Title: Death Sentence
Rating: T (it's just got some dark themes, cussing and stuff)
Genre: Drama/Angst
Pairings: Roger/April
Summary: It wasn't herself that April had planned to kill that night. And it was not HIV, but an different disease entirely that made her decide otherwise.
Notes: This is a weird direction for me, but give it a try. It was inspired heavily by Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.
"You've got to stop, April. We have to.... I... it- it's just fucked us over, don't you fucking get it? From the first time you had me shoot up with you... I..." He had trailed off; eyes swimming with what he wasn't sure he could bring himself to say. He breathed quietly and finished softly, "I feel like I'm losing you... losing us, and it scares the fucking hell out of me. We never talk anymore... I don't know how - but we have to stop... I-I... I think... if you're not with me on this, it hurts but... I don't think we can be together anymore."
That had been the beginning.
When Roger had decided that their relationship meant nothing more than smack, that it was what held them together. The words had sliced through April's papery white skin, tracing the spidery track-marked surfaces with threads of blood. It seemed to her, that through this declaration, Roger had been trying to say he didn't love her anymore, and that thought was the weight that crushed her ribcage, allowing only for shallow, empty breaths to escape.
That had been the beginning.
When she convinced herself that she hadn't imagined what Roger had meant by his words. She barely heard his voice speaking of the pain that had overtaken him, of how somehow along the line he'd been hurt. True enough, hurt had a funny way of loosening the lips, but April could not dismiss what Roger had said to her as hurt's product.
Every word had singed her too deeply; every ellipse filled with pained sadness had bored another hole in the imaginings of her happy relationship with him.
And so, she realized, partially before and partially after she took the fateful slip of paper in her hand and read the word: POSITIVE, that Roger was not as deeply in love with her as she had hoped.
That had been the beginning, but now, it was all about to end.
Because April Ericsson, despite how this epiphany hurt her, loved Roger endlessly. The curdled, unrequited emotion she felt building up in her due to this realization left her knees wobbly, and her brain was muddled and fuzzy as the test results sunk in. She was going to die, and so was he, that man who she loved and the man who had hurt her so.
They were going to die, she resolved herself to that, but she was determined that they would not leave this world by just any terms.
True enough, hurt had a funny way of making your body, your mind, betray you. Roger had carved a deep gash in her, and the HIV was merely what cut her to the quick. And it was this wound that would find her there.
The back of her throat burned in revulsion at where her thoughts wandered, scolding herself, telling herself she'd brought the pain upon herself… what she deserved for what she'd done.
She walked in the door, and this time, unlike a couple times before, he didn't stop her. There was no acknowledgement or remembrance of a lover's presence, nor any admonishment about her entrance, the white powder freshly burning against her hip.
There was no brilliant bitterness between the two of them as there so often was, only the brilliant bitterness of the smooth and sharp flash of silver she concealed in her sleeve. And he didn't stare at her, eyes flashing unrecognizable emotions as his mind filled with waking dreams of her or any awful words they had exchanged.
He heard her footsteps, somehow both delicate and heavy, then the sound of the doorknob slowly turning, sticking for an instant, then turning some more. And he knew, without glancing behind him that she was looking at him through the window of her lake blue eyes.
It was these eyes that, beyond his perceptions, had scoured the cupboards and shelves of cobwebs in her apartment for some comfortable, portable solution to all their problems. By then, she had scurried into each pocket and corner of her own loft, motivated by the purely imagined image of Roger's arms around the shoulders of a faceless girl with hair of burnt copper cascading softly over the worn leather sleeve of his coat, an image derived from madness and jealousy, a diversion from her true motives. In her mind's eye, the girl turned slightly and all April registered seeing was the piercing brown of her eyes.
In doing so, April had allowed the fist pressed comfortably yet painfully upon her chest to constrict her ever tighter, winding around in an array of complicated latticework and knots that no one could hope to untangle.
And so, in an almost untamed natural way, she had searched until rewarded by her fingers closing calmly around the steel of the blade, and then slipped soundlessly from her loft to find the man for whom she believed she existed.
As it turned out, her acuity about their love's failure and his supposed rejection had not dimmed her passion or stopped her love for him from twisting from admiring affection to ailing affliction.
To disease.
In fact, this metamorphosis had been what caused her to collapse into a fit of salty tears at night and sleep blindly and what dragged her lifeless body up in the morning. Painfully, she had awoken each morning having spent perhaps a whole other day and night without his presence or voice, which was what made that gloved fist squeeze her ribs agonizingly. She had spent every day filled with a bitter longing that hoisted her from empty sleep, brushed dry of any dreams or thoughts.
Once or twice, they had come together and fought, exchanging verbal blow for blow, words snarling and coiling in a heated dance.
And once or twice she will had threatened to cut off his supply of smack, which despite all his desires to quit needing, had become what fueled his very being, unbeknownst to her, due to her lack of support in abolishing the drug.
She had begrudingly resigned herself to the unspoken thought that she was suddenly unable to get his love, so she had to settle for his fear. Resigned herself to knowing somehow that Roger's mind never wandered to peaceful, admiring thoughts of her, so she was left only with dazed, flurried fright.
For entertaining the notion that Roger never thought of her at all was, put simply, implausible.
She had paced about her loft for hours formulating a plan to end it all, staring unseeingly at the objects strewn about her cluttered room, finding solace in none of them.
Not in the half empty bottle of alcohol that had burned her tongue.
Not in the two tiny baggies of powdery bliss that rested calmly upon her bedstand.
Not in the assorted mementos of their love, which, she realized sadly, were very few, unless she counted the needles and the smack.
Not in the unshapely wax candle she'd borrowed from Roger's downstairs neighbor when the unreliable power had switched off.
Nothing had been able to pull her mind away from the image of the man who had hurt her but whom she loved so dying, and her too expiring... slowly and painfully...
The lips Roger will not have kissed, chapped and cracked, had trembled with resignation. The feet that had not carried her into Roger's waiting embrace had instead moved in an endless circle over the unfinished, dingy floor of her apartment. The eyes that had not gazed into his beautiful green orbs in a mutual exchange of love had leaked rivulets of tears that descended down puffy pink cheeks and were brushed quietly away by the hands that had not held his.
Calculated violence had slowly risen with her heart, piercing her like shards of glass. Strangely, she had found herself energized by thoughts of her new mission, and when she finally came to some sort of conclusion, she found herself in his doorway.
On that day, she silently regarded his back, unkempt hair a wildfire on her head as she took one step forward. It took twenty seconds, maybe thirty, for him to turn around, eyes barely meeting hers. The green slightly meeting the blue sent a jolt down April's spine as she regarded her victim, the receiver of her disease.
She shuddered violently and the knife slipped a centimeter lower in her grasp. She quickly thwarted all remaining thoughts of desire to grab his wrist and pull him to her, to tackle him to the couch and plant a sloppy kiss on his jaw.
She folded up into herself and several cleansing tears dripped from her eyes. Something slithered past her guard then, which she submitted to with almost audible relief.
His eyes darted to her face, and his mouth opened a little, lips parting as he pondered possible words. April then reached into the recesses of her mind to retrieve the plan, the mission, the carefully thought-out blueprint that led to the solution to the whole mess.
And in her scramble, several key last-minute details fell into place. Details that would both captivate and paralyze her.
She stretched toward the remnants of her calculations, behind some door in her mind, and was not so surprised to find that suddenly it was locked. He stood there, still as the strands of neon lights crept silently into the loft from the night air outside.
April felt the knife slip another notch down her sleeve, its hilt settling gently in her perspiring palm and the blade's coolness lightly pressing the smooth, pale skin of her wrist. For a moment, April refused to move or take her gaze from Roger's eyes, failed to adjust the steel coolness hiding tucked against her forearm.
Because for a moment, everything felt right and belonging, and the perception of this stunned her into steely resolve and conclusion.
Weak on her feet, she whispered, "I came to do something, but now I realize I can't... I thought it was right but now I'm not so sure..."
Her voice, dry and foreign even to her, induced a small cringe from Roger, for he obviously believed that she had come with the intention of mending things between them and decided that was not truly what she wanted.
But of course, Roger's idea of her intentions was wrong. For that was indeed be exactly the reason she came, and what followed would be her interpretation of making things right between them both.
She breathed a small sigh and her lips pulled upward into a tiny ghost of a smile, and she hoarsely completed her train of thought aloud. "... I'm sorry, Roger. This is what is right. I love you."
And with a blink, she gazed at him softly. After several moments of pure silence, he reached downward and closed his fingers around the handle of his guitar case and nodded slightly to her before brushing past her and descending the stairs out of the building, stumbling sadly down the sidewalk toward that night's gig.
April bristled slightly at the unspoken I love you too, and with a small breath, the knife slowly withdrew itself from her sleeve.
She looked at it quietly for a moment before, without hesitation, scooping up her bag and striding swiftly into the bathroom, uncapping a blood red lipstick and scrawling the death sentence that awaited him onto the mirror in her bold, neat slant.
Then, she soaked herself in a tub of delightfully warm water, tracing the ugly marks on her wrists with steel, ribbons of red pouring from the scars of what she had become, waiting for his return, lying calmly, half- covered in a pinkish-red veil of water, bottomless lake blue eyes drowning him forever.
April had come to the loft with every intention of revealing to Roger the nature of her sickness, both the one that attacked her immune system, and the one that drew her heart to his, ending her despair at watching the man she loved die because of her misjudgements by ending his life.
She entered the room with every thought blankly focused exactly that - for what she had kindled was a strong longing to let him die on her terms if he was to die because of her.
But the disease that was her love for him will have made her too weak, too selfish. She realized then, that she was not strong enough.
And being unable to carry out her original solution, she clung desperately to one piece of logic - if she was not strong enough to end him now, she would, in turn, be forced to watch him end on terms not decided by her love, but indeed brought about by it.
Of course, not willing to accept such a notion, April then knew that she was also not strong enough to stay and watch that happen.
That would be a death sentence all its own.
Oooh. Creepy.
Hahaha, it's not often I write something like this. Hm.
Did it suck? :( If it did, keep that to yourself. I will cry.