This One's For You
Chapter IV
As usual, the first thing that Bonejangles thought upon waking up was how thankful he was that the dead were incapable of being hung over. He had a brief moment of mental blankness as he lay staring at the uneven wooden panels of the ceiling. He remembered drinking enough to kill a living man, but why? There was a party. There was Emily. There was…
Bonejangles groaned as the memories of the previous night snapped into focus. Emily and her new husband; Emily and her true love; the skeleton's revelation of his secret longing, not to mention the revelation of his unequivocal stupidity. And now morning had come, and it seemed evidently clear that no amount of intoxication was going to get rid of how he felt about Emily. At least it felt like morning. He couldn't really be sure.
He hadn't forgotten his decision, though. Emily had what she needed, or at least what she wanted- a husband- and he couldn't intrude upon that because of some… stupid crush. Still, Bonejangles knew it wasn't that easy. It wasn't some schoolboy's infatuation that would be forgotten in a few months. He also knew he was too late now. He'd have to let Victor have her.
At the thought of Emily's husband, he felt a small pit of rage around where his stomach used to be, like a mob of tiny insects fighting each other. He would have to get over that, too, he supposed. From now on, spending time with Emily would probably mean spending time with Victor, more often than not. Bonejangles harrumphed. This deal was getting worse all the time.
The skeleton didn't bother to remove himself from the splintered wooden floor until he heard a faint melody drifting up from the pub below. It was a slow, melancholy tune- airy, but played deliberately. He picked up his bowler, which had rolled off during his drunken collapse the previous night, and slunk off to investigate.
Peering down from the top of the stairs, he found Emily seated in front of the piano. Her shoulders were slumped and her bony fingers ambled along the keys one-handedly, as if she just couldn't be bothered to lift her other hand. This wasn't an unusual sight; he often came in to find the dead girl at the piano, pouring her heart out into the notes. In fact, he was sure he recognized the gloomy tune she was playing. Still, he tarried at the top of the stairs. This was the first time he had seen her since… well, the stupid thing, and he felt as if he were looking upon a different person. It was all in his mind, of course, but he couldn't help but feel strange seeing Emily, the girl he was in love with, when he used to seeing Emily, his dear but platonic best friend. However, he was more concerned with how sorrowful she looked. Was this the same girl that had been prancing about the pub last night? What had happened to make her look so heart-broken, even as she stepped heavily onto the piano's foot pedals?
Bonejangles descended the stairs, trying hard to look casual and jocular. He slid onto the piano bench beside Emily and grinned, hoping to cheer her up. "Hey," he said, leaning on the keyboard so he could look at her face. "For a gal who just got hitched, you're not looking too cheery."
The bride didn't look up from her hand as it danced along the piano keys. "No," she agreed quietly, her eyes sparkling with tears.
The grin fell from Bonejangles' face. She really was upset. He straightened up and shuffled closer to her. Normally, he would've slung his arm around her shoulder consolingly and not really thought anything about it, but he was feeling oddly uncomfortable now. Suddenly, every move he made around her was suspect. Worse than that: it was evidence of his true feelings. "Everything all right?" he asked gently. The question was almost rhetorical. Obviously, everything wasn't all right.
Emily ceased her playing and looked at him then. The tears clung to her eyelashes, but none escaped to roll down her cheeks. With surprising grace, she answered, "Victor has another woman."
At first, the skeleton wasn't sure he'd heard her correctly. The pallid young man hardly seemed the womanizing type. Bonejangles blinked his one eye in surprise. When he made no immediate move to respond, Emily leaned into her hands, her elbows striking the keys and sending out a soft jumbled chord. "She's alive, of course. He went off to see his parents and I found the two of them… together. Him and his pale-skinned, air-breathing mistress." The last few words were full of resentment, but she closed her eyes and sighed as the anger that had rippled across her features vanished.
The skeleton cocked his head, and in a second attempt to defuse the situation asked, "Did ya' hit him?"
"No," she answered in the same morose tone.
"That's no fair!" Bonejangles said, playfully faking indignation. "You hit me all the time!"
To his relief, a half-smile spread across Emily's face as she raised her head and punched him swiftly in the arm. His yelp of pain was only partly in jest. Obviously, it didn't physically hurt, but he could still feel the blow resonating through his humerus. The fact that someone with such a petite stature could punch so hard never ceased to amaze him. He knew too well how lucky Victor was that Emily had been too distressed to release the full potential of her anger on him. Bonejangles had actually seen her tear the arms off a corpse who had been pestering her in the pub. Granted, she was drunk and he was dead, but he did still have quite a bit of flesh and sinew left at the time. Needless to say, he was a lot more polite to her from then on.
Bonejangles was glad he was able to get Emily to smile, but it faded almost as soon as it had come and she turned back to the piano, tapping out a few random notes. "I left him with Elder Gutkneckt. I couldn't stand to have him watch me cry anymore." With no irony in her voice, she lamented, "Maybe I should have hit him."
"Aw, Em," Bonejangles murmured sympathetically, placing his hand consolingly on her shoulder with only a twinge of hesitation. He would have never guessed that something like this could happen. Victor didn't seem the most ideal man for Emily, but he certainly didn't come off as someone who would abandon her to have a secret tryst with a mystery woman- and a living woman at that. The skeleton hadn't a clue how the dead girl and her fickle husband had made their way to the Land of the Living, which only made the story more bewildering. Bonejangles didn't think it pertinent to ask.
"He said he would never marry me," Emily said, the tears finally spilling down her face. Her voice became more distraught with each word as she spoke; "He seemed so horrified at the thought. As if marrying me were the worst thing he could imagine happening! And that living girl is up there waiting for him. She's beautiful and… and… alive! And to him, all I am is a corpse!" She lost it then, breaking down into sobs. She dropped her head onto Bonejangles shoulder bone and he wrapped his arm around her in a well practiced half-embrace.
He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. He knew Emily was comforted enough just having his shoulder to cry on, literally. Anything he could've thought to say at that moment would have been superfluous. As they sat together in silence, his hand resting on her exposed shoulder joint, a strange feeling of déjà vu passed over him. He remembered a time, years ago, which felt eerily similar to this moment.
It had been the one-year anniversary of Emily's death. Of course, the citizens of the Land of the Dead knew there was a good chance that she would be upset on this morbid day. In an attempt to keep her mind off her terrible murder, a few of them had decided to put together the wildest death day party anyone had ever seen, to remind her of all the good things there still were to being dead. The event had been a huge success, and the celebration had gone on strong through the day and into the night. To everyone's surprise, Emily hadn't seemed distressed in the slightest. She had been jovial and cheerful throughout the day, enthusiastically joined in during the skeleton band's boisterous rendition of "Remains of the Day" and had even ventured into some brief details of her death, which was more than she normally offered to anyone but her closest friends.
However, at the end of the long day, things had changed. Emily had been the only one left in the pub, along with a few straggling members of the band, all of whom were engaged in packing up their instruments, with the exception of Bonejangles who was nonchalantly fiddling with a random assortment of percussion instruments. The skeleton had noticed the dead girl sitting on a bench in the corner of the pub, looking forlorn, which was a strange departure from her earlier mood. Abandoning his instruments, he'd gone to sit beside her, and the girl had almost immediately broken down into tears, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck. She'd confessed about how awful she really felt, about how she'd spent all day pretending to be happy and not bothered by her murder, but that it really still killed her inside. She'd told him that she was afraid she would never get over it, and that she wished she could just forget about her death, as he had.
It had been then that he'd decided to tell her how he had been killed. It was a story he'd never told before. Most didn't even dare to ask about, and the ones that did only got some coy answer in return. Even those that knew him best were under the impression he'd just forgotten how it had happened. Usually, he just couldn't be bothered to get into it. But telling Emily had felt like the right thing to do, even though it meant breaking to her that, no, you could never forget about your death- or your life- and many didn't ever get over it. For a long while afterwards they had sat together, just the way they were sitting now.
Thinking back on it, he wondered if he'd been in love with Emily even then. In hindsight, it seemed stupid of him not to have noticed the way he felt about her, when they had shared moments like that- dozens of them.
And, he thought indignantly, it had been him that had been there for her, not Victor. Who was this Victor kid anyway? Some breather who had stumbled over her in the woods? She didn't even know him –obviously, since he'd run off to see some other woman. And, yet, he was the one Emily had married. Bonejangles thought it hardly seemed fair. Or was he just being totally selfish?
Either way, his hatred for Victor had increased tenfold. It didn't seem like an irrational jealousy anymore. The living boy had lied to Emily; he'd treated her like dirt and he'd broken her heart. Bonejangles wasn't one to hold a grudge against anyone, but when it came to someone hurting Emily, he found he could harbour quite a bit of spite. At the moment, his malevolence for Victor was second only to his absolute despisal of Emily's murderer.
Bonejangles looked down at the dead girl. Her eyes had dried, but she stared sadly ahead of her, lost in her quiet reflection. "He's an idiot, Em," He said, finally. "Anyone who wouldn't want to marry you is an idiot."
Emily sat up and the skeleton let his hand drop down to her waist. She smiled at him appreciatively. "That's sweet," she whispered, her voice hoarse from crying.
"It's true," he said matter-of-factly, grinning back at her. He watched as she turned away shyly and ran her finger along the edge of the piano keys subconsciously. He was struck with a sudden desire to wrap his arms around her, profess his undying love and convince her to leave her stupid husband- possibly after kicking him around a bit.
Come to think of it, would that really be such a terrible thing? Not in such dramatic tones, of course. Maybe not ask her to run away with him. But with her marriage not being all it was cracked up to be, would it be so wrong of him to just let her know what she meant to him? Maybe she'd realize that she didn't have to spend the rest of eternity with some guy who would lie to her just to see his secret paramour. Maybe it was what she'd been waiting for, and neither of them had known it. At the very least, she would know that someone cared for her.
"Hey, Em," Bonejangles said carefully. "Can I tell ya' something?"
The dead girl looked at him inquisitively, cocking her head at the hesitant tone in his voice. "Of course."
The skeleton opened his mouth once, then shut it again. How would he put all that he felt and that had happened since the previous night into words, without sounding too pathetic? "Em… I-,"
A loud commotion erupted from somewhere above the bar, and the two corpses both snapped their heads away from each other and towards the stairs. They heard shouts and the unmistakable bone-on-bone clanging of a skeleton brawl. One of the band members came dashing to the railing and shouted down, "Bonejangles! Ya' gotta break these guys up! They're killin' each other! Well… not really. But they're breaking our stuff!"
Bonejangles couldn't believe the horrible timing. He glanced at Emily, then back up towards the clamor of the fight that was echoing down from upstairs. He sighed heavily, as if merely annoyed by the inconvenience and not completely crushed, and started towards the stairs. Before he could walk out of her reach, Emily grabbed his wrist. "Wait," she said. "You were going to tell me…"
The skeleton turned around and, as coolly as he could muster, winked at her. "Don't worry, babe. It can wait."
(A/N: Hehe. I definitely referred to this as "Worst Episode Ever" for awhile. As usual, upon re-reading I realized that I was being over-critical, but this chapter's just a tad too sappy for me. However, necessary! Next chapter should probably have more hitting and anger, which is the kind of thing I enjoy. I'll be in England for the next week and a bit, so it might be awhile before the next chapter. Till then, kids.)