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Kris stared at his scuffed up old converse. He didn't want to look up and face the sight that awaited him. The whole room smelled like body fluids and cleaning fluids. Kris hated fluids. He finally raised his head to look up at the man before him. Adam. Always Adam. Eyes closed and hooked up to a million tubes and machines while the heart monitor went beeping away. Every one of those goddamned little twitching lines only served to remind Kris how far gone Adam already was.
Kris kicked softly at the floor. They'd had a plan. A carefully laid out plan. Marriage when it was legal and kids if either of their careers allowed for it. They had discussed future albums and tours. Then Adam had gotten sick. Really sick. Too sick to ever get better. And then none of the planning had mattered. None of it ever matters. Every plan anyone ever makes is just a crossing of the fingers in the hopes that whoever is watching over you is merciful enough to give you the time to do it.
And apparently, a lot of the time, they aren't.
Kris pulled in a stuttering breath. Every machine here said that Adam was alive, but he had no LIFE. Adam always had so much LIFE. And now it was like that was all drained from his body. Kris wondered if we're all slowly draining away. If we all only have a specific number of breaths we're allowed to take before we've reached our limit. And Adam had just laughed one time too many.
Or maybe it was the high notes.
He had just sucked in so much air in his desire to entertain and make music that his breath count had simply run out.
It would explain why so many singers died young.
Kris was dragged out of his musings as the nurse shook his shoulder and told him that it was time to leave. She said she'd get him if anything changed. As he was shuffled out the door, he looked over his shoulder to see the faint rise and fall of Adam's chest. Kris didn't want to leave. He didn't want to return to the air of general sadness that pervaded the waiting room.
No one here was expecting good news.
The T.V. in the corner of the ceiling blared alway some inane late night sit-com. No one was paying enough attention to it to bother shutting it off. They were too busy staring off into space with their heads bowed. Or pacing. Or aimlessly fiddling through piles of old magazines. The vending machines sat squatly against the wall as no one here could bring themselves to eat. Kris surveyed the scene of depression before taking his own seat, bowing his own head and clasping his own hands in front of his face. Every time a nurse came by, he found himself looking up along with everyone else as they waited in anticipation. As Kris waited, he let himself immerse his thoughts in old memories.
It burned when he realized none of them were sharp in his mind's eye. None could hold a candle to the real thing. All of the memories of laughter and song were like looking through a fog. As if the camera lens in his eye had been shoddy during their whole time together.
He hated how the only memories that remained crisp in his mind were of Adam after he'd gotten sick. No wide grin or eye makeup, he was pale and withdrawn, his body curled up as he was hooked to the machines and tubes. He had still tried to smile even as the light had obviously gone from his eyes.
Kris needed that light. He felt lost without it as even his memory worked to dim its glow.
As Kris sat there thinking he suddenly realized he wouldn't trade it. Even with his faulty memory and the pain he could feel in his chest just waiting for the numbness to subside so that it could burst forth and consume him, he wouldn't trade it. He would never in a thousand years regret the time he'd had with Adam. It was worth it. All the pain of losing him now was worth that brief shining moment of time that he'd got to spend with him. Every morning he'd woken up to find that he was lying next to that sunny energy and those sparkling blue eyes was worth everything a thousand times over. Even the knowledge that he'd never get to do it again.
He would rather have had him and lost him than never know that kind of joyous spirit at all.
He felt his head rise up without conscious effort to do so as another nurse came into the waiting room. This time, she nodded her head at Kris. He got up in the same blind manner and followed wordlessly as she led him back to the room that smelled like fluids and sounded like heartbeats running out of time.
Once they were inside, he finally looked up, questioning, to the nurse's face. But she only cast her eyes downward and fiddled with her scrubs. So no miraculous recovery then.
Of course not.
She left him alone with his his thoughts and his lost cause.
With Adam.
Kris moved forward to sit on the edge of the bed and clutched Adam's cold clammy hand in one of his overheated ones and rested his forehead against Adam's. But Adam remained motionless except for the steady, shallow rise and fall of his breathing and the painful beep of the heart monitor.
What Kris wouldn't give just to see those eyes one more time..
.As if in response to his plea, his memory suddenly cleared enough to gift him with all of the vivid images he had been trying to dredge up earlier. Every memory was precious now, joyful or sad, tender or angry, music or silence, it was all the Adam he had left. He suddenly flashed back to one memory specifically.
Both of them were watching some melodramatic hospital soap opera that Kris had found ridiculous at the time but Adam was engrossed at the man who was watching over his brutally injured wife.
"That's what love means," he'd said, "To stand there and watch someone die. You'd have to love them more than anything to do that,"
So for that, Kris would stay.
He would stay to stand and watch Adam die.
And when that heart monitor finally stopped, and it would soon, Kris would be there watching because that was what love was.
Watching someone die.
The room became full with one long loud ringing noise and a single tear fell from Kris's eye
"Love you more than anything...Adam..."