AN: I don't own All the Bright Places, or any of the associated characters. Heaven forbid, I ever write a book of my own.
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1. the broken boy
He's there. Beside the Blue Hole, with the medics on each side, turning him onto his stomach, one with their arms wrapped round him, pulling tight against his ribs, forcing the water back up.
His skin is white. Eyes closed. He's been under for they don't know how long.
Alive though— that's what they're saying— he's alive, impossibly alive— but all she can do is think, I'm losing you, too. His lips are dark and he's still not breathing. If he's alive it's not for much longer.
Instead of running to him for maybe the last time she'll ever run to him, she sinks down on the grass and is a mess of crying and fear and hating him for letting go. Please no, don't do this. Please no, Finch. Not you.
There is nothing gold or flowing here.
Just the medics and the ambulance lights and the cold of the grass.
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2. the unawake
It has been three months, but every day she comes. She wraps her hair up into a ponytail and walks the whole distance from her house to room 17B in the children's wing— the children's wing, because the colors are bright. She walks even when it rains. She used to get into a car and think of Eleanor. Now she thinks of him, and sometimes of them both.
The pain is with her in every moment, when she cries and when she doesn't. She can touch her forehead now and feel the foggy press and pressure in her temple, the slow ache in her head. There it is, the throb: that's the pain of losing Theodore Finch.
She sits by his bed as long as she can, waiting for the nurses to ask her to go, but they never do. Her father is the one, tonight, who takes her by the shoulders and walks her home.
Finch never wakes up. His eyes are always open but he never wakes up.
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3. the not-words
Sometimes he makes sounds. Very low and wild —frantic sounds. Sharp little pants. Gasps. Sometimes his breathing will go rapid and his eyes will dart without looking at her.
As if his mind could still be whirring and running and shouting and not wanting to sit still.
She is terrified of it.
But the sounds are not words or anything like words— she assures herself of this. There's been too much damage, the doctors told her, it's unlikely even if he woke from the coma he would be able to make them aware of it. On the scans, his brain is quiet, only active enough to grant him another year on the machines. A numb, obedient brain.
No, he won't speak words again. Not to give her another quote from Virginia Wolfe, or call her Ultraviolet Remarkey-able, or even to do something simple and easy and unprofound, like laugh. They say that a lot, her parents, "He'll never be able to laugh," as if they remember him laughing a lot before. But they always say it so quietly, as if she can't hear because they don't want her to.
He won't laugh.
She's home in her bed in the dark, staring into the great nothing above her, and she starts thinking about his head and maybe what if somewhere inside him there is still Theodore Finch, angry he can't speak, move, blink; broken and trapped now. Maybe angry he isn't dead.
Not even in her own thoughts will she admit to herself that she wishes he was.
Alive or dead.
Not in between.
It hurts too much to see him stuck in-between.
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4. the bits of letters
Dear Finch,
She starts the letters with his name, the same way, every time. Only the ink is different. She folds the letters into squares, creased over in ten places, not throwing them away even though never finishes; she never knows how.
Dear Finch,
You saved my life in the bell tower, but you-
Dear Finch,
You're here but not here.
Dear Finch,
I am not free.
Dear Finch,
Someone could have helped…
Dear Finch,
Why wasn't I enough?
Dear Finch,
Why couldn't I have been enough?
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5. the bell tower
Her parents will be sad for a while, maybe, but they'll move on like they moved on before. It wouldn't matter. It'd be better for them, wouldn't it, to admit she was dead than to be the one who keeps pretending to be alive?
They look at her like she looks at Finch. They wait and they wonder if she'll ever really wake up, but she can't. She hurts too much to wake. She wants only to sleep a long sleep and maybe in her dreams he will be there.
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6. the last letter
She's angry. She spreads her arms to the world like he did that first day. She tilts her head up into the rain. She says the words in her head and not out loud. They're only for him, a letter, her final one.
Dear Finch,
Today, you aren't here. There's no one to hold onto me, no one to stop me. I wonder if you thought of that. Who would be here to keep me from falling.
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7. the hope
If I jump…if I jump, I don't know what. I just know that I'm scared, Finch. And I'm empty. But not just empty, because I can feel this heaviness inside of me all the time, and I'm numb, and I can't get away from how much I HATE IT I HATE IT
So I think maybe if I jump I might find release— because I can't go on like this.
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8. the feelings
But maybe I won't feel anything. Maybe you have to be alive to feel release. And I'm afraid if I jump, I'll only be where you are now, and maybe my parents will be the ones looking after me like I look after you. Because you wanted to die, too, but you…
I think sometimes maybe you're coming back, but you don't, and it hurts, to hope. They say all life is beautiful, but you are not alive, Finch. And everything… alive in you is gone… and everything alive in me…
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9. the missing
I miss you I miss you I miss you I hate you I miss you
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10. the hurt
It hurts so much to…watch you…
What does it feel like, inside your head? Will I know?
Please wake up, Finch. For me, wake up.
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11. the nothing
She has her phone with her. In her right back pocket. If it rings right now, if it's her mother or father telling her
Violet, this is a miracle—
Violet, come to the hospital right now, there's—
Violet, it's amazing, but—
she won't jump. She won't need to jump. Won't have to.
That will be her sign, the cry from the universe that she is meant to live.
But it doesn't ring.
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12. the sky
She is at the bottom of the bell tower, but she walked there, she didn't fall. She looks up at the sky and the tower in front of it, with her hair dripping and wet in her face.
The boy who was broken and perfect, strange and alive and something— something— is cold and silent and nothing, not even dead.
She looks at it and says to Finch, the part of him that is real and that she knows will still hear: "Just let me go!"
She feels weak. A kind of twisted, pathetic shame that she couldn't make herself tip forward, wasn't that brave. Somehow he's still there on the bell tower. He's still whispering, and he says he doesn't want her to fall.
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13. the ground
It's been a year and a month and some days since the Blue Hole. She is showered and clean and smells faintly like soap. She has slept without waking for days, her own Sleep, hiding in the dark and the warmth and the Not Thinking. But today she woke up early, and for the first time in maybe two weeks, she is with him again in the hospital. Today he's turning nineteen. They will take him off the machines soon.
The stone is in her jacket pocket. Your turn. She has had it with her since that Last Wanderings.
"I love you," she says to him, and the monitors and the life support are the only things that speak back.
"I'm going to… wander again. Not just Indiana…I'm going everywhere. You won't see me for a while."
She kisses him. His lips are cold and very dry.
"To the great Manifesto," she says against them.
Her face is wet when she leaves. She's not finally okay. She can't be.
But she will wake up each morning, she will go places he can never go with her. She will go everywhere. She will live, because this is what she chooses, what he didn't choose: to get off the bell tower, and stay on the ground.
One leg over the railing. And then the other.
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AN: Thank you very much for reading.