He's written out his will several times through the decades. The first time was when he learned of his tuberculosis, more than sixty years ago, and later iterations of it didn't change much, everything generally left to Sorelli, with things to go to Harry or Darius at different times. Then Sorelli died, and he re-wrote it for everything to go to Alex Daaé instead, with a letter explaining in case he died before Alex went back and met him in 1947. And then he rewrote the letter once he knew that Alex would have met him, to account for that. Then Alex died, and he rewrote it all again for everything to go to Christine, which is how it remains, now, except for a few small things to go to Erik and Anea instead.
He has, of course, written out instructions for after, on the matter of his funeral and how he should like it to be, but Christine knows it already. It's mostly there to keep her from worrying that she might remember things wrong, and he keeps a copy of it on his desk – because he knows her and where she's likely to hide herself if she needs to – and Anea has another copy, for a couple of years now.
She looked at him askance as he told her what was in the envelope, and he assured her there was nothing to worry about, that he just wanted everything in order as much as possible.
(The last time he was in hospital, with the pneumonia, he filled out all the forms to be sure that they wouldn't try to revive him when the time comes, to have it on record. He knows he's not going to live past that day, and at his age it would be indecent to look for more time.)
Some might consider it morbid to think on such things, but he's just being practical.
He did worry, in the winter of 1990, that that will he'd written out was going to be needed.
It had been a busy few months, campaigning alongside Sorelli to have Mary Robinson elected president, once they knew that Labour were nominating her and not Noël. The best woman for the job, Robinson, and the first woman to be elected to it, and when the news came through in the count centre that they had done it, he swept Sorelli into his arms and swung her around like he had all the way back in 1948 when they first had Noël elected.
That was when he felt the first twinge of something in his chest, but it passed in a moment and when she noticed that his grin had faltered, he shrugged off her concern, and hugged her tighter.
Between the campaign, all the administrative work as head of department, his own lectures and research (Irish soldiers in WWI, this time), and supervising three PhDs at different stages, he was just so busy.
He awarded Alex Daaé his gold medal in history, and wished him well with his Masters up in Queens, and wondered not for the first time how far in the future Christine was, and there was another twinge in his chest, this one sharper than the first a few nights earlier, but he swallowed down the breathlessness and smiled at this young man who was something of a prodigy.
He was due to go to Belfast himself for a weekend, and to see Harry's new photographic exhibition, but in the end it wasn't to be.
He was having dinner with Sorelli when the pain came again, spreading into his back, sharp enough that it made him drop his fork, and she frowned at him.
"Are you feeling alright?"
He gasped around the pain, around the bile rising acid in his throat, and nodded, and reached for his glass of water.
"Fine." It sounded weak to his own ears.
"I really don't think you are."
He was just beginning to think that himself, the sweat beading cold on his skin, but he shook his head not to worry her. "I am."
She looked down at his fist clenched on the table, as he swallowed another breath, and shook her head. "I don't care what you say. I'm ringing Noël."
She stood up and walked out into the hall while he was focusing on breathing, blinking against his vision threatening to blur, willing the pain to ease, and then she was back searching through the cupboard, and she produced the box of Disprin.
"He said to give you aspirin and get you to a hospital."
It was more than he was able for to argue with her, and when he nodded her mouth set into a firm line.
A heart attack. They carried out some sort of procedure on his heart by going in through a vein in his arm (Noël tried to explain the science of it to him, but it was too much to really take in) and he spent two weeks in hospital while they tried to get his blood pressure under control.
When Sorelli heard he'd been having odd pains for a few days and done nothing about them, she gave him the sternest talking to she ever had in all the times he'd landed himself in hospital, but her face was pale and pinched, and her eyes bloodshot, and he knew he'd frightened her terribly this time, so he let her, and whispered that he was sorry, which made her shush him and fret about him wearing himself out.
If she gripped his hand tight enough to make it ache, he didn't comment.
Harry came to see him one of the days, and he, too, was paler than Raoul could remember seeing him since the day after Jack died, and instead of sitting down in the chair where Sorelli spent most of her time, he pulled him in for a hug.
"Christ I was frightened when she rang to tell me."
And Raoul didn't miss the tears that he wiped away.
Christine came to see him, too, while he was still in hospital. A younger Christine than he had seen in a long time, come back from October 2017 (which doesn't seem all that far away, now). Of course he didn't know, at the time, that they would know each other in her lifetime, certainly didn't know that he would have recently died when she was coming from, so when she came into his room, this young Christine like the one he had first known all those years ago, and her eyes, too, were bloodshot, watering as if she was on the verge of tears, he wondered what terrible thing had happened when she was coming from, but decided it best not to ask, in case it would upset her more.
When she took his hand, he squeezed her fingers, and tried to think of what to say that would not in any way spoil her future.
"I feel fine," he said, and smiled at her so she might believe him, and her own smile was watery.
"I knew you'd say that."
(The most amusing episode of his time in hospital was later that day when Noël came to see him. Christine was still with him, cheered up now, telling him that her thesis was going well, and when Noël found her there he stopped and stared. He opened his mouth to say something, and then closed it again, and then, "Do I know your mother?" And it took Raoul a moment to realise he meant the older Christine, but Christine herself was faster, and nodded, "You might. People say we're very alike." And that answer was enough to satisfy Noël and he extended his hand and she took it and shook it. "A pleasure to meet you, Miss..." "Daaé." "Miss Daaé.")
(He didn't stay long, and after he left Raoul nearly choked on a laugh, and beside him there were tears trickling down Christine's cheeks as she grinned. "I can't believe I met him, I can't believe it." And Raoul kissed her hand, and grinned at her. "You'll meet him many more times, I promise.")
The whole affair of his heart attack persuaded him that he needed to slow down his work. Sorelli insisted he stay with her in Wicklow after his release from hospital, and it was more than his life was worth to argue over it. So he spent Christmas with her, and was still there when his birthday rolled around, and by then, almost two months since he landed in hospital, he had made up his mind.
He would have to retire. Step down from head of the department, continue to supervise his PhD students until they had submitted, but he could do that easy enough. And when they were finished, then retire fully. He'd be seventy, but, he supposed, it would be time to retire, at seventy.
The only thing he could do, if he wanted to live much longer, as his doctors reminded him.
Though Sorelli, too, had reduced her workload as she got into her seventies, she was still busy directing films. With his decision to retire, she decided that the time had come for her to do the same. She was about to turn seventy-seven, had taken to wearing glasses, and insisted that he was the cause of most her grey hair with all the times he'd worried her over his health. She handed over the reins of her current project to her assistant, and set about reorganizing her garden with enthusiasm.
She was less enthusiastic the day Darius came to see him, shortly before he headed back to Dublin with his strength recovered. It was only when she'd brought him the stack of post that had arrived while he was in hospital that she found a letter from Darius, and discovered that they were back in contact. He hadn't told her simply for the fact that he knew she wouldn't approve after how things had ended, and though he regretted keeping it a secret he still felt it was the best thing to have done.
She'd presented him with the letter, and a quirked brow, and he'd sighed and knew he had to explain himself.
"I just want you to be careful," she'd said, and he squeezed her hand, and nodded.
"I know."
The day Darius came, they took tea in her garden. It was the first time in almost eighteen years that he had seen Darius, and he found him changed terribly with time, his face lined and hair grey, his edges softened. And Raoul knew he must have changed a great deal too, in those eighteen years, but he didn't think he'd changed all that much, until Darius squeezed his hand and said, "you're thinner than I remember."
If that was a good thing or a bad thing, Raoul couldn't decide.
Darius went back with him to Dublin, and though they agreed that they would not be rekindling their relationship it was nice to have him in the house again, in a quiet sort of way, for the few days that he stayed. And then he was gone again, back to London, but it was not the severance that it had once been.
It felt quiet, and right.
Christine and Sorelli were the ones who helped him clear out his office in the history department. The office that had been his for forty years, since he was a newly conferred Doctor of History, and now he was leaving it for the last time.
There were tears in his eyes as he packed the boxes, and every so often Sorelli would squeeze his arm, or Christine would take his hand, and having them there made it easier.
They argued over him carrying the boxes to his car, on account of his heart, but he felt perfectly fine and a good deal better than he had before he got sick, so he insisted on carrying some of them.
He suspects, even now, that Christine took the heaviest ones.
All the books, the letters, the essays and journals. Notebooks, photographs. His gown, and that gown still hangs on the back of the door of his study. All the assorted bits and pieces of forty years working in the one room.
It didn't seem real, his office, empty and echoing, as he closed the door on it for the last time.
Most of what he remembers of that first summer of his retirement is long walks in Bray with Sorelli, is learning to garden properly for the first time. There was the trip to Clare to visit Jack's grave, and the roses he brought this time were delicate and ones that he had grown himself. Harry and Sheila came to stay with him for a week, and it eased some of the strangeness of his new situation to have familiar voices in the house. Christine was a regular caller, more regular than he had known her to be in years, popping in and out from a whole range of different times in the future, and maybe if so much else hadn't been new and strange that would have been the thing to make him realise that 1991 was not a normal summer, was not a normal year.
It was, in fact, the last normal year. But he didn't know that at the time, so every time she came with Sorelli, no matter when she was coming from, he hugged her and made her tea and they navigated the fragments of visits that had happened for him and not happened yet for her, the usual negotiation through the pieces of their friendship.
How Sorelli managed it he never asked her, and he wishes now he had. He would have liked to know.
Maybe that was why she spent so much time keeping records of things.
The autumn was cold and it made his bones sore, but it was frosty and crisp and he experimented a bit with photographing the trees and the plants in the garden, but it wasn't in any serious sort of way. He still had his letters to Darius, and ones to Harry, but he felt a little lost, to not have lectures to organize, and students, and exams and essays to mark, and conferences to prepare for.
The times he went to stay with Sorelli, or she came to stay with him, they went back to staying in the one bed, both of them a little lost, with the changes in their lives.
They talked about Philippe more than they had in years. He's glad, now, that they did.
Christmas they spent in his house, that year, and on St Stephens' morning they went to Glasnevin and brought a wreath to lay for Philippe.
He never regretted not loving women, but that winter he did regret, just a little, not having a son he could have named for his brother.
He broached the question with Sorelli, on New Year's night, in the earliest hours of 1992, and she sipped her wine, and gazed into the fire, and sighed.
"I couldn't have married a man I didn't love," she said, softly. "And I couldn't have loved a man after Philippe, and I couldn't have married someone when I love Christine." Then she smiled, and said, "So I think it's turned out for the best."
She turned seventy-eight on 12 February, and he took her for dinner. There was nowhere for them to go dancing, so the dancing was in his own living room by the fire, with his ancient record player, and when she laughed it was the most perfect night it could have been.
Even then, there was some part of him whispering, remember this. Remember this always.
They went together to visit Philippe, as they always did, on his fifty-third anniversary, and she leaned into him and he felt the tears damp on her cheeks.
"God but I miss him terribly," she whispered, and he hugged her tighter.
"So do I," he whispered, "so do I."
Then she laughed. "He'd say we're both ridiculous still crying over him," and he smiled to himself, the tears damp in his own eyes. "He would, but he'd be a little bit honoured, too."
And they were quiet a long time, until she sighed. "I've always hated that I couldn't see him after."
And the lump was tight in Raoul's throat, as he swallowed hard against it, and told her, for the first time, of what it was like to be there, of what it had been like to see him for the last time.
("There was a cut over his eye, and I could feel the stitches beneath my fingers…")
He went to visit her on 21 April. He's always remembered it. He was only there for an hour, had driven down just to say hello, and because he missed her face. And he was bored, too. Bored, and trying to talk himself out of taking on a bigger workload, and if there was anyone who could talk him out of that it was Sorelli.
But she seemed tired, so he didn't mention it. And when she asked him to come again the next day, he told her he couldn't, that he had an interview for a documentary about 1798, and it wasn't a lie. Then she said it would have to wait two days, because she had a meeting about a film someone wanted her to direct about Roger Casement, and she could do with a good historical consultant, if he knew of anyone, and just that hint of mischief in her eyes.
"What happened to being retired?" he asked, and she swatted him.
"I could ask you the same."
He hugged her before he left, and she kissed his cheek and leaned into him. Whispered, "Mind yourself," like she did every time he left her, and he said he would, and then she hugged him tighter and followed it with, "you've always been my dearest friend," and he smiled into her hair.
"And you mine."
She released him, and waved as he drove away, and he watched her fade into the darkness in the rearview mirror.
If he had known it would be the last time he saw her, he would have turned around and pulled her into his arms, and never let her go.