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Romeo feels like he is drowning. His eyes sting and his throat burns, closes up. He can’t breathe and the sick feeling that had started in his abdomen has spread through his chest, tearing everything inside him apart.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry. The words swirl in his head, dominating everything else. His fault, all his fault. This can’t be happening. This can’t—
It is. He can see it in Mercutio’s face as his eyes start to cloud over, lose focus. The pained lines in his face deepen, then start to smooth out. Romeo clings to him desperately.
“Mercutio, Mercutio, please, please don’t leave me.” I don’t want to know what it’s like to live without you. I can’t, I can’t, I’d rather die. He had had the chance. Tybalt had been provoked and riled by Mercutio but Mercutio had not been his primary target. That honor had fallen to Romeo. He wants to apologize, again and again, to swear that he will do anything, anything in the world to make it better, to make it right.
He holds Mercutio tighter to him, the ache in his chest increasing when he feels Mercutio pressing gently into him, looking for more comfort, more warmth. He lets go of Mercutio’s hand to brush strands of hair out of his face, rub light circles into his temple. He wants to offer what comfort and reassurance he can, but doesn’t know how, when the only thing he truly feels is terror.
Mercutio reaches up, touches a blood-stained hand to his cheek. Romeo covers it with his own hand and holds it there. He traces the back of Mercutio’s hand and wrist with shaky fingers, grasps the sleeve of his shirt, “Please, you can’t leave me. You promised me you never would.”
They had been nearly children then. Romeo was in the throws of his very first infatuation and Mercutio made fun of him so consistently and so viciously that it had occurred to Romeo to ask him if Mercutio would truly hate him if he every became serious with a girl. Perhaps he already hated Romeo for being in love. Mercutio had laughed, put both hands on his shoulders and said, “It would take much more than that for me to abandon you. In fact, I’m rather not sure what ever could.”
This could. A dagger to the stomach, and too much blood to bear. Romeo can feel the tears running down his cheeks. Mercutio tries to brush them away but his strength fails him and his hand slips down to Romeo’s shoulder and then, limply, to his chest. Romeo gives his sleeve a small tug, his breath catching. “Don’t you remember that you promised me?” he repeats, desperately.
Mercutio smiles up at him, pained and a little sarcastic as always. “Too well. I die, Romeo, so you can live—”
“No.”
“But who knows, perhaps you will follow me.” There’s an odd tone to Mercutio’s voice – both horror at such a proposition and a bit of wistfulness. “I’ll wait for you on the other side.”
Romeo’s hands are shaking too hard for him to be able to do anything more than to clutch at Mercutio, his hand fisted in the sleeve of Mercutio’s shirt. The world has disappeared around him, narrowed to a single person, a single purpose. His memory is rife with moments to agonize and regret over. Moments where he did not take advantage of an offered embrace. Moments when Mercutio had kissed him as though in jest, but with dark and sad eyes, and Romeo had pushed him away, laughing, like it was a joke. Moments when they had held on to each other, cried in each other’s arms, laughed so hard they fell over and still couldn’t stop.
So many things he could have said, could have done. It would have been so easy in one of those moments to think, to realize, to know.
Like he knows now with all the agony of loss casting weight on his shoulders.
“I love you,” he whispers, his voice breaking. “Please, please stay with me.”
Mercutio’s eyes are sad and unfocussed, though the faint, sarcastic smile from before still lingers on his lips. He says something, but it’s too faint for Romeo to make out.
Romeo presses their foreheads together. “I love you,” he says again, as though it can change anything now, as though it can matter. He is fortune’s fool. He is a fool of his own making.
Mercutio breathes out one last time, and goes limp in Romeo’s arms.
Romeo lets out a strangled sob and buries his face in Mercutio’s shoulder. Mercutio’s final words, exhaled in the last moment of light, linger between them and wash over Romeo with all the warmth of affection and all the cold of despair: “I love you.”