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Simon,
I want you to know that I love you more than anything. It’s important to me that you know that. I don’t want to give you up for anything. I can’t give you up, Simon. I can’t lose you.
I’m afraid every single day when I wake up that I’ll find you already dead. It’s all I can dream about. I see you the way I saw them and I can’t sleep. I’m so tired, Simon.
I love you more than anything. You are everything to me, and you always will be.
Don’t come into the bedroom. Pour gasoline on the ground and light a match. Leave everything behind and start over, love.
I love you. More than anything. I’ll see you again soon.
Johnny
-
Wind blew hard against the windows, rattling the old glass inside the frames. It felt as though the walls were bending and leaning with the force of it, as it threatened to force its way into the home. The shutters outside the windows shook loudly. Simon wasn’t sure if it was a threat or a promise; the house would fall around him and leave him sitting there surrounded by rubble.
He wished it would. He wished the bricks would give in under the force of the winds, he wished the roof would tear and crack and rain would drip into the furniture, settle into the floorboards. Mushrooms could grow from the old fibers. They could sprout up around Simon’s feet, climb their way up his legs and to his chest. He wasn’t sure he’d mind if they consumed him, if they surrounded him in a cocoon and took him away with the rest of the old cottage. The windows rattled, but they didn’t move an inch. The roof stayed intact and sturdy. Rain poured down hard but not a drop touched Simon.
His hand ached. In the dark he could almost see it, the lacerations across his knuckles, aggravated by the swelling around it. Blood had dried across his fingers. He could feel it peeling away, tugging at his skin as he flexed his hand.
Reluctantly, Simon flipped the bedside lamp on. A photo on the nightstand stared back at him. A woman with dark hair and bright blue eyes smiled at him. She was gorgeous. She had a stunning face with a smile that could stop anybody in their tracks. It was lopsided, left side higher than the right. Her lips were thin. Still, it was the kind of smile somebody would sell their soul to see again. And he had it here, immortalized on his bedside table.
Her chin was narrow and her cheeks were full, hardly hollowing out below her prominent cheekbones. Her eyebrows sat strong over her blue eyes, straight lines that were such dark brown they were almost black. Her eyelashes were short but thick, they lined her eyes like eyeliner, making the bright blue of them brighter. Her nose was strong. It took up space on her face, but it was narrow. Lightly colored freckles dotted her skin, a constellation of proof of the sunlight she’d seen in her life.
She had strong genes. Simon had proof of it, in the form of the man in the bed behind him, finally asleep.
Strong, straight eyebrows. Light freckles dotting a pale expanse of skin. A jagged scar on a narrow chin. Short, dark stubble on full cheeks. Bright blue eyes. A narrow, strong nose. Hair so dark it was almost black, cut into a mohawk. And a smile that could turn heads a mile away, lopsided as his mother’s. Simon could see it all clearly when he turned to look at the other man, despite the lack of expression on his face. He was peaceful in sleep. In sleep he was safe from the world, from himself.
He could also see those blue eyes welling up, tear stained cheeks, puffy and bloodshot eyes. He could hear sobs and sniffling. He could hear that voice, weak, begging for Simon not to leave him.
Now he laid on his side, a hand tucked under his head on his pillow and the other stretched out across the bed, one leg curled up towards his chest, the other stretched out underneath him. Simon reached out carefully, a hand landing on John’s outstretched left arm. The bandages were stained but dry; blood had stopped flowing, finally.
Simon stood up quietly and carefully stepped out of the room. He longed for a cup of tea. He shut the door behind with great effort to remain silent, and then he reached out and flipped on the hall light. He blinked against it, temporarily blinded by the brightness of it.
Once his eyes adjusted, he lifted his watch to check the time. 0450. The sun would be rising before long. It wouldn’t make a lick of difference with the rain. He could hear it relentlessly pounding against the roof and the windows; white noise that wouldn’t be silenced.
As he moved, a glint of light from the bathroom floor caught Simon’s eye. The mirror lay on the floor, shattered to pieces in a fit of something between desperation and rage. Simon’s hand ached at the sight of it. He’d stopped bleeding, too, but the pain remained. He’d clean it up later. For now he simply turned his head away from it and continued through the living room to the kitchen.
It was a mess; boxes of other people’s belongings littered every flat space in the cottage. They were labeled with messy letters written in sharpie. Ma. Price. Gaz. Filled to the brim with anything and everything; clothes, old books, favorite mugs, photos, dog tags. They sat collecting dust, except for one. One of the smaller boxes labeled Price. An old picture frame laid on the floor underneath it, glass shattered and wooden frame splintered. The photo still sat on top, undamaged.
He couldn’t see what was inside the box from where he was standing, but he knew well enough what had come out of it. Blood still stained his shirt.
He moved on, resolving to step into the kitchen instead of confronting what waited for him in that mess in the living room.
-
Simon was in a foul mood. He’d gone alone to the grocery store after John had declined yet again, opting instead to stay in bed. Rain poured down relentlessly, soaking Simon and the groceries the whole walk home. The bottom of one of the bags had fallen out, leaving Simon to clean up cans and vegetables on the sidewalk. Now he carried them all in his arms haphazardly.
The sound echoed through the house loudly as he threw everything onto the counter. Water dripped from Simon’s hair, clothes and shoes and landed in a puddle on the floor underneath him. He’d have to mop the floor. “John, I’m home,” he shouted through the house. There was no answer.
He went back to the front door to kick his shoes off, leaving them in a wet pile on the floor along with his jeans and his jacket. He dried his hair with a kitchen towel. Wind whistled through the trees outside, and Simon felt a chill down his spine. The silence in the house was eerie, filled only by that sound of wind whistling through branches outside.
His mind drifted away from the groceries on the counter in an instant, thinking instead of the state of the small garden out back. John had taken up gardening in the months since they had retired, and he wondered if the wind had hurt any of his plants.
His socks made no sound as he walked across the floor into the living room. His eyes stared out the window for a long moment, observing each and every one of the little plants outside. They were alright. Resilient. Like John.
As he turned to step back into the kitchen, something on the floor caught his eye. Looking down he could see a picture frame, glass shattered, picture fallen out onto the floor below.
He bent and collected it carefully, and he could see his own eyes staring back at him. A photo they’d taken when they’d first begun the Task Force. Simon stood behind John, who stood with his arm wrapped around Gaz’s shoulders. Price stood on his other side, hands on his vest. They all smiled. Simon couldn’t see his expression behind his mask, but he knew he wasn’t smiling.
He wondered why it had broken, and where John had gotten it from.
His eyes darted around the room, landing on a box on the coffee table. One of the boxes of Price’s things. A small piece of the collection he’d left to John and Simon. His eyes landed back on the picture, on Price’s face. He hadn’t seen that face in months. He hadn’t so much as heard his name outside of his dreams and John’s sleep talking.
He’d died badly. Violently. A high calibre rifle had torn through his chest and stomach and he’d choked on his own blood. John had stayed far too long, desperate to give him CPR, desperate to hear his Captain take a breath again. Simon had to pull him off while he screamed, begging for them to let go of him. He’s dead, Simon had insisted, and we will be too, if we don’t get the hell out of here.
Gaz smiled up at him from the photo, too. He leaned hard against John. They had been like a brother to John. They’d bonded immediately when they’d met and they were always eager to teach each other what they could.
He’d died an hour before Price. A bullet hit the back of his head. There was nothing left of his face. No chance he might have survived. John hadn’t even gotten a chance to give him CPR. There was no reason.
Things had never gone so badly for them that day. They never would again; Simon and John retired as soon as they could afterwards.
The picture stared back at Simon, and with it the memory of Gaz’s head, little more than a mess of blood and bone on the ground, Price soaked in blood, choking as it poured out of his mouth, his last words begging John and Simon to get the hell out of there.
He let the picture drop back to the floor where it landed on the shattered glass. He could understand, suddenly, why the frame was splintered on the floor.
It wasn’t until he returned to the kitchen again that he saw a piece of paper with John’s handwriting scrawled desperately across it.
-
Hot ceramic threatened to burn Simon’s hands as he held onto his mug of tea. Milk had done little to cool it down. It burned his lip as he took a sip.
Emotion overwhelmed him at the feeling. With a curse, he threw the mug. Hot water spilled across his arm and exploded across the kitchen along with the delicate ceramic of the mug. The sound echoed in his ears and his skin screamed out from the heat, begging for mercy.
He stood frozen still, staring at the puddle of glass and tea on the kitchen floor. “What the hell did that solve, you idiot?” He grabbed a towel from the counter and bent to dry up the tea. A lull in the wind and the rain outside revealed the quiet sound of the floor creaking in the bedroom. Panic welled in his chest and Simon abandoned the towel in an instant to hurry to John.
“Johnny?” No answer. He knew it was obvious he was panicking. He didn’t mean to try and hide it. “Johnny?”
He pushed the door in all at once and there sat John in the middle of the floor, a blanket from the bed wrapped around his shoulders. He looked up and Simon could see his face, pale and tearstained. As he blinked, a tear rolled down his cheek. “Simon.”
“I’m here, Johnny,” Simon whispered. He landed on the floor next to John just as a sob tore through his chest. He collapsed against Simon, and Simon wrapped his arms tightly around his shoulders. “It’s alright,” he soothed.
“I’m so sorry.”
-
The note had told Simon not to go into the bedroom, but he found himself there in an instant. The door was unlocked. A part of him wondered if that meant John wanted him to come in, to stop him.
He was there on the floor, bloody and half conscious. A knife Price used to carry lay on the floor next to him, dropped from his hand after he’d dragged it across the skin on his left forearm.
He was delirious. Blood was pooling on his pants, soaking into his shirt, spilling over onto the floor. His eyes sparkled as he looked up at Simon. “Simon… I told you to say outta here.”
“Fuck you,” Simon answered. He wasn’t angry. Maybe he was. His hands shook as he grabbed a shirt from the dresser and he knelt next to John. John watched him, eyes distant, still sparkling. He looked almost enamored as Simon desperately went to work trying to stem the bleeding.
“It won’t work,” John mumbled, words slurring.
“Shut the fuck up. It’s going to work.”
There was blood everywhere. It soaked into the knees of Simon’s jeans and stained his hands. He’d seen worse than this. John would be alright. His thoughts raced, remembering what to do. He didn’t look at John’s face. He couldn’t see that it was him who was bleeding, him who had written that note. He struggled to get his belt off with a shaking hand.
John’s skin was pale. Simon could smell whiskey and cigarettes on him. He was drunk. Very drunk. He couldn’t have lost more than a litre of blood. He’d live. Simon’s belt tightened around John’s bicep, a desperate attempt to stem the flow of blood from the deep lacerations on his forearm.
A voice in the back of Simon's mind stayed clear; instincts from a previous life spoke calmly and logically. He needs stitches, it whispered. Dark and quiet, echoing from the recesses of his imagination. Of course he does. Simon moved to stand, but John’s eyes landed on his own. He whispered, “I don’t want to die.”
“You won’t die,” Simon reassured him. He moved again to stand, but John’s arm reached out and grabbed him.
“I can’t die alone. Si, please don’t leave. Please.”
Simon’s heart sank in his chest. He leaned in, pressing his forehead against John’s. “I’ll be right back, Johnny. You’ll need stitches.”
“Please don’t leave.”
Simon cupped John’s chin and pressed a gentle kiss to his lips. “I’ll come back. I promise.”
-
“You’re okay,” Simon soothed. He held John tightly against his chest. He had some color back in his cheeks, some restored strength stood behind his sobs. His body shook hard as he wept, begging Simon and God for forgiveness.
Simon could do little more than hold and shush the other man. Over and over again he repeated the same words. “You’re alright. You’re alive. We’re okay. You’ll be okay.” The words didn’t do anything to soothe John, and they settled uncomfortably in Simon’s chest.
The rain stopped pouring by the time John stopped crying. When he finally sniffled for the last time and forced a deep breath into his lungs, an overwhelming silence overtook the room. There was nothing; no wind, no rain, no music or voices or laughter. Just the still air that hung heavy around them, smelling of copper. The stain wouldn’t come out of the floor.
John fell asleep there against Simon’s chest. His breath came quietly and slowly. His face looked peaceful again and Simon could do little more than stare at him, admiring that gentle, quiet beauty. He longed to help him, but the blood stained gauze wrapped around John’s forearm taunted him, proving that he wasn’t enough for John, and he never would be.
It had rained on the day of Price’s funeral. It echoed quietly through the small room while a preacher had given a quiet sermon. He’d been buried next to Gaz in a military graveyard, and their names had been engraved on the SAS clocktower.
Simon and John had gone back to the graveyard often, sitting by those headstones. John would talk to them. He’d tell them about the world, about what had been happening in his and Simon’s life. He’d tell them about movies he’d seen, about things he and Simon had eaten for dinner, even about little things, like his newest pair of hiking boots. Simon always went along with him, and though he didn’t ever speak, he found a great deal of comfort in sitting next to John while he did. John always left flowers he’d brought from his small garden. Small bouquets of sweet pea, poppy, and asphodel.
John visited his mother’s grave as often as he could. She’d died years before, but he still went to talk to her. Simon had gone along just once, at John’s request. He’d wanted her to meet him. He’d introduced himself, and they’d eaten bread and jam, and John had left some there for her.
-
Simon’s hands shook so badly he could hardly carry the first aid kid and alcohol back into the bedroom. He dropped them unceremoniously on the floor, where they landed in the small puddle of John’s blood on the hardwood.
John let out a soft sob of relief when Simon knelt next to him again. Weakly he whispered, “you came back.”
“I promised you I would, Johnny.”
“I’m dizzy.”
“I know, Johnny.” Simon’s hand landed on John’s, and he lifted it into his lap so he could peel away the t-shirt. The bleeding had slowed, finally beginning to clot.
John sobbed as Simon cleaned the wound out as well as he could manage. He clung hard to Simon’s bloodstained jeans with his left hand as he stitched him up. He begged for mercy. Cried out for Simon to stop hurting him, but Simon continued stitching away at the torn skin.
By the time he’d finished the stitches, John was pale and his eyes were unfocused again. He’d need to lie down. He’d need water. He’d need something to eat.
“Johnny, I’m going to put you in bed.”
“I’m sorry.” John’s answer came immediately. His voice was quiet and shaky.
“It’ll be alright, Johnny.” Simon lifted him from his right side, trying not to jostle his freshly sutured forearm. He settled John into the bed, and the man curled up on his left side, extending his bandaged arm straight in front of himself. Blood was already peeking through the gauze, but Simon was determined to leave those bandages there as long as he could. John needed to rest.
Simon leaned down over him and gently brushed his hair out of his face. He pressed his lips to his forehead, and John let out a quiet, content sigh. “I love you,” Simon said.
“I love you,” John answered.
“If you ever pull a stunt like this again, I will kill you.”
A smile tugged at the corner of John’s mouth. It was small and exhausted. “I won’t.”
“Good.” Simon leaned down and pressed a kiss to the corner of John’s mouth. “Sleep, Johnny.”
John did. And Simon gathered up his mess from the floor to clean some of it up. When he stepped into the bathroom to put everything away, a disheveled, tired face stared back at him. He almost didn’t recognize himself. It was a stranger standing there; more tired and exhausted than he’d ever seen. It stirred something in his stomach, a rage at himself, at Johnny, at the world. That dark, hidden voice in the back of his mind whispered to him that he was a failure. That he couldn’t keep John safe.
He screamed out as he swung his fist at his own reflection. It shattered in an instant and glass rained down onto the floor. He was left standing among the mess, staring at a blank spot on the wall where a mirror had been. His ears rang from the volume of his scream. His chest was tight, and he was left breathing heavily.
“What the hell were you thinking, Johnny?” His voice shook and he finally wept.
-
Two days later, Simon found himself knelt at Price and Gaz’s headstones, a small bouquet in his hand. Sweet pea, poppy, and asphodel. He split it up carefully, taking his time to make sure each bundle looked as beautiful as he could manage it.
He spent longer than he should have, procrastinating something, but he wasn’t sure what .
As he laid the flowers at the base of both mens’ headstones, he felt his voice rising from his chest all at once. “Johnny is alive. He didn’t want to be… I came home and found a note from him. He meant to bleed himself to death in our bedroom.” Wind blew cold, chilling Simon through the jacket he’d put on. “I had to stitch him up. Put him to bed and let him sleep before I took him to the hospital.”
He was quiet for a moment. Part of him hoped for an answer. He hoped to hear Price’s voice, Gaz’s voice. Anyone’s. The wind carried nothing but the scent of frost in the air and the sound of rustling leaves.
“He’ll be alright, I think. I’m going to sell your cottage, Price. Maybe we’ll head up to Scotland.” Tears welled up in Simon’s eyes but he blinked them away. “I think he would have wanted you to know. I’ll bring him by for a visit before we leave.”
Once again, nothing answered Simon except for the sound of leaves rustling with the wind in the trees. He longed to hear Gaz tell a joke, or hear Price hum before he gave an answer. He longed to hear them laughing along with John, to see all of them sat around a table in a pub, sharing a few drinks and a few more stories.
Instead all he could hear was the wind. Wind, wind, and more wind. It carried everything away with it. It jostled the petals of the flower he’d laid down.
He sat for a long time by himself, nothing to keep him company but those names carved into the stone in front of him. Kyle Garrick and John Price. It wasn’t until rain started falling that he finally dragged himself back towards home.
He didn’t cry while he finally put away the groceries. He didn’t cry while he cleaned up the shattered glass from the picture frame and the mirror.
He didn’t cry until he’d sat on the bedroom floor for an hour, scrubbing uselessly away at the hardwood floor until his fingers felt raw and his arm ached. The bloodstain stayed.