because it gave him something to do. It distracted him from the more pressing things in life- the tubes in his arms, the wires on his chest, the beeping monitors next to him, and- and the way Gilbert looked at him whenever he passed by the door, every once in a while, with a look that said yeah, you’re dying, but we kinda can’t do anything, sorry.
Sometimes, knowing that that was true hurt more than anything else.
So he focused on other things, like tuning the radio and remembering better times. Like when he and Francis had first met (back in college in a moment of ‘if you keep giving me that look from across the library I’m lobbing this shelf at you, Bonnefoy’ and ‘you are quite cute when you act like that, Kirkland,’ and ‘it’s not acting. I will seriously punch your face off if I have to.’). Like when they’d first started dating (‘What, no flowers?’ ‘Do you want me to get flowers and shove them up your ass, Francis?’). Like when they’d graduated (‘Together, Francis? Even if we wind up being absolute terrible bastards?' ‘Of course, Arthur. Always.’).
When Arthur was alone- really alone, the two-thirty-in-the-morning-hospital-insomniac alone, when he’d gotten tired of composing music to the beeping of the heart monitor- that memory always made him cry.
He had too much pride, even in this state, to cry in front of Francis. The mindset was that I have to show him that no matter what happens I’m fine. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. I’m still here. Right now. I'm here and I'm breathing and it hurts but I'm fine.
(Sometimes, he thinks he does that to convince himself more.)
But he wasn’t crying in front of Francis, not for anything or because of anything, ever again- because the world would not take the best of him away in such a manner.
So he concentrated on the time when things were fine. When there wasn’t hacking, blood-filled coughs and endless hospital machines and being alone. When there wasn’t this- nameless illness between them, between everything.
Late at night, the radio flickered to life again in trembling hands.
And you need to take
three pills each day
otherwise the virus will surely gain
travel through your veins,
to your heart,
your brain,
ending all the life that you seem to know
-
The only other sound in the room besides Arthur’s radio was the clock on the wall. It’s strange, he thought, that the things he put most of his life into (when he wasn’t composing in silence to the sounds around him) would be the things to tick the last remnants of his life way.
He could taste the irony in his mouth.
It could just be the blood, but he pretended it wasn’t (-because it can’t be, it just can’t be, this can’t be happening, this can’t be real, it has to be something else, it has to be a nightmare, Francis, you need to bloody well wake me up before something else happens and-).
-
After he checked on Arthur every morning, Francis retreated to his office and worked. Scores and scores of puzzles and solutions and pieces and options had been thought up and discarded over the year he’d been working on this, and every time, he came up with nothing. Every test failed, every medicine failed, every prayer to a soundless and imaginary god failed. Each one tore him apart on the inside because it meant he was one more step away from figuring it all out.
He was one more step away from Arthur (which meant one more step away from perfection and happiness and everything in his life he was accustomed to and if that were to just suddenly leave-).
That morning, the radio was flickering and Francis was starting to lose more and more of his composure (it fell off in pieces and he could hear it in conjunction with the beeping of the monitors that haunted his nightmares).
And Janet you called
you cried on the phone
said darkness surrounds you…
-
Things were starting to break.
Because everything always does, no matter how well it was originally put together.
-
Occasionally- on those very rare days- they’d really slip back into the way they used to be. Quick banter and sharp glances and wry smiles. They exchanged insults like air, like they always had, like the way they’d always functioned.
But it was hard- because each remark related to each other, each quip brought back some memory of when they still lived in the same house, each smile dragged up more pain than was necessary. Every- single- damn- thing they did reminded them that they didn't have that anymore and they'd never have that anymore so why were they still trying?
The masks were falling apart like glass and they could hear them breaking in the white silence.
Arthur cleared his throat, jade eyes downcast, those shaking fingertips curling around the sheets of his hospital bed.
"Francis," he began, "have you- how's it going?"
"Oh. Um," Francis fidgeted as he spoke, trying to put together words in the right way because it was hard, all of a sudden, to even think about speaking, once he heard the way Arthur's voice cracked. "You know, it is- going as well as it can be. I have been working but I still have not found anything sufficient."
(And it felt like they weren't even the same people anymore, really, because Francis couldn't be himself around Arthur and Arthur was starting to crack himself.)
Arthur took in a breath. He'd been thinking about this for weeks, trying to put it all into words in his head so that when he finally got himself together and tried to say it it wouldn't hurt.
But this was Francis, Francis Bonnefoy, the damn Frenchman he'd been in love with for ten years, and of course Francis would understand. Of course Francis would understand that they couldn't go on like this. That they couldn't go on pretending everything was fine when Arthur was dying and Francis was going insane trying to figure something out.
A white, sterilized clock that hung on the wall by the door was ticking in his ears and he couldn't stand it.
“Francis,” he tried again, “what- and I mean this in all honesty- what are you going to do, you know, if, er- if-“
I can’t finish that sentence, I don’t want to finish that sentence, I don’t want to say it because then it’ll be true and- and-
"I mean- we know what we mean to each other, and, I just suppose- it's just- Francis, I think this has to stop."
Francis looked away, leaning back in the chair (his chair) by the bed. He tugged at the sleeves of his white coat, intending to disguise the way his own hands had started trembling. And then he looked back- and they were staring at each other, eyes roaming hungrily over each others' faces, trying to take everything in, ocean eyes and jade eyes and shades of blonde hair, the gorgeous and the coarse, the delicate collarbones and sunken cheeks and every single damn thing about them that they never wanted to forget.
And then it just- stopped. Because everything stops, really, once it can't go on.
"I- what would I do without you, Arthur?"
"What, without me- without me nagging your ear off, or- or attempting to destroy your kitchen, or- or stupid things like that, you could- you could have that with anyone, anyone, not just me, and- and-"
I don't want you to get hurt. That I in your sweet thought should be forgot, if thinking of me then should make you woe.
"-you're putting too much store in this, you git, we can't go on like this-"
And- and- I can't do this, for everything that I am, everything that I was, I can't do this-
"-you should just- let me die and get it over with."
-so- do not so much as my poor name rehearse, but let your love even with my life decay. Forget me, Francis, because- because nothing good is coming of this and I don't want to see you destroy yourself even more, dammit.
Francis cleared his throat. Phrases like you are right and we- I- I should stop doing this, for the sake of both of us and you are right, Arthur, you are so right, but I cannot just- let you go like this and even if I am running out of things and cases and pieces to research and I love you I love you I love you got caught in his throat.
Radio.
Well death sucks, I know
but it’s your time to go
Janet, I love you
-
The next few days were quiet.
-
Death, as always, preyed upon the unexpected.
That did not mean that those who expected it were saved (because no one ever is. And before you know it, there’s a gaping hole in your life, an empty chair, an empty desk, and so many things will try and fill the space and no matter how happy you may be eventually, there will always be a space).
-
That day, Gilbert had called Francis from his office with a flurry of wild hand movements, and Francis had immediately understood and came running.
The radio was still singing in the background.
It’s just
You hurt me so much
As I cried and I begged
for just one more day, one more night
you left me in pain
-
Every single conversation they’d had before this- especially the last one (even if it seemed to set everything up so well)- was erased by the slow beeping and the panicked breaths and that white silence.
Arthur, even with everything they’d been through, had never really gotten around to the words I love you in any situation. It had always been a foreign phrase that got stuck in his throat and was hard to say because it was so easy to break that phrase and forget it. It was so easy to pretend it was never said. He saved it for special occasions, he’d said.
Francis had never heard it.
And then-
“I love you.”
(They were crying because it was seconds from being over and there were still so many things to do and say and so many things to be and it had to be a nightmare a long nightmare it couldn’t have been happening and- and- and-)
(They were to be married, you know, in the spring.)
"I- I-I am not- under any damn c-circumstances- wearing a dress."
"But of course you are, cher. Together?"
"O-Of course, Francis."
(But-)
White silence.
Stop, the sounds through your heart
as you cried and you begged
for just one more day, one more night
it’s too late
-
Francis was not sure how he managed to move afterward.
There were traces everywhere. Empty chairs. Empty tables. Cold sheets. Space. Barren hallways and dressers that lacked the proper amount of clothes. Something was missing- like the other half of a set. The world was still going in every way possible, but everything seemed lost without that extra person, without that extra smile, without those extra eyes. Without a car coming home every night and without goodnight kisses.
There was a buzzing in his ears and lead inside his chest now. It was dull and it was awful and it hurt.
-
“So you never figured it out.”
“No.”
Funerals had to be some form of hell, Francis figured, all red-eyed and trembling and tear-stained. Too many people, too many hugs and close contact and arms that weren't the ones he wanted.
Cemeteries also had to be some form of hell.
It was then when Alfred approached him properly, in a sombre suit and an ashen Matthew in tow. They stood off to the side, by the road, Francis’ eyes trained on the headstone, ignoring Alfred's hand on his shoulder (it burned).
“Ever think you will?”
“No.”
(Because the time to find the pieces had run out.)
-
It felt like ages (but was only really months) before Francis figured out what the buzzing was.
The clocks in their (his) house were still ticking.
Gilbert thought it meant something.
"I mean- think about it, Francis- don't clocks usually stop?"