Work Text:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
He's carved the words into his skin with a metal fork a thousand times. He doesn't break the skin, only digs in deep enough so he can see the letters in thin white lines turning pink over time. When he steps back, he sees himself, on the verge of tears with a kitchen utensil clutched like a weapon in his fist and he laughs at how stupid he looks while he presses the fork harder into his wrist.
c a r p e d i e m
He writes it with a pen during his lectures, scratching it out so it trails blood through the ink, just a little, so nobody knows but him.
"Man, someone's inspired," the guy next to him says. Neil grins, baring his teeth and remembering to squint, too, because people's eyes change when they smile.
There’s a poem Neil remembers from class, not one of the famous verses but a short snippet they looked over just once before continuing on their pilgrimage to disillusionment.
The very stars are justified. Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes, things happen for stupid reasons, like Neil's father being a stubborn, overbearing tyrannical monster and his mother being weak. Or his father being concerned about his future and his mother agreeing. It's a matter of perspective. The very stars are justified; there is always a counter argument.
After he graduates, he moves to New Jersey. He changes his name without telling anyone back home and lives as James Wilson ten months of the year, Neil Perry for two. He meets a guy named House who's even more emotionally stunted than he is, and he celebrates his ability to find people who need him no matter where he goes.
It's refreshing to be around someone so blatantly wrong with people, who doesn't care what people think of him and keeps his distance from anyone who isn't Neil. It makes him feel needed, like he's in this profession for a purpose and not just because he didn't have the guts to defy his father twenty-two years ago.
House is different from Todd, though. Neil doesn't trust himself with the gentle ones anymore; he'll ruin them with the way he is now. Instead, he drinks up the self-absorbed types like a safer sort of addiction.
He gets divorced three times before he decides marriage isn't worth the hassle. It's easier to play the nice guy at work, where he gives patients shocking diagnoses in such a sensitive way that they try to comfort him instead.
He knows by now that few things have a cure, but it's still an ordeal to stand by when a man comes by who has ruined his body by jumping in front of a car to save a little girl and Neil has a working body that isn't doing what it was made for.
If he could separate himself from his body and divide himself up amongst the terminally ill, he would almost be happy. At least those patients wouldn't waste their resurrected lives like he does.
He was young once. He'd thought life was all about living for the moment, making the most of every second. Now he knows it's about taking the best times of his life and sucking the marrow out of them until they fade in memory, lifeless, only a shadow of joy when they once meant everything.
Nothing gold can stay. Nothing young can live. He sees Keating walking into a university many years later, hair grey, eyes foggy with the first signs of cataracts. Still smiling. Always smiling, Keating, smug and self-satisfied like the fat Buddha on the polished desk in the Dean's office. Nothing gets the man down for long. Neil wants to run up to his old teacher and stare him in the face, to say: “Look at me, I'm a failure, you failed.”
So he does.
He feels a vicious sense of vindictiveness as Keating's cheerful mask slips, and then the man is gone, leaving nothing but a few polished words in his wake.
"I'm sorry, do I know you?"
There had been a time when Neil drew hope from Keating, leeching inspiration from his speeches like some sort of disgusting parasite. Now he pulls the question apart and stacks the words until they make sense.
“You know I’m sorry.”
"I do?"
Keating is sorry and Neil doesn't care anymore. Keating is only a teacher and Neil has learnt that teachers, too, are not invincible. Sometimes Neil takes a knife out, or fondles a length of rope, and he casts his mind back to that moment with the gun, wondering what would have happened if he had pulled the trigger.
He bleeds red.
He bleeds until he doesn't bleed anymore, realizing that he was too much of a coward to bear the painful path to oblivion. His skin is free from scars.
When he's feeling particularly masochistic, he writes poetry. He writes poetry because it is too late for words. Then he collects the sheaves of paper and bundles them neatly away under his bed in the apartment. He is beginning to run out of places to store his regrets.
On his worst days, he calls Todd. He says, "seize the day, you know? You've got to hold it close, and shake it." Todd likes nonsensical lines like that. Todd says his name like Neil is the hero in one of the old Greek epics. Maybe Todd writes poetry with “Neil the Wise Sage” or the “Man Who Knows the Road to Success” or the “Best Friend Who Always Gives Good Advice.” It makes Neil smile. Then, when he's about to burst out laughing imagining it, Todd will say, in that earnest, well-meaning voice of his, "Neil, how are you? Really, I mean?"
Neil is sick. He tells Todd so, and recites Lady Macbeth sotto voce while Todd prattles on about soup and lying in bed.
He's being chased by a shadow which only grows longer as the sun rises over the horizon. As he closes his eyes, the shadow grows, engulfs his world. He opens his eyes, blinks, straightens his suit.
He has no time for regrets (except when he does).