He didn't even struggle. Didn't protest. Didn't scream.
The Great Jay Gatsby didn't react in the slightest except to smile, slightly, softly, when Wilson came—wrapped in insanity and his terrible vengeance.
He merely lay still on his mattress, floating serenely along in his pool of clear, crystal water. Because life was not clear and never so simple as floating, or as dying. And in these last moments—for he knew, as he had known her call would not come, that his sweet Daisy was only a dream that he had given and lost his life to—he knew that while this was a terrible, sad, way to go, that there was no justice in the world. That the closest he could come to peace was to die as he had lived, blind and idealistic and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming….
So he smiled as the enraged wraith that was all that was left of a broken man descended upon him and mercifully ended his suffering in epiphanies of reality. And had he still been aware, he likely would have only smiled all the broader, the more blissfully, as the wraith's own existence ended, peace found at last in the much sought after justice of a false vengeance.
Justice is blind and vengeance may be false, but peace is peace is peace and he had found it. That was all that mattered in his endless dreaming.
