Scenes de la mort de boheme-

Part one: Dernier pour Mourir

We had to be thrust together and then taken apart piece by piece. First angel went, and then Mimi. Then Collins. We were all surprised. Mark went before roger, but only minutes earlier. They died together. Now it's just the three of us, of course it's not really like that anymore. No matter how many times Benny apologizes, he's still an asshole. Joanne and I had a fight. I moved out and finally got a job and my own apartment. I'm not starving and freezing, I can afford food and heat now that I got a good role in an off Broadway musical.

So now all I can do is stand. It's snowing, but I'm not shivering. Joanne is a few paces away, staring at mark's grave. My eyes rest on angels. And Benny is kneeling beside Mimi's grave. He doesn't do anything that looks significant. He's not even gripping the grass with a melancholy look on his face. He just…stared at it. His eyes are blank, black, and wide open. Joanne looks like she's remembering something funny as she stand's bay mark's grave. She hums a simple tango, and her feet tap occasionally.

I walk away from Angel's for a moment, staring at five graves lined up next to each other. Collins and angel rest in peace next to each other, and Roger lies between his three lovers. Mark and Mimi lay beside him, and only a yard away from the graves, is a sixth, not in line, but close by, the first to die. "April Erickson" the gravestone reads.

I turn away from them, staring out at the green hills, covered with small, and similar silvery gray stones. Then I turn to Benny, the one who insured at all times, no matter how much he hated us, there would be a grave to cry on. He paid for each and every funeral, and would pay for mine in a few years, when I would die of the disease that killed my friends.

I would die, and leave Joanne, leave Benny. I sobbed the day I came home to the loft with the test. Positive. I marched right over to Joanne's apartment to make her get tested, despite the fact that we were in a huge fight at the time, despite the fact that it was unlikely that I could have given her the disease. I cried with happiness when she came back negative.

I looked back to Roger's grave. Roger had been the last to die, clinging to marks dead body as he took his own last breath. I smiled. I wish I could have loved like him. No matter how depressed he ever got, he never cheated, not once. He never once took advantage of them. Not like me. There is only one person who I ever could have loved like that, and he didn't love me. I couldn't even love Joanne like that. I looked wistfully at her, as she touched the grass before Mimi's grave. I had let her go, it hadn't worked, and now life was pulling her away from me.

Slowly the two figures around me walked away. Joanne first, giving me one meaningful glance before walking away. Benny came to me before he left. He laid a hand on my shoulder, and spoke to me softly. It was almost scolding, but in a lost and hopeless way. "Remember, at least you will join them soon, but Joanne and I will live years and years without you" he told me. And I nodded. He was…helping me somehow. Reminding me that I wouldn't have to survive this emptiness as long as they did.

"It seems almost fitting, that the closest should die first, and those who distanced themselves the most, should have to die last. To remind them they should have held on tighter."

He broke the mood with a single sentence. "You are too wise to be Maureen" He walked away after one brush on the arm, and I looked down at Roger's grave once more.

"I'll see you soon." I whispered to the grave, and I knelt down and touched the grass once more. "Goodbye love"

-X-

Maureen had come with me to visit the bohos' graves. She and I hadn't spoken a word, but I had needed her presence there. I walked down the street toward the loft, where she was living right now, hoping to talk to her. I hadn't spent much time with her since Roger and Mark died. I knocked on the door to the loft, only to find it open. I stepped lightly inside, looking for where Maureen would be. I peeked in Roger's old room, which she had taken over when she moved in. She wasn't there.

A moment later I saw the light on in the bathroom. It glowed not the customary brownish, but almost pink as if something was bright red in the bathroom. I didn't want to go in, but I knew I had to, and I knew what I would face when I entered it. I pulled the door open, and immediately flung myself down on Maureen's dead body. I lost my mind, put in the same position as roger had been when he found April's body in this very same bathtub. With a message scrawled in lipstick on the very same mirror.

I lost it there in the bathroom, I went into denial. She wasn't dead, she couldn't be. My Maureen couldn't be dead! I pulled her hands to mine, not noticing the sticky red substance that was now staining my hands. The toxic red substance. My head spun as I tried to make sense of things, and I fell. I cried and I cried, and then I stumbled into the living room to call some one, something, to tell them what had happened.

-X-

That bathroom hit me differently than it hit Joanne. Sure, she saw someone she loved more than anyone else lying dead in the tub, but I saw that every detail, down to the shade of the lipstick used to scrawl the message on the mirror, was the same as when April died. A razor was used to do the job, and she'd cut exactly the same, fell exactly the same, died exactly the same. The water was at the same level, the shampoos were arranged the same way around the tub. Maureen wore clothes almost identical to the black leather miniskirt and tank top April had been wearing. I could see only three differences in the room. It was Maureen, not April that lay dead in the bathtub, it was Joanne, not roger, crying over her dead body, and it was a different message scrawled on the mirror in lipstick.

'Bury me by roger'

Joanne looked in no condition to have read the message, but if she had, she certainly would have wondered why it was there. I knew, and I bowed my head as I remembered. They always thought Benny didn't notice anything, but he knew a lot more about the group than they gave him credit for. He had noticed that the second Maureen had met Roger, she had loved him, whether she knew it or not.

-X-

Another funeral, another day. I had watched this one group of friends get picked at again and again, and had been to each and every one of the funerals. I had watched as eight friends gathered together for a tiny funeral for Roger's dead girlfriend. I watched as Collins sang his and angel's love song at their funeral, and listened as the remaining seven lifted their voices with him, and cried, not only for angel, but for how they were being ripped apart. I listened as Roger went up to the alter at Mimi's funeral, and sang his love song for her. I listened as the remaining six sang the lyrics under their breath as roger sobbed for his lover. I watched the last five sit silently, but reunited for Collins funeral. I watched as roger and mark held each other, finding comfort in their new lover. I watched, and I cried, and I sobbed silently as each of the remaining three spoke about the two men at their combined funeral. I watched as roger and mark's mothers met for the first time, and watched as Maureen explained to the two women that their sons were in love. Something the two conservative women had never heard from their sons. I listened from a distance as Maureen sang quietly under her breath in the graveyard. 'Goodbye love' floated to my ears.

Now I sat watching as the two very last members of that nine person family, held each other inside the church in which every one of their funerals had taken place. I watched as Joanne, having just learned that the disease had now infected her with its death sentence, leaned on Benny's shoulder and cried. I watched as over the next ten years, the bond between Benny and Joanne grew unbreakable, but I also watched as Joanne grew weaker.

I didn't see Joanne die in Benny's arms, but I knew she did, and I watched as he sobbed by her dead body in that white hospital bed. I watched as he gave her one last kiss to her cold lips before leaving the room. I watched as tears ran down his cheeks harder and faster than they ever had. I watched the very last member of the bohemian family left the hospital.

I watched as he visited their graves every weekend. I watched as he divorced his wife Allison, and went to live and die in that loft. I saw as he went into reclusion. And then I never saw him alive again. I went to his funeral though, and I watched as his casket was closed him forever. And then I laid a white lily on his grave, and then a laid a white lily on all of their graves, because I needed to signify the end of the bohemian family. I was the only one who had seen as it was born and seen as it died. And I didn't cry. I smiled. They were reunited once again. For good.

-X-

-If you can't tell, each section is from a different point of view. First Maureen, then Joanne, then Benny, and then Paul(which was harder to get, but it tied them together.

-I wrote the first section as the beginning of a pre-rent, rent, post rent mark/roger drama angst story (you know there are tons of them- why does distance make us wise, is a really good one btw.) but I thought it was better as a one shot. I also have issues finishing big stories. I might make this a drabble fic, where the chapters would end up telling a story, but they would all be in the same style as this chapter. It's a great one shot anyway.

-Please read and review. I want to know what you think of it.