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Johnny is still when Dallas enters the room.
Dallas feels the cold flood him, seep through his every bone, but a sweat still manages to break out on his upper lip. "Johnnycake?" His voice is hoarse when he speaks, denying, aching, knowing. "Johnny?"
The cold is gone when Johnny opens his eyes, dark and unfocused, but not really. His voice is soft when he speaks. Johnny's voice is always soft. It's how Dally knows it's him, how he can identify the doe-eyed boy with dark skin and too-long hair that curls wildly despite the grease always slathered in it in the small, sickly pale heap lying in front of him.
Suddenly Dallas is short of breath with all the things he would say, could say, has to say, but they all twist and tangle in his mouth until he is left with nothing to say at all. Dally manages to force out, "We won." He doesn't have to explain. He speaks too quickly and too desperately, and for the first time in over ten years Dally is not the hard, street-wise hood the world knows him as, labels him as--he's a child, fearful and trembling, a kid just like the one dying in front of him. "We beat the Socs. Stomped them--chased them outta our territory."
Dally knows Johnny wants to grin but can't, so his mind instead envisions every single time he's ever seen Johnny smile, filling with panic when he realizes it not enough, it will never be enough, that he wants to see more.
"Useless," Johnny breathes. "Fighting's no good..."
Dallas continues because he can't stand for the room to fall quiet--not now, not like this. He licks his lips (a nervous habit of his no one knows of because Dallas Winston is never nervous) before saying, "They're still writing editorials about you in the paper. For being a hero and all." Dally's words come out calmer than he feels, and he can't fathom how he's even managing. "Yeah," he goes on. "they're calling you a hero now and hero-izing all the greasers." Dally pauses for a split second and bites his lip so hard he almost tastes blood. "We're all proud of you, buddy."
The desperation that claws like a trapped animal in the inside of Dally's stomach doesn't go away when Johnny's eyes light up, only tears harder--but the weight on Dally's chest lifts so he's only carrying a whole world instead of a whole universe. Dallas thinks that even now, short-haired and bone-thin and as white as the hospital sheets, Johnny is still the best thing he's ever seen in his entire eighteen years of dirt and grease and blood and crime. It hits him that he always has been.
Then he speaks again, his voice softer than ever, and Ponyboy has to lean in to even know he's saying his name. Dallas doesn't hear what he says exactly, only catches something that sounds like "Stay gold, Ponyboy," before the light is put out and the glow in Johnny's eyes that was keeping the ice away vanishes.
The weight comes back ten-fold. Dallas is freezing, the coldest he's ever felt in his whole life, emotionally and physically. When he swallows to remove the growing lump in his throat, the only thing he succeeds in doing is making himself aware of how painfully dry his mouth is. Dallas reaches out his hand to touch Johnny because for a moment he lets himself believe that he could do it--that he could really bring him back--that with the words that Johnny worshipped so much he could give him a perfect spine, a pair of lungs with air, a beating heart; but it doesn't take an education for Dallas Winston to know that he is not a giver, never was, and never will be. That he is a taker, that he has taken and taken for his entire life and suddenly the only thing he could ever want was for the glow to return to the eyes of the boy lying in front of him.
Johnny's hair hasn't grown much, not since he cut it back at that goddamn church, but Dally pushes it back anyway. "Never could keep that hair back," Dally breathes, voice not even a whisper, not sure who he's talking to exactly. He couldn't even remember who was in the room save for Johnny and himself. He couldn't care. "That's what you get for trying to help people, you little punk, that's what you get..."
Dallas Winston breaks for the first time in his life. He knows because he can feel it, feel the nothing grow and distort within him into something, something, anything until it is threatening to swallow him whole. He whirls around so quickly he slams himself into the wall, cold sweat pouring down his face along with something hot and acid on his skin but was salty and liquid all the same. "Dammit, Johnny," he cursed, and the memory of Johnny admiring his swearing abilities back in Windrixville hits him with such vivid clarity it threatens to floor him. To think it was only a few days ago was bewildering. It must've been in someone else's life. Someone else had that conversation with Johnny that day, not Dally, because then Johnny's still happy and not paralyzed below the waist and maybe still a little small and pale and short-haired but for Pete's sake, his eyes are glowing and that's all Dally cares about.
He punches the wall to steady himself, to shake himself, to jar the memory out of his mind. Dallas hits the wall so hard he thinks he feels something crack and he's half-surprised the wall doesn't give, but the room was spinning much too fast for him to feel anything but the gaping hole in his chest where it caved under the weight, growing larger by the second.
"Oh, dammit, Johnny," Dallas repeats because his entire vocabulary of swear words has vanished. "Don't die. Don't die, don't die, please don't die," Dallas is pleading now, repeating the three words like a remedy that could drown out the other three spinning in his head: Johnny is dead. I loved him. Johnny is dead. I loved him. Johnny is dead. I loved him.
It's then when the instinct kicks in, and Dally whips around and flees the room because he can't stand the fact that Johnny's eyes are still open, fixated on nothing, when they could've been on him, should've been on him. He turns at random corners, runs down so many hallways they blur together and he thinks he's running in circles. The hospital was too bright and too white for a world that suddenly seemed so black and void of light and color--he thinks one of the many nurses he halts in his rampage shouts for him to stop, but he couldn't be sure over the roar of blood in his ears.
Finally, he finds the front doors, and he jets out of the hospital, not once looking back. He runs out into the parking lot and rips open the door of Buck Merril's stupid fucking T-Bird. Dally can't remember igniting the engine or pulling out of the hospital parking lot at all, doesn't remember running three red lights in a row and almost crushing a pedestrian and slamming into another car. He drives nowhere with everywhere in his mind, until suddenly he screeches to a stop in front of the local supermarket three blocks away from the hospital.
He stumbles out of the car and slams the door shut so hard the window cracks a little. He practically runs into the store, not meeting anyone's eyes though he can feel them on him anyway. He doesn't think when he grabs a Coke, a pack of cigarettes, an apple, all this shit he doesn't need, stuffing it into his jacket anyway. The clerk gives a yelp, yelling for him to stop, but Dallas is on auto-pilot and by the time the clerk has made their way from across the counter he's already running out of the store, feet pounding the pavement, making his way down a route to a place he knew well. He doesn't bother to take the car, abandoning the T-Bird in the lot. He lets the instinct overcome him, the adrenaline take him, and he has just enough sense to wrench open the door of a phone box and punch in the number of the Curtis household. It rings once.
"Hello?" Darry's voice sounds on the other side of the line, rough and static. "Robbed the supermarket. Fuzz is after me. Pick me up in the lot." That's all he says before he hangs up, not bothering to place the phone back in position and instead letting it fall to the floor. He's running again now, sweat streaming down his body, heart pounding.
It's wintertime, so it's dark by the time Dally reaches the lot. The street lamps were already lit, spilling fluorescent orange light onto the ground in wide circles. He can almost make out the car in the dark on the other side of the lot, Darry's car. But the sound of sirens drown out the thrum of his own heart, frantic in his chest, and Dally knows he's done. He turns around, hands smoothly taking out the shotgun hidden in the waistband of his pants on instinct. He brandishes it calmly, and not even a second after the cops take out theirs.
He feels the bullets pierce his skin before he hears them. Four of them in total; four hard, cool, sleek metal objects, shot not by a gun or a hand but an impulse decision, and Dallas thinks it's a metaphor for him. All he was was steel, cold and hard and deadly, a trigger begging to be pulled. The bullets tear through his flesh with lightning speed and startling power and half of him stumbles backward with the impact, but it doesn't hurt. Oddly, he thinks, a last grim, wolfish grin forming on his cracked lips, it doesn't hurt. He feels like he's floating. This is what he wants.
Dallas Winston closes his eyes because he doesn't want to die lying with his eyes open like Johnny. Eighteen years on the streets flash before him like one of those movies Pony likes to watch. His brain stops on the moment he first meets Johnny, the first time he laid eyes on that tan, scrawny, scared-looking little kid. Huge black eyes look up from the ground to lock on his own, blue and as pale and cold as ice.
In that moment, Dallas thinks they're glowing.