A/N: Don't worry, this is just my (quick) attempt to unravel how Nick interprets the Gatsby/Daisy love. My admiration and obsession with the novel will never die. F. Scott Fitzgerald is an absolute genius, and Gatsby really doesn't need another ending. But here is one.

As Something Unattainable Lingers

"Did I drive you away?

I know what you'll say

You'll say, 'Oh, sing one we know.'"

- Coldplay, Sparks.

He came from nothing and made himself into something, something shining yet broken, real yet false. Fool's gold.

For her.

She had everything (in him) and threw it away. She hung him out to dry on the clothesline like an expensive apple green shirt, and when he blew away she didn't care.

On the outside.

I suppose what they had was, in all honesty, a facade. Gatsby was a masochist, killing himself a thousand times over just to hear her golden laugh - so funny was another man's joke. Daisy was a narcissist, a voice full of money and a mind full of of unintentional, heartbreaking deceit.

Yet they loved each other.

Gatsby never spoke of it, but I knew. I could see it in the way he looked at her, eyes full of hopeless admiration and dizzying affection. I could see it in the way he spoke to her, as if the world revolved around her. Truly, he was selfish; however shortly after his passing I experienced one of those rare epiphanies that restored his honor in my eyes. He was better than them, better than me. I'm not honest because I choose to dance around lies - but he was honest because he truly believed the lie he was living.

The man was a goddamn bloodred saint.

Daisy was a beautiful, cynical fool, to quote her indirectly. She thought she had life's meaning wrapped around her slender finger (and, actually, life's meaning at one time might have been Gatsby). But she lived a lie as well, and even when given the chance to break free she chose to retreat back to wealth and gold and transparent security. She fled from her true lover and back to a cheating husband. She didn't telephone after Gatsby's death... Couldn't manage a word.

It's disgusting.

For Daisy Gatsby laid his heart open, tried to hide the cracks in it with beautiful shirts and a castle fit for a king. She reciprocated with a green light, an eternal symbol of hope; then she crushed him with her delicate words. I can't begin to dissect their complexities, I can't see far beyond the smokescreen. Neither can Jordan.

As I stand before his grave, she appears beside me, a strong silhouette of a girl with sad, bright eyes.

"Nick."

I don't say anything because there is nothing to say. I see sharp blue eyes instead of brown, I see one man who sat on top of a fantasy world.

"I'm not like them, Nick."

But you are. You all are.

She takes my masculine hand in her own, electricity running between our skin. Somehow the familiar pressure of her head on my shoulder is reassuring, comforting; I breathe a sigh as my eyes flit over the headstone: The Great Jay Gatsby.

Somehow I forget that she is still just like the others. Nothing matters now. We depart from the grave of the man I only understood on the surface, hailing a cab back to the West Egg. The visit to his grave is over quickly, the golden and melancholy atmosphere of it slowly disintegrating with thoughts of his doomed love. My count of enchanted objects has been reduced by one.

Jordan's body slumps against mine. She murmurs, "Daisy is fine on the outside, but I know that on the inside she's distraught. She floats around the house, humming to herself, unable to look Tom in the eye. She knows. She knows what she did."

I smell her silky hair and shake my head. "It doesn't matter now. Don't you see? Nothing matters now."

"Nick," she says gently, a little sad and desperate, and I feel like the whole world is collapsing. "You don't have to make sense of what happened. They couldn't even make sense of it, and that's why things happened this way."

In my mind I see a yellow car. Gatsby and Daisy were the bad drivers, crashing forever into each other, bound by some inexplicable force. They couldn't escape the viscous cycle of their own star-crossed love.

I swallow hard, trying to grasp some sort of closure. "I guess... We could try to preserve them as one person. One foolish, grand, great person. I... I don't know how else to see it."

"I think you see it perfectly."

The cab groans to a stop in front of my cottage. The sky over the Sound is threatening, dark; I wrap one arm around Jordan as we head into the house. That sentence was all I needed to hear.

I pour her a glass of Scotch and we sit at the bar, talking in hushed, reverent voices about two people who melded into each other. I'm reminded of twin girls in yellow dresses, people floating over my neighbor's blue lawn like moths in the summer twilight.

Her eyes are deep and sparkling, mine full and quietly awed. We sit and drink and reminisce, attempting to see beyond the smokescreen until the lights above us turn green.

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