Title: - Whispers of Immortality

Author: - Katt

E-Mail: - - T

Feedback: - Like it or loathe it let me know

Archive: - Archived at the Shield Fanfiction Archive

Disclaimers: - I don't 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.

Whispers of Immortality - Second Verse

"Times when the day is like a play by Sartre

When it seems a book burning's in perfect order -

I gave the doctor my description

I've tried to stick to my prescriptions

Someday I'll have a disappearing hairline

Someday I'll wear pyjamas in the daytime

Afternoons will be measured out

Measured out, measured with

Coffeespoons and T. S. Eliot."

Pressing his face against the tiles on the bathroom wall, Dutch felt the chill from them on his cheek. Sitting on the floor, his back leaning against the wall, he stared into the distance. His brain felt tired and sluggish, his body drained. He found himself staring at the shower stall and remembered the moment when it had all become real. The moment when he had finally accepted the enormity -- the finality -- of it all.

He'd been standing under the hot water, his eyes closed and his face turned upwards towards the warm flow. He'd wanted the warmth and the soap to carry away the smell of the hospital and the tiredness and creeping despair he'd felt. He'd suddenly realized that he was standing in a couple of inches of water because something was blocking the drain, preventing the water from flowing away. He'd run a hand over his face and then looked down. Looked down to see hair. The drain was blocked by hair, his hair. With a shaking hand he'd reached up and passing it over his head, closing his fist, he'd found a clump of hair trapped in his hand. He'd dropped it like it was burning his flesh and it had fallen to join the other soft, brown strands that moved gently back and forth in the pooling water. Stumbling from the shower he'd stood dripping wet and increasingly cold, staring at the shower stall as if it was somehow responsible. The he had ended up sitting naked on the floor, not too far from where he was now, crying because he was dying and he so wanted to carry on living.

The reason for his hair loss was of course the poison the hospital kept pumping into his body, into his brain. One poison supposedly fighting another. Chemotherapy, drugs, etoposide and cisplatin being pumped into his veins fighting the cancer cells in his lungs, his lymph nodes and liver. Well, not really fighting them, more a case of temporary containment, trying to buy him some more time. "Palliative treatment" they called it. Privately he visualised it as two armies drawn up inside him. The black spiders surrounded and besieged, by the forces of good. Well, the guys not so much in the white hats as grey hats actually. It was only a holding action though, eventually the spiders would multiply too rapidly and break through, and then he'd be finished. "Six months," he'd been told and "maybe, if you're lucky", they could stretch that to eight months. He'd see one more spring, one more summer, might be lucky enough to make it to his birthday... but he'd never see another Christmas. If he'd known that it was going to be his last one he wouldn't have worked the previous year. Maybe he'd have gone away, gone skiing or something, he hadn't done that since he was a kid back in Nebraska, he'd never managed to find the time.

He hadn't been sure though if it had been the chemo drugs or the radiation therapy, which had caused his hair to fall out. He suspected the latter. It had been a couple of days after his first round of prophylactic cranial irradiation. Huh, his vocabulary was growing all the time it seemed. His CT scans had shown that the cancer hadn't spread to his brain and the radiation therapy was to prevent that from happening. Ten to fifteen minutes spent lying with his head encased in a linear accelerator once a month was supposed to be enough to prevent cancer cells from growing inside his head. He certainly hoped so.

Having the treatment in the first place had been a hard decision. Not because he hadn't wanted to buy himself extra time. He didn't want to die and if the Grim Reaper was coming for him Dutch had decided that he'd make the bastard wait for as long as possible only to finally have to drag him off kicking and screaming. He had to agree with Dylan Thomas on this one - "Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light." The difficulty had come when the possible side effects had been explained to him. The fatigue, even the hair loss, had been expected, but the possibility that it would effect his intellect, his memory, his motor function, that had given him pause for thought. Still, the side effects from a brain tumor were no more attractive and in the end Dutch had decided that the damned cancer had already won too much ground. It had spread and infected too much of his body and he wasn't letting it take any more from him without a fight. Still every lapse of memory caused by tiredness, every tremor in his hands made him wonder if, now that he was three months into his treatment, maybe some signs of degradation were beginning to show.

Once again turning his face into the cold tiles of the wall, Dutch rubbed his damp forehead against their comforting coolness and forced his thoughts away from the frightening prospect that he might be losing his mind. That little bits of himself were floating away down the drain, just like his hair.

Back to his hair again, he thought with a rye smile. It wasn't so much that he was vain. He'd never exactly been the sex-symbol type, but he'd still spent the past few years watching his slightly receding hairline with dismay and then it had all gone in a matter of days. In the end he'd taken it away himself, shaving off what remained, wanting to take back some control over his own body. Because it was still his body, even though it no longer seemed so sometimes. Even though it seemed as if it belonged to the illness, to the doctors, to just about everyone but him. By Christ if he were going to be bald then he'd use a razor, not wait to be left with some pathetic clumps here and there. So he'd gone down the Vic Mackey road of hair-care. Not that he could pull it off as convincingly as Vic could. So now he wore baseball caps. Hey, at least they kept the sun off; Mackey had to be spending a fortune on sunscreen.

Just because he'd finished what the treatments had started didn't mean he was comfortable with his new look though. He definitely tried to avoid looking in the mirror now. If he caught his reflection he saw a stranger looking back at him, an alien. Sometimes he couldn't help but to think of himself as a monster, guaranteed to frighten the kiddies. He was pretty sure that was why parents would occasionally drag their kids away by their arms telling them "not to stare at the poor man", their faces burning with embarrassment as they tried to look anywhere but at him. It was one of the reasons he felt uncomfortable going out now. He was different and that always seemed to fascinate people. He'd feel their stares, feel their pity, feel their fear as they realised what the bald head and gaunt, pale appearance signified: disease and death. Some even moved away from him, as if he were contagious, as if by touching him they might find themselves cursed too. Of course, he thought wryly, he might just be imagining it, so self-conscious that he felt himself to be the centre of attention when nobody even noticed him. Or maybe irradiating his brain was skewing his perceptions.

Or maybe he was projecting his own prejudices back upon himself in a kind of karmic punishment. The oncology department at the hospital was somewhere he hated. Not only because his visits there marked out the milestones in his life now, one chemo session equaled a sixth of his life gone, today's third session equaling the distinct possibility that one half of his life had passed. And those were days he didn't want to spend in waiting rooms or treatment rooms. Days he didn't want to come face to face with other cancer sufferers. He didn't want to look into their faces and see a reflection of his own. He didn't want to be associated with them, be one of them. He didn't want to spend his time with the sick; he wanted to be outside with the living, the healthy. Sometimes he felt panic welling up in his chest as he lay unmoving in the CT scanner or the linear accelerator because encased in the machines he could picture himself lying in his coffin. Catching his reflection he could see the skull behind his sunken cheeks and pale skin. That was why people shied away from him now. It wasn't so much that he looked like he was dying; it was that he looked like death - that he was death.

Christ, you sound like a miserable bastard, Dutch thought to himself. He wasn't all doom and gloom. His sudden and unwanted look at his own mortality had affected him in other ways. He understood what people who had had brushes with death meant when they talked about appreciating life so much more because that was exactly how he felt. It was the smallest things that would suddenly grab his attention and entrance him as if he'd never experienced them before. Hearing a phrase of music that seemed to vibrate through his soul, seeing a combination of colours in a bird's wing that should clash, but which nature had somehow managed to blend together to perfection, a smell that transported him back twenty five years to a summer's day spent on his uncle's farm playing in the barn with his cousins, a day, the pure, innocent joy of which, he'd forgotten all about.

The small smile that had formed on his face at once again remembering that golden day faded as he thought about children. The hospital had offered to freeze his sperm, since the treatments would leave him sterile, but since no one would want it he hadn't taken them up on their offer. There would never be any little Dutch Wagenbach's running around, his genetic lineage ended with him. He'd once thought, for about an hour, that he was going to be a father, but Lucy had soon set him right on that misconception. He'd lost his chance at immortality; everything he was would die along with him.

What was that exactly? What was he? A good man? He'd tried to be. A good friend? He hoped so. A dedicated detective? Yes, that he was sure of, he'd always given everything of himself to his job. Would that be how he was remembered? Would he even be remembered, he wondered bitterly. Even now Claudette had a new partner, Greg someone-or-other. Thankfully she didn't talk about him with Dutch. He was glad about that because he always had a sneaking feeling deep down in his soul that Greg, what-ever-he-was-called, was stealing his life. Greg was doing his job, Greg was interacting with his colleagues, Greg was living his life. Needless to say Dutch didn't like Greg very much.

Suddenly he felt a wave of heat consume his body from the inside and a flood of nausea stopped him from envying Greg anymore. The sickness brought on by that day's chemotherapy overwhelmed him once again and he dry heaved into the toilet, briefly wondering if a couple of extra months were worth all of this.

He didn't hear the door opening behind him, but he felt the soft cool hand that brushed his forehead, the other hand that smoothed little circles across his back.

"It's okay son, you're not on your own."

Claudette's presence centering him in his distress. It was worth it. Every hour spent heaving into the toilet, every hour spent feeling exhausted, every hour spent at the hospital, was all worth it. It kept him here, it meant he could find miracles in the world, it meant he could hold a friend's hand and feel he was loved, that he'd be missed when he was gone. It meant he was somebody. Somebody more than a set of symptoms, a diagnosis, a set of treatment and drug regimes. He was a person, a life, and he was going to hold on to that with all his strength.