disclaimer: my lack of ownership here is something you all should know by now

"Ray, Ray..."

Her voice was like a broken-winged bird trying to get back into the air and flap blindly up. It was cracking, anxious, and somehow afraid.

Once upon a time he would've comforted her. But now? What a laugh. Raymond Davis Garraty had gone through all the medical treatment he needed and should have been fixed. The doctors had promised her that he'd be fixed. They'd said that he was just shocked, that after they were done with him he'd be back to normal again.

But the boy staring blankly back at Jan was anything but normal and fixed.

"Ray, how do you feel?"

Garraty seemed to ponder this for a few moments, then spoke slowly. "Dead. I feel dead."

"No, Ray!" Jan shook his shoulders, like she was trying to get some point into his head and somehow words just weren't doing it. His eyes looked empty and she found herself biting back tears. "You're alive!"

Garraty stared off into space, his eyes not really focusing on anything. "Yes, I suppose I am." Sadness washed over his face in the place of the empty expression. "And they're all dead. Abraham, Collie Parker, Baker, Stebbins. All dead. Every last one of them."

"But you're living!" Jan grabbed him by the arm, pulling him from the drab, white hospital lobby and into the hallway. "They don't matter, Ray, because you're alive!"

"What did you just say?" Garraty's eyes narrowed.

The anger on Ray's face made Jan's voice start jumping around from topic to topic, just desperately trying to get around making him any angrier. "Oh, the doctors said they'd...said they'd..." It was hard for her to say, because being told that he was supposed to be fixed was unlikely to make Ray any happier. It made him sound like a broken machine, anything. "Better. They said they'd make you better."
Garraty's eyes narrowed. "You tell me that you want to make me better, and then you tell me that they don't matter?!"

Jan sniffled, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. They walked out of the hospital unit in silence, Garraty not wanting to speak and Jan not daring to. This wasn't her Ray. Her Ray would've perked up right away and tried to make her feel better about the whole thing.

It was selfish, but Jan didn't know how to comfort her boyfriend and honestly, she was better at being comforted than being the comforter.

Or maybe she just didn't want to. Maybe something in her knew that this boy wasn't the one she'd begged and pleaded not to go on the Long Walk. "They gave me the wrong person, didn't they," she blurted out. "You're Raymond Davis Garraty, right? You gave me perfume for my birthday once and we went sledding last winter and-"

Garraty cut her off, turning to look at her with the blank, empty expression that seemed to have made itself at home on his face. "Yes. I'm Ray Garraty."

"Then start acting like him! Your mother's in the car, you don't want her to see you like this, do you?!" Jan's heart ached from having to play the guilt card on the boy she thought knew simple, polite things like this.

Garraty laughed darkly. "Oh, yeah. No sadness around family members. No grieving, no crying, no feeling anything but fuckin' content with what you've got. I forgot about that rule."

The silence that came after that was long and difficult. When they finally reached the car, Garraty's mother said a quick hello to her son and was met with the silence. She'd expected to hear happy chatter between Ray and Jan in the back seats, but again, she was met with silence.

The lack of noise was then suddenly broken by Garraty. "Olson was right." Jan blinked at him in surprise and was about to say something in response when he continued. "Olson was right. Love is a fake. Because it never lasts. Surgeries last and machines last, but love? Love's human and love fucking dies." He paused. "I realized it too goddamn late. I was dumb enough to love somebody and I saw them die! Love is a fucking fake!"

Garraty's mother didn't even bother to chide him for his language. Her eyes were on the road, deliberate ignorance resonating from her.

"Talk about it, Ray." Jan was pleading now. "Tell me about it. It'll help."

Garraty's voice was between a whisper and a shout, and yet it somehow embodied both of them. "You're just like I used to be. Back when I was Ray Garraty, not number fucking forty-seven."

"Ray, I love you, I'm here. It's going to be alright." She put a hand on his shoulder and he flinched away. Garraty then began to sob. It was violent, angry sound and the feeling it gave Jan reminded her of nails on a chalkboard.

He pulled out a scrap of paper from the pocket of his sweatshirt and shoved it into her hands. There was a number on it, and although the paper was crusted with dried blood and creased from being crumpled up, she could read that it was a 61.

"Do you understand now, Jan?! Do you get it?! Dead! Fucking dead!"
"What is this?" she asked softly.

"Give it back to me," he snapped. Jan did, and her boyfriend continued crying, only this time staring down at the number with a sort of angry grief.

"We're both here, Ray." It was his mother, in that conspiratory tone that made Garraty seethe every time he heard it.

His response was harsh and to the point. "Fuck off."
That quieted his mother, and she whispered something to herself and went back to that state of deliberate ignorance that she'd been in before. Suddenly Ray Garraty didn't want to go home, go back and sit down in his house and eat dinner and do all the things that he'd been able to do with such ease before this year's Long Walk had happened.

He yearned to just unbuckle his seatbelt and burst out of the car door. He would run and run until his lungs gave way and he collapsed on the ground. And then he'd just lie there. Lie there, on whatever cold Maine ground it was until everything was numb and he'd enter the place that every Long Walker entered right before they died.

That was what he really wanted. Numbness. In that moment Garraty realized that Barkovitch's dying wish had been the most sensible. Plastic feet. Because who wanted to feel the ground through the real thing? Reality was pain and suffering and sorrow, it was better to face the horror inside of your own head than outside where everybody could see you.

He laughed, as though he'd just figured out a great secret. Jan's eyes were almost wide with terror at the lack of continuity in Garraty's display of emotion. Anger, sadness, and now laughing. It was as though a switch had been flipped and suddenly the boy she thought she knew was turned off.

And in a way, Garraty wished he had. He wished he could just flip a switch and be back to normal. Because he knew the secret of the Long Walk, now. He was the winner. The Major would be by later to ask him about his Prize.

Winner. As though this was some sort of real victory. Ray Garraty was lost, Ray Garraty's being was dead on the road, somewhere along with McVries and Stebbins and Baker. This boy was a shell, a vessel that had dropped its cargo.

And Garraty didn't know how or why, but at that thought his lips twisted into a sick little smile.

another multichapter yeah okay