Part 11:

(( I'm a goof who didn't realize how much time she'd have in the first half of the day before work, so you guys get this a little earlier than expected! I'm thinking there'll be one more chapter, and then an epilogue, and it'll be done! I'm not sure when you can expect them, but probably soon? (lbr I will probably write another chapter after work) This has been a real whirlwind of a writing project but I hope you guys have enjoyed it and will find the ending satisfying, when we get there!))

I sit here for minutes, at the most, although it feels like days. It doesn't take long for the bench, made of cast iron and ancient wood, to drain me of my heat, making me shiver. Besides the cold, I'm dizzy, and getting tired. These things all together worry me, because I promised Erik I'd take care of myself, and if I don't get moving soon, I might never move again, stubborn and asleep.

I have to force myself to stand up and trace my steps back to the place I was attacked. I need my keys, after all, and my bike and my phone. I need to try to keep living, even after the insanity that's passed in just this one night. Has it really been one night? Did I give up on our relationship, get attacked and then saved and then attacked again, reconciled, and then separated forever.. all in one night? What kind of..?

Even if I didn't have multiple head wounds, this would be dizzying, impossible to conceive. Paired with the head wounds, I struggle to keep my balance and think at the same time. So I try to turn off the thoughts. I'll have plenty of time for that later.

The bodies are gone when I get back to the alley. So's the blood. Even the lamp is lit again, and I wonder for a hard and terrifying moment if I imagined it all. Erik, the months of misery, the months of simple bliss, the attack, everything. But I remember his eyes, and his face, and I know that while I might have been able to hypothetically design such a person, I could never imagine him in such depth and detail as to trick myself into believing he's real, and fall in love with something worse than a ghost, a figment. I feel the bandages on my head, feel the split in my lip, and I remember how it felt for his hands to care for me.

My stuff is all gathered in one place, almost neatly, thoughtfully. There's no sign on my key that I used it to stab someone, and I don't know how any of the evidence disappeared, but I feel, deep in my bones, that nothing will ever come of tonight. No detective or police man will come knocking on my door, asking me what the hell happened here. It might as well have never happened, except for how much I hurt because of it all.

I open my phone, flashing back to having my hand pried open, punched in the stomach, with my pin instead. I call Meg, and ask her to come by my apartment. She doesn't ask why, but I know she will. She asks if Raoul can come too, since they're hanging out, and I mumble some affirmation. The details aren't very detailed at all, and I know I should be worried about that, but I just have to think of one thing at a time. Step one, 'retrieve items', is complete. Step two, 'call friend(s)', is also complete. Step three, 'go home', needs to start.

So I drag myself to my feet, tugging my bike alone, bag wrapped around the handlebars because my arms hurt too much to bear any weight. I walk home in silence, and even the city seems quieter than usual, not a person in sight either. Like before, like just earlier today, it all seems gray, but it's edged, laced, with slightly deeper shadows, and the old lights don't seem yellow at all. I feel like the darkness is soaking into me, staining me slowly, like coffee spills that don't seem so bad until you get home and you try to wash it out, only to realize it won't.

Meg and Raoul are waiting at my door when I get there. They both panic at the sight of what must be a bloody bandage around my head, the forming bruises on my arms, and the bleeding lip that just keeps opening. I don't break down until they've cradled me inside, all three of us pressed on my tiny, affordable, uncomfortable couch, trying to explain.

Somehow, I tell the tale, minus maybe some details, just to spare them any moral indignation. I don't really care what they think about Erik's past, and I don't want to, so I just don't spill all the beans, not quite. Meg cries with me, and Raoul even seems fit to join us, though I can't tell why or what he thinks. Maybe he still cares enough about me in the old way that it hurts to see me crying about some other guy, but he cares enough in the new way to not pounce or berate or badmouth. He puts an arm around Meg to put a hand on my shoulder, and I would be a liar if I said that didn't give me some strength, to have him, both of them, here for me.

He voices his concern about my head injuries, and Meg agrees, and they look up what to do. Google is a life saver. They determine, from what few things I can express, I may have a concussion, but that it's best to keep me here for now. I can only nod. What else do I do? What else should I want?

They also decide that for at least a few hours, I should try to stay awake. Raoul reads something about 'signs of deterioration', but mostly it makes no sense. I just agree. So we keep talking. Most of my tears are spent. I just feel a deep emptiness, and I tell them, as best as I can, about it. I swear, I keep repeating myself, but they never interrupt me when I talk, or tell me I'm being silly, or that I've already said something.

Until, at one point, I express that I don't know how to move on, that I feel trapped in a permanent moment of loss and emptiness. Not exactly like that, but they seem to understand, based on their reactions. Raoul stiffens, and Meg sighs, and the silence is drowning for too long of a moment..

"You simply have to." Raoul finally says, and it's the clearest thing I've heard since I came here.

"How?"

"You just.. do. For both your sakes. You said.. you said he was going to serve life, right? That all his hopes and dreams were in your hands? Then.. you have to live them. Yes, without him, but for him, if that's what it takes. Don't you think?"

"Not in so many words, I-" I get caught on the first half. "- but yeah.. but how?"

"One day at a time, like anything else, Chrissie." Meg says. "And we'll be there for every step of the way, if you let us." And she smiles, and Raoul smiles, and even I smile, then, pulled close to them. I guess that's something else I can thank Erik for. Without having met him, I'm not sure I'd have been able to know my two friends nearly as well, and that's almost as unfathomable as the reality of the situation.

And I feel some of the emptiness clear, not beaten back entirely, but filled with a little bit of hope, and a tiny bit of happiness, and a dash of determination.

Eventually we collectively decide to go to bed, that it's safe for me to go to bed, someone having set up an appointment, paid for by Raoul, who says he expects nothing. We turn my 'living room' into a sleepover zone, mostly done by my companions as I am wildly uncoordinated, and we turn in.

The doctor's visit confirms that I have a concussion. Not the worst, but definitely not 'nothing to worry about'. He advises I rest, take off from work, and not be alone, based on the vague details of the night I allow us to give and what he can tell of the injuries himself. For the most part, we're just treating what looks to be mild symptoms, and just letting my addled brain recover.

Meg moves me in with her and her mom and Raoul visits every day. They keep me distracted, keep me focused, whatever I need. I feel like a princess, like when I was young and my parents said they would juggle elephants to try to cheer me up. But a lot of times, they just let me be sad. I need it. I need time to mourn an unexplored and now unknowable future before I can move on. They seem to get it, and they let me.

A week passes, and I feel better, physically and emotionally. I feel hopeful for the future, almost ready to return to work with my coordination and eyesight recovered, a little less ready to live a life, a proper life, knowing I can't share any of it with Erik except in spirit, in heart, but I'm determined to try. Something about what Raoul and Meg said spurs me on. It's a kind of duty, but one done out of love, to keep living and keep trying to be happy without someone close.

It still stings, still burns to know I'll never see him again, never hear his voice or watch his hands and the fascinating, marvelous way he seemed to work magic. My lungs ache sometimes, and my heart corrodes, knowing he'll never grow another flower, never play another song, never walk free.

But it's all I can do to keep going, isn't it? To give up now would be disrespectful, would be rude, and in a way, kind of unfaithful. I could never hurt him and my parents or anyone like that, but especially him. Especially knowing that he's out there, living what little life he can, based on the hope that I'm somehow happy out here. I get a tattoo of a red rose with a black ribbon on the inside of my left forearm, just like I remember the very first one he sent me, half-open and ever so perfect so I always remember him and my promise to keep going. If this rose can be in bloom for me, then maybe I can keep trying to bloom for him.

Some days, some nights, it's especially difficult. I have nightmares about Erik as a shadow, fighting off the others, but in these dreams of torment, he doesn't win. He's taken from me, sooner, more violently, but I can never remember the details after I wake up, only that it leaves me shaking for days afterwards, flinching at sudden noises and touches. Some nights I dread going to sleep for worse reasons, for the happy dreams that come to me. I dream we're together again, happy and sometimes even married, officially. Sometimes we live in my parents house, sometimes we live in his already perfect apartment, sometimes we're on the run and free. But I always wake up, and the dreams always take a little bit of my strength as they fade away.

It takes a week after my recovery for me to brave going back to the shop and the garden. The shop is locked, and everything is dead inside. It figures, much of it was cut, ready-to-go bouquets, very few living plants, and even those are visibly dead. The shop's pastels seem just as dead without any contrasting brightness, and it looks like a broken heart feels. I'd clean it up, just for the sake of the sight of it, but it's locked, both front and back. I don't dare try to go through Erik's apartment. I wouldn't if I could. I couldn't bear to see the place he lived without him living in it.

But the garden. The garden still lives, although the liveliness of it is.. depleted. It had such perfect care up until two weeks ago.. or maybe it was longer. The night that Erik pushed me away, I thought I heard breaking pots, but I'm not sure I actually believed it. Here, I can see that a lot of the freestanding pots, both planted and unplanted, were tossed like toys in a child's tantrum, and hadn't ever been cleaned up. There is weeding that needs done in all the feeders, and the magnolias have long since dropped their flowers, their dried husks sitting sadly at the roots.

I take it upon myself to take care of it. Erik taught me well enough that I really can handle it on my own, now. I don't always remember everything right away, but with my hands in the dirt or pulling gently at tiny branches, it all comes back to me. In a course of days the garden brightens, everything coming to stand at attention once more. This is the one thing I do completely on my own. I don't even let Meg come with me. This garden was Erik's sanctuary, and I feel a bitter pride that I was the only one allowed in, and another sense of duty or need for it to keep on being that way.

Months pass. I go to work, I take care of the garden, I fight off dreams and nightmares both, I come home to Meg and her mother. It repeats.

And then, one day, Mrs. Giry has the news on while we do laundry. It's my day off, but I don't feel right not helping around the house, not paying rent even though I've gone back to work- Meg refuses to let me return to the 'dumpy little apartment' and she had me cut my contract there-, and it's nice to get to know the woman who helped make Meg, well, herself. She's a much more reserved and intimidating woman than her daughter, but I see where Meg's spontaneity and eagerness and determination all come from. She is supportive and encouraging and logical, which I dare to call wise. She makes me think of my own mom, in some small ways, and it both soothes and inflames the ache in my heart for my own. I think, though, she's more remedy than anything else.

I look up from folding a sweater- it's almost fall now and the city has cooled so much with the unexpected rain of the season but so many buildings still have their A.C. set high for the summer- and I catch a glimpse of a headline, not thinking much of it. Until the words repeat in my head, with understanding.

"MASKED MAN SHOT TO DEATH IN VIOLENT STRUGGLE"

A moment passes as I continue to understand what those words mean. And I collapse.

I don't mean to say that I faint. I've never, actually, ever passed out from anything other than a need for sleep. Even this shock isn't enough of whatever's necessary to make me fall unconscious. No, I mean that all of me, my heart, my hopes, my determination, everything collapses in on itself. I feel dead, and truly empty.

It's Erik. It can only be Erik. I watch as a reporter gives all the details- just outside the city, on his way out of the states for some trial elsewhere after much legal deliberation behind closed doors, where he broke free and put up a destructive, and almost deadly, fight. One of the agents, she says, had to shoot him five times before he fell. And that was that. The world is safe from this supposed maniac.

The news station moves on, but I do not.

I was promised. I was given surety that he would live, at least, even if in captivity. Was it too much for him, to live in a proper cage? Did he never mean to go down so easily, and only said so for my sake? I don't know, I don't know.

I don't cry for him, this time. I cried for his death months ago. I knew he would die in prison someday, though I believed, apparently wrongly, that day was in the distant future, when he and I were both old and gross and crazy. I was imagining wrinkles on our faces.. Even now that it's happened so much sooner than I ever would have allowed, I've already accepted it. That's just the way things are now.

No, I cry for myself. I had built myself around Erik, one way or another, and now he's gone. How am I supposed to stand? How can I do anything but fall apart from the inside out? I had tied my life to his, as distant as it was. His end is mine.

Maybe that's silly, to build your life around a single person or an idea, but it's what I've always done. I was built between my parents, and then around Raoul, and I tried to stand for myself for a long time, and built a place in the tattoo shop and with Meg and this city, and then I built myself into Erik. I was trying to stand alone again for him, but now.. now that the base support is gone, can I really stand alone again?

I know, I know that's so selfish of me. What about Meg, and her mother, and Raoul? What about my coworkers, my bosses, my other beloved clients? They've all done so much, in their own ways, knowingly or not. They haven't really let me stand on my own. They keep trying to build me back up, giving what they can and taking nothing other than what little I offer them. I believed I was getting stronger, more capable, but maybe I was always built too weak to stand on my own, and now that I've suffered so many attacks, so many imbalances and faults and crumbling pillars, I just can't stand at all.

I love them, too, so why can't I stand for them? Why do I fall so easily when someone else does?

I think it's because, despite how much I love them, I have never loved someone so desperately and easily as I love Erik. And yes, I say love in the present tense, because I can't stop loving him, the idea of him, the memories and the happiness and the everything. I don't know how to stop, and I consider it a deadly sin to even try to. I love them all so much, but I love Erik even more, and in a much stranger way.

Meg and Raoul and Mrs. Giry all try to comfort me, but they might as well try to make rain fall in reverse. I laugh at their jokes, I hug them when they reach, I eat the food they make to cheer me, I let them give me their condolences and promises, but nothing sticks. Like water over plastic, it just all falls away. I feel like the dead and dried flowers that fell from Erik's trees, too old, too late to save. I can only be swept up and tossed away, to make room for those that come next.

I keep going with life, but my focus is gone. My passion is gone. It's hard to do anything, to take care or pride or really feel anything at all. 'I've had a tough year,' I say, if people ask about my apparent decline. I wander, like a vagabond, through the walls of my own life, but it feels foreign and remote and wrong. I don't know the way anymore. Everything's wrong.

Despite knowing that there's no hope at all now, that I'll ever see him again, I keep having dreams. I keep waking to my phone, but the number is Erik's, and that's not possible. They're only dreams, lying, cruel dreams that haunt me. I let it ring, over in over in these repetitive dreams, and turn over, back to deeper sleep when it's done.

It's Meg's suggestion to go back to the garden. She says it might help me find some closure, or a way to work through the dullness. I think she's wrong, at first, but the more I think about it, the more I want to believe her, and the more I simply do. She helps me get ready, helps me get going, and makes me promise to call her if I need anything. I don't understand how she's put up with me for so long, but I am grateful for her and her help even if I don't understand it.

I have to take a bus to get across the city, but I don't mind. It's nice to see the buildings fly by in blurs of concrete and brick and asphalt. No one tries to talk to me, and I don't have to think about how to get where I'm going, only where to get off.

I still can't tell if everything is gray because of the rainy season we're in, or my warped perception of everything, but it hardly matters to me. Well, that's not entirely true. In the weeks before Erik was killed, the brightest part of my life was the garden, the caring for what he left behind. I wonder now, after he's really, really gone, if this will still be true, or if even the life of the garden will seem stripped of color and feeling and vitality.

The bus lets me off a couple squares away, and the walk is brisk and brief from there to the fenced patio. I ignore the sad state of the shop, the brown-gray haze of dead flowers and dreams inside too much for me. I just round the corner and pop open the latch, hands shaking. I don't know what to expect.

I push open the gate, and the garden is just how I left it, give or take some of the foliage dropping in the cold. It seems just as green and alive as when I left it, and part of me is greatly relieved that this place still feels just as alive as before I knew Erik wasn't. The rest of me is too muted to have any opinion on the matter.

I'm not sure where to start, so I just sit on the edge of one of the feeders, trying to take in the buzzing positivity. Despite everything, it's too pretty here to be sad. Even so chilly, it reminds me of our summer, the blooming everything between us. We got to be close, we got to know each other, we got to fall in love. It was a kind of magic to be here with him then, and some of that magic is still here now, even diluted by time and change. I'm almost at peace. I could fall asleep here, on the edge of the tulips, looking out at the roses and the magnolias and the lavender and all of it.

I hear a ruffling, something towards the building, and I snap alert, and then to my feet.

"Who's there?" I yell, the loudest I've been in weeks. How dare anyone come in here? I ball up my fists, angry and protective, and head towards the noise. Out pops Darius from behind a rose bush, arms full of dead and dry leaves. He seems stunned to see me, mouth open to try to speak, but I act on instinct and punch him. He drops the leaves, arms up in defense, but I just keep going. "How dare you come back here!? What the hell do you think you're doing here?!" I yell, beating my hands against his arms and shoulders.

"Hey- Christine, wait- We've been trying to call- stop ow-!" He says, but I still don't stop. "Christine, please-"

"No! There is no 'please'! You took him and you killed him and you dared to come back here after all of that!" Darius groans at that, and finally reacts, grabbing me by the wrists. I forgot how young he actually is, only remembering now that I'm forced to look at him. I twist to get away, but I don't have the strength.

"No, actually, I didn't." He says, pouting angrily. "Now will you please just listen? Maybe if you answered your damn phone.. Ugh. Just.. will you wait here? I'll be back, but you have to stay right here." He says, demanding but also kind of begging. I'm still angry, still furious, but I figure I might as well see what he's got to show me, hear what he's got to say.

"Fine." I say, and finally wrench my arms away from him.

"Great." He sighs, and heads up into Erik's apartment, stomping up the stairs. I don't watch him go in. I still don't think I could look at what's inside, and I'm not sure how he can just.. walk right in.

I sit back down to wait, feeling tired, really tired, from even that small exertion. Have I let myself get this weak? I know I've been struggling to eat and drink like I know I'm supposed to, but I hadn't felt any worse up until now, I guess.

"Christine, check it." I hear Darius call from the tiny porch, up above me. I look up to him, but he points down the stairs. I look, and there, at the bottom of the stairs, one hand still lingering on a post, the other reaching for me, is Erik.

"Christine?" He asks, my eyes meeting his.