Chapter Text
It’s a dreadful day for a date. It’s as if the laws of nature were declining Bobby the chance to revisit a past lover, to make amends, to tie off loose ends. But he is resilient and stubborn, so he hikes out to see you anyway. The Saturday he does it is overcast with clouds that are so gloomy and rotten - they’re in a horribly spoiled mood, Bobby thinks, which is why they seem to threaten him, thundering the promise to split and downpour on his overgrown dreads. He shoots them an even nastier look, saying, “Don’t even think about it. I have to look my best for her. You know that.”
The grass is less grass and more mulch that day, and, Bobby thinks, it must be because nature is spending all of its efforts and energy on keeping the bouquet in Bobby’s hands alive. He cannot blame the autumn for doing so. The flowers took his own priority over his supper tonight, after all.
“Lovely day, isn’t it?” Bobby says, attempting half-assedly at a signature grin. You’d always chided him for laughing at his own jokes. It almost stings that you don’t today. Instead of facing your well-intended criticism, he faces something much more irritating. Cold, insufferable silence. “I… I’ll have to beg your pardon for leaving our picnic in the car. I ran so late I don’t think the gods will give us enough time to feast. I’m sorry.”
And he waits in the cold, insufferable silence for a pardon that would never come. Your pale, chapped lips don’t move to say, “No worries,” or, “You apologize funny, Bobs. Did I ever tell you that?”
But he responds as if you have. “You did. You told me all the time. You said, You don’t have to hop and skip along the way, you know. It’s a little stroll from my name to I’m sorry, and I’ll beat you to the forgiving bit every time. You knew me better than everyone else. You said you’d - “ And here is where Bobby chokes on his words. The man you fell in love with was always spewing a few too many, never stumbling or stuttering, and never to you. “You’d be the best at knowing me, and nobody else would even get a spot in the race. And when I prodded, when I said - “
“Are you sure about that, lass?” he had said, with the same shit-eating grin he always had before he moved his hand down to your waist.
You cocked your eyebrow like a gun, pulling him closer to you by the belt loops of his jeans that he’d hidden beneath the ugliest Christmas sweater you’d ever seen. “Over my dead body.”
“You were so many things to me, lass,” Bobby says, tears clinging to his lashes like his hands to what’s left of your memory; a polaroid photograph that you’d taken of the waterfall the two of you came across the very last July you’d ever survive, the one that you’d claimed God himself had to have materialized, plagiarized, frankly - from one of your favorite dreamlands. Every droplet, you’d mused, was falling just as it was meant to fall. And at that waterfall, as you had many times before, you kissed him, and as he had each time before, he wished it would last forever.
But it was different that time. Bobby could feel himself moving, he could feel you moving against him - but the feeling was incomplete. Like a card declined. He felt far away, even as he lived the moment - as if he was watching himself in third person. Or perhaps he simply felt he was being watched, by hundreds of thousands of pairs of his own eyes, days, weeks, months or decades into the future. Either way, the surreality of the day lingered until sunset. And he knew it at the time, to an extent, but he knew it fully today. He was living in a memory. The moment, just as he’d wished, lasted forever. For better or worse, it lasted forever.
And each moment he spent with you henceforth and afterward felt the same. Time, he realized in the month before your demise, was a currency of its own. Moments spent with you could have been moments spent with some other brilliant and talented dame, but he wouldn’t trade them for the world. Every moment in the hospital kitchen could have been spent behind a desk, computing and calculating, blossoming as an expert in numbers and finance and technology and science - but instead he was a baker.
“It all sort of adds up to a big pitiful waste, though, doesn’t it?” Bobby’s friends would say of his love for you. “I feel for the bloke, I really do. But what I feel is pity, which is the last thing he needs right now. So what do I say to him? Exactly. So I say nothing.”
And that was the case for everyone who ever claimed to love him. Bobby drowned in empty promises to be there, to care and to listen. He grew comfortable in his loneliness that he felt wasn’t loneliness at all. Anyone with eyes and a sliver of sanity to their name knew he was past the point of lonely. ‘Basket case’ felt too generous. The poor Scotsman was a shell, without a ghost to fill it, of who he used to be.
He drew a breath, finally dragging his unwilling consciousness to the present, only when his lungs demanded it. And he stared at your lifeless eyes, or the colorful lids to them that your good friend Chelsea gave him to gaze at instead, and he echoed his own words from before he lost himself in your memory.
“You were so many things to me, lass,” he says, and by now he’s lost all control over the tears so clingy, they could have given him a run for his money. He shook his head as he remembered your promise - your promise to take his every secret, well… “To the grave, lass. To the grave. God, you were so many things. But you were never a liar.”
Silence. It was a common thing here, at the cemetery. And it was the silence that forced him to realize he was never gazing at your pale, lifeless lips or your lifeless, lidded eyes. He hadn’t for years. All he had of you now was the name etched in the headstone before him and the photograph in his hands. A photograph he hardly needed to revisit the memory captured in it at all. So he sets it on the gravestone, buried in the bouquet he sets atop of your grave.
“Lilies in autumn,” he says. “Your favorite conundrum.”
He sighs, his gaze dropping to his muddy shoes, as if he’s afraid to look your grave in the eye.
“But you were mine, lass.” He forces his legs to walk away from you. From the mulch you were buried six feet beneath. From the worms who were undoubtedly crawling over what was left of the skin he used to call his own. “And over your dead body will your promise be broken.”
He glances over his shoulder at the bouquet that’s being torn up by win from the coming storm.
“No one will ever know me like you did. Take my secrets to the grave, lass. I won’t make a liar out of you.”