Co-authored with Illyria Lives, a.k.a dearsummerdiary on Tumblr.
I had thought, wrongly, that it would be a quick movement. A quick step inside the room, a curious glance about at the colors splattered on the walls, and then another motion to move me to a dusty desert or a starving jungle; I had not expected this at all.
As often as I make light of my lack of appearance, of my ability to see it and of other's ability to accept it, I am not fully aware that I can even be looked at, in the correct way of eyes to human-shaped form. It has never happened before. Not since I allowed a soul to walk alongside me on a crowded city street…
I stepped into the hospital room and cast an eye at the mist of gray that clung high to the ceiling, silken storm clouds hovering at the window in anticipation of rain. There was a young girl holding the man's hand in the hospital bed, her eyes wearily closed, half-asleep and mumbling to herself, fingers remaining locked around his. I moved to stand by him and placed my hand over her's, beginning to draw the soul away from its beaten shell, and suddenly I am being restrained—yes, such a thing is possible—and the girl is awake, looking at me through a veil of grayness. It is not mistake; she was looking straight at me in a manner I had never been looked at before.
"Don't," she said, "Don't take him."
She didn't know what made her say this. What made her believe that her simple command would make this specter of a human stop whatever it was doing. Mist was barely being clutched in its fingers - the fingers that had momentarily gone loose from shock.
It took a moment - a split second - for the fact that this mist was Stephen to become a slap to the face and for her heartbeat to speed up quicker than she thought possible.
The lips she had pressed against hers the night before - the hand which had always been there, regardless of what had come like a tidal wave - that poor boy who needed to sleep but wouldn't - the last of the mad ones - everything that was Stephen Dene had been reduced to this grey-whiteness that was, almost relunctantly, wrapping itself around the specter's fingers.
Its eyes - what she guessed were eyes - watched her and she watched it and she didn't know what she was expecting to happen, but the name of Stephen's old terminus rang in her head.
Thanatos. "Peaceful death."
She didn't mouth it, didn't speak it, but she saw strong realization on this specter's face. A facial expression that must've mimicked hers.
Not the mythical god Thanatos, but something pretty close.
When it spoke, Rory didn't know what to do. The voice that came from it—and it was only that, a voice, not a sound or an echo or anything at all mystical, just a voice with so slight of a German accent that it was almost undetectable—was kind, amicable even. It was not the voice of a skeletal figure in a black robe. It was the voice of a person-like thing that suddenly appeared to be standing in front of her, flickering in and out of shapes and images, shedding skins with every erratic beat of Rory's heart.
"Who are you?" it asked her, "How can you see me?"
Rory didn't explain—there was too much to explain, and not enough time—and she clung to Stephen's hand.
"Don't take him," she begged, "Please don't take him."
There was hesitation. The voice spoke up again, and Rory shuddered as her face was reflected briefly at her in the specter's, shimmering, tear stained, before flickering out again.
"Then don't let me take him," the voice was curious, it was shy, it was unsure. "Come; take him back." It did not release its hold on Stephen, but it made some room for Rory to cling tighter to his hand.
She began to pull.
I have seen many things in my travels. Many more souls than you would think, considering my eminence in the world, have fallen from my hands before, like water through the cupped hands of a child, to return to their places below. I have dropped stones of souls down darkened wells and listened for the sound of them entering the water below—the gasp of breath into lungs, the angry beeping of machines shocked back into power.
But that was all me. I am nothing if not human, and to err is to human.
This. I have never seen this before. A little girl holding onto the hand of a young man's soul, refusing to let me take him. A young girl who looked at me, into my eyes, and begged not for herself, but for someone else.
I wondered. I wondered how, and why, and when, but she did not answer me.
So I gave her a chance, curious and wondering what new story I would have to keep me company. "Then don't let me take him," I told her, foolishly and naively. "Come; take him back."
She tried.
I watched her. Her brow furrowed, and she appeared as if she was searching – searching for something inside of her – something that would bring this young man back to her.
Her mouth was moving on its own accord. Her lungs were the bellows that gave the air for the silent Stephen Stephen please Stephens.
There had been many Stephens. There was Saint Stephen – he was considered the first Christian martyr. He was stoned to death. I wondered – I needed to stop wondering, I needed to stop pausing on my travels for little girls who had experienced me and lifeless bodies much too soon – what had happened.
What had caused for this young man – Stephen – to end up caged in a hospital bed with this girl begging, begging me, for his life.
"What happened?" The question leaped from my mouth and landed in the air between us. It made itself at home, sitting on the body that was on the sterilized sheets. Pressing down on the chest; becoming the pebbles that sat in the pockets of the ones that stared at huge bodies of water.
I shouldn't have asked, for the words shook her, oh, the power of words, and what control she had – what power she had in this tug-a-war for an unfortunate Stephen's soul – slipped.
She gasped and took the pale, long-fingered hand in both of hers.
I tried to twist my facial expression into something akin to regret, but I was not sure of how much of me she could see. When she recollected herself, and I could detect her part of the tugging – it felt like a compass; Stephen was the needle, and I was north and she was some other cardinal direction -, she told me:
"There was…a car accident. He saved me."
She bit down on her lip. The specter's face was torn between regret and sympathy. It was almost split cleanly down the middle.
Stephen's hand was cold. She looked at his angular, hollow face, because it was much more familiar than this…thing's and she needed something to tie her down to Here, to Stephen's soul being on the line; and damn it, she should be focusing on this and not answering the questions that tore at her.
"And I was never able to thank him."
So many thankless people in so many thankless stories gathered at my back, pushed at me, prodded at me, reminded me that they were there for me to see—a boy with yellow hair placed his hand upon my back and urged me forward, a smile on his mouth. Rusting silver eyes assured me of safe harbors and an elderly woman, once a young girl with her eyes full of words and her hands full of dust appeared beside me, reminding me, reminding me.
I did not sit down; did not know if I was even capable of doing it in a way that could be seen, but the young girl's face was even with mine now as I felt her hand pulling, pulling at my own and the young man's, and I knew that there was only one way for her to win this fight (I wanted her to win the fight, oh I did, I did with all the force that I could).
"Tell me the story." It is not a request; it is a plead. "Tell me."
She took a deep breath, and got on her knees. I saw the top of her head as she rested on the tiled floor and slipped the young man's hand between the spaces of the hospital bed's barriers. The IV and its line tugged.
"London...London loses a lot of people, doesn't it? I mean, people die. People die and when they die – sometimes it goes wrong. Like a computer trying to shut down."
I nodded. I had seen ghosts – specters – that were the…not errors of my job, but miscalculations. It was their souls who had misjudged the leap and didn't make it to the other side.
"I choked on a piece of meat at dinner. Stephen was in a boathou- boating accident. We can see ghosts because of these occurrences." She took on a lecturing tone. I almost heard a young man's voice echoing hers. But then it was nothing.
"There was a copycat Ripper."
...
"I made some stupid, stupid mistakes."
...
"I was drugged."
So many of these phrases engrained themselves in me; they found homes in my innumerable pockets. They resided next to The Book Thief and countless other stories. I felt. Callum and Boo, Stephen and this little girl who had yet to tell me her name - they were remarkable.
Stephen's soul was inching toward her, slowly unwinding itself from my fingers.
"Like I said, he saved me. Boo and Callum...They all saved me." Tears had silently continued to slip themselves down her face. She had not kissed dust-bombed lips. She had not hidden a Jewish fistfighter in her basement. She wasn't Liesel. But she was something remarkable, and I wanted her to take this soul into her arms and place it back.
"Look," I told her, gently. The mist was beginning to shrink. I was reminded of another young man; one that had said he would punch me in the face; one that wrestled me away while he was being given thirteen gifts.
"That's a good thing, right?" she asked.
I want to answer her, yes, yes it is a good thing, take it from me, I do not want to take him, while there is still so much left to this story, this strange story, but even as I move to do so I know that I will not, cannot, give it back. It clings to my skin, this silken grayness. It pours into me, molds to me. Magnetism seeking true north against a stormy sea. I may be the north, but she is a lighthouse that he must reach.
I do not hold onto the illusion that I am emotionless. But I do not pride myself on what I did next.
I took her hand.
Rory almost screamed as the hand of the figure, this kindly almost-German Thanatos covered hers. She could feel a hard leap, something tangible but not in the normal sense of the word, drawing up her throat, pressing at her teeth to try and cling to the hand in a way that she could not. The grayness that beat out with the silent cry of Stephen Stephen Stephen intertwined with her fingers and she could almost feel it pooling into her palm.
Thanatos was not kind anymore. His face was the face of rage.
"Take him from me!" he demanded, "It is the only way! TAKE HIM BACK AND FINISH THE STORY!"
Rory let out a weak scream as she wrenched her hand away. The grayness clinged to it for the longest of seconds before drifting away. "Where—" Rory's eyes were full of tears—again—as she whipped her head around, looking for the form of a man she had once known. The machines were screaming as she stood and then swayed, knees weak. "Where is he?!"
Thanatos was fading out, a calm pillar of something achingly human but also so terribly alien.
"He's around," he promised, "I can see it."
The sky outside stretched pale gray and hopeful. Rory was alone in the room with nothing but a body and the taste of snow on her tongue.
He's around. Around as a ghost? Or was his soul left forgotten to wander around aimlessly like a lost child? Or, just maybe, was his soul back where it belonged?
Rory was ushered away. No questions were asked. The kind nurses gave her coffee, which was bitter, and a bit of toast with butter with "don't worry, love." And their expressions told Rory that they knew that she was not "just a friend of that unfortunate boy" because apparently "just friends" don't sit by the bedside of a "just friend" practically 24/7.
When the nurses were called back to assist the doctors with Stephen, Rory poured the coffee into the potted plant that stood next to the chair she was seated in.
Her hand still tingled from Thanatos's grip and from Stephen's soul just being within the vicinity of it. She couldn't help but smile wryly at the intimacy she and Stephen now shared. If - when – he awoke, she would have to tell him that Hey, I practically held your soul. How? I met the personification of Death. No biggie.
"Child?"
Rory looked up to the grey-haired nurse.
"You can go in to see him, but-"
She didn't have time to finish the sentence, because the girl was already down the hallway.
The nurse called, "Wait! I should tell you-!"
The Styrofoam cup sat in the pot.
Something about brain damage never made it past the nurse's lips.
Polished grey, silvery bright, poured around him, poured into him, cold and clear and painfully sharp. The first breaths he took were knives forced down his throat—which was crowded with a tube—and sucked into his lungs. He gasps and his back arches, and a nurse standing by removes the tube quickly, shouting and yelling pointed words to the other people crowded around him.
The light was muddled from the window, but overhead it was white, painfully white, bright and fresh like snow, but in his eyes it was dulled, fogged, a sterling cast of silver. Everything around him was silver and bright and metallic, the bed and the instruments he was being removed from while the nurses and doctors threw heavy words like "miracle" and "unbelievable" over his head, back and forth.
"What…" he doesn't have the strength to let loose clouds of metallic air, laced with his own voice, "What happened… where… who…" his head is full of shadows.
It takes them a moment, almost as long as it takes him to rake through the darkness in his mind. He was Stephen Dene, and he… he saw… he had done… what had he done? Why was he here? The last thing he remembered… he remembered sleeping, falling asleep…
"Rory!" he shouted, "Rory!"
They settle him down, assure him that he is fine but he keeps babbling, babbling about Rory and a man that was less than a man, a man that changed faces with mud from a soccer field on his feet, and they shushed him gently.
"Possibly hallucinations from the head injury," one nurse told another. "Is it too soon to give him another dose?"
"Yes," the second nurse replied, sadly, "But in the meanwhile, maybe we can go find that girl… she probably thinks, what with the machines acting up…" they spend a second in horrified silence before one leaves and Stephen is ordered to rest, his room slowly draining of people.
Draining…
Everything blurred together in his mind, tangled, grew foggy and then righted again. He looked out of the window and saw the cloud banks break, slowly, letting out a small curve of sunlight.
Rory stood at the doorway, breathless and with her eyes wide. Stephen is too shocked by her sudden appearance to make a sound. By the time he gets it in his mind to speak, she is already around him, beside him, hugging him like he's bound to disappear should she let him go.
"Rory," he said kindly, and then a bit harshly, "I can't breathe."
She laughs, a wonderful sound to break through the rusting metallic silence, and looks at him in a way that suffocates him more than her rib-crushing hug had.
"What—What happened?" he asked, eyebrows drawn together. "Everything's a mess. I remember you, but, who was the… the other man."
"Other man?" her face pales a fraction.
"He stood beside you," Stephen clarified. "He was German, maybe."
She exhaled long and hard and relieved before clinging to his hand again, in a way that feels so right that he doesn't even pull away.
"Let me tell you a story," she said, and makes the storm clouds gathered in his head vanish with her words.
A few days later.
I was within the vicinity of St. Mary's once again. I absentmindedly ran my fingers along the walls as I entered the room of an elderly man.
His soul was wispy, already fading.
After he joined the others in my hand, like I'm holding a suitcase, I idly glanced out of the window.
There was a young man sitting in a wheelchair and a little girl standing next to him. They were watching the sunset.
I assumed that he wasn't strong enough to fully walk yet.
The girl bent down, and pushed back the young man's fringe of hair. She placed a kiss on his forehead, on his bandaged cut, and he gently, with his hands slightly shaking, pulled her down to kiss her lips.
I turned away from the sight, wanting to smile.
The End.