And I tried to post this already but I think Live Journal possibly ate it all up. Not that Live Journal has a habit of doing things like that of course. No.

It's just little and it owes a rather large and shameless debt to Neil Gaiman's passage for the Tori Amos cover of Raining Blood here. I'm really not claiming anything about this is original but I kind of like it anyway. Incidentally, if you've not read Raining Blood go do so - it tears my heart out every single time. Um, in a good way.



An exercise in choice.

He celebrated his thirtieth birthday last week. A small gathering, quiet, but his partner was there and so too were the four friends they see so rarely now and he was happy. They live a quiet life, fine wine and good books and each other. He teaches at the local college and writes to academic journals in his spare time.

It's not the life either of them had imagined when they had made their plans as teenagers but it fits the people they have grown into. They visit his father every Thanksgiving and the turkey is always perfect.

Or that's a lie. Actually he died on his back with his lungs on fire and muffled screams in his ears. He had been sixteen years old and his future had stretched wide and golden before him.

His last thoughts as his life ran out of him were of green eyes and warm lips that taste like coffee. And that in spite of everything he would still die like those who lived his father's life.

He wonders what he will do now.

There is a man who wakes, confused, from old dreams with a soft cry on his lips. He presses his hand to his chest, whole and silver-scarred. Beside him the marks across the broad tan back burn as vivid as they had done that day fourteen years ago. Untroubled in sleep and close enough to touch but he doesn't move in case his hand passes straight through.

He lies awake until dawn, afraid these past years have been one last dream, one last spasm of a life he could have had as he lies dying against stone. This moment lies uncertain and in-between and he barely breathes as he waits for the sun to come up.