Chapter 2: June Sixth
Do you remember cooking pasta at midnight in your kitchen, and he managed to get sauce in your hair? Do you remember buying body paint to play hide and seek in the apartment under a blacklight, and the sound of your screams of laughter when his hands would snake out of a closet and grab you from behind? No, because these are the new memories you're building together, not old ones. You have remembered no collarbones left unkissed. You've remembered how to laugh and done so more in two weeks than you have ever before.
You're rewriting your whole last two months together and you're not caring about anything anymore. Your friends used to barely come over, but now you've got them dancing in your living room with confetti in their hair and eyes; drinking more for celebration than to get drunk. They like you so much more when you're falling over with laughter instead of avoiding their calls. Who knew?
On just an ordinary day you woke up before him and watched him sleep in the wee hours of the morning. You brushed his thick, rough curls with your palms and kissed his cheek, trying to absorb him somehow so even when he was gone you could still taste him, still feel him.
You don't bother going to work, or doing anything that isn't about making love. Making love through laughter, dancing, and music. You know that it could all disappear at any moment, and you aren't going to take those kinds of chances anymore.
You wander into the kitchen and start trying to look for the pictures you both took last year after he met your parents. You want to hide them so that when he dies and you go on your rampage, you can't find them and tear them up. It's your biggest regret thus far.
You rifle through the drawers, but they're not there. The more you look in fact, you can't find any of the old pictures that used to grace the apartment, just the new ones you've taken. You start to panic, tearing the kitchen and living room up looking for those photos. They're all you will have left at the end of this.
You walk back to your room and slip on your clothes, scribbling him a note that you'll be right back. You jog down the street until you find the place that Dr. Maryam's office should be, but you don't know if she'll remember you or if it will even be there. You have to try anyway.
You sigh in relief when you see the gloomy grey building and rush inside, noticing this time the waiting room is full. You run up to the desk and the lady at the front tells you you'll have to wait, but you can't wait because your most valuable possessions are disappearing. When you get to her door, she's escorting a patient out and before you can open your mouth to explain anything to her she says "In a minute Tavros," and you watch her lead an old woman down the hallway towards the warehouse. For a moment, a chill goes through you and you wonder if you went in there you would see your body on the floor.
When she returns, you go right in to her office and have a seat and she sits; just like the first time you came into her office.
"What's wrong?" She says folding her arms and giving you a smile.
"All my pictures of me and Gamzee... some of our stuff is disappearing." You blurt out.
"Well you know Tavros, if you never go do those things with Gamzee, they will never happen. If you want those things, then you have to follow the sequence of events that led you to acquire them." She shrugs, matter of factly.
"Some of those pictures were taken...on days where we fought horribly, some of the videos even, were on days we weren't speaking. I cant go through those fights... again." You sink down in the chair.
"You wanted to spend time with Gamzee right? Well, there are some parts of your relationship that have to happen in order for everything to end the way its supposed to. Not going in order could make his death happen a lot sooner than it was supposed to. You've had fun right? Just go to the next memory and go from there, I'll put the pictures back." She nods and you take a deep breath.
You don't want to go to the next memory, the only big memory that comes after May fourteenth is June sixth and you dread that day with all of your being.
She stands up and puts her hand on your shoulder, and when you open your eyes again you're on the corner outside of your job, clutching your bag and grimacing because your friends forgot to pick you up like they said they would. You think that's because you went back to not having time for them like it originally happened. Because of work and complications with Gamzee; undoing all that bonding you spent the last bit of May building with them. You start walking aimlessly down the streetlight lit sidewalk towards your apartment building.
You know what's ahead, and you keep your eyes on the concrete because you don't want to see it. But nevertheless when you look up there, Gamzee is smiling at you with his arms outstretched in front of that hellish car that he decided to buy on this day. He bought it because you had decided to move in together, and he didn't want you walking home in the dark anymore.
"What do you think?" He smiles at you and you pretend to be surprised, letting him ramble on to you about the details of the car as you walk up the stairs and inside. You cling to his hands and even though you're getting wet around the eyes, you put on a good show long enough to get into the bedroom alone and take a few deep breaths. This is too hard, this is the day you could change everything. If there was any point in the timeline that would have made the difference, it's today.
After a few moments of sitting on the bed in the dark, you realize you've been undoing your tie for about five minutes and he's watching you from the door. He's been trying not to hint that when you're with him you laugh the loudest, but when you're not looking he can see the sadness spilling out of you at the seams.
When you look up, he crosses the room and sits down next to you, bumping into you until you slide over; but that only makes you smile for a moment.
"Is it the car? You know it might be a little hard, but we can afford the motherfucker. So if that's it, don't worry about that." He nudges your shoulder but you keep looking down.
"I know we can, it's not that, its's...can I tell you something?" You don't care, its eating you up inside that this is your chance to save his life and you're not going to waste it.
For the next hour or two you explain to him the story of how on this day he bought a car; and two weeks from this day he's going to get in that car for whatever reason before you wake up and go down 156th, where a driver is going to underestimate the distance between the merge and Gamzee's damned purple car and sweep him clean off the road. You explain to him through ragged breaths and quick panicked sobs that you're going to get a phone call very early in the morning on a Tuesday that your lover's beautiful body is crushed under his car. You will take this call, and you will show up at the scene and see your lover's blood on the road for everyone to see.
You cannot express to him how sick it made you to see his blood on the road and have people walk over it while cleaning up the wreckage like it was nothing.
He doesn't say anything for a long time after you finish telling him, you even tell him about Dr. Maryam. After a moment he hugs you and says "Tav, everything's gonna be fine, don't all up and worry about nothing. Dreams like that sometimes seem-"
And after that there's nothing. You don't hear him complete his sentence and when you come to, you're laying down on the bed in your work clothes still. You think you must have passed out from the stress and how tired you are, so you sit up thinking he must have gone into the kitchen.
"Gamzee?" You call for him but you don't hear anything.
"Gamzee, are you in there?"
Silence.
Your heart starts pounding hard in your chest and you scramble to get up, but your legs feel wobbly just like the first day on May fourteenth. As you make your way to the kitchen holding on to the walls for support, you keep calling him but hear no response. You go to every room searching for his things but they aren't there, none of his stuff is there and you start screaming, the walls start to shake and you pull your knees to your chest thinking that this feels worse than dying.
When you open your eyes again, you're sitting in that position in your bathroom, in your underwear. You hear your bedroom door creak and footsteps approaching only to see Gamzee smiling down at you.
"Hey, didn't you hear me calling you? I made breakfast." He beams down at you and you smile up at him wearily. As he helps you to the breakfast table you catch the day's date on the calender by your dresser.
May Fourteenth.