Chapter Text
He wakes up to aching. His mouth tastes like blood and he’s out of breath, too. It’s the same as every morning’s been for longer than he cares to know.
Immediately, he closes his eyes again. Not in an attempt to sleep — He does more than enough of that, even without considering how he spends most of his time in bed and the rest of it in a wheelchair. He’s long past believing the lie that he can sleep off discomfort, too. Every morning is the same stiff pain, and it only ever gets worse.
He’s just waiting for Emma.
And just like that, she’s there. She always seemed to know when he was awake, or tired, or thinking something strange.
“Good morning, Emma.”
“Morning! How’re you feeling today?”
He gives her a crooked smile. “Good,” he says.
He braces his forearms against the bed to push himself into a sitting position. Before he can do anything too strenuous, though, Emma slides her arm under his back to help him up, leaning him against the headboard and adjusting a pillow to support him.
“Thank you.”
“Mhm! I’ve got some water boiling, so I’ll make you some tea in a sec. Does that oolong Violet gave us sound good?”
"Actually," Norman says, a small smile gracing his lips, "do you think we could go outside to eat breakfast today?"
Emma's eyes light up. "Of course! Porch or garden?"
He thinks about Gilda and Don next door, and Thoma and Lannion across the street. He thinks about all the other children, safe, happily playing outside. They had cried when Barbara passed, and then again with Adam, Zazie, Vincent, and Cislo. He doesn’t want them to cry again. He knows they will anyways, but it’s the least he can do to soften the blow by making his departure gradual.
“Garden. The backyard.”
She lifts him into his wheelchair (it never ceases to impress him how much strength she packs into her small frame) and throws a blanket over his lap.
“Oh, d’you want that book Ray got you?”
It seems like she’s talking to herself more than him, though, because she grabs the poetry anthology off the nightstand before he can reply. She hands it to him, and makes a cute little noise like a train as she starts pushing him outside.
She parks him by their garden table. They had bought it to have picnics like this, but had only gotten to use twice before he had become bedridden.
If this is how happy it makes Emma, though, he’s going to pretend he’s well enough to go outside every day.
“What do you feel like having?" she asks.
“Pancakes, and strawberries?"
He curses himself because he’s pretty sure they don’t have any mix left. If he had given it just half a second’s worth of thought, he would have asked for the leftover porridge from last night, and then Emma’s face wouldn’t fall in-
She grins. “The tallest stack of pancakes you’ve ever seen, coming right up!”
He stares at her back until she’s out of sight, then turns his attention to the book he’s holding. He traces over the embossed letters on the spine. It’s a nice book. Hard-cover, and brand new. He knows that doesn’t mean Ray picked it off a shelf at random, though. Ray isn’t like that. He probably read through extensive collections before deciding to buy him this one.
Ray is using this book to tell him something. It’s just a Ray thing to do.
He flips through the book for what must be the fiftieth time, until he reaches the dog-eared page, and glances through the poem again.
From what he can tell, it’s about a man telling another, demanding another, to struggle against death, to ‘not go gentle into that good night’ , to ‘rage against the dying of the light ’, to ‘blaze like meteors ’.
He wishes he could. He wishes with all his heart that he could struggle, that he could fight whatever was killing him with such agonizing slowness. He wishes that they could have won their miracle without having to lose their comrades after it seemed like everything was done.
That’s an impossibility now, though. There isn’t a cloud in the sky, and he still feels cold under layers of shirts and blankets.
He leans back to stare at the blazing sun. Blazing, like the poem mentioned. Blazing, like Ray’s anger at him for letting himself die, and Ray’s anger for him towards whatever has been consuming his body from the inside for years now.
Is that it, then? Is Ray trying to tell him that he’s angry? Or is it just a push to make him try to live?
He shuts the book. He breathes. He ignores how he has to strain to fill his lungs, and how little his chest expands before it starts hurting.
He inhales again, holds it as long as he can manage and lets it out. It’s a pointless game he’s come to enjoy. The number of seconds he can last is the number of days he has left. Thirty-two, today. It had been thirty-five yesterday.
It’s just a silly game. He doubts he really has that long left. It’s been weeks since the others from Lambda passed. He doesn’t know why he’s the one who’s still here, when he’s always been the most sickly.
He’ll take the time, though. He’ll use every moment he has to try and make Emma happy, even though he knows there’s nothing he can do to stop himself from ripping her apart in… Weeks? Days? Not thirty-two, probably. He’s not so far gone that he’d believe some superstition he’d made up himself.
Emma gets back when he’s halfway through his third game. (He had lasted only twenty-nine seconds in his second, though he personally blames it on still being out of breath from the first.) He knows she hates the game so he stops and pretends he was just waiting.
“Ta-da! Pancakes and strawberries. And hot chocolate with extra marshmallows!”
She sets two mugs that she had been carrying precariously in one hand onto the table, and drags up a little plastic chair so she can sit next to Norman.
The plate is arranged more nicely than he’d thought Emma was capable of, with the pancakes drizzling with syrup in the middle and the strawberries in a ring around it.
“What do you want first?” Emma asks. He can’t help but notice that there’s only a single fork to go with the single plate she’s prepared.
In lieu of answering, he reaches for a halved strawberry and extends his hand towards her.
She laughs, plucks it from his fingers with her teeth, and spears a berry on top of a bite of pancake for him. He eats it, too, even though it’s kind of a mouthful and leaves him stuck trying to swallow it for nearly a minute.
His expression must have been hilarious, because Emma can’t stop laughing, and that makes it worth it.
Once he’s managed to avoid choking on pancakes, and Emma has managed to avoid choking on laughter, Emma starts to feed him. He could probably manage himself, but he gets that she wants to take care of him.
“At least eat some yourself,” he says, though. “You need energy, too.”
She alternates giving them a bite each after that, and if she skips her turn every now and then, he doesn’t bring it up. It’s the best morning they’ve had in a long time, basking in the sun and sipping hot chocolate together.
Still, his energy has waned to nearly nothing by the time the sun is at its peak. He’s getting too tired to sit up straight even if he forces himself, and there’s no hiding anything from Emma.
“Are you tired?” she asks.
“Yeah,” he mumbles. He hates this. Sometimes (a lot of times), he thinks it’d be easier to be dead. It’s awful, burdening Emma with so much heartache. But he won’t succumb, because he decided long ago that he was going to make every moment count, and pleasing Emma is just as valuable as destroying the demons.
“Okay. Let’s go back inside, then.”
She doesn’t sound disappointed.
He does, but in all fairness, a day like this is a bonus. She’s probably treating it as such, taking and enjoying it as much as she can.
By the time Emma has him laid back in bed, he’s more than halfway to sleep. His eyes are sliding shut, when out of nowhere, Emma grabs his hand.
His eyes snap open.
“Are you scared?” she asks.
“Not really, no.” And that’s the truth. But he’s not blind to his own fixation on death, how the stories he lingers on are the ones where characters die. He’s read enough about it that he knows most panic when they’re on the verge. He wonders if he, always so carefully composed, will do the same. “Why?”
“Well, I think I’m scared,” Emma says honestly.
He knows. He knows from every sideways glance she’s given him, from how she’s always smiling a little too brightly, how her hand is shaking against his right now.
He gives it a light squeeze. “You’ll be okay.”
Emma is not the kind of person who would whisper under her breath, and she doesn’t. Even so, he can hear her thinking that she won’t be.
She smiles at him. “Don’t worry about me. You should get some rest.”
He returns the smile even though it’s every bit as fake as hers. He’s in that state of groggy where he can’t seem to focus and produce coherent thought, but in the midst of the haze, he says, “I’ll get better for you, Emma. I love you.”
Wondering if this time is the last, he lets the dark take him.
(His heart knows it isn’t.)