[A/N: A short, two-part oneshot to post while I work on another, longer piece. Season 5 needed an explanation, so here's mine.]
Disclaimer: They aren't mine.
Weak Hearts, Broken Minds
I.
This is how I'll die.
It was the last thing I thought before I blacked out and the first thing I thought when I woke up.
My heart, you know. My heart, which my mother told me I wore on my sleep with her face half-proud, half-sad, as though she knew what life had in store for me. Blocked arteries, too much work for my aorta, the usual.
I thought it as I stood in the foyer when I felt like an elephant had sat on my chest. Most terrifying of all, I didn't even think about Babcock and using that image against her. She stood in front of me, her back to me, and I could tell by the way she laughed that she'd just insulted me. Silly old fool, she always laughs the hardest at her own jokes. Oh, hell, I don't have to pretend like I don't think it's endearing. It is.
I thought it as I fell. This is how I'll die. A heart attack at 47. There are more tragic things in the world, after all. (And wouldn't it have been my luck that the last thing I ever saw would have been the back of her? Not a bad view, of course, but even the most spiteful God could have granted a man one more chance to see her face.)
I thought it again when I woke up. The elephant was gone, but it didn't change anything. Now, I saw the end. What are the chances of having a second heart attack? Better yet, what are the chances of surviving a second heart attack? Too high for my liking. I never looked it up. Who wants to know the numbers? What good have numbers ever done anyone?
It's a strange thing, facing your own mortality. I suppose I should count myself lucky—an Oxford-educated butler doesn't have much room to consider luck, no, but indulge me—that I never experienced the sort of death that makes you think about life more. This isn't to say that Mrs. Sheffield's death didn't affect me in a very deep way because it did—but it was still separate from me. I still have both parents. Grandparents, no, but they passed away early in my life.
I never had to think about my own life as a life, as something that could end, and so suddenly being thrust in Death's spotlight—it didn't sit well with me. I never considered myself old but how strange to look at someone just one year my junior, Mr. Sheffield, and feel positively ancient. The rich age better, I suppose, but the weariness with which I greeted my nights far surpassed the exuberant energy that grabbed hold of Mr. Sheffield and allowed him to either take out Miss Fine or run from her, depending on the day. I was so tired. And so old.
And, after the heart attack, so weak. I mistakenly thought that, a week after laying in a hospital bed, I could get up and take a walk. I can barely fathom the embarrassment I felt when my legs wiggled like Jell-O and failed me like my heart just had.
How can a man who remembers his 15th birthday clear as day look down and not recognize his own feet?
Far from helping, the instructions and directions and suggestions upon my hospital release made me feel even worse. The doctor suggested a heart rate and oxygen monitor. Best not to overexert myself. I nearly laughed in his face when he told me not to have sex for 6 months. No worries there, Doc.
What if I had died? How would the world have been affected? Such were the nature of the thoughts that plagued me as I laid in that hospital bed. If the questions sound depressing, best not to fill you in on the answers. (I experienced a moment of true self-loathing and even more shame when I suddenly and randomly thought: At least Mrs. Sheffield had dozens of mourners at her funeral. She had people who had loved her so intensely that they couldn't imagine life without her.)
If the heart attack had done me in, people would grieve, certainly. My parents would likely mourn the fact that their son had beaten them by just a few years. Maxwell, my oldest friend, would feel sorrow but part of him, I know this for a fact and say it without the intention of receiving pity, would worry about who would fold his socks just the way he likes it. The Fines would miss my crème brulee.
What a legacy, eh? Folded socks and torched desserts.
In short, there was no one who loved me so much that his or her life would be irrevocably changed without me.
Though I suppose that isn't entirely true. I realized this as I came out of my medication fog and saw a blonde angel coming towards me. I wasn't sure if I'd died and, if so, which direction I'd gone in. (Satan was an angel at one point, let's not forget.)
But I wasn't dead, it wasn't an angel, and I supposed I wasn't entirely alone. There was CC.
Yes, there was CC. Speaking to me softly, kindly, like an invalid, like an old, old man who'd just had a heart attack in front of her. Even after I tried to prank her, she pulled back the curtain and let loose a torrent of expletives and threats against the couple who were…ah…coupling on the hospital bed next to mine. Relief, utter relief, at seeing CC be CC again—but after she sent Max and Fran scurrying and muttering apologies in my direction, she turned back to me and spoke quietly and carefully, as though Death were hovering in the room.
It was with no small amount of shame that I embarked on my road to recovery that summer, but it was with a lot of regret that I saw how CC treated me now. I don't think anyone could reasonably claim that CC and I weren't heading towards something that year. She blew me a kiss! Right after she insulted me (God, she was getting so good at it, too), she salved the wound with a blown kiss. Weeks earlier, we'd danced next to a fire.
So I tried to be a little more worthy. I exercised more, I tried to watch what I ate, and I foolishly dyed my hair black. (Please don't suggest I did it to look like Maxwell. Perhaps I did. I'd rather leave that stone unturned. I can't take much more shame.) What a convoluted sense of humor God must have—I try to be a more deserving man and the next time CC sees me, I'm hooked up to a catheter.
It only made the summer unbearable. The way she treated me after the heart attack…I had to poke and prod to get a reaction from her. Most of the time, she smiled politely and asked if she could get anything for me. I finally lobbed the elephant comment her way and joked that she was the one who'd caused my heart attack…though that was not well received, I'm afraid.
I wanted more than anything to move forward with her, and I had no idea how.
The little things that had once meant so much—she blew me a kiss! we danced!—suddenly seemed so small. Mr. Sheffield, a man even more oblivious than I, managed to form a relationship with Fran. He proposed. They were forming a life, the kind of life that can be measured and qualified. The kind of life that, if lost, would be grieved and mourned. In the face of that, my history with Babcock seemed rather pathetic. We kissed twice. She laughed a few times at something I said. Hard to build a life on that. Hard to imagine someone mourning over that.
But she refused, she refused, to treat me the same after my heart attack. I tried, in my own non-trying way, to get closer to her. And when that didn't work, I went the opposite way. (Facing one's mortality does not make one more mature, I've discovered.)
Misery must not love company because mine did not notice its twin in her. Now, I like to tell myself that I saw her slipping, that I noticed something wasn't quite right, but I don't know if that's true. But I do know that I should have. I should have seen what was happening to her. I should have noticed. It's what we did, after all, if we did nothing else. We noticed each other.
How terrible it must have been for her to think I wasn't noticing her.
