Chapter Text
“… because you want to die for love, you always have.
Imagine this: You’re pulling the car over. Somebody’s waiting.
You’re going to die in your best friend’s arms.
and you play along because it’s funny, because it’s written down,
You’ve memorized it, it’s all you know.”
Planet of Love, Richard Siken
When Ray wakes up, everything is acrid and smells like sulphate, like iodine, like burning flesh. There’s a heavy pounding behind his left eye, and his arms feel like jelly. He lifts them, wiggles his fingers experimentally, then lets them drop back onto the crisp, white bedding. There’s a layer of film across his eyes, making everything muggy, unclear. Everything sounds like he’s been submerged in water. His joints crackle and pop with each movement.
He strains to sit up, dislodging something on the bed, a heavy mass curled up half on top of him. He pats the mass experimentally, finds a hand, a finger, warm flesh, soft shirt. He recoils as if he’s been burnt.
There’s a screaming pain, like someone is plunging a knife deep into his stomach, into the soft tissue. He grits his teeth, presses a hand against the flat of his belly, pushes. The heat of the pain draws a low wail from somewhere deep, deep inside of him. He has heard of a death rattle, those last few choking breaths someone takes as the life slowly tumbles out of them. Hell, he has even heard a few death rattles now, too, though he has heard more death screams, more death pleas, more – He sucks in a deep breath. It whistles through his pursed lips. This is his own, personal death rattle. He is sure of it.
He strips back the covers, tentatively. He is wearing a stark, white hospital gown with blue embroidery. His skin is bright red, angry, as though someone has scrubbed it clean. He was sure there had been blood. He was sure there had been dirt, and sweat, and blood, caked into his skin, embedded so deep it had nearly become part of his genetic code, an immovable part of his person. Blood is thicker than water, that’s how the saying goes, Ray thinks, although he’s sure it’s not quite right. Blood may be thicker, but water can wash it all away. If a rainstorm is heavy enough, it can wash away anything. It can wash a whole person away. It can suck him out to sea.
His feet are wrapped in thick gauze. He grabs the hem of the gown and edges it up, slowly, over his crackling legs, around his waist, stopping at his stomach which is also wrapped in gauze, the off-white kind. There is a slight red tinge to the bandaging. He presses, again, against his stomach, harder this time, enough to draw a sharp cry from deep inside himself.
The mass next to him, the one made up of the shirt and the flesh and the hand, wakes with a start. Ray pushes. He yelps, tears springing to his foggy eyes. The red is spreading wildly across the bandages, darker now, like the blood that had run down Art’s nose and caked his shirt, the colour of the road with Curley’s brain matter smattered across it, his jaw unhinged, his eyes rolling back into his skull.
Hands close around his wrists, yanking them away from his stomach, fingers dancing delicately against the bruised skin. “Ray.” The hands are talking to him. The hands belong to strong arms, to a wide set shoulder, to a kind face with a downturned mouth, to a pair of worried eyes. The hands belong to Pete. “Garraty. You need to calm down for me, okay?”
He shakes his head, tears spilling down his cheeks, burning his skin. Pete has a firm hold of his wrists and all Ray can do is thrash, wildly, to no avail. Pete has always been stronger than him. Pete walked for five days and he barely tired, barely got a warning, except when he stupidly decided to help Ray, why would he do that, why –
The tears are coming thick and fast now. Ray can feel his heart beating up, out of his chest, into his throat, making it harder to breathe. Pete’s fingers are digging into his skin. Pete is frowning. That makes Ray’s heart clench all over again.
“I’m okay,” he manages to say, through the unashamed sobs. He shakes his head again. If he shakes it hard enough he swears he can feel his brain rattling around his skull. “I’m okay. I’ll calm down in a minute, and we can keep walking.”
He expects Pete to say they don’t have a minute, that they have to keep going now, if they don’t walk one of those soldiers is going to empty an entire clip into their brains. Instead, Pete runs his thumb gently across the protruding bone in Ray’s wrist, slowly. Ray focuses on the sensation.
“That’s okay, Ray. You take all the time you need. We have all the time in the world.”
When he wakes, Pete is gone and he is alone. The cries come again, this time so hard they shake his ribcage and make him choke.
He decides Pete must be dead.
That’s what he tells the nurse when she comes to take his bloods. She has a needle, the length of his forearm, and sandy blonde hair and she is the omen of death. She is coming to tell him that Pete is dead, that Pete got shot, oh god Pete knelt down for him on the wet asphalt, and he took a bullet in his brain for the trouble.
She’s got these big, blown-up pupils, and a pretty pink mouth which turns up and down in seemingly no pattern. Her skin is so pale it looks like a porcelain mask. She’s going to tell him Pete is dead, that he’s gone six feet under where Ray can’t follow. She’s going to tell him that it didn’t work, loving Pete didn’t work, it just left a big, gaping hole, straight through his chest.
Ray reaches out. Her nose gushes with thick, clotted blood and her perfect porcelain mask is shattered. She is wailing. Someone else is wailing, too.
Oh. That’s just Ray.
“You should really calm down,” Stebbins tells him, but Stebbins is dead and his face is a jagged collection of bullet holes. “You won’t be able to hear the good news, otherwise.”
Ray doesn’t want to hear good news. Pete is dead.
He sleeps fitfully. He sleeps for days.
Once, when he isn’t sure if he’s in or out of sleep, he hears his mom. She is holding his hand and sobbing, big wet globs of tears splashing against his skin. Her breathing is ragged, her lips chapped as she presses them to his forehead, scraping the hair out of his face.
“My baby,” she is saying, or rather sobbing. “My baby, my baby, my baby.”
He wants to talk to her. To tell he everything is okay, that he’s here, that no one else’s son made it home, but I did, mom, are you proud of me?
But everything in him in lead, dragging him down into the mattress, making it too heavy to speak, too heavy to come back.
“Hey, Garraty.”
That familiar accent, lilting a little heavy on his name.
Ray almost doesn’t want to open his eyes. He’s sure that Pete will fade away like a dream, slipping away into the early morning light before Ray can even remember the curve of his mouth or the flat bridge of his nose.
He’s been seeing the other boys, from the walk – Curley, his jaw blown clean off, or Olson with his guts spilling through fingers, even Collie Parker with that sharp bullet hole through his chin. Pete looks nothing like those boys. He has dark shadows underneath his eyes, and a small, but noticeable, patch of stubble spreading down his neck. He is wearing a dark blue jumper with a zip up the middle and grey shorts. He looks tired, but strong. He looks alive.
Ray strains to sit up and Pete sets a hand on his shoulder, forcing him back down against the cushion. “No, no, no. Don’t move. You need to keep still, you hear me? You’ve got some nasty cuts and bruises going on there.”
He gestures vaguely to Ray’s whole body, waving a hand across his battered legs and up to his stomach. He looks good, despite the exhaustion written into his face, and the way he can’t quite keep a smile on his face.
“You’re dead,” Ray says. It’s the most probable solution, though Pete doesn’t look dead.
He wrinkles his nose. “Who told you that?”
“I- I won the walk. You’re dead. You got down on your knees, I-”
The Walk is fuzzy and thinking about it for too long makes Ray feel like he’s staring directly into the sun. He can remember, however, the sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach when he realised that Pete was no longer walking beside him. ‘When I’m tired enough, I think I’ll just sit down’. That was what Pete had said, wasn’t it? Ray feels a lurch in his stomach just thinking about it and he tries to sit up again but Pete is right there, guiding him back down gently.
“We don’t have to worry about that right now. Okay?” He says.
Pete starts move around him, all motherly as he fusses with the covers on Ray’s bed. He wonders where his mother is. He wonders if he dreamt her up, her lips pressed against his forehead. He wonders if she is still worried sick.
“Pete?”
“Hmm?”
“Where’s my mom?”
“She’s downstairs getting coffee,” Pete says, almost dismissively, in a tone that warns Ray not to ask too many questions. Ray relents and lets Pete fuss over him. It’s easier that way. And he’d be lying if he said it doesn’t feel nice, Pete’s strong hands securing the blankets carefully underneath his legs. “You can’t get yourself worked up, okay Ray? You know, they only let me in here because you keep freaking out. I was asking if I could come and see you for days, and they wouldn’t let me. But apparently every time you’ve woken up, you’ve freaked out and no one can calm you down. I think it’s upsetting your mom, but you know her, she won’t say.”
Pete stops, suddenly, fixing Ray with a severe look that makes him squirm. “You broke someone’s nose, Ray. You remember?”
It’s blurry, but its there. The nurse, blood dripping down her pasty white face, emitting shrill sobs, backing into the corner away from him. “I thought she was going to tell me you were dead,” he says, sheepishly.
“Shit, man. I am not worth breaking some pretty ladies’ nose over,” Pete laughs. He settles into the chair opposite Ray’s bed, resting his elbows onto his knees, leaning onto his palms. Ray is taken aback by how strong he looks, like the whole walk has rolled off his back.
“Pete, how-”
How did we survive? How are we both here, talking to each other, as if one of us isn’t meant to be dead? How did we get away with it? How are we not dead for what we’ve done?
“Is it okay if we don’t talk about that?” Pete’s voice is tight, guarded.
“Yeah. Yeah, okay,” Ray nods, and so does Pete, leaning back in his seat.
All the questions sitting on Ray’s tongues are eating him alive. He can feel every single impossible answer churning together, all muddied and tangled up. Every outcome seems as equally as unlikely at the last, and yet he can’t stop entertaining all the possibilities.
“Stop it. I can hear the cogs in your brain turning.”
Pete is looking at him, his expression perfectly neutral, his lips pressed together like he’s scared if he opens them he won’t be able to stop talking. Ray knows how he feels.
“Fuck, Pete, I’m so – I’m so-” He babbles. He can feel hysterical sobs bubbling up his throat.
Pete sets a hand on his knee. Even through the layers of blankets Ray can feel it, warm and grounding. “Hey. Hey. Look at me. I’m good. There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
“But I – You nearly died, you saved me, I-“
“No. None of that, I won’t have it, alright?”
Its so stern, so sure, that Ray nods rapidly in agreement against his better judgement. His head spins. Now that he’s opened the can of worms he isn’t so sure everything won’t come tumbling out.
“Is everyone dead Pete? Is that true? I can’t – I can’t remember what’s true,” he confesses. His thoughts and memories feel like they’ve been put through a blender, or hacked to pieces with a knife. He can’t say what’s real and what isn’t anymore, not with any great degree of certainty.
“We’re not dead,” Pete says, like that’s the only thing that matters. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s the only thing left that matters. “Okay? Me and you. We’re alive,”
“We’re alive,” Ray repeats.
It sounds hollower coming from his mouth, less self-assured, but Pete nods anyway. “That’s it. Good man,” He says, rubbing a thumb over his blanketed knee.
There’s a thing about Pete that Ray has always known to be true, for as long as he’s known Pete, and maybe for even longer, if the universe works that way.
Pete is a man who you can’t help but believe in. And right now, God, Ray wants to believe in him.
He’s going to follow his belief in Peter McVries, if it’s the last thing he does.
His feet are fucked. There’s an entire layer of skin missing, gone, that will never grow back. There are surgeries the doctors can do. They can take the skin from other parts of his body – his stomach, when it heals, or from the backs of his thighs, if they weren’t so worried about the damage to the muscles there from the strain of walking for five days straight. He’s never going to get the feeling back in his feet, though. He’s never going to be able to walk for extended periods of time, or run, or any other type of exercise. Fucking fine by him. Why would he ever want to walk ever again?
He looks out the window, listless and bored.
His feet are the least of his problems. It’s the bullet holes in his stomach that the doctors are more concerned about. They’re worried they’ll get ‘infected’ – they say the word like it’s banned, in hushed tones, followed by long, unpunctuated periods of silence. They say it like they’ll afraid Ray will go off the rails again, like he did that night he woke up and tore out all his stitches. He had pulled out his catheter, too, and ran around the hotel on his blistering feet, screaming for a fucking bullet in the head. The memory makes him wince. It had taken three orderlies to restrain him, tying him to the bed by his ankles, and the whole time his mom had been doing this stupid moaning cry that made him feel like he wanted to burn all his skin off. Pete had been there, too. Pete had held his feet down while they had fixed the restraint. Then he’d held Ray’s arm while they jabbed him with needles. And then, when it was all over, he’d squeezed into the bed next to Ray and stroked his fucking hair.
He hadn’t seen Pete since then. Which is fucking fine by him.
Outside the window there is nothing but a wide expanse of sky, and an oak tree, who’s branches tap rhythmically against the glass when blown by the window. It is summer, and the tree is full of leaves, dizzyingly green. They had walked past forests, dense with trees, unendingly deep. They had talked about running. One of them had tried and he had been torn in half by the tanks. They didn’t talk of running again.
He hadn’t understood, in the first few days, why he wasn’t still walking. His body, broken and beaten as it was, still wanted to. His feet had been rubbed raw and yet they still moved, almost mechanically. They carried his body forwards. The gunshot wounds in his stomach were nothing, a tiny, imperceptible ache. It was easier to deal with that pain, than to deal with the screaming aching in his limbs, that cried out with every single step he didn’t take. What was it that Stebbins had said? The body can keep going if the mind is still willing? He’s not sure if that is what Stebbins said, if Stebbins had even said anything at all. His mind is mush. His soul is soup.
“Baby?” His mom’s voice is tight with nerves.
Ray keeps looking out of the window.
They wheeled a TV in. He still wasn’t getting it. He still wanted to walk.
He wasn’t sure, at first, who the man on the TV was. His mom said it was him, but he wasn’t so sure. The man on the TV looked exhausted, like he could keel over any second, like he was going to stop walking. It couldn’t be Ray, because every muscle in Ray’s body was screaming at him to walk. The restraints bit into his ankles.
Pete was there. Pete was strong. When he dropped to one knee, he kept his back straight, his chin tilted upwards. The rain was slick on his face. His hands were shaking, ever so slightly, a small tremor. The other man got his arms under Pete’s elbows, hauled him forward. Ray’s mom combed his hair out of his eyes and pressed a small kiss against his forehead. He could feel her tears dampening his skin.
The other man got shot, in the stomach, just like Ray. The other man had stopped walking.
Ray asked them to turn it off, and they didn’t. He felt hysterical, so the nurse gave him a shot of something to calm him down, and another shot of something to stop the nausea that always came with the first shot. She topped up his fluids, and she tightened his restraints. And he slept a long, dreamless, sleep.
When he woke, he knew everything, with a startling clarity. The world had righted itself in the way it can after a deep, fruitful sleep. He had saved Pete, and Pete had saved him in return, because Pete was incapable of letting Ray make things even, letting him make things right.
He had thought he was dreaming. He thought his mind was protecting him, trying to soften his fall by giving him Pete, his Pete. He was so sure the truth was going to be something that he couldn’t swallow, something that would send him mad, his sanity, at long last, unlatching within his brain and floating far, far away. So, his mind had given him Pete, all patched up and alive, no bullet wound in his head, no rain clinging to his shirt.
His sanity had unlatched. But Pete was real. Pete was the victor.
No one seems to know what to do with him.
They can’t send him home, not straight away, not with a stomach scarred from bullet wounds. He struggles to eat anything without a dull, throbbing ache that starts soft and grows, uninterrupted, until his bowels clench in agony. Instead, they put him on a liquid diet, feeding him through a tube in his nose. The sensation makes him nauseous, so they up the anti-sickness medication too. They give him blood transfusions to replace what he keeps losing every time his stitches reopen, and to replace the cells his body refuses to produce naturally. They scrape infections out of his wounds and bathe him with sponges. He does little more than look out of the window. There are larks that fly past now. They have made an unstable nest in the oak tree. They lay their eggs. One day, the nest slips, and the eggs plummet fifty feet. Ray wishes, perversely, he had been able to watch them crack against the concrete.
His body wants to die. That’s what he thinks. It has given up the ghost.
Still, he lets the nurses sponge his hair clean from sweat and change the cannula in his hand. They’re worried his veins are going to swell and burst. The ones in his feet already have.
Pete doesn’t come to visit. His mother sits in the chair by his bedside and cries into her disgusting, wrinkled hands until he tells her to go home. He doesn’t remember most of their conversation. The night nurse, a timid mouse, tells him he said some things to her he might regret. She tells him she’d never talk to her mother like that, that he should have some respect, that it must be hard to see your child in such a state. Ray tells her she should loosen his restraints so he can poke both their eyes out with the watch she has pinned to her scrubs. He makes her cry. In the dim light her tears look like blood, rolling down her chubby hamster cheeks.
He stays awake for three days straight, just screaming, his voice curdling like rotten milk. If he got a wish, if finishing in second place on the walk meant a wish, he’d wish to go back to the beginning and put a bullet in his brain at the starting post.
Either that, or he’d wish that Pete didn’t get a wish.
He’d wish for reprieve.
Olson keeps heckling Ray as he’s trying to walk his, stupid, shitting, goddamn doctor mandated laps up and down the hospital corridor. He might as well be walking over burning coals, the pain is just as bad. It’s like dragging sharp rocks backwards and forwards over his already torn skin.
His mom is clapping her hands together, idiotically bouncing up and down like a toddler as he turns every corner. He smiles at her, the corner of his mouth curving upwards. “Go, Ray! You’re doing so well, baby!”
“Baby,” Olson says with a snort. His voice is like nails down a chalkboard, thick and claggy at the back of his throat like he’s already gurgling blood. “You’re a fucking mama’s boy, Garraty. Does she still spoon-feed you? ‘Here comes the aeroplane, Garraty!’”
Ray likes Olson. He liked him better when his intestines were inside his body. He grits his teeth and lifts his foot. Just keep pickin’ ‘em up and puttin’ ‘em down, that’s what Pete had said. Pete still won’t visit him. Pete might as well be dead, for all Ray cares. Okay, that’s not true. He’s just angry. He’s so fucking goddamn angry about this fucking physiotherapy, and about Olson being dead, about everything he says being nothing but Ray’s own pale imitation.
He lets out a small hiss as he completes the last lap. He braces his arm against the wall and slumps against it. His mom is there to break his fall. She rests her hand, gently, against his elbow. Her eyebrows are knit together, like she’s worried Ray will push her away. He’s done it before.
“Oh shit, Garraty!” Ray’s mom helps him into bed, and Olson follows, sitting cross-legged at the end. He has his cap pulled down so low Ray can barely see his face, just small sliver of his nose, and his mouth, which is moving rapidly, even when there is no sound coming out. “Does she still breastfeed you?”
“Fuck. Off.” He says. His mom glances at the pair of them, only seeing Ray. Her mouth is pressed into a thin line, so thin it almost disappears into her sallow, sunken face. She looks back down at the knitting her lap.
Olson shrugs, his fingers dancing over his rations belt, tightening it. He unscrews the lid of his canteen, presses it to his lips, and sighs. “It’s fucking empty.”
You can call for another one, Ray thinks, picking at the blanket in his lap. He doesn’t voice this thought out loud, because Olson is in his head, and Olson is dead, and he doesn’t need another canteen of water wherever he is.
When he looks up Olson is gone.
Pete comes back with paperwork. Lots and lots of fucking paperwork.
It makes Ray’s head spin, just trying to focus on a single word. Pete stands opposite him, worrying his bottom lip with his teeth. Ray gives up pretending to read, pushing the papers away from him, curling in on himself like a wounded animal. Pete just stands there, worrying his lip. He’s going to peel the skin away, Ray thinks. Then they’ll have to take skin from his stomach to replace it, and he’ll have these strange, fleshy lips, and he won’t look much like Pete anymore. At least not when he smiles, anyway.
“I know it’s a lot,” Pete says. Even his voice sounds different. There’s no ease in it. “I’m going to get us both a lawyer, to help us sift through it all. I think I’ve got the gist of it though. Ray… Ray?”
He isn’t listening. He knows he should be, but although he hears the words individually, he can’t string them together in a way that makes sense. He knew Pete was alive. The TV proved that. Still, seeing him in person is different. He looks so solid, like a statue. There are no cracks in him, besides that small split in his lip.
Ray rolls over, away from the paperwork, and Pete. The pages rustle on the bed.
“Should I come back later?” Pete isn’t asking Ray. He’s asking Ray’s mum, and the nurse, who are standing in the corner of the room, their eyes fixed on the floor, their mouths downturned. No one says anything. The air in the room is stale. Ray feels like he’s choking on it.
Ray has been thinking about Frankenstein.
About The Creature, mainly. About how Frankenstein took pieces that didn’t belong together and smashed them into each other until something new was created, something that had never been alive before. Ray read the book, only once, back in middle school when he was too old to be scared by the idea of a monster under the bed. He was scared of The Creature though. He was scared how something could be parts one day and breathing the next. If creation was that easy, then so was death – surely?
Now he thinks about Frankenstein himself. How he created The Creature because he could, how, though it had never been done before, he knew just what to do to make something that would live a cursed half-life. How easy Pete had wished for two winners, for Ray to live, not knowing he was creating something new, something which had never been alive before, except for as parts.
Pete holds the pen out to Ray and he takes it. His hands are trembling, almost imperceptibly.
“You understand, don’t you? Ray?”
He nods. He’s not sure he understands anything anymore.
“You’re getting your wish.”
Pete swallows. Ray presses the pen unsteadily against the paper. It makes a throaty, scratchy noise as he drags it across the little blank line, leaving a trail of ink in the shape of a wobbly, cursive R. He looks up at Pete. They’re sat so close on Ray’s bed, their bodies pressed together. It reminds Ray of the walk, the way their elbows would knock together, that fear that if he was more than ten yards from Pete that he would lose all the remaining strength he had.
Up close, he can see Pete’s eyelashes, each one a single, delicate strand. He can see the puckering shape of his scar. He can see the slight twitch of his eyebrow.
“I can’t,” Ray begins. He forces air into his lungs. “I can’t write anymore. My hands won’t work.”
“That’s okay,” Pete says simply. He takes the pen out of Ray’s hand, caps it, then shuffles the papers into a neat pile. “I’m sure that will be okay, Ray.”
It’s the first time they’ve been alone, properly, since the walk. Ray’s mom is downstairs getting coffee with his doctor, talking about his treatment plans. There are no nurses or orderlies lurking. Ray is even free, finally, from the restraints. The wounds on his stomach are nearly healed up. “What happens now?”
Pete takes a long, steady breath. “Now, I send these papers off, and they put it into writing for next years walk. Two winners. Only one wish, for the boy that stops walking last. That would be me, this year.”
There’s a lilt to his voice as he says that, so light that Ray can’t catch what it means.
“Aren’t you worried… that the boys next year will just keep walking? That they’ll be so desperate for that wish they’ll walk themselves to death, even when there’s only two of them left?”
“I didn’t make the rules, Garraty. I just made the wish.”
Pete sounds tired. He looks tired, up close. Ray doesn’t even know where he’s been all this time. Sleeping in the back of his car? Crashing in a motel? Wherever he’s been, he’s not been sleeping.
“He’s rich,” Art says. His shirt is still crusted with blood. His eyes are black, like something in his head has popped. The sight of him, loitering in the doorway, makes Ray’s stomach clench uncomfortably. “You’re both rich now, Garraty. He’s probably bought a mansion for the two of you or something.”
Ray doesn’t know if he is rich. He doesn’t want to know. Pete can have all the money, for all he cares. Hell, he deserves it. He’s earnt it, scurrying around getting Ray to sign form after form, hiring a lawyer to help them decode whatever bullshit contracts their signing, waving away Ray’s hospital bills before they even hit the doormat. His mom had cried about that, last time she saw Pete. She had blubbered into his shirt like a baby, getting it all snotty. Ray had hated her for that.
He ignores Art, but he’s still talking. He’s gotten used to ignoring them. Nothing good comes from talking back. He’s only talking to himself, after all. The real Art would be funny, and kind, and gentle. Ray’s version is like Ray – an asshole.
“I think I would’ve kept walking forever,” Pete is saying. His eyes are hollow, like Art’s, and somewhere far away.
“For the wish?”
“No, not for the wish. I don’t give a fuck about the wish, didn’t give a fuck about the wish for half the walk, hell, you know that Garraty. A wish is only… it’s just a different word for a trap, isn’t it? All those boys talked about what they’d wish for, half of them wouldn’t shut up about it. They were like kids in a candystore with their little chubby fingers, clutching at straws.” Pete shifts in the bed. His shoulder bumps against Ray’s. “How many of them do you think would’ve even be able to go through with what they were wanting to ask for? I’ve been there. I’ve stood in front of The Major and made a wish. It ain’t that fucking easy. There’s too much fucking candy.”
“I would’ve wished for my rocket,” Art says. He sounds angry, which isn’t right. His nostrils are flaring, and his hands are tensing. He’s all wrong. “I would’ve followed through with it.”
“I know,” Ray mumbles. He presses his hands, hard, against his eyes. When he pulls them away there are light spots dancing through his vision. Art is still there. His nose has started bleeding again. Pete is looking at him. “I know, Pete. Fuck, I know.”
He buries his head in his hands again. He wants Art to leave. He wants Pete to leave. He wants his lungs to stop drawing in breathes, wants the monitor to flatline, wants to sleep, deep and uninterrupted. Fuck. He wants to keep walking.
“I don’t regret my wish, Ray,” Pete is saying. He sounds solemn. Ray splays his fingers slightly, allowing himself to peak through the gaps. Pete looks disjointed, his head almost disconnected from the rest of his body. “I don’t want you to think that for a second.”
Ray nods. The movement is dizzying.
“There was a moment, you know, when I was going to wish for the carbine. I was going to point it at The Major and say, ‘this is for Ray’ and just unload it into his fucking head. But you were still breathing. Your eyes were still fluttering. I swear, Ray. I could still hear you talking.”
Pete reaches out, suddenly, his fingers closing around Ray’s gown. He pulls the fabric taut, squeezing it in his fist. The fabric cuts tightly against Ray’s neck. The pain is familiar and friendly. He lets out a soft gasp. Pete is looking at him in the eyes, intently, for the first time since he held Ray down for the nurses. His eyes are hungry. Imperceptible.
“You should’ve wished for the carbine,” Ray says. “You should’ve let me die.”
For a moment, Ray is sure Pete is either going to punch him or kiss him. Then, his hand flexes, relaxing, letting go of the gown. Ray sags backwards, deflated, his back hitting against the pillow. “Yeah. Well.” Pete starts, but he has nothing else to say. “I didn’t.”
“You’re an asshole,” Art says. His voice is thick with blood. When Ray looks up his entire shirt is red, and there is blood dribbling through the gaps in his teeth.
Yeah, well, Ray thinks. So are you.