Title: - Whispers of Immortality

Author: - Katt

E-Mail: - - FRT

Feedback: - Like it or loathe it, let me know

Archive: - Archived at the Shield Fanfiction Archive

Disclaimers: - I don't own any of the characters of The Shield, they all belong to Shawn Ryan and FX. The song "Afternoons and Coffeespoons" is performed by Crash Test Dummies and written by Brad Roberts. The title "Whispers of Immortality" is from the poem of the same name by T. S. Eliot.

Author's Notes: - Whipper very kindly betaed this fic for me, doing some marvelous tinkering, and trying to reign in my comma compulsion LOL. Thank you Whipper.

Whispers of Immortality - First Verse

"What is it that makes me just a little bit queasy?

There's a breeze that makes my breathing not so easy

I've had my lungs checked out with x-rays

I've smelled the hospital hallways

Someday I'll have a disappearing hairline

Someday I'll wear pyjamas in the daytime."

When he was a kid he used to spend hours up in his room, lying on his bed while studying his atlas. All the countries of the world joined together, different colours like a quilt. The maps at the beginning of the atlas telling him which country had the most coal deposits, or grain production. Maps where the red triangles represented volcanoes. The map of the world that was all in different shades of purple showing him each country's life expectancy for it's citizens. You sure didn't want to live in one of those countries that were coloured a light mauve where it was only 35-45. There were city maps and in his head he'd walked down the streets of Berlin, Paris and Tokyo. He would marvel at the fact that if he flew from London to Toronto the time zones meant he'd get to Canada an hour before he'd left England! He'd wanted to do that one day because he'd thought that he'd be able to cheat time and get an extra hour. He was going to go to all those places with names that captured his imagination; Reykjavik, Ouagadouguo, Arkhangel'sk and dozens more. He was going to visit every continent, see it all. Then he got older. More time needed to be spent maintaining those straight "A's" so badly needed in order to escape small town Nebraska, go to college, and do something great with his life.

Now he'd never get the chance to see those places. He could've traveled, could've lived... instead he'd had his head stuck in books, putting everything off. There would always be time tomorrow, next month, next year…

Sitting in his car outside The Barn Dutch just couldn't make himself take his hands off the steering wheel and get out of the car. Glancing down at the car clock, ignoring the few puzzled glances he got from people passing him by, he saw that he was already ten minutes late. Just another five minutes, he thought to himself. And suddenly he saw his life stretching out in front of him, a finite number of "five minutes" slowly counting down, only not slowly enough.

He just wanted a little more time before he went in there. He had decided to tell Claudette first. She was his partner, she deserved to know first, deserved to hear it from him. For some strange reason he felt like he was letting her down, deserting her. Not for the first time that morning he wondered if he should've worn a suit instead of the casual Chinos and sweater he'd opted for. Somehow though he hadn't felt comfortable putting one on. He'd left them hanging in a neat row in his closet. Like Kim and her closet full of Kyle's suits, hanging there waiting for a dead man to return and pull one out. That's why he hadn't put one on today. Just looking at them had reminded him of a dead Kyle, and he hadn't wanted to wear something that made him think of death.

Just a stupid fucking cough.

A persistent, annoying fucking cough, sure, but just a cough nonetheless. It had hung around for over a month, despite the increasing amounts of cough syrup he drank. Sometimes the cough was accompanied by a sharp pain in his chest, like talons being dragged over his chest cavity from the inside. He tried to keep the cough in sometimes. Clamping his mouth shut, refusing to give in to the tickle at the base of his throat, swallowing saliva hoping it would ease the dry, scratchy feeling. Feeling it welling up inside him, determined to escape, until he had to admit defeat and give in, spluttering and panting in its wake.

He had to tighten his belt an extra notch or two. But the thought of food making him queasy, that was just because he'd been working really hard lately. Getting a little breathless climbing his stairs just meant he had to seriously think about joining a gym. When he'd coughed, hand in front of his mouth, to spare the rest of the world his germs, and had pulled his hand away to find it speckled with little red drops of blood... well, then he'd finally begun to wonder if maybe it wasn't just a virus. The theory he'd formed that he'd just ruptured a little blood vessel in his throat through coughing was blown away when he'd begun surreptitiously coughing up blood into a handkerchief, like the pale, wane, consumptive heroine in a Victorian melodrama.

The symptoms "googled" on the Internet hadn't reassured him, but had convinced him to make an appointment with his doctor. The way his doctor's mouth had tightened ever so slightly as he'd described his symptoms, and the way he'd rushed him straight off to the hospital for an x-ray "just to be on the safe side", had done nothing to reassure Dutch either.

As he'd stood, his bare chest pressed up against the cold metal, having his insides photographed by a woman who smiled too much and hid away in her lead-lined anti-room, Dutch didn't think he'd ever felt quite so exposed in his life. There was something really personal about someone getting to look at your internal organs, he'd decided.

Shadows his doctor had called them, shadows on his lungs. That tightening of his mouth had been back, even as he'd told Dutch: "I don't want you to worry too much, these things are often benign." Dutch wondered if they taught platitudes, the monotone voice and reassuring smile that never reached the eyes in medical school along with bio-chemistry and the principles of anatomy. Was this bedside manner? Because if it was, he figured his doctor had probably been at the bottom of the class for that particular lesson, or maybe he'd missed it altogether.

Dutch had sat in the doctor's office as he'd phoned the hospital arranging various tests to be carried out -- "…as soon as possible!" -- and had thought about the euphemism "shadows". For some reason it had made him think about "Babylon 5", a sci-fi show he'd gotten hooked on for a while a few years previously. The bad guys in the show were referred to as "The Shadows". He couldn't remember if you ever got to see them, but they did fly around the universe in creepy space ships that were black and looked like giant spiders. That's what he saw when he thought about the shadows on his lungs the x-ray had found; giant black spiders with long legs like tendrils, shaped like those evil space ships, wrapping themselves around his lungs...

He'd needed time off from work to have the tests done, but he hadn't wanted to tell anyone, so he'd called in sick. Stomach flu, really contagious just to make sure no one visited. Since it was the first time he'd ever called in sick there had been no argument when he'd told Aceveda's secretary that he'd be off for a week. The concerned phone calls from Claudette had been fielded with ease, although he'd felt a pang of guilt for lying to her. He'd absolved himself from that by arguing that if she knew the truth she'd only worry, it was kinder of him not to tell her until he knew something for certain.

So the first time in his life he'd ever played hooky and he got to spend it hanging about at the hospital. He got to spend it listening to the same platitudes as he'd heard from his own doctor. Only this time from doctors of whom some didn't look old enough to have left high school. He wondered if maybe there was a "Platitudes Textbook For Physicians".

He also got to spit into a cup a couple of times and give more samples of blood than he was sure was good for him. Then came the broncoscopy. A thin tube had been threaded down his throat while he was feeling a little floaty from a sedative. He remembered that the medicine they'd made him drink had left his mouth as dry as a desert. They were taking tissue samples and having a look around, they said, and he'd wondered if it looked like the pictures he'd seen on the Health Channel of cameras sliding down people's insides. Down tubes that were all pink and moist and slimy looking. What would they see at the end he'd wondered? Those black spiders, or maybe oozing tumors. He'd squeezed his eyes shut and had tried to go with the floaty feeling and imagine himself somewhere else, but the quiet voices of the doctor and nurses kept edging into his tropical beach fantasy. The CT scan had been another test carried out in a room all on his own, just like the x-ray. The only communication with the outside world the disembodied voice of the technician telling him when to hold his breath before the giant machine he was incased in began to hum into life around him. He began to realise that he'd be on his own for a lot of what was going to happen from now on. He'd never minded his own company before, but right then he'd found himself wishing he had someone to hold his hand.

Those were the exciting highlights of his week though. Most of it had actually been spent sitting in uncomfortable plastic chairs in hospital hallways, wondering if every hospital in the world had the same battered copy of the National Geographic magazine for November 1998 and dog-eared copies of "Peter Rabbit". The thought that there might be a readership for "Peter Rabbit" who would find themselves waiting in the same hallways as him, for the same tests, had pushed him into real depression.

If he breathed too deeply he could still smell that hospital smell he hated so much; disinfectant, urine and nameless chemicals with a little underlying aroma of fear and uncertainty. The smell seemed to seep into your pores after a while, it was on your clothes, in your hair, and no matter how long you stayed in the shower the slight whiff of it lingered around you. He supposed he'd better start getting used to it.

He'd seen his doctor again yesterday, and the man had been so tense that Dutch had thought he might snap. Then the platitudes - "I'm very sorry to have to tell you…It really is most unusual in a man as young as you…We'll do all we can…Modern treatments can give you some extra time, months even…"

It wasn't fucking fair. Lung cancer, and not just any lung cancer, but small cell lung cancer that had already metastasized throughout his body. A black poison that had stealthily spread itself around his insides. More tests would be needed to determine more accurately where it had spread, but the lymph nodes, liver, bones, brain had all been mentioned, and Dutch had felt his guts turn to ice as he'd realised he was dead. He was being eaten alive from the inside inch by inch, and he was dead, he just hadn't lain down and stopped breathing yet. Lung cancer, what was with that? It wasn't as if he'd even smoked, unless you counted the two cigarettes he'd smoked when he was ten, sharing them with Carl Pearson who'd stolen them from his mom's purse. They'd made him dizzy and sick, and he'd promised himself then, and there, never to smoke again, and he'd kept that promise. Looks like he shouldn't have bothered, should've kicked back, lit up and puffed away for all he was worth.

It wasn't fucking fair. He was angry, and frightened, and now he had to go into The Barn and tell Claudette that she'd have to find herself another partner because he was never coming back to work again. Because everything he'd worked so hard to achieve meant nothing anymore, because he was going to die. He was going to die and he'd never done anything with his life. He'd never seen Arkhangel'sk, or set foot on all seven continents, or strolled along the Thames or the Seine. He'd never done any of the things he'd spent cold, rainy Winter days, and hot, lazy Summer days, dreaming about when he was a kid.

It wasn't fucking fair.