Chapter Text
The night after Neil Perry’s death, I couldn’t move.
I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling, terrified of the image of waking up again with my head in the same position it was in when I had received the news. I couldn’t fall asleep, but I couldn’t find the flicker of even an idea of the energy to move.
I stayed like that for hours before something in me finally loosened, and sleep came.
I awoke almost immediately as I crashed off of the bed from the loud sound of a gunshot in my ears.
Neil's gunshot.
I stood, gasping for breath, twisting around to look for the source of the bang. Nothing. There was nothing. It was just my imagination.
I fell sideways until I was sitting on Neil’s bed. I was hallucinating now. Shit. Add that to social anxiety, and my friends will like me even more. With a small crash, something fell to the floor that must have been set between the mattress and the beams holding it up.
I found myself dropping to the floor slowly, agonizingly, as though I had suddenly gained the movement of a turtle. I tried to move faster, but found it pained me as much as stabbing myself and twisting the knife.
My blood went cold as I held back the sickness that threatened at my throat. I pulled out a small razorblade from beneath the bed.
Oh, Neil. Why didn't you—why hadn’t you told me? We had loved each other. We never said it, but really, we both knew it. Yet Neil suffered alone. He didn’t even call me before he died. Didn’t even leave a note.
Why had Neil done everything, everything with me except suffer?
I tried to cry. I couldn’t. I fell asleep on the cold, hard floor between our beds, wishing the agony that settled over my chest like bricks would disappear for just a moment so I could feel something.
I awoke with a quieter agony, and then reached into it with a questioning nature. Everything came back to me, as it always did the mornings after disaster struck. I let out a slow, piercing wail. It didn’t matter who heard me. I heard the shuffling stop and then begin again as they figured, for once, I didn't care. Of course I didn't. Nothing mattered because Neil Perry was gone, and he wasn't ever going to smile at him or breathe near him or love him quietly again.