i know that i am (the luckiest) - PART 2 OF THE CANCER FIC {joshler}

four

Ten years later and he walks through a night just like the one so long ago, a warm night with blushing clouds as the sun sets. Two boys skate past him, laughing and yelling the way teenage boys do, and Josh feels the voice whisper in the back of his mind. Everything here is so close, so familiar. It is the place where the voice had a name, had a face, had a body and a hand for Josh to hold and a heartbeat. This place feels like the beginning and the end of everything Josh has ever felt, his culmination.

He turns right at a street corner - and there it is.

The house is sagging more than it was ten years ago, its shingles more bleached from sun than ten years ago. It is set back from the road and the houses around it have been remodeled since, so that it seems smaller than it did back then. There's a "For Sale" sign posted in the front yard, and Josh feels a guilty relief that he won't have to see the Josephs tonight. He'll look them up when he goes home. Out of all the things he has to regret, one that has caused him the most pain is that he has not seen them since the funeral. They deserved so much more than that.

The house isn't as neat, nor as lively as it was when Josh knew it so well. And yet - it is alive. He can feel it. He can almost hear piano chords, can almost smell the jasmine that was so thick in the air that summer, can almost hear the voice - the real one - can almost hear him -

And finally he thinks it.

Tyler.

Tyler's voice comes back now, all in one rush, not the watered down version that has whispered in his mind for so long. Josh sits down on the grass in the Joseph's old yard, and he can hear Tyler singing so clearly it's as if no time passed at all, as if he is back in that awful and wonderful three months in which he fell in love with Tyler and watched him die.

Josh realizes that he's crying - just a bit - and laughs wetly to himself as he wipes his cheeks self-consciously. After Debby had broken the dam that he had been hiding behind, he used to cry every day. But in recent years it's become less and less often. He thinks that this might be the first time he's cried in months.

But if there is a time for it, it's now.

Josh lies back on the lawn and gazes up at the twilight sky, soft blues and purples that haven't quite edged into black yet. There's a single dim star flickering into life almost right above him, and he fixates on it. Tyler's voice is still flowing in his mind, and he begins to sing along softly.

Now the night is coming to an end.

He imagines that the star is Tyler, burning brighter with every second as light fades and crickets begin singing. In his mind, Tyler is singing to him

The sun will rise, and we will try again.

Josh suddenly remembers a night shortly after he first met Debby. Nights were the worst times for him during those years. Hours spent drowning in the darkness, nothing to distract and nothing to drown out the things he was running from.

He remembers being in a dingy motel room, one where he had been staying for a week while Debby was trying to find a place for him to live. He remembers being drunk, so incredibly drunk, and he remembers how he was suddenly more hopeless than ever before.

Crumpled in that hotel room, he had felt a culmination of a different kind. It was not closure, it was defeat. He had felt beaten, exhausted, unable to keep running. And without running, he didn't see any other option. He could not face the past, and he could not run from it. He was stuck.

That night, he had been so close to throwing in the towel, ending the game. He had been ready.

But as always, the voice had been there.

The voice had been there - Tyler's voice, and it had suddenly been clearer than he had remembered it being since he had heard the real thing. It was there, and it was saying, over and over, that line.

The sun will rise, and we will try again.

Josh remembers how much it had hurt, to hear that voice and those words again after so long. He remembers how completely it had torn him open. But the following morning, as he had watched the sun rise through ratty motel curtains, Josh remembers that morning as being the first time since Tyler died that he had felt hope.

There are more stars now, but Tyler's star is still the brightest. Josh is crying again, not sure when it started but no longer feeling the need to stop. He gazes up at the sky, and the tears refract the stars into a billion more twinkling lights, till all he can see are brilliant spots of light against the dark.

Stay alive, stay alive for me.