Short Kathy POV post-NLMG (applicable to book or film, I suppose!)


You were so much more than a warehouse for organs. I wish I'd told you that when you were lying awake in agony, awaiting the final operation, preparing to take the final plunge. I wish I'd whispered it into your ear, so you could smile that knowing smile, while never letting up your stoic gaze at the ceiling that had a pattern far too boring to elicit your undivided attention (you really thought I didn't know, but I think there were parts of you I knew better than you knew yourself.)

I had looked at you, so fragile and yet so inexplicably brave. I wondered what it must have felt like being two-thirds empty. I was still whole. For a few more months. I looked at the cracked lines on your lips, the jaundice of your hollow face, and I thought a hundred different things that I could have told you. A thousand promises I would let you slip away with. A million scenarios we might have lived out had we not been born of science, raised in Hailsham, gifted to the broken, but superiorly human, bodies of the world.

And yet for the infinite amount of things I might have said, it was the ultimate cliché that I whispered into your hair, your lips, the curve of your shoulder, the scarred skin on your chest.

"I love you, Tommy."

And I ought to have told you that you weren't completing, because you lived on with me, because you were so much more than a donor, you were a life, a lover, and you had made a mark on my very real soul.