Title: To Envy The Dying Man
Author: Savage Midnight
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own 'em. Kring does. Yes, I'm jealous.
Summary: Claire tries to remember. Peter tries to forget.
Author's Note: Huge thanks to my betas, Hannah, for picking up on the little things I didn't and giving me the confidence to continue this, and Annika, for keeping her eyes open to mistakes.
--
Part II
She gives him a decade alone before she allows him to find her. He loses his first daughter in that time and she knows now that he's finally beginning to understand how truly unnatural their circumstances are. He's lost his parents already, his brother and his wife, but this is different. This goes against the cycle of life.
Claire doesn't know this kind of pain and she pities him for knowing such an unnatural kind of loss. That's why she waits for him to find her. She knows it has to be his decision, because no matter how many times she walks away, he will always have the choice. He can choose to go on again, to let himself age, to reach that point when death finally defeats him, or he can wait for her, walk with her through the years for a while until he's too weary to go on.
She knows she can't expect that of him, knows that her hatred is unjust. And she knows now that he never really forgot her, not truly, because he's still here.
--
It all boils down to survival instinct. Peter is still alive because his mind chose to live, chose to remember her, and his body followed suit. Claire doesn't have that choice. She doesn't even know if, when the time ever comes -- and it won't, it never will --, she will give in and let go. Sometimes all she wants is that freedom to choose.
She's at his gravestone when he finds her again. He isn't aging anymore. There are no crows feet or grey strands but there is a tiredness in his face that she recognises. It won't be there for long. Weariness is fleeting for them, if only on the surface. But sometimes that renewal creeps into her and she finds herself fighting to make the years a little lighter, a little sweeter.
It happens again when she sees him. Some people would call it hope, maybe even faith, but Claire calls it relief. The days will shape themselves into something else with him by her side. Maybe they won't be perfect, maybe they won't even be good, but they will be different, fresh, bearable.
Peter collapses into her when he sees her there. Exhaustion makes him boneless, heavy, and there is death in his eyes when he looks at her. He buries his face in her neck and cries hot tears that aren't for her but for a life she wasn't a part of, and she lets him. Because she knows one day there will be a shoebox under his bed, too.
--
They live in the South of France for a while, in a tiny cottage hidden away in the woods. Claire has been a city girl for too long and finds the seclusion tiring, but Peter seems to thrive in it. He spends his days painting, portraits and landscapes and abstracts that he sells for a pittance in the local village. He calls it therapeutic. She calls it active wallowing.
She learns to play string instruments. Acoustic guitar and violin and cello. Sometimes she thrums out tragic melodies or broken rhapsodies just to watch him collapse in on himself. He calls her cruel for doing it, but she doesn't want him growing numb. She knows that wounds have to be prodded, maybe reopened, to be remembered, for people to figure out when things are better or worse. The ability to cry is as necessary as the ability to laugh and if Peter is capable of one he's capable of the other.
Their present is defined by their past and shaped by their future. And in that they are no different from everyone else.
--
It's a few more years before she drags Peter out of his isolation and thrusts him into a constantly-changing world. She forces him back into nursing, never really sure if it will be good or bad for him. Working side-by-side with death will either make him want to avoid it or make him long for it. But she wants him to understand why he chose to survive, needs him to find some kind of purpose to pull him through the years.
Claire's purpose is purely to have a purpose. Because that's something she can choose for herself. The choice is right there, limited or not -- live or exist. Death doesn't come into it. For her there is no final decision. There is time for some mistakes to be undone, for some choices to be unmade, and sometimes it's the lack of closure that makes the years feel heavier.
Peter can choose finality, and she's waiting for that inevitable day when he does.
--
People say to be limitless is to be free. What they forget to say is that the dying man will live like he's never lived before, if only because he knows his time is limited.
Tell a man he will live forever and he will live just as the dying man will. But give it decades, centuries, and that man will be trapped by his own limitlessness. He will envy the dying man and beg for the limitations of a mortal life.
Claire tries not to envy the dying man. And that's how she thinks of Peter. A dying man, slipping away from her day after day, creeping towards mortality. Knowing it will end makes it easier to carry on and she can't hate him for having one foot on the green mile. She thinks she'll be the first to take it at a run.
--
There's four months that stand out, trapped between the monotony of the years, that Peter will always remember. Claire remembers simply because he can't forget.
This is how she defines her life now. Not through birthdays, because there aren't any left to remember, but through the moments that shape them. These moments are few and far between but they take them where they can get them and use them to craft out a life, an identity.
She calls these months the Lilly months. Lilly, with her beautiful blue eyes and tiny hands. Lilly, with her child's face and her body aging too fast, decaying, dying.
Peter's life is living but his job is death. Claire knows he sticks it out because he covets death, is reassured by its constant presence in his life, even if it isn't his. She knows he isn't ready for it, not yet, but to know it's there, waiting for him, makes living a little easier.
Lilly changes everything. Peter, who doesn't wish immortality on anyone, returns home every night cursing mortality and his inability to save his patient. He stares at his hands, hands that nurse death everyday, and wishes he could give his life, his years, to the tiny girl dying in her bed.
Peter believes in balance, that nature gives and takes, and he tallies up the years that nature has given them and wonders who they were taken from. Lilly is only one little girl, but she becomes for Peter the embodiment of everything unnatural in his life. It hits him worse than the deaths of his children. They, at least, knew what it was to grow from children to adults, to build their own families, to die old women in their beds. But Lilly, with her careless grin and unshakable trust, would never know of these things.
Peter should have been long buried when Lilly was born, and once, only once, he asks Claire if the price of knowing Lilly, of Lilly knowing him, are the years that he has taken from her and that he can't give back.
She doesn't answer -- can't answer -- and he never asks again.
The day Lilly dies she finds him holed up in the bathroom with a razor blade, his blood trickling through the cracks of the tiles. He's staring at his wrists in morbid fascination, concentration creasing his brow, and she knows he's trying to focus, trying not to think of her, trying not to heal.
She makes a purely selfish decision when she falls to her knees in front of him, when she drags his head up and makes him look at her. He clenches his eyes shut, refuses to let her in, and he begs her, please, please, but it's too late. He's already healing, the wounds closing, the colour creeping back into his face.
Not yet Not yet. Just a little bit longer. Please.
Afterwards he disappears for a month. When he returns there's a picture of Lilly in his shoebox.
-
It's another decade before Claire grows tired of Peter's resentment. Sometimes when he looks at her there's hate in his eyes and it's the only thing capable of destroying her these days. She spends her nights throwing herself off of skyscrapers, dancing on bonfires and burying herself under the ocean. Every time her body renews itself, but her insides grow heavier until she begins to believe that she will die from heartbreak alone.
It's another handful of years before she uses her traitorous body as a bargaining chip. In their world words like wrong and incest mean nothing, and she coaxes him into her bed, wrapping herself around him, anchoring herself to him in the only way she knows how.
It's dark and it's twisted and it has nothing to do with familial bonds. It's blackmail and she knows it. They both do. But Claire is tired of waiting for the day he gives up, gives in, and leaves her alone. If it buys her another lifetime or two, then it's a price she's willing to pay.
When he kisses her it's a punishment. She carves patterns into his skin with her nails in retaliation for the weakness he will one day show, and he lets her. They paint each other in bruises and watch them heal, but the real damage remains invisible, irrevocable, irreparable.
Together they splinter, break, shatter, snap, and somewhere along the way the hate fades from his eyes.
--
What they have goes beyond uncle and niece. That much is obvious. And it's not at all poetic, just a simple fact. The circumstances in which they find themselves bring around a forced intimacy that gradually grows into easy comfort, and familial love becomes just another dimension of their existence. They are a family rooted not just in tradition, blood, biology, but in necessity, history, understanding. Through the years their relationship shifts, twists, breaks and mends. It loses something, gains something else, and it's a balance that is constantly changing to suit their wants and needs.
They never play the roles that others expect of them, only the ones they expect of themselves. They're often mistaken for boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife, but Claire always corrects them, doesn't want to the hassle of feigning public affection and public love. Yes, there is love, but not the kind people will understand or accept or believe. It's ugly and beautiful, treasured and abused, but it's theirs, made by their owns hands, and Claire doesn't want it tarnished by false romanticism.
She never tells those on the outside who they are, who they were or who they'll be. She tells them who they're not, who they weren't and who they'll never be, but only when they ask.
A part of her finds it funny that no one mistakes them for family. They hold Claire's light to Peter's darkness and pass judgement accordingly.
--
For almost a century they are two people pushing and pulling each other through the years. They watch the world shift, watch landscapes change until there is nothing left but memories of what used to be.
It's not the desolate picture Claire expected it to be when she was younger. The world isn't broken and barren and man has yet to succeed in destroying the earth beneath his feet. But there have been changes, drastic and subtle both, and the people have been punished for some and rewarded for others.
The world is thriving and dying depending on where you look, and Claire realises that nothing has changed at all.
-
Her name is Sophie and she is the darkness in which Peter seeks his solitude. He meets her at the hospital, returns home that day with a crooked smile on his face that lingers for months. She catches it, asks to meet the woman that has sparked something inside of him, touched something she'll never be able to reach, and he hesitantly obliges.
Sophie appears on their doorstep one Friday night, a bottle of wine in her hand, and for the first time in a long time Peter introduces Claire as his niece.
This is the moment she realises she's losing him.
-
He asks her for a lifetime. Claire remembers wishing for that once, for a man to ask that of her, and she thought then that it was a price worth paying.
But this is something different. He's not asking for a lifetime with her -- they've had that already -- but a lifetime without her.
He makes promises. Promises that he won't leave her, not forever, just for a little while. Sophie wants a family and Peter isn't jaded enough to give up on the idea yet. But he needs to forget her first, needs the illusion of mortality to keep living, and he begs her to give it to him.
One lifetime. It's nothing and it's everything, and she has no choice but to give it to him. He'll only hate her if she doesn't, will leave her alone for good this time, and forever without him is a future she can't bear thinking about.
He kisses her with something akin to gratitude when he leaves, and begins a life without her.