- i'm last -
warnings: major characters deaths
The air tastes bitter and salty like the dried tears that have cleared a pathway of clean through the taint on his face.
His footsteps are heavy, carrying the weight of lives passed before him, lives that entrust their last words, last breaths to him (who is he, who is he even supposed to be?), and god, he can still feel the fading warmth on the pads of his fingertips, the searing pain down his throat as he clings desperately to a slack hand, the hand of a corpse that stares at him with open eyes that used to say, let this be over quickly please i just. want. a. quick. death. like he had the authority to make the pain go away, and he just hopes to every holy thing above that it won't be like that this time, that if he even has to face that guy with the tears washing his face clean, he'll throw himself off of the nearest cliff.
He's convinced that this is a joke. This has to be a joke, because why should Nathaniel, of all people, be the very last one alive beside him in this godforsaken town—and if there's a justified reason, then it must be something beyond the comprehension of every other deity in this world that has abandoned this town in favor of a society that isn't on the verge of dying—no, that isn't already dead.
He bites his tongue hard enough to draw blood and nudges the door to his destination open with a worn boot. The entire room, if it can even be called that, is filled with short sheets strewn across the floor that used to be suspended and sequester a cot behind them each.
A coughing rasp greets him, and it takes a moment for him to realize that the broken body in the far back of the room is trying to vocalize something through its damaged throat.
Ah, no, not it.
He.
He said, 'you came,' he mentally notes to himself, and then scowls. "Of course I did. I'm here to watch you die."
Nathaniel, laying in that pathetic old, mangy cot with only a thin sheet to hide his poor excuse of an emaciated body, shoots him a glare with dulled golden eyes. He wants to laugh at how pathetic it is; Nathaniel's glower is five meters off from where he's actually standing.
More jarbled noises.
'Sit down. I can't see you.'
Of course you can't. You're blind.
He pulls up a stool and sits down on it - only to fall backwards as the leg snaps the moment he exerts his own scant, pitiable weight. His back roars at him as he pulls himself back up off of the dust-blanketed floor and kneels down next to the cot instead. It's low enough for him to rest his bony elbow against and grip Nathaniel's outstretched hand.
Nathaniel opens his mouth, but he presses a finger over those chapped, bleeding lips. "Don't talk. You'll cough up blood," he orders.
'These are my last moments,' he translates for himself. 'Take me somewhere.'
"Take yourself there."
'The only place that I can take myself to is death.'
"Hurry up then."
Nathaniel grips his hand tighter, stares up into his eyes, and he gets an unpleasant jolt. Though Nathaniel isn't seeing him, those eyes are locked straight onto his own.
'The beach. I want to be there.'
Every car and bus in this town is broken down or tainted with radiation. The only plausible transportation in this place is walking.
Like hell I'm taking you that far.
But he stays silent.
Nathaniel takes it as a cue to keep talking, even if he wants to hear absolutely none of it. 'She wanted to go to the beach with me. The last time we went, some girl screwed it up and she got an allergic reaction, and I never made it up to her. I kept pushing it back, kept telling her that we would go later.' A cough interrupts his confession. 'I never intended to go with her. But when she died too—you were there, weren't you?'
He shuts his eyes tightly and tries to block the memories. No. Please, no, don't remind me of that shit—!
But he remembers Amber's reddened, swollen nose, her bloated face, her blackened fingers as she cried so hard that her eyes almost shriveled and dropped out of their sockets. Nathaniel gives him a moment to recover, but it takes him a few minutes to shake the scene from his head, the scene of Amber screaming like a tortured banshee that she didn't deserve it, and though his spiteful thoughts were like hell you didn't, thinking back on it, she didn't deserve any of that shit. The reaching fingers blank out from his mind as soon as he hears the words that a seeing Nathaniel told her, the shaky 'close your eyes, Amber, and you'll see the beach, and just wait for me there' and she stopped crying, her entire posture straightening out utterly as her eyes rolled to the back of her head—one last convulsion, she was gone.
He forces himself to snap out of it just as Nathaniel hits him weakly.
"Was that supposed to hurt?" he says contemptuously, and half of the bite is lost in the weariness it takes to say those words.
Nathaniel gives him a resigned look, eyes five inches off from where his face is, and sinks back into the covers. 'She's waiting for me. Take me there.'
"You're batshit insane."
'Are you going to take me there or not? My legs are broken—I can't take myself.'
He bites back every single insulting name he wants to call Nathaniel and instead releases Nathaniel's hand.
And in that moment, the panic on his face, the thought of being left here to die alone, to not be able to fulfill his promise to his dead sister—because honestly, at this rate, anyone left alive in this damn town is only living on promises crushed and jammed in the doorway to death—is enough to break a man's will.
'Please.'
It sounds like a shattered sob, dragged back and forth on the ragged turf that used to be Nathaniel's voicebox.
He clutches his own throat and is glad that he can still sing, because it's the only thing left to keep him company—the only thing that will be left as soon as Nathaniel, the next-to-last person in this town, bites the bullet and dies.
"Fine."
He hates the pathetic-relieved look on Nathaniel's face.
A suspended sheet collapses on him and covers him. He lets out a sharp exhale in surprise and tries to whip it off of him unsuccessfully, tripping over the hem and landing on his back for the second time.
Laughter resounds from above him, and he realizes that it's Nathaniel after a few seconds of nursing delusions that some lone angel slash magical being has come back to save them both. The only sound that Nathaniel can make without sounding like cracking glass.
He pulls himself up with dignity and lets the sheet fall from his shoulders as he leans down to burrow his arms under Nathaniel's unmoving body—for a moment, the president of the student council feels dead—and lift him up.
He cradles the male like a lover and takes him from the run-down shack.
"If you fall asleep, I'll kill you."
'Death either way.' Nathaniel smiles. 'Is the sun out today?'
"Can't you feel it?"
'I can feel the heavy press of dust against my tattered skin.'
"Poetic," he compliments. "Just like Lysander was."
Then stops himself there.
'You stopped.'
Stopped what? he wants to ask, but can't swallow the brick that's suddenly congealed in his trachea.
"I know," he croaks.
Lysander's death actually isn't the one that hits him the hardest, but it's enough to make him cry. He stares down at the body in his arms, and for a moment, he just wants to toss him aside, to bash his head into the concrete, to demand why the hell he's Nathaniel and not Lysander, but he only tightens his hold until it hurts to be in his arms, and Nathaniel tells him that he's sorry.
"I am too. Let's go."
The sun beats down on them both, but the glare is dulled by the translucent atmosphere wrapped around them.
"Do whatever it takes to stay awake."
'Can I insult you?'
"Fuck you."
Nathaniel lets out another chuckle, and he resists the urge to look up at the sky, to look for some divine beings in this shitty hell. A bony arm is draped around his shoulders; thin, spindly fingers curl into the fabric of his worn shirt.
This is the person that punched him all those years ago after being falsely accused of hitting on his girlfriend.
'I don't hate you.'
"That's great."
'How did we end up here?'
That's a really good question. Fantastic. And one that he's been considering forever, something that he wonders, something that he applies 'what if' to. He stares straight ahead as his legs drag them both along.
Instead of 'oh? this is something that even the almighty student council president can't answer?' he says, "I don't know."
But despite his answer, both of them know that he knows. They all knew.
'Liar.'
He closes his eyes and clutches Nathaniel's bag of bones closer.
"I know."