Forever Within the Numbered Days
It starts soon after they move in together. The tiredness, the pallor, the not-eating, shadows dark under his eyes, bruises teeming on his skin like angry thunderclouds.
She sits and watches from the kitchen table, their kitchen table, as he clatters about, looking for his keys. He's thinner than he used to be, diminished, reduced from the person she met two-and-a-half years ago at the faculty ball, hovering uncertainly at the edge of the room, dapper in a somewhat faded suit, looking as though the hotel ballroom with its lacquered floor and chandelier like knife-sharp shards of ice was his very own personal hell.
"You don't look very well," she says sleepily, turning her cereal spoon over and over in her hands. Her Shreddies are slowly forming a milky mush at the bottom of her bowl.
"Kitty, I'm fine," he says, exasperated. "Have you seen my damned keys?"
"You forget that as a nurse, I deal with sick people every day." She pushes her cereal away, getting up from her chair and padding over to him, all wild dark curls and patterned pyjamas. "And as your girlfriend, I also know when you're lying to me."
"I'm just a bit under the weather," he protests, turning to face her and taking her wrists. "Look, I've got to go. I'll see you this evening." He kisses her quickly – even after all this time, she marvels at how he still wields the power to turn her blood to fire and her bones to ashes – and makes his escape, his car keys jangling like the discordant notes of a victory march.
As his forgotten toast pops in a cloud of smoke, she wishes that he wouldn't be so stubborn.
Later that day, she's sitting on the ward supervising visiting time when the door opens and Matron Carter slips in, her stern face creased with lines like an origami figurine.
"Nurse Trevelyan," she says quietly. "If you'd just step outside with me for a second…"
There is damp, sincere sadness to her usually guarded iron-coloured eyes, and Kitty nods, gesturing to Flora Marshall – in conversation with one of the patients – to take her place.
The corridor is deserted, white, clinical. Matron Carter turns to face her. "Nurse Trevelyan, am I correct in assuming that your boyfriend is a certain Dr Thomas Gillan?"
"Yes," Kitty says, warily. It's not forbidden to go out with any of the doctors, but within the hospital walls, professionalism must be kept up.
"I'm afraid to inform you that he collapsed today, during a surgery. He's undergone some scans, and they've put him in the ICU."
"What?" Kitty stares at her, aghast, sagging against the wall.
"I've arranged for other people to take over your shifts. They're expecting you in the ICU." Matron rests a hand on Kitty's shoulder. "I'm sorry."
Kitty is mute. Thomas, her Thomas, her indestructible boyfriend who helped her flee the constricting coils of her old life that were tangled around her like the thorns guarding the castle of a sleeping princess, who'd hacked them away, her wonderful, grumpy, passionate, driven Scotsman couldn't have collapsed. He'd always been the strong one, the one who'd brought her out of the looming depression that circled like carrion crows above her head, he couldn't be sick, no, no….
"Go," Matron says.
Their friend Miles waits for her at the entrance to the ICU. Without a word, he opens his arms and Kitty walks straight into them, resting her head on his shoulder. Her whole self feels weak, disconnected, like a helium balloon lifting off into the great unknown.
"How is he?" she asks, her voice muffled by his white clinical coat. "What happened?"
"Do you want to come into my office?"
"Miles, tell me."
"You'd better sit down."
"Miles."
He lets out a slow breath, resting his cheek against the top of Kitty's head. "I don't suppose Tom told you that he had cancer as a kid?"
"What?" Kitty jerks out of his embrace, disbelieving, looking for the humour that always sparks beneath his eyes. Seriousness stares back at her. "What are you saying?"
"He suffered from leukaemia for about five years at the end of primary school and the beginning of secondary school," Miles rakes a hand through his hair. "He's relapsed." Tears glisten at the corners of his eyes like fragmented crystals, reflecting the light. "God, Kitty, I've just seen the scans. It's everywhere; it must have been like this for months."
"No," Kitty shakes her head, back and forth, back and forth, as though it might dislodge the words from her head, make them happen to someone else, make them not happen at all. "No."
"Kitty, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry." Miles' voice cracks, and then they're holding each other tightly, sharing strength, sharing hope.
"Can I see him?"
"He's unconscious, still."
"I don't care."
"Alright. Alright."
He's so still, so silent, and when his eyes eventually open it's like an electric shock jolts through Kitty's heart.
"Hey," he rasps, dry-voiced.
"Hey," she whispers back, reaching out to twine her fingers through his. There's a drip in his hand.
They watch each other for long, slow seconds. She memorises the way that lock of fair hair falls across his forehead, the way his lips curve up at the corners.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she asks, eventually, choking back the hurt.
"It never came up?" he offers weakly. "I've been in remission for so long, I guess I was in denial. Like I could force it to go away if I didn't think about it."
"You should have told me," she says, the words thick with angry tears. "You should have told me, Tom. You could have got treatment, we could have beaten it."
"I know," he says, running his thumb across the back of her knuckles. "I'm sorry."
When the doctors give up on the chemotherapy, they bring him home, to their little flat in Merton, pushing his wheelchair down the pavement under a barrage of silent, sympathy-filled looks.
The doctors say that there are only weeks left. Weeks, when there should have been months, years, a wedding, a family, a house in the country with roses straggling over the porch, sitting in rocking chairs by the dying embers of a fireplace with a gaggle of grandchildren at their feet.
She takes time off from work, and curls up at his side under their big, yellow duvet, sun pouring into the bedroom like golden cream, setting the dust motes spinning in a wild dance. They read together, watch films, talk, hold hands, kiss. She takes him in the wheelchair to Hyde Park, and they eat ice-cream and drink bubbling champagne by the Serpentine. They play Scrabble on the grass, watch as children leap, scream and splash in the brightly colourless water of Princess Diana's memorial fountain.
One night, they lie in the garden at the back of the flat, he cocooned tightly in old, tartan blankets, gazing up at the stars that blink like tiny sequins against the satiny backdrop of the night.
"Remember when we first did this?" Kitty asks. "You showed me the constellations, and I told you all the myths behind them."
"Yes, I do," he says, looking towards her. He sighs, slow, painful. "You said that they were all heroes that the gods hung in the sky to forever immortalise their deeds."
"You deserve to be up there with Perseus and Hercules and Orion," she tells him, trying desperately to keep the sadness from choking her voice.
"Oh, and what would my constellation be? A scalpel? A surgical mask?" he scoffs, and Kitty begins to laugh, a sob-laugh that wracks her chest and makes her feel more alive than she has done in weeks. She rolls towards him, and then they are nose to nose, dark, dark eyes meeting eyes as blue as a summer's day.
"I love you," she breathes, and he kisses her, tenderly, adoringly, and in that moment, she feels buoyant, airborne, barely there.
"I love you too."
In the morning, she comes crashing back to earth like a hot-air balloon with no hot-air. Thomas lies beside her, eyes closed. His breathing is laboured, dragging in and out of his chest as though the air has turned to lead. She calls Miles in a panic, and he comes over from his flat across the road, sits on Thomas' other side, holding Kitty's hand.
They wait, for there is nothing else to do.
In the afternoon, he wakes briefly, seeing Kitty and managing a smile before the restless, greedy sleep of the dying pulls him back under.
Three days later, Miles is making tea in the kitchen. The kettle clicks off. The water subsides. There is a stifling stillness, as though the very world has been frozen at the hands of some ancient magic. And then Kitty screams, an awful, tearing, wrenching scream, the scream of someone whose heart has been ripped from their chest and snapped in half.
He bolts into the bedroom. Kitty is still screaming, gasping, her hands pressed to Thomas' chest as though she can make him come back to life, as though she is trying to catch his soul as it seeps away through his cold skin.
Miles pulls her close, and she crumples against him like a promise someone forgot to keep, her hands clawing into his shoulders.
What can he say when the words wrap themselves into a noose about his neck? What can he say, when he's just lost his best friend, when Kitty's lost the love of her life?
What do they do without him?
It takes months, but slowly, they put themselves back together like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. Kitty wears Thomas' old jumpers about the place, and Miles always makes sure to set a third place at the table for dinner. They make stars out of silver foil, stick them on the ceiling in the shape of a heart, for the hearts Thomas had cured in his surgeries and for the lives he had touched.
One evening, Miles comes home to find Kitty lying on the bed, staring up at the constellation that winks and twinkles in the blaze of the sunset that arrows through the window. He sits down beside her, propping himself up against the headboard.
Eventually, she turns to look at him, an epiphany shining out of her midnight-coloured eyes. "Everyone in this world has a certain number of days in which to live," she says, suddenly. "And Tom got less, far less, than he deserved. But within those numbered days, he gave us his forever, and for that I'll always be grateful."
Miles squeezes her hand, and they lapse into silence, letting memories play out like an old, crackling video tape behind their eyes. For the first time, he feels at peace with fate, because he knows that he and Kitty are Tom's forever.
They owe it to him to live it well.
A/N I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. This is completely and unashamedly inspired by 'The Fault in Our Stars' by John Green - I got back from seeing the film for the second time, sat down, and wrote this. It's based on the quote 'He gave me forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.' Don't kill me, I'm sorry, I'm sorry! Please, review. I'd really like to hear from you all. Even if it's just angst for me making Tom die. Sorry. Sorry. A thousand apologies. Needle xxx