End.

The skeletal frame struck me first.

In a hall of hushed silence, a figure much too thin and pale to match with the memories of the past laid motionless beneath light blankets. Muscle gone. Eaten away by three years of Nothing. Three years of silence. Of stillness. Tubes fed nutrition into one arm, and medication fed into the other. This and that attached to here and there. Monitoring blood pressure. Pulse. Breathing.

The skin was so white... impossibly white... like a ghost of a former self. Blue veins bulging out from beneath paper-like skin. Sitting at bedside, I feared to let myself touch. To hold hands. Sickening thoughts pulling to mind of my own hands - hard and scarred from the Job - damaging that brittle skin. Tearing it. Accidentally peeling it away from muscles which hadn't been used in far too long. Muscles that had had no reason to be laid in such a permanent rest...

The shell was healthy. Always was.

On the night of the accident... of panic and squealing tires and a mass of tentacles and twisted metal... I awoke to a blurred world of rushing actions and a flood on nonsensical words. I was moving fast - people either side of me - but I was lying on my back. An oxygen mask on my face. A brace around my neck. Body strapped down as the gurney was sent on its path. I felt confusion. Fear. But, above it all, my mind was only on my family. I tried asking those around me for them through the mask. I tried shouting for them. Straining for voice against the morphine and polluted noise...

The five of us had survived. Fractured ribs, a broken arm, fractured collar bones, concussions, whiplash, gashes, and purple and black bruising telling the tale amongst us... but, for the mess we were pulled from, the doctors and nurses called it "a miracle" that we were all alive. That we were all "stable" by midnight. Against doctor's orders, I managed out of my bed and found my spouse in a white hall so similar to the one of present. Standing at the door, I could only sag against the frame and whisper the name that I can been crying out from the instant I had regain consciousness on that gurney...

Alex... would never answer back.

Outwardly, Alex's injures were... serious, but manageable. The shell would heal itself slowly. Leaving jagged scars in memory across the shoulder and down across the side... but... the shell is only the shell. A body is nothing without a mind. Just as everything from a simple bicycle to a billion dollar jet is nothing without a pilot...

From that night on... those beautiful eyes that I fell for... eyes that persuaded me to swallow my nerves and ask if a seat had yet to be taken on a bus... eyes that I used to drown in every single time we made love... no longer held any sign of life. Blue pits of misery stared out into the world. Staring out, but never seeing. Never healing.

Some wounds cut too deep to ever heal.

Part of me prayed... that the diagnosis would come back as brain-dead. That Alex wasn't aware of the world. That the spirit was gone, and only the shell remained. Beating a heart for an empty mind. Much like a car idling in a parking lot. Waiting for passengers that would never show up. Secretly, I prayed for that. Because I knew deep down that Recovery wasn't in the cards... and I just wanted there to be peace. An End. Even if I was alone. Even if I lost the love of my life... even if Leo lost a parent... at least Alex would have an End.

Please, God.

They didn't know.

They didn't know if or when Alex would come back. If Alex was even There to come back at all.

Tests.

They wanted more tests. More time.

Tests and time.

Inside, I knew Alex was all too aware. All too awake.

All I had to do was look out the hospital window to Know all too well. To see Him staring back. Standing out across the parking lot. Near a treeline. Even from that distance, I knew He was peering deep down inside me. Down far too deep. Seeing everything I was. Knowing everything. And I Knew even as I stared back in that darkest night... even as I tuned out the doctors trying to tell me to stay positive... supportive...

I Knew.

Time Was Up.

"Pencils down, class! Please pass your papers to the front." 

The body that I once held so close... was now nothing more than a prison for Alex's mind. A mind that heard the knocking on the door, but wasn't getting up to answer it anymore...

I sat at bedside for hours that felt like minutes. One of Alex's hands clasped in mine - holding it to my lips as I prayed on dead faith to anything that was close enough to hear. Or maybe I wasn't praying at all anymore. I don't quite remember. I just remember the pain straight through my chest that burned worse than even the bullet that Nigel had personally delivered there. I just remember the ache that seemed to claw at the very bedrock of my heart. I just remember feeling the tears run down my cheeks, one after the other before tracing their way across Alex's limp fingers...

Owen came to see me more than once during that night. Arm in a sling. Head wrapped up, covering over one eye. Limping. Placed a hand on my shoulder and gave me near to the same speech the doctors did. Hearing it again felt like biting down on tin foil. He told me he'd watch Alex for a while. To go see Leo. That it would do me good. My boy needed me...

And he needs me again now.

He needs me to protect him... just like he needed me to read him a bedtime story that night at the hospital...

But I'm not the Master Storyteller.

I'm not.

I...




Always Alex.

God, how I needed you.

When I Knew... when He let me Know... my heart tore in two just to look at you. At what you were reduced to. Suffering through. All because I had to get involved. All because I wanted to See. To Understand. To Know.

It wasn't you.

It was me.

And it broke my heart to know it. To see it. On you and Leo. Just a boy who's eyes were maturing too fast. Who was starting to utter things his mind shouldn't even understand...

Children understand more than what we give them credit for, don't they...?

But that doesn't mean... I can't try to shelter him from the worst of it, does it?

It doesn't mean I can't take the hits instead. That I can't take them... burden them... so long as he is safe...

I didn't know what to say to you, Alex. Even as I sat on that stiff bed. Staring at you while you held that same lifeless gaze as before - I wasn't sure what to feel. I thought my chest might lite up again in the same flames I had known that night. I thought I'd feel that same weakness. That same despair. I thought that, perhaps, I'd break down in tears... or at least need to work to hold them back...

My eyes were dry.

My heart - whatever left of it there is - only pinched with a mild ache. Not love. Not a heart re-breaking into even more fragments. Just... longing, perhaps. A want for things to have been different...

You would hate me, now.

I wouldn't blame you.

but... I will always love you, Alex.

...even if my heart has forgotten how.




Decapitation... is one of the quickest methods. Everything just stops. Everything.

Red on white.

Such a sharp contrast that I...

It startled me. I don't know why. I've seen it before. The contrast. White to red. Red running in small rivers along creases and folds... but seemed so much sharper then. Unnatural. Blue eyes had turned black as the rain thundered down on the streets outside... but I could only stare at the contrast. Blood was splattered on my face... on my arms...  little rivers...

it was hot

bizarre

for something so hot to still pulse... in a figure so cold...


When I left there was... someone in the rain. The Butler was waiting where I had left him in the car but... even in the downpour that washed away the splatter... the figure made me stop and stare. Just a fleeting glance in the blanket of the storm...

an old man

umbrella raised

i shouldn't have been able to tell from that distance but... there was a despair in those eyes... a sadness...

I shouldn't have been able to see it.

I shouldn't...


























i need to see him