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There are some men better suited to death than life; those dull, unseeing creatures who lumber half-heartedly through their lives on leaden limbs more for the sake of having said they’d done so than out of any true passion for the process. For men like that, it’s almost a relief when their end finally comes, so they may finally be free of masquerading about the living.
Nick Carraway was not one of these men. In fact, he was quite the opposite.
He soaked in the world around him selfishly, paid no mind to the contrived veneers people threw up to defend against such astucity, and saw keenly through the mist of ambiguity that cloaked the upper echelon. These habits lent him a vivid sort of vivacity—the kind only brought about in the stead of corruption or greed.
Gatsby thought such authenticity was admirable. One didn’t see much of it in West Egg.
***
“Is it raining?” Nick’s voice was slightly strained as he struggled to lift his head from the soaked surface of the pavement. “The newspaper said it was supposed to be warm today.”
Gatsby swallowed thickly, pressing a hand to Nick’s chest in an effort to keep him still. Images of people long dead—bleeding, bruised, far younger than him—flashed behind his eyelids as he felt the sticky-sweet warmth of blood coat his palm. He fought back the urge to gag.
“Not quite, Old Sport.” Gatsby offered the other man a shaky smile, one that stuck to the fronts of his teeth. “You fell into the pool.”
“Ah.” Nick’s hand came up to swipe at the water trapped beneath the lens of his glasses, and he blinked up at Gatsby absently, an indescribable blankness beginning to impede on the ardor of his soul. “I made it then. Must have, since you’re still here.”
“Made it?”
Nick inclined his head slightly, acknowledging Gatsby’s ignorance with an easy grace even as the front of his shirt began to turn the color of well-dyed crimson.
“They let you take the fall for that woman's death—Daisy and Tom, I mean—so I figured it was only a matter of time until her husband tried to even the score. An eye for an eye, you know?” A crooked grin split Nick’s face, and he winced as his canines caught on the chapped skin of his lower lip. “Looks like I wasn’t too far off with that assumption. If I hadn’t buttonholed that damn hunk of lead, you both would have had your breasts blown off.”
Nick had barely managed to finish speaking before a great something seemed to drain out of him all at once, taking what little gaiety he’d forced into his words with it. He looked smaller than normal—sickly—his usually neat clothes clinging to his skin like a shroud would a corpse. It was with a start that Gatsby realized the other man had gone entirely slack beneath him, his skin steadily paling as what little color it possessed continued to leech from the wound marring his chest.
“Don’t worry about that now, Old Sport,” he murmured, mind already pulling away and into the foul miasma of its memories, mustard gas burning the tissue of his lungs. “Just stay awake. My butler is calling for a doctor as we speak, the very best in the nation! Wolfshiem lent me his number, as well as an iron-clad assurance that he gets his patients ship-shape in no time, regardless of injury.”
Gatsby’s voice pitched upwards in uneven, broken intervals, gaining the panicked quality of one unsure of what to do with themself. His hands fluttered to his chest, toward a handkerchief abandoned in his suit jacket, then fell tensely back to his sides.
“I’m sure they’re already on their way. There’s no reason to worry, really. Just hold on for a little while longer, Old Sport. A man of your caliber should have no issue doing so.”
Gatsby cast his gaze searchingly upward. The manicured lanes of his property remained tauntingly empty. Where throngs of people had crowded and jeered and thrown themselves upon one another in impassioned, sultry masses mere hours prior, there was nary a songbird to be seen. Bile and hatred, both sour, burned at the back of his throat.
“Gatsby,” Nick drawled, breaking through the moment’s muddled silence. “It’s alright. Really, it is.”
“What? What’s alright? There’s no need to reassure me. I’m well aware that you’re bound to be alright in the end...maybe a little worse for wear but-“
“Gatsby, I’m tired.”
Nick’s pupils flickered as he attempted to meet the other man’s gaze, oscillating between large and small with all the combined fickleness of the physical form. He raised a shaking hand to rest on Gatsby’s forearm in a sickening facsimile of comfort.
“It’ll be alright, I promise. There are worse ways to go, I suppose. At least I died doing something worthwhile.”
“What do you mean?” Gatsby cried, feeling an unwanted warmth begin to well up in the corners of his eyes as he took Nick’s hand into his own. “What could possibly make this—you dying—worthwhile? The world is a rotten place, Nick. I loathe to imagine what it would look like without you, what a gray and uncaring place it would become. Please, don’t leave.”
Nick’s eyes grew infinitesimally brighter, burning from the inside out with a conviction that Gatsby found himself unable to make sense of.
“Jay-“
Nick’s mouth opened momentarily, a silent confession hovering in the stillness above his tongue. Then a final shudder overtook him, and whatever he intended to say was lost in the throes of nonexistence that followed—left unspoken forever.
The hand resting in Gatsby’s went limp with a finality that made his stomach turn.
Nick’s body was still, hidden as it was among cerements of half-wilted orchids whose jeweled petals seemed to recoil from the lifelessness that consumed it. Gatsby could barely bring himself to look at the thing, such a cold travesty it was. Even still, he took a moment to tidy it—brush away the hair plastered unflatteringly across its forehead and polish its crooked set of spectacles—if only out of respect for the soul now vacated from the vessel.
And if Jay Gatsby—now so removed from the greatness he had dedicated his life to the pursuit of—sobbed as he carried the body of his selfless, slaughtered companion into the halls of his mansion, no one was any the wiser.