Chapter Text
The last conversation Declan Lynch had with his mother was after dinner, while she prepared his medicine.
It had been a long time since Declan had someone else inject him. Since he was young, it had always been something he had done himself after brushing his teeth. He’d do it in bed with a book propped up on his knees or during an episode of some show he was watching. By then, he could do it automatically, fitting a clean needle to the body of the syringe, pulling out the dose of liquid, pressing the tip into his arm and pushing down the plunger with the base of his hand. Afterwards, everything went into the sharps bin he kept on his bedside table.
“We should ask Niall to make more of this,” Aurora said, breaking the seal on the new needle blade and attaching it, “You’re almost out.”
Declan glanced over the set of small vials, the pristine glass gleaming, “I have enough.”
“It’s better to be safe than sorry,” Aurora replied.
Later, he would try to remember why Aurora had insisted she do it for him, that night. Had she known, somehow? Had she had a sense, enough to worry her but not enough to say anything? She pulled out the clear liquid into the syringe and held it up to the light.
“Sometimes,” Aurora said, lowering the needle, “I think… we should tell your brothers.”
“Dad doesn’t want us to,” Declan said. He always did that, if he could—neither agreed nor disagreed. Niall thought it would distract his younger brothers from their studies, and Declan could see the logic. There was no point worrying them unnecessarily.
Aurora watched him for a moment, before she pushed the needle into his arm.
Declan was not his parent’s favourite. But he thought, sometimes, that him and his mother shared a certain strange bond. Declan needed medicine only Niall could provide. While Matthew and Ronan would one day leave the nest and fly away, but him and Aurora were stuck in Niall’s orbit.
That was unfair, Declan knew. You are angry at him for dying, his therapist said when he told her a version of the feeling, that is normal and natural. You are angry at being left behind. But this feeling is not sustainable.
A bead of blood welled up where the needle track had been. Aurora kissed her fingers and pressed them gently to the small hole. Kissed it better. Declan smiled at her and she left his bedroom.
That night, Declan slept well, until he was woken up in the early hours of the morning by Ronan’s screaming. Then his life took an abrupt nosedive.
*
Many rituals were disrupted after the funeral.
Niall Lynch’s will went into full affect immediately, like a trap snapping shut, and Declan’s mind was filled with buying clothes to replace the ones left at the Barns, shepherding Matthew around, cajoling Ronan into leaving his bed. There were deeds to look over, lawyers to talk to, relatives to turn away and school officials to flatter. He was so busy that he forgot to brush his teeth and wash his clothes some nights, so of course he forgot his medication, still tucked away in a side draw at his exiled home.
Declan was half convinced he didn’t need it. He never felt any pain. Perhaps Niall had just liked the control, perhaps Aurora had one of those television disorders where she needed Declan to be sick. Perhaps, after all this time, his body had acclimatised to the medicine and could manage without it.
Then, running track a few days after the funeral, Declan’s body stopped working.
It happened between strides, his body jolting mid-air, so that his foot doesn’t come up to carry him. His momentum carried him forward as his joints freeze and he collided with the ground like he was hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat.
Declan got a face full of mud and a sprained wrist, his knees jolted painfully, and the wind knocked out of his chest. But it was surprise more than anything, which dazed him.
Matthew and Ronan were still young. They didn’t have a body like Declan’s, if his younger brothers wanted something from their body, they could get it. They could count on their legs to walk themselves home if they missed the bus, they could sprint faster if they needed, they could focus on the ball in tennis and wouldn’t even think about their knees. But Declan’s body betrayed him. It undercut him, like a faulty wire, and left him sprawling and embarrassed.
When the gym teacher ran up to ask him questions, Declan told him he’d sprained his ankle and the teacher was all too willing to let him limp, muddy and confused, to the nurse’s office. He sat on the patient bed, his sneakers leaving light streaks on the plastic flooring, for a long time.
After school, he phoned his then-girlfriend Allison.
Allison visited his dorm the next morning. She was a good girlfriend, strong-willed, if a little indifferent to him. Declan had been meaning to break it off with her for a while, but after the funeral he felt that he had to extend it to avoid her feeling awkward. Now he was glad he had—her father was a detective and she had a knack for finding this Declan hadn’t even known he was missing, she was forever tucking car keys and wallets back into Declan’s jacket pockets after he left them on diner booths and worktops.
Delicately, Allison set the white cardboard box on Declan’s bedside table and opened it so he could see.
Declan cleared his throat, “Did you check—”
“Everywhere,” Allison said. She ran her hand through her over-bleached white hair, “Every bathroom, every nook and cranny. You said your dad’s an inventor—he’s invented a lot of weird crap, Dec. But these were the only ones I could find matching the description.”
Declan picked up the box and watched the light gleam off the perfect, identical glass cases. Every one was about the height of his thumb and the glass was thick around the single doses. Sixteen. Declan was looking at sixteen doses of medicine, which if he took it properly, would supposedly give him a little over two weeks to live.
“Thank you,” Declan said, setting the box back down.
Allison raised her eyebrows just slightly. She didn’t ask. That was another thing Declan liked about her: she didn’t ask. A lack of curiosity was such a relief that Declan would consider it a saintly blessing. He would find a way to break up with her gently.
*
Declan doesn’t give himself a dose.
Instead, he withdraws from track and tennis club. Nobody seems to mind. He’s a senior now, on the fast track to exams, and many of his classmates do the same thing. When one of the teachers asks if he wants to move up to a single dorm room, he accepts. It will be a shame not to room with Matthew anymore, he enjoyed that closeness, but he needs his space. If what he thinks is about to happen—happens… he’ll need space.
The first betrayal is his left wrist.
Sometime in the week after he first fell in track, his wrist started to feel strange, until one morning he moves his thumb over it and can’t find his pulse. Instead, there is a lump that feels as hard as granite under his skin. It is fairly obvious and looks a little like the retina-shaped yolk in a sunny-side up fried egg.
The school nurse looks over it, touching his skin with hard fingers.
“We’ll have to take a sample,” The nurse says, “but I think it’s a benign sarcoma. These kinds of cancers are most common in young people, because your system is still good at detecting most cancer errors so the only ones that escape are the really aggressive ones.”
Declan rolls the tumour under his fingers, but it doesn’t move much. It isn’t painful, but he can’t fit his watch over it anymore, so he switches it to the other hand.
“Don’t worry about it,” Declan says, keeping his voice light, “You said it’s benign, right? I’ll bring it up with my personal doctor at the weekend.”
The nurse chews at her cheek, “Well… I suppose it will save us the lab work. Besides, since it’s on your dominant wrist—we won’t be operating on it until after finals anyway. It’ll be impossible to work properly with an open wound on your writing hand.”
“Right,” Declan smiled at her.
“Still, you should definitely see your personal doctor,” The nurse said, “you need to keep an eye on these things.”
“I promise,” Declan said, “I am keeping an eye on it.”
*
Declan’s wrist grows worse.
He had, like Niall, always been a southpaw. But now his left fist was weak and strange, like a rusty mechanism, and took a while to curl when he wanted it. When he hits the punching back, the fist falls apart.
So he switches. He hits with his right, trying to relearn how to move his feet to get the momentum behind it. Declan tries to imagine what Niall would say, how he would adjust Declan’s stance and critique his movement. Wrong, Niall would have said, Weak, slow. If this was a real fight, Niall’s voice said, you would be dead.
Ronan doesn’t seem to notice his change, or that he’s suddenly far better at winning. Ronan does not notice much when he is angry, and that is almost a comfort. It is far more difficult to hide from Matthew, who starts shooting Declan distressed looks that Declan does not return.
Writing is hardest. Declan writes like a crab, his right hand like a hook around the pen. Ink gets everywhere. It’s a constant effort to keep his writing legible. Twice, he runs out of time before the English lesson is over, and he’s only scratched out two paragraphs instead of the seven he usually reels off.
He fails his midterms.
During the exam, his left hand had become a block of meat and his right had cramped into an unusable claw. Declan had tried to force it to scratch out more words, but it reached a point where he felt like the was moving raw nerves, his muscles burning. After days and days of back-to-back exams, his hands are shaking and painful.
“I’m sorry,” his math, English, physics, chemistry, history and biology teachers all say, “but there’s nothing I can do, if the work’s not on the paper then I can’t give you the grade.”
Declan listened to the well-meaning lectures about revision and juggling time and moving on from his father’s death through work, and he thought about the Ernest Hemmingway story Aurora had read to him, years ago. Old man and the sea. He remembered the way the main character’s hands had frozen up and cramped into talons when the fishing line sliced them, and he had had to wait hours for them to unfreeze and come back to him. Declan’s hands are like that. Except he has no big fucking fish to show for it.
*
The morning after the exam results, Declan is leaning into the mirror in his empty dorm room and watching his eyes. Under his right eye, there is a pale brown splotch, like a coffee-stain. It has speckles of darker parts.
Melanoma.
Declan has had it before. He ran a finger over it, like he might just brush it away.
The term “Melanoma” comes from the Greek “melan” which meant black, and “-oma” the suffix denoting an abnormal growth. A serious cancer, and because it came out sounding like “mellow”, it was often referred to as “malignant Melanoma”. It was a beautiful word for a terrible thing and came out when he spoke it like the first cord of a song.
Declan breaks open the foundation which is sitting abandoned on his bathroom mirror. Girls tended to shed things; earrings, makeup, pocket mirrors, which after breaking up with them Declan had to dutifully collect and hide before the next girl came along.
“Cancers are strange,” Ashley one had said, “You know you’re allowed to tell your insurance company to hide letters which mention cancer from your partner? It’s, like, the only disease you’re allowed to do that for. It’s a secret.”
“Cancer…” Ashley two had said, “I hear that’s caused by repressed thoughts. Like if you’re secretly gay or something.”
Declan had not told Ashley three.
He was glad he was dating a girl who had a similar skin tone to him. He spread the foundation over his melanoma and wiped it away. With a few dabs he covered it completely, leaving only a slightly strange texture over the damaged skin.
*
The way the story goes when Aurora tells him is like this.
Declan was born as curled up as a broad bean, and early too, shuttled to the intensive care unit. His arms were drawn up and his legs always folded. Impossibly, there was already a melanoma over one eye. “Like you were half-racoon,” Aurora said, and she had a way of making horrible things sound like compliments.
Niall had been away when Aurora had given birth. Even with all her calling, it took him another week to come back. By then, Declan was on all kinds of life support, and the nurses were running out of places on his small, battered body to put needles.
Like a magician, Niall had pulled out the vials from thin air and injected them into his son while Aurora distracted the nurses. Eventually, Declan’s body gave in, the tumours shrinking and receding, drawing back to hide like under-bed monsters in the cells of Declan’s small body.
Every night, he needed new doses, or he started to show symptoms. Declan seemed to have it all, in his feet, hands, face, neck, lungs, stomach, liver. Everything was a potential threat. His body was a valley of death, enemies on all fronts. He asked his father why that was, but was only brushed off, so he asked his mother.
“Oh honey,” Aurora had said, brushing a crisp golden curl from her shoulder, “You’re just dreadfully unlucky. Always have been.”
*
Declan dreams of Chernobyl.
In his mind, he is struck by fear, his feet half-buried in rubble. Everything burned. Ash is thick on his skin, plastered to him by his sweat. Screams are drowned out by the roar of fire; the smoke is as thick as cotton in the sky.
Pain is like a wave over him. He couldn’t shake it off. Every part of him is breaking and mutating, bones snapping and reforming, everything that made him who he is changing, changing. He is an alien now, his own body foreign to itself. Declan didn’t see his own hands before him, his own knees. He is someone else. Something raw and painful, his whole body an open wound.
As he struggles, wave after wave of invisible radiation washes over him. Before his very eyes, his body sways and changes, his skin reddening and breaking, his fingers splitting, his palms peeling away. Tumours bubble and sprout over every inch of him, pushing up from his bones, pushing up from his fat and flesh.
His hand, his left hand, his left wrist—God, it hurts so much—God it’s like it’s trapped between rocks—If he didn’t know better—
Declan woke up and his left hand is in a permanent clench.
Fear lances through his chest and he rolled out of bed, smashing the light switch on. The hand is pale and grey, the nails are tinged with blue. It’s dying. He’ll lose the whole hand.
Declan scrambles for the box of medicine and uses his good hand and his teeth to put the syringe together. His numb left hand is cradled to his chest.
The needle plunges into the middle of the sarcoma and Declan forces the medicine in. It didn’t do anything for a long moment, and panic is still gripping him like a vice, so he pulls out another dose and puts that in too.
As feeling returns, finally, to his left hand, Declan is angry at himself. Two doses? It was probably just taking a while to start working. Now he just threw away an entire day’s worth of medicine over a little discomfort. His left hand is viciously painful, like it’s angry at him, as the sarcoma shrinks very slowly and allows blood back in.
Declan is unspeakably angry.
He throws on his jacket and shoves his feet into shoes. By the time he reaches his car, the sarcoma is a light bump on his wrist, barely bigger than a scab, but that does nothing to quell his ire. He slams the car door behind him and drives off so fast the car lurches and squeals around him.
Declan doesn’t even know he’s driving to Cabeswater before he sees it rear up in front of him, full and mockingly lush. He barely remembers to park before he stumbles out, drunk on anger.
It’s a cold night. Icy air hits him the moment he emerged, shocking and abrasive. He gasps on it.
“Well, here I am!” Declan screams, “Come and fucking get me!”
The forest says nothing. It never whispers to him, like an adoring mother. It never speaks. The wind murmured through the trees, scattering dark leaves. The night is very, very black.
“You want me? This is all a fucking Dream thing, isn’t it?!” Declan staggers towards the treeline, “You want me dead—come, here I am! Come get me!”
Cabeswater is silent. It’s like the forest turned away from him, disgusted by the naked emotion on his face. Declan is ugly with pain.
He collapses. His knees hit the earth and he punched it, once, twice. His left is still weak, and the fist opens when he strikes but he still hits it. His right hits a root and the knuckles split.
It was a Dream thing, because of course it was a Dream thing. Declan’s life is always being fucked over by Dream things. Niall pulled him out wrong and instead of admitting his mistake, he kept stringing Declan along and along. And now Cabeswater was angry, angry because they wanted Declan when he was small and sweet, but they couldn’t have him.
Here was Cabeswater’s revenge—they would take him when he was older. They would take him after he had learned to live pain-free and careless. They would take him right when he was needed by his brothers, right when it would destroy them for Declan to die. And they would take him slowly. And so, despite Matthew, despite Aurora, despite every beautiful and magical thing that was taken from the ley line, Declan cannot help but think of it as evil.
Declan wants to cry, but he is too angry. He curled his fingers into the dark grass and heaved, shoulders shuddering, his body mourning for tears which won’t come.