A/N: A note that this chapter includes references to the AIDS crisis in the mid-'80s
He dreamed of Jack the other night.
Not Jack as he was, gaunt and ill, but Jack as he might have been, if he had been well. Strong, and broad, that mischief in his eyes all the brighter, his hair curling beneath his ears, dark and elegant. Artistic, the winding veins in the backs of his hands. And in the dream, he, Raoul, was not an old man anymore, either. Seventy years had fallen away, he could feel it, and when Jack's hand cupped the back of his neck, and drew him in for a kiss, he smiled into his mouth and felt it as real as if those lips truly were pressed to his, in the waking world.
He woke alone, in his own bed, of course, the first grey light of morning creeping around the edge of the curtains. So quiet, only the odd rumble of cars out in the street, and he had no inclination to move, no inclination to do anything, except stay lying there, watching the light brighten and move into the room, and think of Jack.
Twenty days, now, is all that's left.
(Twenty-four years, down to twenty days.)
He wonders if he'll be dreaming of Jack at the end.
He dreamed of Jack, too, in the winter of 1982.
He had a bad dose of the flu, his bones aching and the room spinning every time he opened his eyes, the sweat pumping through his skin, and as he slipped between sleep and waking, Philippe came to him, and held his hand like he did when he was a boy, and whispered things that Raoul couldn't remember when he woke again, but then he'd slip back into sleep, and Philippe would be still there, just as he remembered him, tired and pale, and smiling gently, small lines edging the corners of his eyes, his hair glowing just slightly in the light. And then he slept, and Philippe wasn't there, but Jack was, and Jack held his hand to his lips and kissed his fingers, and Raoul hardly dared speak in case he'd go away, hardly dared move in case he was only a phantasm, but Jack whispered for him to sleep, and when he said that the room was spinning, and he hardly had the breath for words, Jack kissed his forehead and whispered that it was only the streptomycin, only the vertigo, and that made sense in a distant sort of way, so Raoul closed his eyes, and felt Jack's fingers cold on his cheek, and slept.
(Thirty years since the streptomycin caused his vertigo, thirty years since Jack died, but through his fever-haze he didn't question the words of a ghost.)
When he woke again there was no one there and the room was dark, and he couldn't get his breath until he sat up and that made the spinning twice as bad, made his heart pound in his chest, and as he gasped and fought for air he thought of Sorelli and knew he had to call her.
The phone beside his bed, and his fingers fumbled over the numbers in the darkness, but he got it and heard the dial-tone, and Sorelli's voice was groggy on the line.
He doesn't remember what he said, only that he said something, and she sounded wide awake when she answered, "I'm on my way."
(She told him, afterwards, that she found him unconscious when she got there, and she'd already called the ambulance because she knew something was wrong, and he didn't wake even when she shook him and slapped his face.)
(They hadn't wanted to let her go in the ambulance with him, but she insisted, and held his hand the whole time.)
(He remembers the brush of her fingers, and nothing else.)
Pneumonia, the worst he's ever had, and he was in hospital for three weeks, pumped with antibiotics and painkillers and with a tube in his chest because his left lung had collapsed.
Sorelli didn't berate him, this time, for not calling her faster, and that was the most frightening.
Sorelli insisted he stay with her until he was fully well, and it was almost like how it had been once, only for how much older they both were.
On the day he turned sixty, he went to visit his parents' grave.
(He always visited it a couple of times a year, but he thinks now he should have visited it more, made more of an effort. But he was so young when they died that the only one he remembers in any way is his father, and the grief that he feels like he should feel has always been distant.)
He visited them, and brought them flowers, and thought of the sisters he'd never met, and what they might have been like. Thought of his mother, that woman known only from photographs and Philippe's memories, and what she would have thought of him, her one surviving son.
She must have been proud of Philippe. Maybe she would have been proud of him, too.
And their father, their father that Philippe said was never the same after the war. What things must he have seen? What hopes did he have for his sons?
Didn't matter, really. Philippe dead, and him the only one left. Their father would never have thought of that.
He went to visit Philippe, too, and brought him flowers as well, and it struck him as he stood there that had Philippe lived he would have been brushing up against eighty years old. And the thought of Philippe old almost made him laugh, in an odd sort of way that caught in his chest.
It was there that Christine found him. There, and she was from far in the future, (2052, he learned after, far in the future even from now), and she linked her arm with his, and took his hand.
"Your birthday is no day to be alone," she said, and he managed a smile for her, and kissed her cheek, and together they went to find Sorelli.
It was later that year that Sorelli learned, through her contacts in London, that there was a director planning a film about Philippe.
A dramatic film, in which someone would play Sorelli herself as she had been in her twenties, and someone would play Philippe, and it was going to culminate in his death. It was still going to be Buquet who blew up his boat, and Buquet was still going to be an IRA man, but in this film he was going to do it because the fictional Sorelli had been his lover first.
Bad enough to make Philippe's life and death into entertainment, but to twist the facts in such a way for the sake of drama, to implicate Sorelli in any way in his death—
She was livid when she came to him. Livid, and it was all he could do to keep her from jumping on the first plane and going to London and giving that director a piece of her mind. Such a thing wouldn't work, would only cause trouble for her and he couldn't have that no matter how badly he wanted to hit the man himself, but they had to find a better way to stop it.
They agreed on the law, agreed that they would both engage their solicitors on the matter, and get them to see what could be done, and Sorelli went to London but did not meet with the director. She took the case to another solicitor she knew there, and had him draft papers to block the film, on the grounds that it would damage her good name and Philippe's name too. Raoul drew it up in the press, wrote an article in the Irish Times and sent letters to the London Times. Noël, too, wrote several letters to the papers with the scathing tone he always had a talent for, and between them all they got the project stopped.
The relief, on the day that confirmation came, was enough that Raoul had to sit down.
The tears still came anyway.
The problem of AIDS was a growing one in those years. It was mostly considered an American concern, and not one they need worry about in Ireland. But he worried about it, and the small but growing number of cases, and wrote about it under his own name, not caring if it caused people to suspect he might be gay.
(Gay. Such a strange word on his tongue, and it didn't sit quite right when for so long he had called himself a homosexual in his mind, even if the world didn't know that.)
So he wrote about it, and when Sorelli was interviewed on the Late Late Show she insisted on talking about it, on moving the discussion away from her career to address what they both considered far more important. It caused a flood of complaints to the broadcasting authority, for such a thing to be so openly talked about on television, but the controversy only angered her more.
When Gay Health Action was founded in February 1985, he joined it, and decided he didn't really care what anyone said about him.
Publishing pamphlets and calling on the government to do something to help, to lift the restrictions on condoms and decriminalize homosexuality, didn't feel like enough, but it was all he could do to help.
He wondered, of course, about himself. The last man he had been with was David and that was eight years before, but was that enough to mean he didn't have it somewhere within him? Enough to mean that it wasn't taking its time, getting ready to show some sort of sign?
He knew what it was like to live with a disease that wanted to kill you. But there had been ways of treating TB, even though he knew he had it he knew too there was a chance for him, but this— this was something far different.
He didn't tell Sorelli his real reason, told her only that he was overdue doing it, but he went to Belfast to spend a week with Harry and his family, go to the libraries and museums, and while he was there he got himself tested.
One way or the other, he needed to know.
Harry was the only one he told, because he needed someone to know, needed to put some form on it, and Harry was married to Sheila but they had loved each other once, and Harry had loved Jack and other men too, so he could, in some way, understand.
So he told Harry, who agreed to keep it a secret until they knew for sure, and in those days as they waited for the test results, Harry did his best to keep him occupied, and keep him from thinking about it.
The cinemas, and the libraries. Pubs, music. Walking. Plenty of walking. In that week they must have walked most of Belfast.
There was only one incident, a UVF bomb in the night, but it was no where near them, and in the morning the soldiers were passing outside when Sorelli rang, frantic, from Cork. It was all he could do to assure her he was all right, all he could do not to tell her that there might be something else to worry about.
The results came back negative, and the relief was weakening.
Harry, when he told him, hugged him and wept.
He decided to go to Clare, on his way down to Cork to see Sorelli and tell her. But before Clare and Jack's grave, he stopped in Connemara, to see the Brownes. He hadn't told them either that he was going to Belfast to get himself tested, but Noël wanted him to jog his memory about how things had been in the fifties, because he was putting the finishing touches to his book. Raoul always liked Connemara, even if for years he couldn't think about it without thinking about how he and Jack had dreamt of settling there.
He stayed for three days, three days that seemed oddly removed from the world after the week he had just had. They went for walks along the craggy shore, and Phyllis made scones (he always loved her scones) and talked over old times, and the peace of it did his soul good.
Clare, and Jack's grave.
He picked up a bouquet of roses from the florist in the town, and the woman quirked a brow when he said they were for a friend, but she didn't know the half of it.
He set them down at the headstone, and didn't know what to say, so he didn't say anything only felt the swelling ache in his chest, a little bittersweet, and he smiled to think that Jack would write poetry about the romance of it, about going to visit him when he was thirty-three years dead, longer dead than alive, and still not knowing what to say.
It was bright, just a little cold, the breeze blowing in off the ocean, and he took one of the roses, and plucked the petals off it, and scattered them to the wind.
It was dark when he arrived in Cork City, and he found the address Sorelli had given him of the house she would be staying in, that she had leased for the estimated length that filming would take, and knocked on the door.
It was just starting to drizzle, the streetlights casting an orange glow, and when she opened the door, she stared, just for a minute, to see him.
"What are you doing down here?"
It was a thrill to think he could still shock her. "I came to see you, of course. Aren't you going to invite me in?"
She snorted and stepped aside to let him pass, and closed the door.
"I've something to tell you," he said, in the quiet of the hallway, and regretted his words instantly when the colour drained from her face.
"Don't say that you've—"
He shook his head, and hugged her. "That's what I want to tell you," he whispered in her ear, the tears he'd been fighting all along making him hoarse. "I got myself tested. I don't have it."
For a long minute she didn't speak, her tears damp against his neck. Then she exhaled slowly, her voice trembling, and murmured, "thank God."
Thank God.
(So many young men sick, so many young men dying. And this time, too, he was destined to survive, and even though, logically, he knows it was because of how careful he was even without knowing he was being careful, he couldn't help but wonder, why?)