[#002] Never Can Say Goodbye (The Big Chill)

[catdetective]

Theme Prompt: 002 - Heartbreak.
Title: Never Can Say Goodbye
Fandom: The Big Chill
Rating/Warnings: Death/Suicide
Bonus: Yes.
Word Count: 500
Summary: Michael's immediate feelings in the wake of the phone call, before he starts packing.

 

    The news sweeps over him at first, like water over the smooth stone of his brain, nothing catching anywhere. He can’t hold onto the information. Says ‘what’ ten times. Sam, on the other end, says he’d told Harold he’d call, they’d formed a phone tree, and Michael can’t hold onto that, either.

    He doesn’t understand any of it, until Sam says ‘maybe it was an accident’ with such a discomfort that it hits him.

    He doesn’t know how the conversation ended. He wrote down the information Sam gave, the pertinent details. Viewing, funeral, wake.

    Viewing. He wants to, has to. He never got to see his parents. They were buried right away, he was at college, the funeral had to come after. He’d known it was what they wanted, embalming out of the question, and he’d been told the crash was bad, he wouldn’t want to see them like that anyway, and he hadn’t. He hadn’t, he was nineteen, he was fucking nineteen years old and he didn’t want to see them broken and empty, he didn’t want to remember them like that every time he closed his eyes, he’d had nightmares anyway.

    He has to see Alex. He has to know if it’s what he’s afraid of seeing, he has to know what life’s done to him since last they saw each other, but he’s thirty-three years old and he knows that in his memories, Alex is always going to be nineteen, twenty, twenty-one… he knows no matter what, he’ll never lose the vision he’s lived with in the years since college.

    He’s lived with all of them, loved all of them, so fiercely since then. He’s held onto them, condensed and frozen in time inside of his heart. Gotten family newsletters and the odd phone call, kept up as much as life has allowed any of them, knows how Sarah and Harold and Karen all look now from those newsletters, and of course Sam. Hasn’t seen a picture of Nick from the past ten years, saw Meg once maybe eight years back and they never made anything work out since, even though she’s not far…

    In his heart they’re all twenty-one, wild creatures of promise and compassion. None moreso than Alex, it was always Alex. The center that he guesses could not hold. If it’s true, if it wasn’t an accident…

    He has to see him. He has to say goodbye. He knows he won’t be able to say a single word of what sits heavy on his collapsed heart, but he has to see him. To acknowledge for himself the feelings he never got the chance to speak before. Things he might have spilled down the telephone line if he could have done, there were nights he felt mad enough to, clinging to the receiver and waiting and knowing…

    He has his friends to look forward to, at least. He’s not sure how he’d carry himself on if he didn’t know they would be there for him.