Work Text
Todd is so tired. He doesn’t remember the last time he wasn’t. He’s tired of his old clothes, hanging of him like rags. He’s tired of the view, the room, the cold window sill he can’t help but grip so tightly it digs into his skin and leaves red marks. Maybe he’s supposed to hurt this way. Todd might even be tired of himself.He feels gone, blue, fading, trapped, closed. There was a time where he’d stripped himself bare, devoid of all walls and masks and all defences, laid out for only one pair of eyes to see. How blind they are know. How closed and unseeing.Todd feels just as visionless.He thinks he might die soon. He doesn’t know though. He doesn’t know anything any more. He thought, life wasn’t supposed to work like this. But he didn’t know any better, and now he does, in a way. He thinks he might be angry, if he wasn’t so tired. Angry at all the cruelty and coldness. Maybe, he muses, he doesn’t get angry, because he thinks he deserves it. But he doesn’t know.Todd has never been this numb before. He’s unmoving, like a rock fixed to the ground. He thinks if he doesn’t remain like this, he might fall and never get back up again. He might seep into the floorboards like blood into a piece of cloth. He might turn to wood or ice or leave a fossil behind. A part of him wants to let go and fall, another doesn’t, but Todd is tired of listening to the voices fighting in his head. He just wishes everything would stop.Todd feels like he's fading away into nothingness. He's surrounded by fog, but he doesn’t want to leave it’s all-enclosing haziness behind. He doesn’t want to feel the pain that is somewhere out there, waiting until it gets impatient and comes to him, all in a bang and a rush when he least suspects it – an ambush, if you will. He doesn’t want to get life pushed back into his body, into his blood and flesh and bones.He’s so tired of thinking, so tired of standing, so when he finally let’s go he falls onto the bed. Neil's bed.The ceiling closes in on him, and Todd shuts his eyes. He feels like he’s buried alive, left in the same predicament as Neil the dead in the graveyard, but still forced to breathe when the other doesn’t. Todd wonders if he’ll ever really lie next to him again. If he ever gets to see him again, feel his presence, hear his words again. Todd wonders if he’ll ever heal from this.He breathes air that’s hard to swallow. It’s dusty, he can’t tell where he is. Not on the bare mattress in that empty room. Maybe he’s hallucinating. But there’s no Neil in the corner, and Todd figures that if he’s making things up, it’d be at least better than this. Anything would be better than this.Todd blinks and the room emerges before his eyes. He sits up, just to slump against the headboard. From this angle he can see Neil's desk. This too is bare, empty, like Todd himself. He thinks back to the countless times he’s sat at Neil’s desk, the other boys’ eyes watching him write or think or just merely exist. He thinks back to poems left unfinished, and essays barely started. And as he does, something starts to unfold in his mind.He thinks: you left me in the dark, you left me standing in the cold, you left me in this room haunted by your ghost. You are gone and I am here, but what is that worth? I am but half a man, half a heart, half a soul. I am not who I was before.
It’s just snippets, and Todd’s sure he’ll forget them anyway, but they’re there.He stares at the ceiling, grey and dirty. He has a feeling, a hunch, that the dams will start breaking any minute now. He knows, it’ll come back to him. The sadness, the pain, the coldness of snow, the other boys sharing his pain in a quiet way, the funeral.He remembers Neil’s smile, Neil’s eyes, his kindness and the way he helped him. He remembers the way he read everything Todd ever showed him with the same level of great enthusiasm and how he’d always lamented that he didn’t need those stupid reading glasses but used them anyway because bad eye-sight is nothing Neil Perry knows.And then he starts to mourn Neil Perry. He mourns the happy, and the passionate, and the sad person he was. He mourns his companion and his best friend and some third thing he doesn’t even know how to name. He mourns the presence Neil had in his life and he mourns the life he never got to live. He mourns the little time they had, he mourns the lost opportunities. He mourns the time that’ll pass between now and the future. How it’ll become spring and then summer and autumn and winter again. How Neil won’t be there to see it. Todd knows that he’s never been good at coping with the passing of time, but this, this feels so much worse than simple nostalgia.He thinks, he hates himself for how cowardly he was. If he’d hugged Neil that one time, and told him he appreciated him that other one. If he’d gone after him the night after the play when he felt that hunch, maybe things would’ve turned out differently. But that’s the way life is: you have no way of knowing how it turn out. And that makes Todd angry. So angry and sad and tired and desperate. That’s how he feels.He feels all. He is f a l l i n gdown into the deep where he is buried with all his tears. Where he lies with his sorrow, breath shallow, dirt walls closing in.He asks, why did you leave me? Why did you go? Wasn’t I enough? Wasn’t anything enough? Why did you leave me in a world without you? How am I supposed to stay when you’re not here?He stretches out his hand towards the ceiling, as if he’ll reach a heaven above he doesn’t even quite believe in. He’s so close to his breaking point, so close to crying, begging, pleading again. So close to blaming, even. Blaming Thomas Perry, blaming the school, blaming God. He thinks, he might not stay here, he might not leave this room again. He might stop breathing, he might not wait for salvation, he might not wait at all.After all, he has nothing left to live for.