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Mercutio was dying.
He was bleeding out on the very streets he once walked, crowded by the friends he once played with as a child, with a particularly dear one pawing at the gash in his side in a poor, panicked attempt to stop the bleeding.
People were yelling as blood rose in his throat—Mario? Benvolio? Romeo? Maybe Tybalt? Maybe his own voice? He couldn’t make out the sounds anymore, not as his vision blurred and cleared, blurred and cleared, as his blood-slick hand grasped at someone else’s like it would keep him alive. It wouldn’t work, he knew, but a part of him—a small, small part of him that still weaved flower crowns and scraped his knees while climbing trees, that waved around sticks and wooden swords and rode on his brother’s shoulders—held hope for anything otherwise.
More yelling, sharp words, a hand tightly grasping his like they shared the same sentiment as he did, and, somehow, the world felt slower, warmer.
Thud!
“Mercutio, you know we’re meant to be fighting…! Get up before the dragon eats us both! The queen awaits!” A smaller, eight-year-old Benvolio couldn’t help but frown, turning to the other boy now sprawled out on the ground.
Mercutio cried out and threw his arm over his eyes, “No! I can’t go on anymore! I mustn't!”
Meanwhile, the fearsome, six-year-old dragon slowly lowered his claws at the derailment of the plot, “Wait, but isn’t-”
Benvolio disregarded Romeo and grabbed the other boy’s arm, trying to pull him up from the ground. “Come on, Mercutio... We talked about how this is supposed to go far before we started playing. You’re my right hand man, and we kill off the dragon hand in hand-!” He whispered to Mercutio, the frown on his face trying to fight off his growing frustration.
However, the other boy only fell limp in his grasp, refusing to be moved, and Benvolio gave an irritated huff.
“No,” Mercutio insisted, tossing his head to the side with a furrowed brow, “I’m far too injured! Go, go on without me, Good Benvolio!”
“That’s not how the game goes!” Benvolio tossed Mercutio’s arm back onto the ground, “Get up, Sir Mercutio.”
The boy in the grass, however, still refused to budge, even as he was nudged with the toe of Benvolio’s boot.
“Mercutio, just listen to him..! I want to get to my big scary part!” Romeo muttered under his breath, meeting his limp body in the grass with his gaze and tugging on the hem of Benvolio’s doublet.
Mercutio finally raised his head with a sigh, propped on his elbows as he frowned up at the two boys. His eyes squinted as he tried to peer at them, to make out their faces through the sun’s warm, beating rays.
Benvolio held out his hand.
And when Mercutio merely stared at it, he knelt down to him and grabbed it himself, holding it tightly against his own chest.
“You aren’t supposed to die, Mercutio. Get up," he muttered. “Please? Our game’s not done yet.”
Benvolio breathed the words out, his eyes clouded with the tears that were yet to join the others rolling down his cheeks. “Mercutio, p- please. It’s not your time, you aren’t fated for this. Give yourself more time, give me more time.” His hand tightened around Mercutio’s, his nails digging into the skin subconsciously.
But those words never met Mercutio’s ears, never processed over the gurgled whimpers of him clinging to what little life he’d left. A pool of deep crimson surrounded him, a color he’d once adored, and he spoke to himself, for just a moment, with syllables only he could decipher, that he never thought a summer in Verona could be so cold.
Rip.
“I told you to be more careful, Mercutio,” Benvolio muttered, hoping to calm down the crying boy before him.
A horrid fall had left a young Mercutio with a hole in the knee of his trousers and a nasty gash to go alongside it—a gash that bled profusely, staining everything it was able to.
Benvolio gently dabbed a wet cloth on the wound, soaking up the blood as best he could. Mercutio, however, continued to weep as he watched, lips pursed as tears welled up and spilled over.
“Hey, come on, it’s not that bad…” Benvolio tried again, pulling the cloth from the scrape only to find just as much deep crimson as before. His lips pursed to match Mercutio’s before he lifted his eyes up to the boy in question.
His cheeks were wet, rosy from the heat of the summer sun and the tears he’d shed, and his dark eyes glossy all the same as he stared at his new wound. Far later into the future, that wound would scar, a lasting reminder of that summer day when he’d sworn off tree climbing for a few days. Benvolio frowned, lowering the cloth, at a loss.
“I wanna go inside…” Mercutio’s voice was trembling, smaller than Benvolio was used to.
“Yeah,” Benvolio nodded a little, “Sure, we can do that. Come on.”
He offered a timid smile, then hooked his arm underneath Mercutio’s in order to help him up. The other boy winced as he was pulled to stand, letting out another little sob and a small ‘Ow…’ to accompany it. Benvolio sighed softly, giving him a small, reassuring squeeze.
“You’ll be okay.” he said, “Let’s just get inside first, okay?”
Mercutio hesitated, arm locked securely around Benvolio’s shoulders, and tore his eyes away from his still bleeding wound to instead look at his friend. He nodded.
“Okay.”
His hand runs to the wound, putting as much pressure as he can as if it’ll put the life back into the man below him. His gaze passes frantically back and forth in between the blood gushing from the wound and through his fingers and the eyes of Mario behind him.
“Mercutio..! Good Mercutio, he’s losing .. too quickly.” The words fuzz in Mercutio’s ears, slipping in and out of consciousness. His mouth is shut, he cannot force even a breath from his lips even as they part.
It was all quiet. The music had stopped. The demand to be noticed, appreciated, loved—the liveliness that had been Mercutio had vanished. He was dead. And there was nothing Benvolio could do.
“I don’t know what to do,” Benvolio muttered, tears streaming from his face and falling towards the cold body of his friend.
“Is he breathing?” Mario asks from behind him, watching him shake as he kneels in front of Mercutio, hand in bloody hand. He checks for breath, for a pulse, for any sign of life or hope left in the man’s body. He pauses, the stiff, unforgiving air around him suffocating him slowly.
“No. He isn’t.”
Silence, for a moment.
“... I need to tell Romeo,” Benvolio whispered, standing up from the static corpse before him, hands still dripping with the fresh blood of his childhood friend. He shuts his eyes for just a moment too long, unable to keep the image in his eyes. But in truth, it’s no use – all it does is seep deeper into his mind and sear. As he slowly walked away, tears falling quietly while he searched for his cousin, the world seemed to quiet. He wondered to himself if Mercutio would’ve found peace in that.
When Benvolio was younger, he had always watched the other kids run around and find the tallest tree – ‘fighting for the high ground’, as they would call it. The boys acted out the many troughs of war, fighting with sticks as swords and harsh words they had learned too early. While they did, he’d watch from the side, frozen in thought about how silly it was to fight when peace was an option on the table. He’d sit idly by the roots of the trees they’d climb and hope that when they came back down, he’d be there to scold them again.
And yet, now more than ever, the only words close to scolding were screams. The ones from his mouth, the ones in his ears, the ones right in front of his eyes. The daring fighter, protector of imagination’s queen, lies behind him, spewing blood. Blood. That was all he could see. The crimson glare that could almost draw the life right out of Benvolio’s skin. It was on his hands, down his arms, upon his own face, and burnt into his mind forevermore.
Mercutio was dead.