A/N, I constantly point out how I always see Jerry O'Connell as the fat kid from Stand By Me, so I thought I'd work it into a fic, however sad and angsty as it is, and this is the closest I get to Woody/Jordan. Don't own them though, so you can't sue me.
The night rounds were made as usual, the still night was quiet and dark, nothing was amiss, each grey marker was worn and barely attended to, only a few had anything near them, occasionally a flower, occasionally something that was a memento of what the person that laid there had been, but one, one stood out.
She had gone to his apartment to think, she needed to clear her head, and the hospital had given her his personal possessions. She collapsed on the couch, a couch she had sat on how many times before? Curled up against him on, and watched TV with him on? She couldn't believe it, it still hadn't set in, it felt too fresh.
She really had loved him, despite what he thought, she hadn't said it out of pity, she hadn't said it because she thought she'd never see him again, she said it because she meant it, she just had never admitted it before, not even to herself, not until she almost lost him. There was a small collection of pictures on the shelf above the TV. She hadn't really paid much attention to them before.
There was one of the two of them, taken candidly, he stood there with his arm against a wall, and her in front of him, they looked like a loving couple, like what should have been, what could have been. There was one of him and Cal, he was older in it, already a grown man, one forced to be old before his time, one who had to watch the family, watch his little brother from before he had even graduated high school.
The one that brought a sad smile to her face the most was one of him when he was little, he must have been about ten in it, it was of him and what looked like a bunch of his friends from grade school, out in the middle of nowhere on a camping trip, just out there in the woods. He had been chubby back then, a little fat kid who had grown into a thin, lean, handsome man.
She caught sight of a scrapbook on a bookcase and flipped through it. It had an odd assortment of pictures in it. She saw a sheet filled out in a childish hand that had not yet matured into the fine crisp writing that was his. She laughed as she read it, all the things he had filled out.
It was one of those things that they have you fill out in elementary school, and "about me"thing and she laughed reading some of his responses. His favorite food was cherry pez and his favorite thing to drink was root beer, something that she knew was still true, although she never once saw him eat cherry pez, she wasn't even sure if cherry pez was something they still made. His childhood hero had also been Mighty Mouse, something that she got a real kick out of.
She flipped through it, more pictures of him and his family. Pictures of him at homecoming, his senior class photo, a picture of him at graduation, one of him getting his badge out in Wisconsin, all of them were painstakingly notated in different hands, some of them had been noted by him, some of them by someone she assumed to be cal, and some pages looked like they had been pilfered from others' scrapbooks.
She didn't know how long she had flipped through the book before she felt the tears prick the back of her eyes. She wanted to cry, but she didn't know how. She didn't want to let go of him, she didn't want him to leave without knowing that she really loved him, that it wasn't something she said out of pity. She didn't want to let go of him before she accepted the ring, the one that she had seen on the table by the door, tossed there haphazardly, forgotten, but not.
Laid in front of one of the grey markers were three things, a picture of a loving couple, a note, rolled and secured with a beautiful ring, and a pack of cherry flavored pez, mementos of what the person had been.