Tfios (Larry Stylinson)

Chapter 26 last chapter

May 17th - Day 119

The waiting room was cold. 

My hands were cold.

I was cold.

Cold, always cold. 

I repeated it slowly in my head until the word lost its meaning. I’d been doing that all morning really, repeating words until I forgot what they meant and the letters jumbled together.

Sorry, please, okay, tired, sick, all reduced to syllables.

It was only Harry that never really lost its meaning no matter how many times it slid around inside my skull. 

I could see the clock from where I sat, the second hand trickling across the face and drawing ever closer to the six hour mark. Six hours, six months, and an infinity I would forever be stuck in. 

I’d managed to identify Harry’s family across the waiting room, his sister looking like she wanted to exit her skin just as much as I did, his father stern, his mother barely moving as she snuck glances up at the clock. I knew then I couldn’t truly hate her. She might have been selfish, but here, watching her pick at her cuticles I knew that she’d only wanted what was best for him. She’d just never known the right way to love him.

I pulled my hands deep in the sleeves of the jumper I was wearing, ducking my head against the collar so I could breathe in Harry. I’d stolen it after he’d left, the same one he’d worn that time we’d baked together, his smell still lingering in the creamy knit. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend he was still here with me.

I wanted him to live. I wanted him to live so badly, to lightly kiss his bandages and then later his scars and assure him that he still looked beautiful. I wanted him to remind me I was okay and that I was stronger than I believed. 

I wanted to take away his suffering and make him never hurt again, for his tumors to shrink into remission and leave him well, for us to be able to live as we should have been able to in some white house in the sunshine. Together.

I’d always been a little cynical when it came to love, but I think some part of me had thought that if it did exist it was somehow unbreakable, that if two people were truly in love nothing should ever be able to break them apart. Sitting here, sending prayers out into the void I thought that maybe my cynical heart had been right all along.

We would not get a forever. We could not truly take away each other’s pain. Even if he made it through today I could only save him for so long. Our love was merely flimsy solace in a world that was always so very cold.

I couldn’t get everything I’d wanted for him and for us, but I guess the privilege of loving him for six months is more than some people ever have. I thought of his eyes, of the way he’d clutched at my fingers when I was the only thing he could remember to hold on to, and I knew that maybe wherever he ended up he’d miss me just as much as I missed him.

I knew I shouldn’t be this attached, but I’d never really had a choice in the matter. There are some people you love out of habit, because they’ve always been there and always will be, who you can trust with anything because they know you better than you know yourself. 

Then there are those who creep into your life and send you spinning. They change you and you know somewhere deep inside that this, this is what you’ve been searching for your entire life. They’re perfect and impossible and hurt so much when they leave, because at some point you’ve forgotten how you ever survived before them.

In many ways, Harry was both.

xx

It was 4:26 when the doctor came out and made a somber beeline for Harry’s family, clipboard clutched in white hands. I couldn’t see what he said, couldn’t see as he formed words with pale lips, but I saw the way his mother crumpled, how his sister jumped to her feet, eyes wild.