3:43pm, Tuesday June 11th, 2019
It was all fading away.
Memories like smoke, like cinder ash, grains of sand washed out to sea by a relentless, uncaring tide and he felt submerged, ten thousand feet below the surface where it was dark and cold, the weight of an ocean pressing him down. Hard to breathe. Even harder to think, to remember.
Nothing lived down here.
There was so much he couldn't remember any more...names, facts, days of the week. Sometimes he had trouble remembering their faces, remembering they weren't dead, that the world still turned on it's axis, brilliant shades of blue and green. Was he thirteen, or fifty-eight? Was the apocalypse coming, or had it already happened? He'd go looking for Dolores and then realize she wasn't there anymore.
Occasionally, he went looking for Ben.
He had trouble controlling his jumps. He'd blink and suddenly find himself outside or on the stairs or in the foyer. Once he tried jumping to his room and ended up in the park. He'd wandered, searching for familiar faces, landmarks, anything. He's seen a woman wearing a white blouse with black polka-dots and something about her seemed familiar to him. He'd followed her for six blocks before he forgot what he was doing, tenuous memories sinking below the surface again, lost. It took the family three hours to find him, and when they asked he couldn't explain how he got there.
His siblings were relentless. They would barely leave him alone and for all that he did care for them, he couldn't stand being fawned over. The pity and sadness in their eyes chafed against his skin like sandpaper, left him feeling raw and exposed and he wanted to yell at them, tell them to toughen up and get over it and start living the lives he gave back to them.
What had been the fucking point of it all if they were just going to insist on being miserable about things they couldn't control?
And he was so fucking tired.
Tired of appointments and tests and pills with their kaleidoscope of side effects. Tired of being poked and prodded and condescended to by doctors who didn't (couldn't) know what they were talking about. (There was no cure for what ailed him anyway, he knew that well enough.) Tired of not remembering, tired of remembering the wrong things. Tired of falling asleep and wondering who he would wake up as. Tired of losing minutes and hours to the fog, time no longer linear but broken, spiderwebbed like pavement cracks.
He'd never wanted them to see him this way. He hadn't wanted this to be their last memories of him.
He started by saying goodbye to Dolores, though he didn't let her see him. He didn't want her to worry. Besides, she looked happy and he didn't have the right to take that from her. Someone ought to get a happy ending in this story and it seemed right that it be her; she deserved that much at least. (Most of all though, he didn't want her talking him out of it.) She was better off without him anyway. No, he did not let her see him; this farewell was for himself alone. He spent awhile watching her, recalling as much of their time together as he could.
It wasn't twenty-three and half million minutes anymore.
He left before he could forget who she was and perhaps if Five had been more himself, more observant and aware of his surroundings he would have noticed the man with the briefcase who watched him from the background.
The note was short and to the point; the words "I'm sorry" and a location where they could find his body. He didn't have the mental wherewithal for long-winded letters and anyway, he didn't think there was much else to say.
Liar. (There was too much to say. There was forty-five years of things to say and he didn't have words for any of it, even the bits he could remember.)
He knew the perfect place. Not here, not the academy. Bad enough they'd have to bury another sibling; he wasn't going to leave a mess for them to clean up as well. Besides, he didn't want to die inside these dreary walls. There was a large building downtown that overlooked the city; a beautiful observation deck on the roof. He could stand there and take it all in; sunlight shining down on the world. Trees and parks and houses like perfect square boxes with living people inside and blue skies undirtied by ashes and dust. Life in every direction as far as his eyes could see. He wanted to die under a blue sky, in a world filled with growing things.
It was a good place; peaceful. No one would bother him there.
For as confused as he was these days, his hands still knew their way around a gun. (M9 baretta, military issue.) He didn't remember how he got it, but he knew what to do with it. It was instinctive, a natural extension of his own arm. He could do it blindfolded. (He probably had, at some point.)
He needed to finish this before he forgot how to pull the trigg-
A knock on the door. His thoughts went tumbling around his head like a pair of dice, coming up sixes and sevens. Why was someone at the door?
"Yoo-hoo!" ...Klaus. That was Klaus. Klaus was knocking on his door. He tucked the gun under his pillow, unthinking, walked three steps to the door and opened it. "Klaus?" he asked, trying not to sound as confused as he felt. "What are you doing here?"
Klaus leaned forward, face tight and jittery and Five wondered if he was using again (again? Had he stopped?) "I need to show you something," he said in a conspiratorial whisper.
Five blinked at him. "No, I'm busy."
"Come on," Klaus whined, going so far as to wrap his hand around Five's arm and draw him forward.
Five was too confused to stop him and let himself be pulled on like a toy on a string, ended up in the hallway. "What-" he said, then stopped. Nothing was making sense.
The problem, he thought, was Klaus' shirt. It was some horrid, garish thing he's certain had been fished out of a reject bin at the local thrift store. It made his eyes hurt to look at it. (There may have been more pressing matters to attend to but that shirt was an affront to his sensibilities.)
"What are you wearing?" he asked, bewildered. He'd been doing something important...
"Oh, do you like it?" he looked at Five expectantly, holding the vomit-patterned cloth out for closer inspection.
"No," Five said and Klaus peered at him, eyes suddenly clear as chips of ice.
"Are you feeling okay?"
No. Of course he wasn't. What a stupid question. Out loud he simply said "No," again, then turned and marched back to his room. This time he locked the door.
He never did find out what Klaus had wanted to show him. Not that it mattered (he'd just forget about it anyway).
He closed his eyes and felt the sun on his face; first fair weather day after three days of rain and the world smelled scrubbed clean, baptized by water, the sky a fierce and relentless blue. There was fresh air up here and Five took in several deep breathes, savoring it. In his head he said goodbye to each of his siblings in turn. They would mourn him, but at least they would mourn him, while there was enough of him left to mourn. It was fine, he was ready. He'd lived a long, mostly unhappy life. He didn't want to die the same way.
Time for this old man to get some rest.
He put the gun to his head, pulled the trigger...nothing happened.
He tried again, and again, and again (somewhere he'd read that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results).
He checked the gun, deeply confused. The empty magazine stared up at him like an accusation, the perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with his life right now. He'd been standing there holding an empty gun to his head like the goddamn idiot he was turning into.
But he had loaded it, hadn't he? (Safety off, pull forward the slide. Insert bullet, release slide. Magazine, safety.) He was sure he had...but now he couldn't quite remember actually going through the motions. How could he have forgotten to load his gun? It was instinctive, a natural extension...
He'd never remember how long he stood there, staring at his useless weapon, the fog around his mind slowing chewing up the minutes but by the time he came back to himself it was too late.
The family was there.
"We got your note," Diego said, breathing hard, voice pitched somewhere between anger and worry.