Disclaimer: I don't own IPS or any of the characters.
Warning: Rated M for character death, adult themes, and angst. If those will upset you, don't read.
Author's Note: It's been a while. I'm so sorry, my dear readers. There were some family issues and I ended up going out of town for that. I'm not back yet, but I did have the opportunity to put this small chapter together (and it started bugging me while I was trying to sleep). I hope you're still with me.
6.
Marshall wished he could say the first night without her was the worst, but it wasn't. He'd lain awake, pillow hugged to his chest, and stared at the empty side of the bed next to him as he attempted to force some sense from the abrupt shift in his reality. Sense would not come, nor feeling; there was only a hollow, numb void where something he'd never thought he would lose had once been, a gaping emptiness where that something had been torn away, leaving a wound that could not yet offer sensation.
Later, he would wish for that numbness to return.
God, how he would wish for it.
But that night, there was only the hollowness within him, the emptiness in bed next to him, the numbness that refused to accept that she was gone and denied him the pain that might force such an acceptance. The space around him, so much empty space, echoed with a silence that stood with the half-empty bed as proof of what had transpired.
It should be familiar to him, that silence, he felt; hadn't he lived in this very house alone for years, with the same once-peaceful nighttime silence that was now deafening, suffocating? It was as though the very house around him had become accustomed to Mary's presence, and was grieving her with him.
He wondered, then, if it would always feel as it did now, cavernous, and empty, even though he knew it really wasn't; he knew that Stan slept a light, watchful sleep just down the hall on the living room couch, a sleep honed over years of guarding the lives of others. He knew, too, that his father would arrive not long after the sun rose, after hours of darkness that would be marked, minute by minute, slowly and sleeplessly; he knew that in a few days, his daughter – his daughter, and that was something else again, something else with which he had no idea how to cope – would come home from the hospital. He knew these things, but he felt it was likely that these additional occupants, like Stan, would do little to dispel this oppressive miasma, no matter how much sound they made.
Nothing could replace what was missing.
Soon, the hollow feeling within him would swell with grief and loss, but for that night, he was numb.
Maybe that, in and of itself, was a mercy.
And God, what would he do when he could feel again, and he'd have to face the hurt?
Marshall buried his face in the pillow he held against his chest, carefully stifling soft, whimpered sobs from Stan's ever-attentive hearing and from the house itself.
To break the silence would be to admit it was there.
Marshall wasn't ready for that.