14 - The Other Side

Every single hour, minute, and second, every single Before and After collapses into one, eternal moment. All I can do is stare, numb, as reality forges on without me.

"No!" Sam screams. "No, no, no—!"

Drawers snap free. Cutlery goes flying. Curtains shudder beneath Sam's rage. Chairs are flung, cupboards are thrown open. Chaos descends.

My dad stumbles back and lets the bloody knife clatter to the floor. "What the fuck—?"

"Fuck off!" Sam bellows, fury setting off explosions in his eyes. He rushes for my dad and tries to shove him.

No.

He manages it. He sends my dad sprawling.

The strength leaks out of me. I can only stare at my jumper, dripping with blood, and let myself crumple to the floor. The numbness fizzles away, and white hot agony lances liquid fire through my veins.

Vaguely, I hear the thud of footsteps, and the roar of an engine.

He's leaving. He's running off and leaving me here to bleed out.

I feel a vague sense of irony. Of déjà vu.

Sam collapses to his knees at my side, his misty face cracked with tear stains. "No, no, no," he moans, his voice soft and echoing as though he's caught between states. As though he's deep in a well and falling deeper. "Theo, please. Please, not like this."

I'm not sure when it happened, but my hands have jumped to my side, pressing against the wound. They're not pressing hard enough, because Sam's insubstantial hands cover mine and press a little harder, and a pained noise rushes from me.

"I'm so sorry," he manages. His form flickers. He's fading.

"Please, don't... don't leave me," I manage to gasp out, thinking of the tornado and the unbearable quiet when he blinked from existence for a time. I don't want to be alone.

Resolution sparks a fire behind his eyes. His form flickers once more and then, like a flame finding its wick, he stays insistently here.

"I'm not going anywhere," he promises, taking my hand in his own and giving a gentle squeeze.

I can't quite feel it.

Panic floats just out of reach. Or maybe I'm the one floating; caught on a fraying thread.

I think I'm dying.

Time slides away.

My head lolls to the side and I see the floor around me stained with a puddle of blood that seeps stubbornly further and further. Crawling out of me. Whatever my dad hit, I think it was vital. It feels vital, with the way agony pulses in time with my racing heartbeat.

I watch, through a darkening, vague vision, as Sam dips his smudgy finger into the pool of blood and scrawls one word onto the floor.

dad

He brushes the hair from my eyes and whispers soothingly, "Shh, you're not alone. Don't be afraid."

And in everything he doesn't say, in every emotion he locks away behind his eyes, he's screaming, 'you're dying'.

"I'm right here, Theo. Please, please stay awake. You just have to wait a— a little longer, and someone's going to help you. You're going to be okay." Sam's ramblings don't quite register. I hear his voice, shuddering beneath the weight of tears, but I can't make sense of them.

It doesn't hurt anymore.

Before and After blur until I can't distinguish between them. Until I am both and neither; until I am everything and nothing.

I die.

And I don't.

I feel my body go limp and heavy. I feel my lungs seize and my heart trip before falling still. I feel the blood go cold in my veins. But I'm staring up at Sam, watching as his vague complexion clears as though someone has swept the fog away.

He's here. His hands are warm as they grasp mine. I hear his whispers clear as day. You're alright, you're alright.

Clarity hits with all the force of a battering ram.

"Sam—" I gasp. "I can see you."

He flinches. "Theo?!" he cries, gazing down at me with wide eyes, horror seizing his features and tainting his voice. "You— holy shit—!"

Strangely, I feel more awake now than I did before. As though the pain has shredded my nerves to knife edges, and every impulse is razor sharp.

Sam is still holding my hand, and I give a testing squeeze. Warm. Solid. Squeezing in return. I lift our joined hands, expecting his to be incorporeal like always. But his hand is there. Insistently alive next to mine.

"You— you're here," he manages.

I tense to sit and Sam uses our joined hands to haul me up. I'm enveloped in his warm, tight embrace.

"Don't look," he insists, his voice shuddering as he holds me to him. "Don't look, Theo."

But I have to know. So I pull myself from his arms, still revelling in his presence, and I look down.

It's rather disconcerting to come face to face with your own dead body.

For a moment I just stare. The breath torn from my lungs; thoughts stuttering to a stop in my mind.

I'm dead. I'm looking at my own body, crumpled on the floor.

"Theo? Kid, you left your door wide open," a familiar voice calls into the thick silence, startling us both.

Ryan is here.

Sam and I share a look, and whatever he sees in my expression has him pulling me into his embrace once more. I melt against him. Reality is a distant speck on the horizon and I'm floating in an abyss, tethered only barely.

Footsteps scuff on the floor as Ryan meanders his way through the house, searching. "Listen, I just wanted to thank you. Come out because I'm not saying it twice—"

He finds his way into the kitchen and freezes as though he's reached an impenetrable wall.

It must be a sight. All the blood, the knife lying between us. The word. My body lying still, my eyes staring vaguely up at the ceiling. Sam and I clutching one another in the midst of all the chaos.

No. No, wait.

His eyes slide straight over us, land on my body at our side, and stay there. The breath rushes from him; he covers his mouth with a shaking hand.

"Oh, shit."

And he turns and bolts unsteadily from the room, grasping walls for leverage. He's leaving. He's running away again.

"You asshole!" Sam calls after him, still holding me close. His voice is somehow warmer, too. More... there. Even as he shouts, it seeps like liquid silk through my mind. "You fucking coward!"

I can't stop staring at my own body. I can't catch my breath as my own eyes — vague and empty and glassy — stare unseeing up at the cracking ceiling.

Something close to a sob rushes from my throat, choking me on its way out.

"Shh, it's okay," Sam insists, his voice shaking even as his steady, impossibly warm hand presses against my cheek. A tether. He gently forces me to lift my gaze to his and wipes away a stray tear. "You're okay, I promise."

Movement startles us.

Ryan collapses to his knees at the other side of... well, of me. He's pressing his phone to his ear with a shaking hand.

He's here. He's not leaving.

"I need an ambulance, at— at Solus Estate. Oh, God— please hurry. He's not breathing. He's— I— I think he's been stabbed."

Then, very suddenly, he drops the phone onto his lap — on loudspeaker — and presses his hands firmly against the substantial bloodstain on my top. Meaning to stop the bleeding, I realise blearily. A little too late.

It looks like it should hurt.

I feel nothing.

"Don't you dare. Don't you fucking dare, kid," he chants, his stoic features cracking with dawning horror. Once more, his gaze slides down to the blood on the floor. The word scrawled unsteadily at my side. "Come on. Come on, kid, please."

"Can you find a heartbeat?" a soft, disarming voice calls out from the phone.

Hastily, Ryan presses his fingers beneath my jaw. My— no—

"No, I— I can't find it."

"Alright. I need you to start chest compressions."

He does. I watch, waiting to find myself gazing up at the ceiling once more; shoved back into my own body.

Nothing happens. My body stays limp as Ryan forces his fists down again and again, following the voice's directions.

There's too much blood. I'm too far gone.

Time melts away. Sirens blare, getting steadily closer.

Things are rather chaotic after that. Paramedics and police officers rush into the house, my mum close on their heels. She takes one look at my body and screams.

It's an awful, jarring sound. It's a sound of pure heartache.

And then she sees the blood. The word Sam wrote. Ryan's incessant compressions.

An officer holds her up, grim-faced and stoic as she screams my name and begs me to wake up.

I can't. All I can do is watch as the paramedics take over from Ryan and try to revive me.

Sam's attention is fixed on me. He keeps telling me that I'm alright, that everything's going to be okay. He's more solid and human than I've ever seen him before. I've got no energy, and I melt against him and watch through vague eyes as the paramedics back up. They let my mum drop to her knees and cradle my lifeless self to her chest.

"Please, baby, please—!" she cries, tears sliding down her face as she gently swipes her thumb across my cheek. My blood smears her nurse's uniform. "Come on, darling. Wake up."

I can't feel it. I drift somewhere unreachable; held on by a fraying tether.

"I never got to say goodbye. Not... not properly." The words come spilling; unbidden and leaden with sorrow.

"I know. I'm so sorry, Theo," Sam says, wrapping me in his arms. "We don't have to watch."

I swallow against the tightness in my throat and peek out at the chaos. An officer is taking Ryan's statement. He looks devastated and pale and more like a ghost than either me or Sam. He hugs himself and points out the knife. The word. The front door left open. The papers strewn across the hallway.

I hope it's enough.

I pull away from Sam's warm embrace, suddenly desperate to get away from this room and the chaos. "I've always hated Eden's Gate," I managed, wiping at my cheeks.

Sam smiles. It's brittle as cracking ice. "Me, too." He must read some desperate intention in my expression, because he offers me his hand and I take it at once and let him pull me up. "Come on. Let's go."

Days drift away. I sob and sob for what could have been, for my mum, for the lost prospects of going to university and meeting new people and existing. I don't know if the police found my dad. I don't know if he passed it off as an accident.

I think that, for the first time, I completely understand Sam. His desperation to know.

I'm in the dark, locked in Solus Estate, and I hate it.

My mum, bleak-eyed and tear stains cutting ravines in her features, returns home. I don't know how much time has passed. She makes her slow way to my room, sits on the edge of my bed, and begins to cry.

I can do nothing but kneel before her, begging her to see me, or hear me, or feel me near.

She can't. She crumples and sobs and I can do nothing to comfort her as she apologises again and again and again.

It's hell.

She packs her things that very night — the bare essentials — and retreats into her car and drives off. Leaving me here, with my vague hand on the window, with vague tears streaming down my vague face.

I don't have a reflection. I press my forehead against the glass but it stays clear even as I breathe against it.

And I explode with rage. Throwing clothes, tearing curtains, shoving dressers across the floor, screaming and bellowing and cursing the world until Sam crushes me into a hug and breathes calming words into my ear.

I feel myself fade. The energy crackling like bottled lightning in my veins goes weak and distant, and for a while I simply float on the knife's edge between existing and fading. Tethered only barely, and unable to cut the thread and float into obscurity. Trapped in a mist; neither here nor there.

I emerge at last; energies resorted, breakdown tempered.

Sam waits for me. He takes my hand and leads me to a window overlooking the quiet, depressing little town of Eden's Gate. Lights blink and twinkle in the dark; speckled through the swaying trees bordering the desolate little lane. It gives the impression of fireflies. It's strangely beautiful; admiring something I hated so much from a distance. No longer able to quite reach it.

I tried. I stepped out the front door, once, and ended up right back in the hallway. So I tried again and again. I cannot leave. I'm stuck, just like Sam. Cursed to stay. It's not fair.

"Why are we still here?" I ask Sam, resting my shoulder against the creaking window frame. Just solid enough to keep from passing through.

"I don't think people like us get to move on, Theo," he tells me, nudging his shoulder against mine. "Residual energies, traumatic ends— there's no peace, no rest, for us."

"So... what happens now?" Something close to acceptance seeps through my mind. A strange sense of peace. I think of Sam dealing with this... emptiness, all those years ago. Without anyone to help him through it. I think of his shoulder pressed to mine, and I think that this ceaseless existence can't be all bad. Not as long as his hand stays solid and warm in mine.

"Now," Sam says, giving my hand a gentle squeeze as we look out over the city blinking in the dark like starlight, "I guess we simply be."

We are not alone, and we are not afraid, as we delve into the prospect of forever, hand in hand.

- ✧ -

The End