Ugh. I don't know why I'm doing this. I'm probably gonna cry for eighty years after this is done. Eh, yolo.

Note: Dark Passage spoilers. The exact days of the week for this and the ending of Dark Passage may not coincide, but it's fanfiction.
And: To Sophia Dream: You're added on the petition!
SHAMELESS PLUG: Please go check out my new KK forum, The Talk of the Kingdom! I'm gonna stop posting if I don't get any more views. I don't wanna do that.
AND! Go check out Anubis08's KK roleplay forum! We need more characters! :D
Also: Neon Cloud's amazing "For The King", her gorgeous oneshot about Finn after it too, gave me hope for this. Go read it. Favorite and leave a review. You're crazy good, Neon! Twenty times better then I'll ever be, baby.

First Friday

This is the first Sunday since he died.

Finn still isn't able to pause mid-sentence when he reaches out to greet his friend with a "Hey, pal!" He still isn't able to comprehend, categorize, understand, that when he goes to wave, there won't be a response.

He lies on his bed, counting the ceiling stains, rubbing his hand back and forth on the navy duvet cover. The last few days have been misty clouds. He doesn't know the last person he's talked to. He hasn't slept.

The people in charge got them home quickly, alright. It is almost as if they all want to pretend not anything ever happened. Like, if they are in their own beds by the time the next sun rises, yesterday is a nothing.

But he knows otherwise. He knows that the burden in him arms, slowly slumping down, rapidly losing life and words, will never burn away.

This is the first Monday.

It's supposed to be good to be home. From all the magazines and articles that were thrown into his eyes, this is a new stage of healing that will be more comfortable and easier to lean on the people who love you most. Or that may have been what it said. He doesn't really know words anymore.

But how to lean? They've been there, sure, at the moment it happened, but did they hold him in his arms? Did they spend their whole life laughing and playing soldiers and knights and kings and looking into his light-filled eyes? All to know, that one day, it'll end, because all things end, but some too soon, because that's the way it is and only the good die young and all that ridiculousness, reasoning and okaying child death. Because that's all he really was, a child king.

He can't speak now, because as the words were taken away from his friend, they were taken away from Finn also. It only seems right. The only thing to remember him by, the one thing they both share.

Silence.

This is the first Tuesday.

They've stopped fighting evil, all of them, because it's just too darn soon. After what they've been through? Three years, at most, is a proper healing time. No stress, no things tugging their brains away from where their supposed to be. Nothing will pop up until then, and they'll make it be that way.

It's almost like protest. The bosses have come to Philby and Willa before, and they've taken on Leader, and the teens'll shake their heads and refuse. Get someone else to fight. And to believe in good. Because we've been through so much good, and so much bad, it's hard to understand the difference.

Finn almost wants to think that the only way to heal is fighting, the rush, the wind in your hair as you dart from those throwing fireballs toward you. To fight, on and on, as if nothing happened, screaming no each time it enters your mind, and pushing it farther and farther away until it fades in the distance and just becomes another fact, another casualty.

This is the first Wednesday.

Tell me a story, Finn wants to say, but then he realizes there's no stories to tell, because they've lived all of those stories.

Finn sits up against his bed's back board, burning his eyes into each of the carpet's tassels to drown out her being there. His mother perches on the adge, her legs crossed, her hand extended out, patting Finn's foot. He doesn't know if she's spoken or if she's been silent. All he hears is soundlessness.

He looks up, gazing into those beautiful glassy eyes, no longer the color of a traitor, because she pushed through that. And in that moment, he realizes: My mother really is beautiful.

He wants to think of beautiful things. Jess. Willa. Charlene. Amanda.

Philby and Maybeck.

Him.

Finn pulls the sheets over his eyes, trying to rid of the image. Not himself, no, never. But everything comes back to his friend. It's a never-ending circle.

Lists and lists of qualities that the boy's on the list for, in the middle, at the end. Because that boy just wasn't the death of himself, he was the death of everything that accompanied his name. Not only a human passing…but the demise of good in this world itself.

There's a list, though, that's become null and void now, because he was right on the top, and the only one on it.

The first to fall for the Keeper's sake.

This is the first Thursday.

He's finally spoken.

"Why, God! Why?" He feels like he's ripping his heart apart. Maybe the phone will tear to shreds, too, as he's utterly ignoring Amanda on the other line.

"Finn—Finn! Baby, it's alright!" Amanda sobs on the other line. Finn hates to make his girlfriend feel this way, but she asked him how he was doing, and he answered. A circle of why's.

"It could have been anyone. It could have been me! He was innocent!"

"Finn, it's not your fault!"

"You didn't see it. You weren't there. You didn't see it!" Finn sits down on the wooden chair in his room, gesturing wildly. "You didn't see how I took the knife, stabbed it into his heart, and carried him, in my arms, until he died."

Silence. "Oh my God…" he breathes.

"Finn," Amanda softly whispers. "I know you loved Dillard. I know—" she doesn't pause to hear his weeping—"I know, honey. I know. We…we all did. He's not truly gone."

"He was my best friend. He was my best friend…and I rejected him…when he asked…to be a Keeper."

"You didn't know."

And those days come rushing back. He's on the boat in the shimmering lake, his friend at his side, holding the spindles. He's outside the school, confronting the bully, his friend crouched behind a car. He's in the ship's night club, doing a double take when he sees his friend's face, silently protecting him.

He's in the hallway, with him. Talking. Being friends. Being young.

Being together.

He hates how everything's past tense. Like Dillard's a memory, not a person.

As he hears her quietly cry and whisper the same thing over and over again, all he can think of is this: life is never gonna be the way it was.

This is the first Friday.

It has been a week.

He's in the same place he was two days after the incident. Still lying on the bed, not particularly thinking about anything, but not empty minded either.

Willa on her tiptoes. Jess's leg bleeding profusely. Philby sitting by the notebook. Maybeck attacking from behind. Charlene in her disguise. Day flash by, just memories, enough to gaze at, but not grasp onto.

He sees Dillard leaning next to him on the railing, being a guardian angel.

Tears leak from Finn's eyes. "Dillard…"

And it has almost gotten to be unbearable. He cannot go on like this, feeling him in his arms every time the name is whispered. Questions have gone through his head many times over: He never got to live, so why us? Me?

He slams the mattress, letting out another bawl. "Tell me why you had to go!"

Sobs rack his body. His bones ache. So this is what love feels like.

And then, as soft as a whisper, like a hug—"I'm here."

Finn exhales gratefully, looking around to match a face with the voice, but he can't.

It doesn't come again, but Finn hears it in his mind, and he laughs, along with Dillard, smiling and chucking and enjoying each other.

He doesn't need to know if it was Dillard reaching to him from paradise, because Finn knows his friend is most certainly there, grinning down.

It's better than knowing he's just next door. Better than knowing his gravesite. Where to find him. Because now, Dillard is inside Lawrence Finnegan Whitman's head, and when he held him, a little bit if Dill left and made a home in his heart.

Finn smiles. He clutches onto his pillow. "You're here. Hey, pal."

He never thought he could hear his voice again.

Finn is happy now, for the first time in a week. The first fortune he's had all his life. He closes his eyes. He's finally able to sleep.

Wow. I honestly intended to have a sad ending and then leave a link for a certain YTP for emergency cheer-ups…but I guess I won't need to. My fingers have a mind of their own. They don't know how to end it sadly.

Review, I guess? Bring on the concrit. Beat me up. I can take anything after this.