Disclaimer.
I got inspired once again. I'm on a roll! I should start an actual Town fic sometime—but at the moment, I have other things to update, but let me know if you'd like one, because I can think up a few ideas for one! Thanks for reading—review?
I loved him. I really did. But I guess few people would actually believe that, because to them, it's impossible to love a man like him, like James Coughlin—and there's some truth to that, to what most people think. But what most people don't know is that it wasn't impossible to love that man, that drug addicted, dangerous, loose-cannon of a man—it was just so damn hard sometimes to remember that you loved him like I did.
Dougie got it—they were brothers, practically. He understood him. Sure, they pissed each other off, and got in each other's faces from time to time, but they were non-blood brothers. You could love James—in order to, you would have had to work for it, to work for the tiny bit of good in him that was still left, even after prison, after everything.
I managed to find it, though. It took some digging—it took some time, but I did—I found that tiny bit of good in him, and he made it mine. Maybe even Dougie didn't see good in him towards the end—maybe I was the only one, and maybe even Jem didn't see good in himself. Maybe I was—literally—the only person who saw him more as a criminal, more as a drug-addict, more than he a bank robber—and maybe that's because I was foolish enough to marry him, knowing full well our relationship—a twisted excuse of love, but still love—would end badly, and probably one of us would end up dead. That, I did not doubt, and when I saw him on the news—when I saw him go down, on his last job, I knew that I'd been right, but still, it had hurt to be right.
It's only been a few hours since the funeral ended, and I still haven't been hit with the full effects of his death. I still don't feel anything. I still haven't cried. I eventually will, though—despite what people said about him, said to me about him, about what he did.
If James Coughlin were still alive, and if he had heard the things people had said to me—because I was his widowed wife now—he would have probably killed everyone, and I might have been okay with that, because he hadn't liked it when people looked down their noses at me when they found out I was married to someone like him, someone as lowly and as twisted and as consuming as Jem. I loved him for him—him and all him, even if he had gone to prison, even if he had killed a man—despite all he'd done, I couldn't—I can't—stop loving him, even if he's dead, even if he did hurt people, even if he did steal money.
It doesn't really matter, in the end, what I thought of him, or what other people think of him, or what people knew him as—because to me, he'll always just be Jem. He'll always be James Coughlin—my James—and me? I'll always be Thalia Coughlin, his widowed wife, eve if I ever do find love again—and I don't think much else matters. But no love could compare to the heavy, consuming, twisted thing we had—nothing could ever compare, and that's alright with me, because I think if I found that kind of love again—to love a poison that I should have gotten the antidote for—it would kill me. I'm surprised Jem wasn't the death of me, nor I of him, but none of that matters—none of it, none at all, because he's gone and dead and in the ground, and I haven't started sobbing yet, and that's all that matters. We're still us, dead or alive, awake or asleep, whether we like it or not.
And I might move on some day. Not that it matters, but I might; dead people will always have a place in your heart, and I won't be surprised in the slightest if that mess of a man haunts me for the rest of my day—even without a ghost—because he was my first love, but maybe not my last—maybe. But you just don't forgot people—you can't just do that, as much as we'd like to, as much as we'd want to—and as much as I would love to forget him, to forget everything we've been through, and all the fights we've had, and all the times we've made up, and all those tiny little moments where that mess of a man proved to me that he did, indeed, once upon a time, had a little bit of good in him, no matter how black and twisted his heart and soul might have seemed to everyone else.
And even if I imagined that bit of good, even if all those good and not so good times we had weren't because we cared for the other's existences, I still loved him, no matter what. He'd only said he loved me a few times throughout our lives—but he'd still loved me. The man was capable of love, and capable of being loved—no matter what you or anyone else might think.
It was just hard to love him sometimes, and it was hard to see that he loved you back—but nevertheless, there was still some sort of twisted, cold, cruel love there—with us, from our youths till the day he died—and no matter how scarring, no matter how damaging that love had been, I can never forget it, because with these memories comes pain, and laughter, and tears that will come soon—not that any of this matters now, though.
Not much else matters, in the end. He's still him, even dead—and I'm still me.
And that's that.