Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The morgue smells like citrus disinfectant and old breath.

Nico stops noticing after the first year. The cold becomes ordinary; the quiet becomes mercy.

He writes the time of death in block letters. He washes his hands until the skin splits. Sometimes he thinks he can hear the bodies whisper—just the air-conditioning, probably.

When he looks at the glass doors of the freezer, he sees his reflection blink a second too slow. Bianca used to blink that way when she was tired.

&&

Nico first realizes that death is permanent at age ten, when Bianca forgets to wake up.

They call it sleep at first — an extended, painless one — and he believes it until the housekeeper whispers condolences that don’t mean anything.

He doesn’t cry. He waits. Because she always comes back.

But she doesn’t.

When Hazel is born two years later, the world expects him to start over.

He doesn’t.

&&

Hazel texts him at noon: eat something that’s not coffee.

He sends back a photo of a sandwich still in its wrapper.

She replies with a heart.

He throws the sandwich away untouched.

&&

Bianca lives in small things now:

—the static on the morgue radio that cuts out mid-song

—the smell of her shampoo on strangers in the street

—the way he keeps setting two plates at the table and pretending it’s habit.

He tells himself he’s over it. The lie gets easier the more it repeats.

&&

Hazel first realizes that Nico is not her brother in the same way she is his sister at age eleven.

He speaks like every sentence is a closed door.

He smiles only when no one looks.

She calls him “Nico,” not “brother,” and he never corrects her.

At family dinners, she is praised for “bringing light back into the house.”

Nico stops showing up to dinner.

&&

Hazel visits on her day off, brings soup, rearranges his plants. She talks about her job, about Will, about the sun.

He listens without really hearing.

“You look thin,” she says.

“I’m conserving energy.”

“You mean starving.”

“Same difference.”

Her jaw tightens. “You think grief is a personality trait.”

He shrugs. “It’s the only one that stuck.”

Later, when she hugs him goodbye, his ribs click like piano keys.

&&

Will first meets Nico in a hospital stairwell, spring 2021.

Nico had been called in to move a body to the morgue.

The girl couldn’t have been older than Bianca was when she died.

Same dark hair. Same small, quiet face.

He stood there too long, staring, until someone told him to sign the papers and go.

Will found him by accident on the stairs, crying into his hands, the way people cry when the sound can’t get out.

Will doesn’t say anything — just sits three steps below him, close enough to be real but not close enough to touch. because proximity is mercy, and mercy is all he knows how to give.

When Nico finally speaks, it’s without looking up, his voice sounds far away.

“She died again.”

Will doesn’t understand until later that grief doesn’t stay buried. It finds new names, new faces, and comes back.

Grief never dies. It just learns new ways to stay.

&&

He dreams of Bianca most nights, but the dreams are mundane—folding laundry, walking home from school. In one, she asks him to hold her hand and he can’t; his fingers pass through air.

He wakes with his hands clenched so hard the nails draw blood.

At work, he catalogues a new intake, a young woman drowned. The tag around her wrist reads Bianca A. for a split second before his vision clears. He laughs under his breath and it echoes in the stainless steel.

&&

Hazel calls again.

“Come for dinner. Will’s cooking.”

He says he’s busy.

“You work nights. It’s barely five.”

“Then I’m sleeping.”

“You don’t sleep.”

He ends the call.

Later, guilt tastes like rust in his mouth.

&&

Will loves Nico like a terminal diagnosis he refuses to acknowledge.

He brings him coffee every morning, drives him to work when Nico’s car won’t start, calls him “sunshine” even though he means it ironically.

Nico doesn’t laugh.

He says, “You can’t fix people by loving them.”

Will answers, “I know.”

He doesn’t.

&&

There’s a locker in the morgue he never uses. Inside, he keeps a violet she once gave him, long dead, the petals like ash. Sometimes he opens it just to check it’s still there—proof that something can stay gone.

&&

Bianca shows up in the kitchen on a Wednesday.

She looks exactly the same as when she left—hair half-wet, cardigan buttoned wrong, that absentminded tilt of her head that meant I’m listening, but I’m already gone.

Nico doesn’t ask what she’s doing here. He just keeps stirring his coffee until it goes cold.

“You’re wasting away,” she says.

He answers, “It’s fashionable.”

She laughs, soft and cruel. “You still think jokes make you human.”

She also shows up in flashes:

A child’s laugh too close to her pitch.

A flicker of movement behind frosted glass.

A sentence half-remembered, finishing itself in his head.

She never speaks again, but he hears her anyway.

&&

Hazel texts: You’re scaring me.

Nico sits with the message open for a long time.

He types: I’m fine.

Erases it.

He tries again: I don’t know how to stop hurting.

Deletes that too.

He writes: I’m scared, Hazel.

Backspaces until there’s nothing left.

For a second, his thumb hovers over her name, like he’s about to send something, anything.

Then he locks the phone.

It lights up once in his hand, waiting for him to change his mind.

He doesn’t.

&&

Hazel calls every Sunday.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Are you eating?”

“I think so.”

“Do you miss me?”

“Sure.”

After the third week, she stops asking.

&&

One evening he stays late, inventorying belongings. Wallets, watches, wedding rings. He lists them, labels them, files them. It feels like prayer.

When he finally looks up, the clock is blinking 3:03 AM.

Someone has written on the fogged glass of the observation window: still here.

He wipes it away. His hand comes back wet and shaking.

&&

Hazel stops by unannounced two days later.

“You look awful,” she says.

“Occupational hazard.”

“You smell like bleach.”

He almost says you smell like her, but swallows it.

They eat in silence. She pushes her plate away halfway through.

“I can’t keep visiting you like this,” she says.

He doesn’t look at her. “I didn’t ask you to.”

She breathes in too fast. “That’s what hurts. You never ask. Not for help. Not for anyone.”

The air between them folds in on itself.

Nico’s fingers twitch against the table, the small tremor of someone fighting the need to reach back.

He says nothing.

She waits like maybe silence will turn into an answer.

It doesn’t.

When she leaves, the door stays half open, as if it’s waiting for him to change his mind.

He doesn’t.

He just stands there until the light burns out.

&&

Bianca’s photo sits on the counter. He turns it face-down, then right-side-up again. It doesn’t help.

He tries music; every song ends where hers used to.

He tries work; every name tag reads hers for a second.

He tries forgetting; memory rots slower than flesh.

&&

One night, after too many hours and too little sleep, he walks home through the industrial district. The sky is the color of hospital light. His reflection follows in every dark window, thin, half-there.

He whispers, “You can stop now.”

The echo answers, “You first.”

&&

He writes a note he doesn’t send:

Hazel—

Don’t look for me.

Tell Will the sun sets fine without me. Know that you and him are the only thing that made me hesitate.

I’ve been trying to find a way to stay, but every room sounds like an echo now, and I don’t belong in any of them.

You deserve someone who looks at you and still sees the world, not someone counting exits.

Will deserves someone who can love him without breaking him for it.

I’m not sure what comes next.

Maybe rest. Maybe nothing. Maybe somewhere I can stop being a ghost.

 

Don’t wait for me.

If I can, I’ll send a sign.

If I can’t—

you’ll know why.

N.

 

He folds it small and leaves it on the kitchen counter beside the photo.

&&

At dawn, he locks the morgue for the last time. The key stays in the door. He walks toward the sea.

No one sees him leave.

&&

Outside, the air smells like rain and endings.

Bianca walks beside him, shadow thin and steady.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

He says, “Somewhere quiet. Somewhere it doesn’t hurt.”

She nods. “That’s all you ever wanted.”

&&

When Hazel calls that afternoon, the line rings into silence.

When Will checks the apartment, the coffee cup is still warm.

&&

Bianca hums somewhere in the walls.

The morgue freezer clicks shut.

&&

&&

It’s rather quiet, in the end.

Chapter Text

Hazel doesn’t cry the day Nico disappears.

She waits for it, sits on the couch with the note in her hand until her knuckles ache. Nothing comes.

Grief needs proof, and she has none.

He’s not dead.

He’s not alive either.

He’s just gone, and it’s the worst of the three.

&&

The police take a statement.

She gives them the dates, the last call, the way his voice cracked on “I’m fine.”

They nod like it’s a script.

She hates them for it.

Will waits outside the station, two cups of coffee gone cold.

When she steps out, he says, “They won’t find him.”

She answers, “I know.”

Neither throws the coffee away.

&&

At night, Hazel dreams of him sitting on the kitchen floor, head in his hands. She kneels beside him, says, “Please, look at me.”

He doesn’t move.

When she touches him, her fingers go through smoke.

She wakes with her hands shaking, her throat raw from silence.

&&

Will’s apartment smells like the hospital. He hasn’t stopped working—he just stopped resting.

His coworkers whisper about him. He keeps smiling.

He thinks if he stops, the walls will fall.

When Hazel calls, he answers on the first ring.

“Any news?”

“No.”

Then neither speaks for a long time.

Eventually, she says, “He loved you, you know.”

Will presses his forehead to the wall. “Then why didn’t he stay?”

Hazel whispers, “Because love isn’t a cure.”

&&

Hazel starts visiting the morgue. No reason, no permission. Just sits outside in her car, staring at the windows, waiting for something to happen.

It never does.

Once, she swears she sees movement inside, a shadow that knows how to walk like him.

She almost runs in. Doesn’t.

The building hums with refrigeration. She imagines him inside, cataloguing names, whispering them like prayers.

&&

Will dreams of the morgue too.

He dreams Nico is still there, standing at a stainless steel table, hands trembling.

When he says his name, Nico looks up, mouth open like he’s about to apologize, but instead he says, I can’t stay where things rot this slowly.

Will wakes with blood in his mouth from biting his tongue.

&&

Hazel finds Bianca’s old photo album in Nico’s closet.

She flips through it, page after page of proof: birthdays, sandcastles, smiles.

Every time she turns a page, she feels like she’s peeling away skin.

She whispers, “You got him first.”

The walls don’t answer.

&&

Will keeps coming to Hazel’s apartment.

He brings food neither of them eat. They sit on the couch and let the TV play static.

Once, she says, “He hated being saved.”

Will nods. “He made it impossible to stop trying.”

They look at each other like they’re the last two survivors of the same crash.

&&

Hazel stops wearing colors.

Her coworkers stop asking about her brother.

When someone mentions the sea, she leaves the room.

She writes texts to Nico that start with I miss you and end with please come home.

She never hits send.

&&

One night she tries calling instead.

The number doesn’t work anymore.

A voice she doesn’t recognize says the line has been disconnected.

Hazel sits there listening to the silence that follows, as if he might still be on the other end, breathing quietly, refusing to speak.

Later, she throws the phone across the room.

The screen cracks.

It feels right.

She tells herself she hates him for leaving like that—no body, no goodbye, just absence.

But hatred still sounds too much like love when she says it out loud.

&&

Will starts drinking again, quietly.

He tells himself it’s manageable, that it’s not about Nico.

He lies well enough to almost believe it.

One night he comes to Hazel’s door at midnight. His hands are shaking.

“He’s not dead,” he says.

“Then where is he?”

Will’s voice cracks: “I don’t know how to love someone who keeps disappearing.”

Hazel closes her eyes. “Then stop trying.”

He laughs, hollow. “You sound like him.”

&&

They sleep in the same room sometimes. Not together, not really.

Two people orbiting a ghost.

Will wakes up once to find Hazel whispering to the empty air.

She says, “You should have stayed. I would have made it worth it.”

Her voice breaks on worth.

He pretends he doesn’t hear.

&&

A month passes.

Then two.

Hazel gets a postcard. No name, no return address, only a line:

i tried to stay. i am tired. i want to sleep now. tell Will i’m sorry. know i am sorry.

The postmark is blurred, the handwriting shaky—
like someone who wanted to start again,
and almost did.

She throws up when she reads it.

&&

Will holds the card like it’s something burning through his hands.

“It’s him,” he says.

Hazel shakes her head too quickly. “Or it’s someone cruel. Someone sick.”

He looks at her, eyes red, voice small. “What’s the difference, Hazel?”

&&

The silence after that feels endless. The clock ticks, the refrigerator hums, both of them wrong for existing.

Hazel whispers, “Do you think he—”

She can’t finish.

Her lip trembles. “By sleep… did he mean…?”

Will’s breath stutters. He presses a hand to his face like he’s trying to hold it together, but tears keep falling anyway.

“I don’t know,” he says finally. It sounds like he’s breaking. “Maybe. Maybe he did.”

&&

Hazel sits down hard on the floor. The card’s still there, between them, small enough to ruin the whole world.

“I wish I knew,” she says. “I wish I could just know.”

Will nods, staring at nothing. “Not knowing is worse. You can’t bury a maybe.”

Neither of them moves.

The postcard curls at the edges as the air dries the ink.

Outside, the day goes on like nothing happened.

Inside, they don’t speak again.

&&

They don’t talk after that for weeks.

Hazel takes up running, as if movement can outpace grief.

Will works overtime until he collapses from exhaustion.

They’re both waiting for a miracle they don’t believe in.

&&

Hazel dreams of Nico again.

This time, he’s younger—twelve, maybe—and Bianca stands beside him, smiling.

Hazel reaches out, says, “Don’t take him.”

Bianca answers, “He was never yours to keep.”

When she wakes, she doesn’t cry.

She’s too tired for that.

&&

Will drives to the pier at dawn. The sky is sickly blue.

He whispers into the wind, “If you’re alive, please let me go.”

The sea answers with silence.

He stands there until the tide reaches his shoes.

&&

Hazel and Will keep meeting in the hospital cafeteria. Nico a silent ghost always accompanying them.

She says, “He wouldn’t want this.”

Will laughs without humor. “He didn’t want anything.”

They sit there, breathing the same air, both pretending they haven’t already lost everything.

&&

Grief settles like dust—quiet, patient, permanent.

Neither of them moves it away.

&&

Chapter Text

The police close the case in spring. Three years later.

“Missing, presumed dead.”

Two words that sound like permission.

Hazel doesn’t sign the paper. She lets them file it without her.

When the officer offers condolences, she says, “Save them for someone who believes in endings.”

She walks home under a sky that can’t decide between rain and light.

Will is sitting on her porch steps, a bruise under one eye from a patient who fought him.

They don’t speak. They don’t have to.

He looks at her, eyes hollow. “They’re calling it accidental.”

She laughs once, sharp. “He was never an accident. He was deliberate about everything, even disappearing.”

&&

Weeks pass like water damage.

Hazel keeps working, keeps talking, keeps pretending she isn’t waiting for a phone call.

Every sound still makes her turn her head.

In the grocery store, a man brushes past her and whispers, sorry.

It’s the same tone Nico used when he forgot her birthday.

She chases after him, heart pounding, but stops when she finds an unfamiliar face—someone who isn’t her brother.

Her chest aches. Tears spill before she can stop them, her sobs quiet under the whispers and glances of strangers.

She leaves her cart and walks out without buying anything, the weight of emptiness clinging to her.

&&

Will sends her updates she didn’t ask for: newspaper clippings, reports of an unclaimed body found two towns away, a sighting near the coast.

She stops opening them.

He stops sending them.

They start texting again instead. One word at a time.

“How.”

“Same.”

“Sleep?”

“No.”

&&

At night, Hazel rearranges her furniture, as if the right pattern might make space for him to return.

When she’s done, the room feels smaller.

She dreams of Nico standing in the doorway.

He says nothing.

Behind him, Bianca’s silhouette glows faintly, like the afterimage of a flash.

Hazel wakes with the taste of salt in her mouth.

&&

Will stops wearing his badge.

He still goes to work, but he leaves it in the locker, as though detachment might protect him.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes he thinks he sees Nico in the reflection of the surgery window, in the spaces between fluorescent lights.

He blinks, and it’s only himself.

He’s tried to cry. The body refuses.

Instead, his hands shake when he touches a patient’s wrist for a pulse.

It feels like trespassing.

Hazel calls once a week.

They talk about nothing: weather, groceries, Will’s insomnia.

Every conversation ends the same way.

“Do you think he’s gone?”

“I don’t know.”

Silence.

&&

One night he dreams of the morgue, clean and endless. Nico is there, writing something on a clipboard.

Will walks up behind him, says, “You can’t keep doing this.”

Nico turns, eyes like mirrors. “Neither can you.”

He wakes before dawn, the sheets cold, the world indifferent.

&&

Hazel shows up at his apartment with two cups of instant noodles.

He lets her in.

They eat on the floor.

She says, “He used to hum when he cooked. Did he ever do that with you?”

Will nods. “Sometimes. He said silence made him feel watched.”

They both laugh quietly, like it’s a secret they shouldn’t have shared.

&&

Hazel stands, starts pacing.

“Sometimes I hate him for leaving.”

Will looks at her, exhausted. “Sometimes I think he died just to prove us wrong.”

She stops pacing. “About what?”

“That love fixes anything.”

The kettle whistles; neither moves to stop it.

&&

Summer blurs into autumn.

She stops visiting the morgue; the building’s been sold anyway.

In its place, construction workers raise condominiums.

She hates the sound of hammers—it feels like someone desecrating a grave she never got.

She and Will meet less often.

When they do, the air between them is filled with everything they don’t say.

Once she tells him, “I think I’m forgetting his voice.”

He says, “Maybe that’s mercy.”

She slaps him. Then apologizes.

He doesn’t flinch either time.

&&

Hazel starts seeing Bianca everywhere.

A woman on the bus wearing the same coat.

A laugh in a café, one tone too sharp.

It takes her days to realize Bianca’s ghost belongs to Nico now—that the sister he couldn’t bury has come to her instead.

She whispers into the empty room, “You won. You took him.”

The air smells faintly of oranges and cold.

&&

Will keeps a single photo of Nico on the fridge.

Not smiling—never smiling—but alive.

Some nights he talks to it.

“I should’ve followed you.”

Or, “You should’ve stayed.”

Or, “Was I ever enough to make you want the morning?”

The photo never changes.

He deletes Nico’s number and then rewrites it from memory, just to see if he still can.

He can.

He wishes he couldn’t.

&&

Hazel calls him at two a.m. one night.

“I can’t stop thinking he’s out there somewhere,” she says.

Will answers, “Then he’s both gone and not gone.”

“That’s worse.”

“I know.”

Her breathing steadies.

“Sometimes I wish I had drowned with him.”

He doesn’t say don’t. He says, “We’re still here.”

It’s not comfort but it’s all they’ve got.

&&

Months slip into a shape that almost looks like living.

Hazel starts drawing again.

Will takes shorter shifts.

They cross paths less. When they do, they nod, share polite smiles, act like survivors who’ve learned not to reopen the wound.

But sometimes, in the corner of their eyes, a shadow moves wrong.

A reflection turns late.

A heartbeat stumbles.

They never tell anyone.

&&

Hazel dreams one last time.

Nico stands beside Bianca at the shoreline.

He says, “I didn’t mean to disappear. I just couldn’t stay.”

She reaches out, but he’s already fading.

When she wakes, she writes the dream down and burns the paper.

&&

Will stops going to the pier.

Hazel stops calling the morgues.

The world keeps going.

And still, sometimes, when the hospital lights flicker, when the wind shifts just right, Will swears he hears footsteps in the hall.

He looks up.

There’s never anyone there.

&&

No graves, no answers, only repetition:

they live, they grieve, they live again.

Maybe he’s gone.

Maybe he’s the silence that lets them keep breathing.

Maybe the difference doesn’t matter anymore.

If Nico is alive, he doesn’t come back.

If he’s dead, he’s somewhere quiet.

Either way, the world keeps turning, gracelessly, faithfully, cruelly.

And that’s the tragedy of it —

not that he left,

but that everyone learned how to keep breathing after.

Chapter Text

It’s been ten years.

No one says his name anymore.

The world kept going, because that’s what it does even when you want it to stop.

&&

Hazel moves inland—away from the sea, away from the morgue, away from the version of herself that waited for footsteps on the stairs.

Her apartment is small, windows that face east. Every morning, light hits the wall where a photo should hang. She never put one up.

She teaches art now. Children who smell like paint and new paper. When they laugh, it cuts and heals in the same breath.

One day, a student draws a boy with dark hair and labels it the brother who sleeps in the sea. Hazel doesn’t ask how she knew to draw him like that. She just adds it to the wall of class projects, next to the rainbows and houses.

Sometimes she stands there after everyone’s gone, looking at it until it stops being a picture and becomes a mirror.

At night, she still dreams of Bianca sometimes.

Never Nico.

She used to think that meant he was dead.

Now she wonders if it means he’s at peace, somewhere beyond her reach.

When she wakes, she whispers into the dark, “We did what we could.”

One afternoon, months later, she meets Frank. They have a child—a boy with dark, wavy hair—and when they name him, Hazel says Nico.

&&

will never left the city.

Still works at the hospital, older, quieter. His hair’s gone gray at the edges, like winter creeping in but politely.

He never fell in love again. His heart went with Nico the day he left, and he waits—silently, patiently—for the day they might meet again.

When he hears the name, Nico, spoken by Hazel in conversation about her child, his chest tightens. A small, quiet ache spreads through him. It’s not jealousy, not exactly. It’s grief. The boy carries a piece of what was lost, and Will lets himself feel it, and then he puts it away, as he always does.

He doesn’t talk about Nico.

But on certain nights, when a patient slips away and the machines fall silent, he finds himself saying I miss you—to the room, to the air, to whoever still listens.

Hazel sends him postcards now and then: a drawing, a line of poetry, a reminder that breathing counts.

He keeps them in a drawer beside the photo he can’t throw away.

&&

Every year on the same date—none of them remembers who chose it—they meet at the pier.

The city built a fence, but the sea still looks the same: endless, indifferent.

Hazel brings flowers. Will brings coffee. They sit side by side, not touching, not needing to.

She says, “Do you ever think he was trying to save us from himself?”

Will pauses. “I… I loved him,” he admits quietly. “Maybe he didn’t know it. Or maybe he did, and it wasn’t enough to keep him.”

Hazel swallows, her voice small. “I resented him at first—for leaving me, for leaving us. But… as I grew older, I realized maybe it wasn’t about me, or us. Maybe it was Nico. Maybe he was hurting so much the only way he knew to survive was to leave.”

Will’s hand finds hers. “I can’t imagine the pain he must have been in to choose that,” he says.

They hold hands, and it feels like forgiveness, like healing, like a quiet surrender to what was lost and what still remains.

The tide creeps in, reaches their shoes, recedes.

They stay until the wind turns cold.

&&

Later, Hazel walks home. She doesn’t check over her shoulder anymore.

Later, Will turns off the lights in the hospital hallway and listens to the hum of the machines.

He almost thinks he hears a voice—familiar, wry, tender.

It’s okay. You can rest now.

He doesn’t turn around.

He doesn’t need to.

&&

The Grief is Never Ending but so is the Love

And the world keeps moving, like it always did, like it always will.

Chapter Text

From Hazel

Dearest Nico,

The air smells like rain today, the kind that clings to your skin and refuses to leave. I think you would’ve liked it — the grayness, the stillness. You always said storms made the world honest.

There’s a crack on the window of my classroom that looks like a river map. Sometimes, when the light hits it, it glows gold, and for a moment the world feels almost holy. I stand there, tracing its shape with my finger, wondering if this is what you meant when you said there are ways to stay without staying.

The years have turned slow and tender. Grief softens around the edges, but it doesn’t fade — it just grows quiet, like a heartbeat you forget to notice until something startles it awake again. A song. A smell. A name spoken in passing.

You are all of these things now.

I don’t know what version of you I’m writing to. The boy who left, or the one who finally found quiet. Maybe they’re the same. Maybe you were always leaving, even when you stayed.

Will says grief changes shape, but I think it just learns new disguises. Some mornings it looks like sunlight on the kitchen wall. Some nights it looks like our father’s eyes staring back from my reflection. Some days, when the world is too gentle, it looks like forgiveness I haven’t earned yet.

My son asked me today if ghosts can love. I told him yes — that’s why they stay.
He asked if ghosts get tired. I said yes again, because I think that’s what you were — tired, and still loving us anyway.

When I light candles on your birthday, I don’t make wishes anymore. I just sit there and listen. The wax melts, the flame shivers, and the silence feels like a language only we speak.

Do you remember the summer we planted violets by the porch? They died within weeks, and you called it proof that some things are too delicate for this world. I planted new ones this year. They’re blooming. Maybe you’d laugh and say I overwatered them. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s the only thing I’ve learned — that love, to survive, needs tending even when it hurts.

I used to think healing meant forgetting. Now I know it means remembering without collapsing.

It’s strange, the way love keeps finding new shapes to take — a letter, a flower, a child’s laugh. You exist in all of them, Nico. Not as a ghost, not as a wound, but as something constant, steady, living.

You once told me I was too kind for a world that eats kindness alive. I hope you know I’m still trying. I hope that counts for something.

I love you. Still. Always.

Hazel.

&&

From Will

Nico,

The hospital lights flicker sometimes. When they do, I pretend it’s you — some cosmic glitch that lets you through for a second. It’s stupid, I know, but it helps.

I still work the night shift. The city outside hums like it’s breathing, and I’ve started to find comfort in that — the low, endless sound of things continuing. You’d probably call it denial. Maybe you’d be right.

There’s a plant by the window you once gave me. It’s half-dead, half-stubborn, still reaching toward the light even when I forget to water it. Every time it droops, I think it’s done for. Every time it lifts again, I think of you. That’s what grief is, I guess — the way things insist on living even when no one’s watching.

I kept your mug. The handle’s cracked, but I still use it. Maybe I like things that almost break but don’t.

Hazel says you left because you couldn’t stay. I believe her now. I stopped asking why. Love doesn’t explain. It just lingers — in the corners, in the pauses, in the ache that hums beneath every ordinary day.

I used to talk to you like you could hear me. Then I stopped. Now I think you probably do, just not in the way I expect. Sometimes it’s a flicker in the hallway light. Sometimes it’s a stranger’s laugh with your rhythm. Sometimes it’s nothing at all — and even that feels like something.

When I tell patients it’s okay to rest, I think of you. The way you used to say it — not as mercy, but as truth. I didn’t understand it then. I do now. Rest isn’t giving up. It’s choosing softness after years of being hard just to survive.

If there’s a world beyond this one, I hope it’s quiet. I hope it doesn’t ask you to be anything more than what you already were — tired, kind, trying.
And if, somehow, you can still hear me: you were loved enough to make staying possible. Even if you couldn’t.

Hazel’s son is growing fast. He has your eyes. I don’t tell her that often — it hurts to say out loud — but I think she knows. He laughs like her, though. Maybe that’s the balance you always wanted for us: light and shadow learning how to share the same room.

Every year we go to the pier. She brings flowers, I bring coffee. We sit there until the cold bites. We don’t talk much. We don’t need to. The waves say enough.

Sometimes, I imagine you sitting beside us, barefoot, your hair wet from the sea, saying something wry like, you two look ridiculous.
I’d say, you took your time coming back.
You’d shrug, say, I was always here.
And for a second, I believe it.

If love is a place, you never left it.

I’ll see you when it’s time.
Until then, I’ll keep the lights on.

W.

&&