They said there was always a light at the end of a long dark tunnel.
If that were so, then Dr. Death had been somehow wandering in circles in said tunnel for years with no sign of light nor of rescue. By day, he hid it all very well. The mask of bad nature and mean-spiritedness he wore in public had done well to keep people at a safe distance and not let them trespass closer than they should.
Nobody had seen beyond the mask. Nobody. He wouldn't let them. He didn't want their pity and he certainly didn't want people poking their noses into his business. Because once it became known that his life bucked the Neopian ideal of being sweetness and light under his angry exterior, the questions would begin and they were questions he didn't want to answer.
He didn't want shoulders to cry on, he didn't want therapy sessions, he didn't want to "get to the root of his troubles" -- he knew his problems inside and out, really. Over the years, he'd become very well-acquainted with them and they were like his own secret dysfunctional family. He didn't need some quack to point them out to him.
First there had been the fact that he had never found an owner as a young neopet. When he hadn't been ignored in his pound cage, he had been picked up and then dropped shortly afterward. Then there was the fact that, though he had completed his medical school training and had graduated third in his class, he hadn't been able to land an opening for one of Neopia's physician jobs. The hospital had filled their staff quota for both doctors and vets and the pharmacy was in the process of training a new recruit. Because of this, he had been forced to settle on his current job at the Neopian Pound.
Aside from his battered past, there were little things too. Lately he had taken to drinking a bit more heavily. It hadn't come to the point of interfering with his work or becoming an addiction, but it was still there. He knew about it, it didn't matter if the rest of the world did. Getting trashed before bed every night was, to say the least, humiliating.
Before he had only taken a glass of wine on especially bad nights to relax himself and sleep better. The bottle under his sink had lasted him nearly a year up until two weeks ago. He had since drained it and five others. It wasn't what could be called a problem by most, but definately on its way to becoming one.
Sleep. That was possibly the biggest problem eating at him at the immediate moment. He couldn't remember the last time he had lain down and slept a full eight hours, even when he was heavily intoxicated. He jolted awake at least four times a night from nightmares he couldn't remember and often would find himself lying in bed staring at the ceiling for hours on end. He didn't know why it was happening, he wasn't sure he really cared enough to find out.
One thing was for sure though, it and everything else was likely a factor in why he was feeling the way he was now. The non-chalant quality of the thoughts had scared him at first. The first time he had picked up a knife had been three weeks ago. He hadn't had any real thoughts in mind when he had done it...it was as casual as it would have been if he had been planning to use it to butter some toast. He had turned the blade over in his hands, watching the light reflect off of the steel surface and letting the edge touch his skin gently.
It didn't hurt...not if you were gentle with it. He had found it almost funny how something as ordinary as a kitchen knife could take someone's life if they should want it to. Oh yes, there were lots of ways to go out with everyday household items. His mind had conjoured up at least ten ways to kill oneself before his better sense had crawled back out of whatever cranny it had been hiding in and screeched him back to reality.
When he had looked down at himself, the knife had opened an incision on the ball of his thumb, blood trickling down his yellow skin in thin crimson worms. It was then that the burning pain of the cut struck him and made him drop the knife with a gasp at what he had been about to do to himself without even knowing it.
The cut had been washed, disinfected, and bandaged and that had been that. Nobody had questioned him, nobody, really had even noticed. Rose had been the only one to give him a strange look and he had quickly explained that he had cut himself while cutting up greens for a salad. If she had doubted him, she hadn't showed it...it was a reasonable lie, after all. The wound wasn't on his wrist and it wasn't nearly wide enough across to be mistaken as an attempt to slash his veins. Though, that's what it nearly had been... He had come to a very important decision after that. No more knives.
The feeling had seemed to vanish after that and had stayed gone since. He had continued to be depressed, though never quite to that point again....at least, not until tonight.
He had gone through his usual routine upon arriving home that evening. He had eaten dinner, read through the magazines that had arrived with the mail, taken a shower, and gone to bed when he had felt the first twinges of depression beginning to rear their heads, hoping he would be able to simply sleep it off before it got too much worse. He didn't want to bother with the wine tonight...he hated waking up with a headache and lately, it hadn't been doing much to help him anyway.
Two hours later, when it became apparant that sleep wasn't in the cards, he had gotten up again and found himself sitting at the dining room table, hands folded in front of himself and staring off into space as he lost himself in thought. The same feeling of casualness had begun to steal over him again, as it had when he had first picked up the knife.
"Is this what its like?" he wondered serenely, folding his arms and laying his head upon them. "Is this 'on the edge'?" Truthfully he had thought it would be a lot more dramatic than this....lots of crying and declaring that no one cared. There was none of that. In fact, he didn't feel remorseful at all. It was as close to good as he had felt in weeks. How very strange.
He felt very detached from everything in his current state of mind -- as though he was sitting in a stranger's house, mulling over a stranger's problems, and borrowing a stranger's body to do it in. He cast a look around the room slowly, his amber eyes tracing the arrangement of the furniture and flatness of the walls with odd interest.
He was in control. Complete control. There was no one here to influence his decisions, nor would anybody be able to stop him from doing anything should he choose to start it.
"Get on with it. Decide if you're going to go through with it, and if not just go the hell back to bed." an alien voice spoke up in his head, cold with no compassion at all. It was a frightening, though not unfamiliar voice. It had spoken to him on several occasions in the past, always when he was scraping the bottom of the barrel, and never with a word of encouragement.
"No knives." he said aloud, his voice sounding very loud to him in the dark silence.
"It doesn't have to be knives, idiot." the voice replied. "There's plenty of ways to go and you know it, so stop stalling. Go into the bedroom, twist a sheet into a rope and its a noose. Problem solved. Hanging not your thing? No problem. Fill the bathtub with cold water and lay in it, slip under the surface when you start to feel tired and that's that."
Neither option really appealed to him....hanging OR drowning. They both seemed like too brutal a way to go for what was supposed to be a coward's way out. Even in his current state of mind, he still saw suicide as something for cowards and the weak-minded, but he no longer denied that he was among that group. Who else but a coward, after all, spent their entire life resigned to everything they hated? Who else but a coward simply rolled over and let the world have its way with him?
The stinging thoughts of accusation made him draw a shuddering breath and squeeze his eyes shut, tears puddling behind the lids like hot oil. He HAD wasted his life. Things hadn't gone right in the beginning and rather than try and amend them all, he had given up. And now it was too late to fix most of it. These weren't a stranger's problems, they were his own. And he hated himself for it.
"Pills."
His eyes shot open, a single tear escaping from the rim of one eye and trickling down his jaw.
"Yeah, you still have some pills, right? That valium of yours you haven't touched in years? That would be a nice quiet way to go." Yes, he DID have some valium, he realized. He'd had it since the breakdown he had suffered while cramming for final exams in medical school. He hadn't taken very much of it and there was more than half the bottle left. He had held onto it....
"...just in case." he whispered, mouthing the words more than saying them.
"That's right, kid! Just in case!" the voice replied, seeming to brighten in his subconscious. "And, not that its any of my business, but this seems like it might be that 'just in case', don't you think?" He thought heavily on this point for a moment before awkwardly standing. He wasn't sure if he trusted his legs to hold out, and though they supported him they felt as though they might spill him onto the floor at any moment. He pressed his tail downward, using it as a crutch to steady himself until he got his balance before walking awkwardly from the kitchen, down the hallway, and to the bathroom.
He hesitated a moment before pulling open the mirrored door to his medicine cabinet and peering inside. The first two shelves were dominated mostly by cold medicines and half-empty bottles of aspirin. Sitting to the side, alone and forgotten, were a sheet of pills, still sealed in their foil that he had been given two years ago when Neopia had experienced an epidemic of heartworms. He'd never gotten worms, he'd never had a need for the pills, and still didn't. He shoved them aside, his fingers jumping lightly over the white caps and necks of the various bottles.
At last he found them, plucking a single orange medicinal bottle from the herd of others. It was slightly dusty and the label had faded. They'd been prescribed to him by Dr. Korai, a portly flotsam that had worked at the hospital until his retirement almost fifteen years ago.
"Now I want you to be careful with these, son." he had told the techo. "Some folks end up going nuts and getting hooked on these things and I can't be refilling your prescription more than just this once. So do us both a favor and go easy on'em." He had gone very easy on them, really. Of the entire bottle, he had taken six of the little blue capsules over the course of the rest of his schooling. After he had graduated, he had simply put them away.
He gave the bottle a gentle shake now, hearing the reassuring rattle of the pills inside and another wave of calm washed over him. Everything was going to be alright now, he decided. In about an hour, everything was going to be just fine. He closed the cabinet and clicked off the bathroom light before returning to the kitchen.
He gave the cap a twist, easily separating it from the bottle and carefully poured the valiums onto the tabletop, watching them all clatter into more or less of a pile. From eyeballing them, he guessed there were about twenty-four of them. More than enough for what he had in mind. He moved to the fridge next, finding a bottle of Neocola he had yet to open from his last shopping trip and pulled the chilled soda out, setting it on the table beside the pills. There was really nothing left to do now except, as the ominous mental presense had said, get on with it.
As he moved to sit, another thought suddenly crossed his mind.
Rose.
His mind ran through all of the times the pink uni had attempted to be pleasant to him and offer him encouragement despite the fact that all he had given her in return was venom. He knew, somehow, that despite how obnoxious he had been to her over the years, when she found out about this it was going to just kill her. She had liked to think of him as her friend...and as much as he hadn't liked to say it, she was as close to a friend as he had.
No...not good enough, he decided as he looked back at the pills and cola. He'd already come this far, and if he were to put it all away now and chicken out tonight, he'd just be doing it again weeks from now and prolonging the inevitable.
That didn't mean, however, that he couldn't say goodbye to her, he decided.
"No. Now knock it off." the voice returned, even more vehement than before. "Just get on with your business. You think it'd make it any easier on her if you were to call her and explain what you're doing instead of just doing it? Oh yeah, that'd make her feel really good I'm sure...to know her co-worker was about to off himself and she wouldn't be able to stop him."
"I'm not going to tell her," he replied, more to himself than to the voice. "She doesn't need to know. I just want to say goodbye to her." Saying so, he edged toward where the phone rested on its cradle on the countertop and wrapped his hand around the reciever. The cold plastic sent a shiver through him as he lifted it to the side of his head and carefully punched in Rosemadder's number.
It rang once.
Twice.
In the middle of the third ring, it was picked up and there was a moment of fumbling before a sleepy voice spoke.
"Mmhello?"
"Hello Rose." he answered, finding it difficult to speak. There was a slight pause.
"Doc. Hi." she said, sounding confused as she yawned. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing." he said unconvincingly. "I just...." he trailed off, realizing he didn't have an excuse for calling her. "I just wanted to make sure you were doing alright."
"Oh, I'm fine." she assured him, sounding as though she was coming a bit more awake. "But how about you? Its almost three, can't you sleep?"
"No, not really. I didn't even notice the time till you mentioned it, actually. Heh." He hadn't, really. "I should let you go back to sleep."
"No that's alright, I'm awake now." she assured him. There was a faint rustling he guessed to be her tossing her blankets back and sitting up. "So what can I do for you tonight?"
"Eh..." he shrugged. "I've just been thinking, I guess..." he muttered, crossing the kitchen back to the table as he closed his hand around the cap on the Neocola's bottle. With a twist and a hiss, it was open. "How long have we been working together?" he asked conversationally.
"I don't know. Five years, maybe..." she muttered. "What was that?"
"Just opening a soda." he replied, failing to mention that he now held one of the valiums in his palm and was looking at it thoughtfully. "Five years, huh?"
"About that..." a hint of suspicion was tugging at her voice. "Where are you going with this?"
"Nowhere." he answered. "I suppose I just wanted to thank you."
"Thank me?" her tone abruptly changed from suspicious to shocked.
"You've put up with a lot from me, Rose." he told her flatly. "A lot more than you should have had to. I should have been nicer to you." Upon finishing this sentence he quickly placed the first pill in his mouth and washed it back with a swallow of soda.
"Well, there's always tomorrow, I suppose." the uni told him gently. "I'm not going to pretend that its not kind of strange you picked just now to tell me this. You're going to see me at work tomorrow."
"Eh." he said again. "Sometimes bursts of conscience don't want to wait. By tomorrow, I doubt I'd have wanted to say it."
"Well, I DO appreciate it. And you're forgiven, of course. I know how that job treats you." she offered. He couldn't be sure, but it sounded like she was smiling. He did too, a little, but felt the smile die shortly after touching his mouth. He didn't feel happy at the moment. The first valium had begun to take its hold, making him feel a bit sleepy. He used the lull in conversation to pick up another between his thumb and forefinger and place it on the back of his tongue, chasing it with another drink of cola. That was two...he supposed, on a full stomach, it would take at least four or five to be dangerous.
"Was that all you wanted to say?" Rose prodded after another moment of silence had passed.
"Rose?" he asked hesitantly, wanting to ask her one last thing...something he probably shouldn't ask, but that he had suddenly grown curious about.
"Mmhmm?"
"Do you think that..." he cleared his throat, trying to shake the fuzziness he felt in his head away for just a moment. "...if things had started off a little better for you and me...us, I mean....do you think we might have...."
".....had something?" Rosemadder tried, sounding very apprehensive.
"Yeah..." he breathed, rubbing at his forehead with the hand that wasn't holding the phone. There was a very pregnant pause on both ends as time seemed to stand still. At last, Rose spoke again.
"We might have, I suppose...." she answered tentatively. "I can't really be one to say at this point." She gave a strained laugh. "Nice night for letting skeletons out of the closet, I suppose."
"Yeah, I guess so." he replied, feeling another smile ghost around his mouth.
"Well, as long as we're touching on the subject of old secrets, I might as well let you in on one of mine."
"Oh?" he asked, the word coming in more of a squeak than anything else as his voice cracked.
"I think I really fell hard for you the first few months we worked together." she told him boldly, laughing a bit. "Kind of moot now, I realize. I think we've both realized by now it wouldn't have worked...we're a little too different." It was as though someone had slapped him sharply across the face. She had liked him? And he hadn't even noticed it?
"Christ, how blind *was* I?" he muttered.
"Hmm?"
"Nothing." he answered quickly, his eyes wandering to the remaining pills on the table. He picked up a third and held it in his palm, his eyes tracing the contours and edges of the small blue object. "I'm sorry for bothering you, Rose. I'll say goodbye now."
"You could say goodnight instead." she told him. "Goodbye is a little too final for someone I'm going to see in a few hours anyway, you know?"
"Yeah...." he grunted, clearing his throat, contemplating the third pill a moment more before tossing it into his mouth. He dry-swallowed this one, not bothering with the soda. The pill stuck in his throat, protesting a moment before sliding into his stomach with the other two. He deserved that one, he decided...for being such a jackass.
"Are you sure you're okay, doc?" Rose asked, worry creeping into her voice.
"I'm fine, Rose, why?" he inquired with an eerie calm. A gray haze had begun to prickle at the edges of his vision as the three valiums all worked together to overtake him. Not yet. He wasn't ready yet.
"I just find it hard to believe you'd call me this late at night to talk about old ghosts like this. It seems a little odd." she pointed out.
"I suppose it does." he nodded. "I won't bother you anymore, then. Goodnight." He was careful to say goodnight instead of goodbye this time. No need to arouse her suspicions any further.
"Goodnight, I guess..." the uni said doubtfully. "See you tomorrow." There was a hesitation, and a moment more of her breathing before the connection was terminated with a faint click, leaving him alone again.
The techo's first impulse was to call her back. He wasn't sure if he could continue this on his own. But then he reminded himself that suicide really wasn't something one looked for company while doing. Not if one wanted to be successful at it, which he did. His limbs had begun to feel heavy, as though he had just climbed out of a swimming pool and gravity was reasserting itself.
He carefully sat down at the table again, losing his patience with taking the pills one at a time as he gathered up fifteen more of them in his fist and scattered them across his tongue, washing them back with a long drink of soda before swallowing hard, feeling a few stray ones escape the rush of liquid and squeeze, with painful slowness, down his esophagus. That done, he recapped the bottle slowly and set it aside. He wouldn't need it again.
He waited.
The drugs took hold of him with oily slowness, draping a veil of black across his eyes until nothing had clear definition anymore...it was all meaningless humps of black and gray hovering at varied distances in front of him. His head grew heavy...much to heavy to hold up any longer as he lowered it to the tabletop and pillowed it in the crook of his left arm.
"So here you are, kiddo...." the voice in his head spoke again, speaking from the echoing void of his mind. "How do you feel?"
".......Tired......" he croaked.
"You do, don't you?" the voice chuckled, sounding pleased. "You won't for much longer, don't worry. Think of everybody that's going to benefit from this...people won't be afraid to bring their pets to the pound anymore, you won't have to try and pretend you're above all the insults anymore....." as the voice continued to speak, he felt himself surrendering into the velvety grip of a deep and final sleep. "And hey, best of all, Rose can finally get on with her own life. Chase after someone worth chasing instead of your pathetic hide, you threadbare excuse."
He flinched a bit, but couldn't find the strength to feel even a hint of outrage at this. He simply resigned himself. He deserved it. He was a problem, and now he was removing himself. Nobody would ever have to worry about him again. Not Rose, not the pets, not anybody. Coldness sank into his flesh as the last flickering bit of his consciousness went out.
He wasn't sure what laid beyond his life as he knew it...but it was too late to go back now. With one last heave of his chest, Dr. Death fell into a deep and very unnatural sleep.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rose knew she was being foolish, but something just had rubbed her the wrong way all over about Dr. Death's phone call. She had initially hung up with every intention of dropping back off to sleep, but something kept her from it...some whining sense that refused to quiet itself.
"Something's wrong....something's very wrong..." it had sung over and over until it had driven her from the bed and found her now, walking silently along the sidewalk at nearly four in the morning. The moonlight cast pale shadows across the pavement and the air, though it was summertime, was rather chilly.
She was grateful that most of Neopia was still asleep, really. The last thing she needed were people staring at her stumbling down the street with an unbrushed mane and fresh out of bed. What a sight she must have looked! All this because of her and her blasted hunches. She already had played out in her head what was going to happen. She'd get to the doctor's front door, ring the bell, he'd answer in an angry half-awake manner, there'd be a short exchange of words, and she'd go home again.
She crossed the street and trotted briskly up the walkway to the doctor's home, hoping he'd be quick about answering the door as she wrapped her arms tightly around herself. She paused on the porch for a moment, frowning as she noted the faint yellow glow of the kitchen light through his front window. Strange...maybe he had forgotten to turn it off before going to bed, she decided, as she extended a hoof and rang the doorbell. She could hear the loud chimes break the early morning silence behind his door.
She waited a moment, steeling herself for when the techo would open the door and demand to know what she was doing there. Two minutes passed with nothing. Only silence. Rose rang the bell again and waited some more. Again nothing. Confused, she drew back her arm and knocked sharply at the door, already certain she wasn't going to get an answer. God, was he really that deep of a sleeper?
At length, she reached down and tried the knob, finding with a degree of surprise, that it turned easily in her hand. She didn't know if Dr. Death was in the habit of locking his doors when he went to sleep or not as she hadn't been to his home nearly enough times to be able to pin down his behavior.
After a moment mental debate, the uni pushed the door open and allowed herself inside. She was fairly sure that the worst she'd get from Dr. Death would be a lecture about trespassing and nothing more....THAT she could deal with. All she really worried herself with at the immediate moment, was finding him and asking simply what was going on.
"Doc?" she called, hearing her voice reverberate back at her. Silence. "Hope you're decent, at least..." she muttered to herself. The light in the kitchen drew her attention again and she headed in its direction, if nothing else to turn it off. One of her pet peeves was lights being on when no one was in a room.
As she reached the kitchen doorway, she realized with a start that she had been mistaken...someone most definately WAS in the room...just not in a very able state at the moment. Dr. Death was sitting at the table, slumped over, his head buried in the crook of his arm. The uni smiled slightly at how ridiculous he looked. He must have dropped off after getting off of the phone with her...or maybe he had been sleepwalking.
Either way, she approached him and gently took his shoulder, giving him a shake. "Doc? You awake?" He offered no resistance as his head lulled bonelessly in time with the jostle she'd given...it was as though she had taken the shoulder of a large rag doll and not something living at all. Her smile dropped from her face as she gently turned his head to one side to get a better look at him.
His eyes stood slightly open, unblinking and rolled back, and his mouth hung agape. As her mind registered that something was wrong with him, something drew her eyes to the tabletop where a couple of scattered pills still remained along with the empty bottle they had once been in. As though in a trance, the uni reached out, picking it up and peering at the label with growing dread wadding itself into a cold knot in her belly.
Valium. Lots of it.
"Oh my god..." she whispered, the bottle slipping from her grip as though it had suddenly grown too slippery to hold. All else forgotten, she seized the techo by his shoulders and drew him backwards in his chair, feeling his neck immediately for a pulse. It took a few moments of fumbling...she had been almost ready to give up when she found it...a sporadic and fluttering beat issuing from his jugular vein instead of the normal steady throb it should have been.
He was still alive...not by much, but it was still something.
Shoving her emotions aside for the moment, Rose strode across the kitchen and seized the phone, hurriedly dialing 911 and explaining to the operator that answered where she was and what she had found. With the promise of an emergency team being dispatched immediately, she had hung up and returned to the techo's unconscious and dying body.
"Why did you do this to yourself?" she asked, utterly dismayed and hurt beyond comprehensible words. "Why did you....DO this to yourself??" she asked again, striking his cheek sharply with the flat of her hoof. His head rocked back on his neck with a faint creak of tendons, but there was no reaction. Her outrage quickly gave way to grief as tears spilled down her cheeks in hot torrents.
"Why??" she sobbed, burying her muzzle against the side of his head. "Don't die on me, doc...please...." she whimpered, folding her arms around his shoulders as though hoping the very strength of her will would keep him alive long enough for the medical team to get to him. "Don't die..." she repeated, tenderly nuzzling at the curve of his jaw. Nothing. She drew back, still crying, as she held his face between her hooves gently.
"You selfish son of a bitch..." she sniffled, the pink fur of her face matted and streaked with her tears as she recalled his tentative questioning earlier about whether they may have had a relationship or not in the past if things had been different. "That wasn't fair...you never even asked me. That's why we never had anything. You didn't think that could change?" Saying so, she leaned forward and kissed his lax mouth softly, just as the faint sound of a rapidly approaching siren wailed in the early morning, signaling the impending arrival of the ambulance and whomever else 911 had dispatched.
Rose stood quietly at his side even as red, blue, and yellow lights flooded the front windows and the sirens ground to a halt. The air came alive with the sounds of car doors opening and closing and hurried male voices. As she watched, the front door burst open and two chia paramedics scuttled inside carrying a stretcher between them. Rose moved obediently out of the way as one of them hurried to the doctor's side, feeling his wrist for a moment before nodding frantically to his partner as they set the stretcher down and began to wrestle his limp body onto it.
As he was being removed from the room, Rose instinctively made a motion to follow them, but someone immediately stepped into her path....a squat chia policeman.
"Ms. Madder, I'd like a few minutes of your time, if I may." he said with a cold official edge to his voice as he withdrew a pad and pen to take notes with for the report he'd be filling out later. Rose looked over the top of his head, biting her lip as she watched them load the stretcher into the back of the ambulance and climb in after it with a slam of the doors. As it began to back out of the driveway, the sirens squealing to life again, she grudgingly turned her attention back to the policeman.
"Alright..." she said faintly, allowing herself to be led into the living room for questioning. As she was informed that, should he survive, Dr. Death would be placed under arrest and put under official custody for a minimum of a year, she felt her resolve melting and broke down again, answering the line of questioning through a fit of tears.
Things could have been different....they SHOULD have been different. An old saying mockingly coined itself in Rose's head, as she pondered this.
You never know what you have until its gone.
THE END
If that were so, then Dr. Death had been somehow wandering in circles in said tunnel for years with no sign of light nor of rescue. By day, he hid it all very well. The mask of bad nature and mean-spiritedness he wore in public had done well to keep people at a safe distance and not let them trespass closer than they should.
Nobody had seen beyond the mask. Nobody. He wouldn't let them. He didn't want their pity and he certainly didn't want people poking their noses into his business. Because once it became known that his life bucked the Neopian ideal of being sweetness and light under his angry exterior, the questions would begin and they were questions he didn't want to answer.
He didn't want shoulders to cry on, he didn't want therapy sessions, he didn't want to "get to the root of his troubles" -- he knew his problems inside and out, really. Over the years, he'd become very well-acquainted with them and they were like his own secret dysfunctional family. He didn't need some quack to point them out to him.
First there had been the fact that he had never found an owner as a young neopet. When he hadn't been ignored in his pound cage, he had been picked up and then dropped shortly afterward. Then there was the fact that, though he had completed his medical school training and had graduated third in his class, he hadn't been able to land an opening for one of Neopia's physician jobs. The hospital had filled their staff quota for both doctors and vets and the pharmacy was in the process of training a new recruit. Because of this, he had been forced to settle on his current job at the Neopian Pound.
Aside from his battered past, there were little things too. Lately he had taken to drinking a bit more heavily. It hadn't come to the point of interfering with his work or becoming an addiction, but it was still there. He knew about it, it didn't matter if the rest of the world did. Getting trashed before bed every night was, to say the least, humiliating.
Before he had only taken a glass of wine on especially bad nights to relax himself and sleep better. The bottle under his sink had lasted him nearly a year up until two weeks ago. He had since drained it and five others. It wasn't what could be called a problem by most, but definately on its way to becoming one.
Sleep. That was possibly the biggest problem eating at him at the immediate moment. He couldn't remember the last time he had lain down and slept a full eight hours, even when he was heavily intoxicated. He jolted awake at least four times a night from nightmares he couldn't remember and often would find himself lying in bed staring at the ceiling for hours on end. He didn't know why it was happening, he wasn't sure he really cared enough to find out.
One thing was for sure though, it and everything else was likely a factor in why he was feeling the way he was now. The non-chalant quality of the thoughts had scared him at first. The first time he had picked up a knife had been three weeks ago. He hadn't had any real thoughts in mind when he had done it...it was as casual as it would have been if he had been planning to use it to butter some toast. He had turned the blade over in his hands, watching the light reflect off of the steel surface and letting the edge touch his skin gently.
It didn't hurt...not if you were gentle with it. He had found it almost funny how something as ordinary as a kitchen knife could take someone's life if they should want it to. Oh yes, there were lots of ways to go out with everyday household items. His mind had conjoured up at least ten ways to kill oneself before his better sense had crawled back out of whatever cranny it had been hiding in and screeched him back to reality.
When he had looked down at himself, the knife had opened an incision on the ball of his thumb, blood trickling down his yellow skin in thin crimson worms. It was then that the burning pain of the cut struck him and made him drop the knife with a gasp at what he had been about to do to himself without even knowing it.
The cut had been washed, disinfected, and bandaged and that had been that. Nobody had questioned him, nobody, really had even noticed. Rose had been the only one to give him a strange look and he had quickly explained that he had cut himself while cutting up greens for a salad. If she had doubted him, she hadn't showed it...it was a reasonable lie, after all. The wound wasn't on his wrist and it wasn't nearly wide enough across to be mistaken as an attempt to slash his veins. Though, that's what it nearly had been... He had come to a very important decision after that. No more knives.
The feeling had seemed to vanish after that and had stayed gone since. He had continued to be depressed, though never quite to that point again....at least, not until tonight.
He had gone through his usual routine upon arriving home that evening. He had eaten dinner, read through the magazines that had arrived with the mail, taken a shower, and gone to bed when he had felt the first twinges of depression beginning to rear their heads, hoping he would be able to simply sleep it off before it got too much worse. He didn't want to bother with the wine tonight...he hated waking up with a headache and lately, it hadn't been doing much to help him anyway.
Two hours later, when it became apparant that sleep wasn't in the cards, he had gotten up again and found himself sitting at the dining room table, hands folded in front of himself and staring off into space as he lost himself in thought. The same feeling of casualness had begun to steal over him again, as it had when he had first picked up the knife.
"Is this what its like?" he wondered serenely, folding his arms and laying his head upon them. "Is this 'on the edge'?" Truthfully he had thought it would be a lot more dramatic than this....lots of crying and declaring that no one cared. There was none of that. In fact, he didn't feel remorseful at all. It was as close to good as he had felt in weeks. How very strange.
He felt very detached from everything in his current state of mind -- as though he was sitting in a stranger's house, mulling over a stranger's problems, and borrowing a stranger's body to do it in. He cast a look around the room slowly, his amber eyes tracing the arrangement of the furniture and flatness of the walls with odd interest.
He was in control. Complete control. There was no one here to influence his decisions, nor would anybody be able to stop him from doing anything should he choose to start it.
"Get on with it. Decide if you're going to go through with it, and if not just go the hell back to bed." an alien voice spoke up in his head, cold with no compassion at all. It was a frightening, though not unfamiliar voice. It had spoken to him on several occasions in the past, always when he was scraping the bottom of the barrel, and never with a word of encouragement.
"No knives." he said aloud, his voice sounding very loud to him in the dark silence.
"It doesn't have to be knives, idiot." the voice replied. "There's plenty of ways to go and you know it, so stop stalling. Go into the bedroom, twist a sheet into a rope and its a noose. Problem solved. Hanging not your thing? No problem. Fill the bathtub with cold water and lay in it, slip under the surface when you start to feel tired and that's that."
Neither option really appealed to him....hanging OR drowning. They both seemed like too brutal a way to go for what was supposed to be a coward's way out. Even in his current state of mind, he still saw suicide as something for cowards and the weak-minded, but he no longer denied that he was among that group. Who else but a coward, after all, spent their entire life resigned to everything they hated? Who else but a coward simply rolled over and let the world have its way with him?
The stinging thoughts of accusation made him draw a shuddering breath and squeeze his eyes shut, tears puddling behind the lids like hot oil. He HAD wasted his life. Things hadn't gone right in the beginning and rather than try and amend them all, he had given up. And now it was too late to fix most of it. These weren't a stranger's problems, they were his own. And he hated himself for it.
"Pills."
His eyes shot open, a single tear escaping from the rim of one eye and trickling down his jaw.
"Yeah, you still have some pills, right? That valium of yours you haven't touched in years? That would be a nice quiet way to go." Yes, he DID have some valium, he realized. He'd had it since the breakdown he had suffered while cramming for final exams in medical school. He hadn't taken very much of it and there was more than half the bottle left. He had held onto it....
"...just in case." he whispered, mouthing the words more than saying them.
"That's right, kid! Just in case!" the voice replied, seeming to brighten in his subconscious. "And, not that its any of my business, but this seems like it might be that 'just in case', don't you think?" He thought heavily on this point for a moment before awkwardly standing. He wasn't sure if he trusted his legs to hold out, and though they supported him they felt as though they might spill him onto the floor at any moment. He pressed his tail downward, using it as a crutch to steady himself until he got his balance before walking awkwardly from the kitchen, down the hallway, and to the bathroom.
He hesitated a moment before pulling open the mirrored door to his medicine cabinet and peering inside. The first two shelves were dominated mostly by cold medicines and half-empty bottles of aspirin. Sitting to the side, alone and forgotten, were a sheet of pills, still sealed in their foil that he had been given two years ago when Neopia had experienced an epidemic of heartworms. He'd never gotten worms, he'd never had a need for the pills, and still didn't. He shoved them aside, his fingers jumping lightly over the white caps and necks of the various bottles.
At last he found them, plucking a single orange medicinal bottle from the herd of others. It was slightly dusty and the label had faded. They'd been prescribed to him by Dr. Korai, a portly flotsam that had worked at the hospital until his retirement almost fifteen years ago.
"Now I want you to be careful with these, son." he had told the techo. "Some folks end up going nuts and getting hooked on these things and I can't be refilling your prescription more than just this once. So do us both a favor and go easy on'em." He had gone very easy on them, really. Of the entire bottle, he had taken six of the little blue capsules over the course of the rest of his schooling. After he had graduated, he had simply put them away.
He gave the bottle a gentle shake now, hearing the reassuring rattle of the pills inside and another wave of calm washed over him. Everything was going to be alright now, he decided. In about an hour, everything was going to be just fine. He closed the cabinet and clicked off the bathroom light before returning to the kitchen.
He gave the cap a twist, easily separating it from the bottle and carefully poured the valiums onto the tabletop, watching them all clatter into more or less of a pile. From eyeballing them, he guessed there were about twenty-four of them. More than enough for what he had in mind. He moved to the fridge next, finding a bottle of Neocola he had yet to open from his last shopping trip and pulled the chilled soda out, setting it on the table beside the pills. There was really nothing left to do now except, as the ominous mental presense had said, get on with it.
As he moved to sit, another thought suddenly crossed his mind.
Rose.
His mind ran through all of the times the pink uni had attempted to be pleasant to him and offer him encouragement despite the fact that all he had given her in return was venom. He knew, somehow, that despite how obnoxious he had been to her over the years, when she found out about this it was going to just kill her. She had liked to think of him as her friend...and as much as he hadn't liked to say it, she was as close to a friend as he had.
No...not good enough, he decided as he looked back at the pills and cola. He'd already come this far, and if he were to put it all away now and chicken out tonight, he'd just be doing it again weeks from now and prolonging the inevitable.
That didn't mean, however, that he couldn't say goodbye to her, he decided.
"No. Now knock it off." the voice returned, even more vehement than before. "Just get on with your business. You think it'd make it any easier on her if you were to call her and explain what you're doing instead of just doing it? Oh yeah, that'd make her feel really good I'm sure...to know her co-worker was about to off himself and she wouldn't be able to stop him."
"I'm not going to tell her," he replied, more to himself than to the voice. "She doesn't need to know. I just want to say goodbye to her." Saying so, he edged toward where the phone rested on its cradle on the countertop and wrapped his hand around the reciever. The cold plastic sent a shiver through him as he lifted it to the side of his head and carefully punched in Rosemadder's number.
It rang once.
Twice.
In the middle of the third ring, it was picked up and there was a moment of fumbling before a sleepy voice spoke.
"Mmhello?"
"Hello Rose." he answered, finding it difficult to speak. There was a slight pause.
"Doc. Hi." she said, sounding confused as she yawned. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing." he said unconvincingly. "I just...." he trailed off, realizing he didn't have an excuse for calling her. "I just wanted to make sure you were doing alright."
"Oh, I'm fine." she assured him, sounding as though she was coming a bit more awake. "But how about you? Its almost three, can't you sleep?"
"No, not really. I didn't even notice the time till you mentioned it, actually. Heh." He hadn't, really. "I should let you go back to sleep."
"No that's alright, I'm awake now." she assured him. There was a faint rustling he guessed to be her tossing her blankets back and sitting up. "So what can I do for you tonight?"
"Eh..." he shrugged. "I've just been thinking, I guess..." he muttered, crossing the kitchen back to the table as he closed his hand around the cap on the Neocola's bottle. With a twist and a hiss, it was open. "How long have we been working together?" he asked conversationally.
"I don't know. Five years, maybe..." she muttered. "What was that?"
"Just opening a soda." he replied, failing to mention that he now held one of the valiums in his palm and was looking at it thoughtfully. "Five years, huh?"
"About that..." a hint of suspicion was tugging at her voice. "Where are you going with this?"
"Nowhere." he answered. "I suppose I just wanted to thank you."
"Thank me?" her tone abruptly changed from suspicious to shocked.
"You've put up with a lot from me, Rose." he told her flatly. "A lot more than you should have had to. I should have been nicer to you." Upon finishing this sentence he quickly placed the first pill in his mouth and washed it back with a swallow of soda.
"Well, there's always tomorrow, I suppose." the uni told him gently. "I'm not going to pretend that its not kind of strange you picked just now to tell me this. You're going to see me at work tomorrow."
"Eh." he said again. "Sometimes bursts of conscience don't want to wait. By tomorrow, I doubt I'd have wanted to say it."
"Well, I DO appreciate it. And you're forgiven, of course. I know how that job treats you." she offered. He couldn't be sure, but it sounded like she was smiling. He did too, a little, but felt the smile die shortly after touching his mouth. He didn't feel happy at the moment. The first valium had begun to take its hold, making him feel a bit sleepy. He used the lull in conversation to pick up another between his thumb and forefinger and place it on the back of his tongue, chasing it with another drink of cola. That was two...he supposed, on a full stomach, it would take at least four or five to be dangerous.
"Was that all you wanted to say?" Rose prodded after another moment of silence had passed.
"Rose?" he asked hesitantly, wanting to ask her one last thing...something he probably shouldn't ask, but that he had suddenly grown curious about.
"Mmhmm?"
"Do you think that..." he cleared his throat, trying to shake the fuzziness he felt in his head away for just a moment. "...if things had started off a little better for you and me...us, I mean....do you think we might have...."
".....had something?" Rosemadder tried, sounding very apprehensive.
"Yeah..." he breathed, rubbing at his forehead with the hand that wasn't holding the phone. There was a very pregnant pause on both ends as time seemed to stand still. At last, Rose spoke again.
"We might have, I suppose...." she answered tentatively. "I can't really be one to say at this point." She gave a strained laugh. "Nice night for letting skeletons out of the closet, I suppose."
"Yeah, I guess so." he replied, feeling another smile ghost around his mouth.
"Well, as long as we're touching on the subject of old secrets, I might as well let you in on one of mine."
"Oh?" he asked, the word coming in more of a squeak than anything else as his voice cracked.
"I think I really fell hard for you the first few months we worked together." she told him boldly, laughing a bit. "Kind of moot now, I realize. I think we've both realized by now it wouldn't have worked...we're a little too different." It was as though someone had slapped him sharply across the face. She had liked him? And he hadn't even noticed it?
"Christ, how blind *was* I?" he muttered.
"Hmm?"
"Nothing." he answered quickly, his eyes wandering to the remaining pills on the table. He picked up a third and held it in his palm, his eyes tracing the contours and edges of the small blue object. "I'm sorry for bothering you, Rose. I'll say goodbye now."
"You could say goodnight instead." she told him. "Goodbye is a little too final for someone I'm going to see in a few hours anyway, you know?"
"Yeah...." he grunted, clearing his throat, contemplating the third pill a moment more before tossing it into his mouth. He dry-swallowed this one, not bothering with the soda. The pill stuck in his throat, protesting a moment before sliding into his stomach with the other two. He deserved that one, he decided...for being such a jackass.
"Are you sure you're okay, doc?" Rose asked, worry creeping into her voice.
"I'm fine, Rose, why?" he inquired with an eerie calm. A gray haze had begun to prickle at the edges of his vision as the three valiums all worked together to overtake him. Not yet. He wasn't ready yet.
"I just find it hard to believe you'd call me this late at night to talk about old ghosts like this. It seems a little odd." she pointed out.
"I suppose it does." he nodded. "I won't bother you anymore, then. Goodnight." He was careful to say goodnight instead of goodbye this time. No need to arouse her suspicions any further.
"Goodnight, I guess..." the uni said doubtfully. "See you tomorrow." There was a hesitation, and a moment more of her breathing before the connection was terminated with a faint click, leaving him alone again.
The techo's first impulse was to call her back. He wasn't sure if he could continue this on his own. But then he reminded himself that suicide really wasn't something one looked for company while doing. Not if one wanted to be successful at it, which he did. His limbs had begun to feel heavy, as though he had just climbed out of a swimming pool and gravity was reasserting itself.
He carefully sat down at the table again, losing his patience with taking the pills one at a time as he gathered up fifteen more of them in his fist and scattered them across his tongue, washing them back with a long drink of soda before swallowing hard, feeling a few stray ones escape the rush of liquid and squeeze, with painful slowness, down his esophagus. That done, he recapped the bottle slowly and set it aside. He wouldn't need it again.
He waited.
The drugs took hold of him with oily slowness, draping a veil of black across his eyes until nothing had clear definition anymore...it was all meaningless humps of black and gray hovering at varied distances in front of him. His head grew heavy...much to heavy to hold up any longer as he lowered it to the tabletop and pillowed it in the crook of his left arm.
"So here you are, kiddo...." the voice in his head spoke again, speaking from the echoing void of his mind. "How do you feel?"
".......Tired......" he croaked.
"You do, don't you?" the voice chuckled, sounding pleased. "You won't for much longer, don't worry. Think of everybody that's going to benefit from this...people won't be afraid to bring their pets to the pound anymore, you won't have to try and pretend you're above all the insults anymore....." as the voice continued to speak, he felt himself surrendering into the velvety grip of a deep and final sleep. "And hey, best of all, Rose can finally get on with her own life. Chase after someone worth chasing instead of your pathetic hide, you threadbare excuse."
He flinched a bit, but couldn't find the strength to feel even a hint of outrage at this. He simply resigned himself. He deserved it. He was a problem, and now he was removing himself. Nobody would ever have to worry about him again. Not Rose, not the pets, not anybody. Coldness sank into his flesh as the last flickering bit of his consciousness went out.
He wasn't sure what laid beyond his life as he knew it...but it was too late to go back now. With one last heave of his chest, Dr. Death fell into a deep and very unnatural sleep.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rose knew she was being foolish, but something just had rubbed her the wrong way all over about Dr. Death's phone call. She had initially hung up with every intention of dropping back off to sleep, but something kept her from it...some whining sense that refused to quiet itself.
"Something's wrong....something's very wrong..." it had sung over and over until it had driven her from the bed and found her now, walking silently along the sidewalk at nearly four in the morning. The moonlight cast pale shadows across the pavement and the air, though it was summertime, was rather chilly.
She was grateful that most of Neopia was still asleep, really. The last thing she needed were people staring at her stumbling down the street with an unbrushed mane and fresh out of bed. What a sight she must have looked! All this because of her and her blasted hunches. She already had played out in her head what was going to happen. She'd get to the doctor's front door, ring the bell, he'd answer in an angry half-awake manner, there'd be a short exchange of words, and she'd go home again.
She crossed the street and trotted briskly up the walkway to the doctor's home, hoping he'd be quick about answering the door as she wrapped her arms tightly around herself. She paused on the porch for a moment, frowning as she noted the faint yellow glow of the kitchen light through his front window. Strange...maybe he had forgotten to turn it off before going to bed, she decided, as she extended a hoof and rang the doorbell. She could hear the loud chimes break the early morning silence behind his door.
She waited a moment, steeling herself for when the techo would open the door and demand to know what she was doing there. Two minutes passed with nothing. Only silence. Rose rang the bell again and waited some more. Again nothing. Confused, she drew back her arm and knocked sharply at the door, already certain she wasn't going to get an answer. God, was he really that deep of a sleeper?
At length, she reached down and tried the knob, finding with a degree of surprise, that it turned easily in her hand. She didn't know if Dr. Death was in the habit of locking his doors when he went to sleep or not as she hadn't been to his home nearly enough times to be able to pin down his behavior.
After a moment mental debate, the uni pushed the door open and allowed herself inside. She was fairly sure that the worst she'd get from Dr. Death would be a lecture about trespassing and nothing more....THAT she could deal with. All she really worried herself with at the immediate moment, was finding him and asking simply what was going on.
"Doc?" she called, hearing her voice reverberate back at her. Silence. "Hope you're decent, at least..." she muttered to herself. The light in the kitchen drew her attention again and she headed in its direction, if nothing else to turn it off. One of her pet peeves was lights being on when no one was in a room.
As she reached the kitchen doorway, she realized with a start that she had been mistaken...someone most definately WAS in the room...just not in a very able state at the moment. Dr. Death was sitting at the table, slumped over, his head buried in the crook of his arm. The uni smiled slightly at how ridiculous he looked. He must have dropped off after getting off of the phone with her...or maybe he had been sleepwalking.
Either way, she approached him and gently took his shoulder, giving him a shake. "Doc? You awake?" He offered no resistance as his head lulled bonelessly in time with the jostle she'd given...it was as though she had taken the shoulder of a large rag doll and not something living at all. Her smile dropped from her face as she gently turned his head to one side to get a better look at him.
His eyes stood slightly open, unblinking and rolled back, and his mouth hung agape. As her mind registered that something was wrong with him, something drew her eyes to the tabletop where a couple of scattered pills still remained along with the empty bottle they had once been in. As though in a trance, the uni reached out, picking it up and peering at the label with growing dread wadding itself into a cold knot in her belly.
Valium. Lots of it.
"Oh my god..." she whispered, the bottle slipping from her grip as though it had suddenly grown too slippery to hold. All else forgotten, she seized the techo by his shoulders and drew him backwards in his chair, feeling his neck immediately for a pulse. It took a few moments of fumbling...she had been almost ready to give up when she found it...a sporadic and fluttering beat issuing from his jugular vein instead of the normal steady throb it should have been.
He was still alive...not by much, but it was still something.
Shoving her emotions aside for the moment, Rose strode across the kitchen and seized the phone, hurriedly dialing 911 and explaining to the operator that answered where she was and what she had found. With the promise of an emergency team being dispatched immediately, she had hung up and returned to the techo's unconscious and dying body.
"Why did you do this to yourself?" she asked, utterly dismayed and hurt beyond comprehensible words. "Why did you....DO this to yourself??" she asked again, striking his cheek sharply with the flat of her hoof. His head rocked back on his neck with a faint creak of tendons, but there was no reaction. Her outrage quickly gave way to grief as tears spilled down her cheeks in hot torrents.
"Why??" she sobbed, burying her muzzle against the side of his head. "Don't die on me, doc...please...." she whimpered, folding her arms around his shoulders as though hoping the very strength of her will would keep him alive long enough for the medical team to get to him. "Don't die..." she repeated, tenderly nuzzling at the curve of his jaw. Nothing. She drew back, still crying, as she held his face between her hooves gently.
"You selfish son of a bitch..." she sniffled, the pink fur of her face matted and streaked with her tears as she recalled his tentative questioning earlier about whether they may have had a relationship or not in the past if things had been different. "That wasn't fair...you never even asked me. That's why we never had anything. You didn't think that could change?" Saying so, she leaned forward and kissed his lax mouth softly, just as the faint sound of a rapidly approaching siren wailed in the early morning, signaling the impending arrival of the ambulance and whomever else 911 had dispatched.
Rose stood quietly at his side even as red, blue, and yellow lights flooded the front windows and the sirens ground to a halt. The air came alive with the sounds of car doors opening and closing and hurried male voices. As she watched, the front door burst open and two chia paramedics scuttled inside carrying a stretcher between them. Rose moved obediently out of the way as one of them hurried to the doctor's side, feeling his wrist for a moment before nodding frantically to his partner as they set the stretcher down and began to wrestle his limp body onto it.
As he was being removed from the room, Rose instinctively made a motion to follow them, but someone immediately stepped into her path....a squat chia policeman.
"Ms. Madder, I'd like a few minutes of your time, if I may." he said with a cold official edge to his voice as he withdrew a pad and pen to take notes with for the report he'd be filling out later. Rose looked over the top of his head, biting her lip as she watched them load the stretcher into the back of the ambulance and climb in after it with a slam of the doors. As it began to back out of the driveway, the sirens squealing to life again, she grudgingly turned her attention back to the policeman.
"Alright..." she said faintly, allowing herself to be led into the living room for questioning. As she was informed that, should he survive, Dr. Death would be placed under arrest and put under official custody for a minimum of a year, she felt her resolve melting and broke down again, answering the line of questioning through a fit of tears.
Things could have been different....they SHOULD have been different. An old saying mockingly coined itself in Rose's head, as she pondered this.
You never know what you have until its gone.
THE END