You spent your whole life trying to please other people and royally fucking it up. You tried so hard to give them what they wanted, to just once, just fucking once get it right. But no. It always ended with you doing something stupid and further distancing yourself from your own paper-thin reality.

And you were always one to stay consistent.

So when you lay there in a pool of sticky blood that just might be yours, you feel the shame. The far-to-familiar press of regret and anger, wondering who you would disappoint the most this time.

You don't have to wonder for much longer.

You feel his footsteps in your limbs as he rushes to your side, those renowned hands trying to work their magic once more. But you fucked it up beyond repair this time. No matter how many times he repeats that you're going to be okay, or yells at the surrounding blurs to help him dammit, you know you've gone too far. His heart is in plain sight, slippery and hot and slowly breaking apart. You search his eyes as you cough out an apology, but no no darlin' you don't have to be sorry, not here, not now. You just have to concentrate on staying with him, the doctor who always patched you up from the inside out and marveled at your perpetual ability to break. One apology of a million, and it was the one that matters the most to you.

You know you aren't' going to make it.

You weakly smile and ask about the others, but you don't really care. Not as much as you care about the man kneeling in front of you and cursing you for being so damn difficult, kid. You feel your vision start to blur as the doctor, your doctor, puts down his tools and resigns to the cruel ways of nature. You know he doesn't deserve this, and if anyone deserves it, it's you. He knows you don't deserve it, that no one does, but goddamn if it could be someone else dying in his arms right now he would trade in a heartbeat.

One more heartbeat.

That's all it takes for Leonard to shatter, like so many broken bones or bottles of bourbon on wonderfully drunken nights with the dead man below him. With your dying breathy you spell out something barely intelligible that carries a thousand meanings under its dry and peeling skin. Glory, bitterness, love, solitude, and an endless string of disappointments.

He understands all of them. And he forgives you. Dammit Jim, he forgives you.