after price kills shepherd, he has a finite window of time to grab his things and say goodbye to his wife.
cw: angst
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You hear the front door swing open and hit the wall behind it and your first thought is he’s early.
You’re at the stove, wooden spoon in your hand with the skillet throwing up steam, onions gone soft and golden at the edges, music murmuring from the speaker on the windowsill.
The word ‘early’ is halfway up out of your throat, light, a little teasing, but it dies there when the sound coming from down the hall isn’t the sound of a man home for the night. There’s no pause to toe his boots off, no keys dropping in the bowl. Just the stairs taken too fast, two at a time, the whole house shivering under the weight of him going up.
Your hand finds the gas dial and turns the flame down. You open up your ears, straining to listen. Then you’re moving, following the sound of him up into the dark of the second landing.
The bedroom door’s open, and inside, John’s just a blur of motion against the moonlight behind him. The wardrobe’s flung wide open, the duffle is out — the one that lives at the back of the closet behind the winter coats, the one you were trained long ago not to touch nor ask about — and now it’s unzipped, open on the bed. His hands are working through the canvas with a fervor that turns your blood cold before he’s said a single word.
He hasn’t looked up, he’s too focused. And there’s something practiced and deeply troubling about the speed of which his hands are movings — it tells you more than his face even would.
“John?” you try, his back is to you now.
“Hey,” he says, a drawer slides open, he rifles through it, turns around, and whatever he took from the drawer disappears into his bag. “Listen to me a minute.”
“What’s happening? Wh- what’re you doing?”
You take a tentative step toward the bed.
“I have to go,” he says flat, pared down, slotted neatly into the rhythm of his packing. “Right now. Tonight.”
“Go where? You’ve only just got back. Is it a—,”
“It’s not work,” he cuts in roughly, then shakes his head, eyes squeezed shut.
His hands go still over the bag and he turns his head and finally, finally looks at you, blue eyes hooking under your ribs. He takes a steadying inhale through his parted lips, then out his flaring nostrils.
“It’s… it’s not a job, dove.”
You feel so behind him in this, like you’re still standing in the warm kitchen five minutes ago, still on the version of tonight where dinner’s almost ready. You can feel a tickle of dread crawling up the back of your neck.
You’ve never seen him like this.
He’s never like this — frantic.
“Then what is it, J—,”
“Shepherd’s dead,” he spills. He says it the way you’d pluck a splinter from a soft palm, all at once because slow is worse. “It was me, I did it. There’ll be people comin’ here to look for me, and I can’t be here when they come, and I can’t—” His throat bobs. “I can’t be anywhere near you. D’you understand me?”
You don’t.
His confession arrives in pieces and your hands rise to your temples as the words work their way into whatever corner of your mind is properly conscious.
He’s gone back to moving, the zip of the bag closing like something tearing in half. It’s the moving you can’t deal with right now because the moving means it’s already decided. It was decided before he came through the front door. You’re hearing the end of a conversation he’s been having with himself for god knows how long.
Sick turns over in your belly, hot and acidic as it ascends your esophagus, burning the back of your tongue before you swallow it back down.
“Stop.” Your hand closes firm around his forearm. “Stop, just— just look at me. Goddamnit, just— Stop moving!”
To his credit, he goes still for a moment, turning fully toward you now and lifts both hands to your face, cradling your jaw, and every scrap of that frantic velocity drains out of him. His forehead comes down to yours, warm, a little slicked. And suddenly you would give anything to have the frantic version of him back, because stillness means he’s made time for it. John doesn’t make room for things that don’t matter. He’s making room to say goodbye, and knowing that opens up beneath you like a trap-door.
His thumbs sweep the tears you didn’t even feel on your cheeks. “Look at me,” his hands stiffen and close tighter when they rest on your face, forcing your gaze onto his. “I need you to hear me.”
“No.” You’ve got two fistfuls of his shirt now, the cotton crushed in your hands, your head moving side to side against the cage of his palms. “No. No! You don’t get to do this, we’ll— we’ll fix it,” you try to sniffle but sob instead. “You’ll go to someone— Kate! There’ll be a way—,”
“There isn’t,” he murmurs, almost pleading.
“There’s always a way.”
“Not for this.” He says it so softly it takes the legs out from under you. His breath is warm against your mouth. “Not this one, dove. Not this time. I’m sorry.”
Part of you doesn’t quite believe the apology. It was tacked on at the end like an afterthought. You know John. Or, maybe you thought you did. The blood in your heart feels like it’s curdling, heavy, turning to tar as you continue to process exactly what’s happening here.
What he’s done.
You wrench your neck and free your face from the heat of his hands.
“How long?” you ask, voice breaking.
He doesn’t answer.
You strike his chest with the flat of both hands, again and again, then again. You can’t even shift him an inch and the both of you know it, it’s just somewhere for the fear to go as it bubbles. His chin tucks, watching with a curling devastation as you keep connecting with his body. In a flash, he’s got both of his hands on your wrists, yanking you forward against him. “How long, John?!”
You’re starting to learn how long.
He says nothing.
This isn’t a tour. It isn’t a season away with a date at the end of it. He’s running. There is no number because there is no horizon he can point to, no morning he can promise you he’ll be standing in this room again.
The realization comes out of you barely above a breath as you tip your head back to see him. “You’re not coming back.”
His eyes fall shut. He presses his mouth to your forehead hard and holds there, and when the words come they come muffled into your hair just above your ear, into the warmth of you he’s trying to memorize.
“I love you.” It’s not an answer to your question by any stretch of the imagination. He pulls back again to meet your eyes. “Whatever they say about me, whatever you hear — that’s the only truth, yeah?” His knuckles lift to your chin, the pad of his thumb pushing against the front of it, holding your gaze. “When they come, you tell them I was here, I threatened you, and I left in a hurry.”
Your lip wobbles as you look at him, your throat is so tight it hurts.
“Say it back to me.”
“Y- you were here, you left in a hurry.”
“I was here, I threatened you, I left in a hurry,” he repeats.
“You were here, y-you thre- threatened me, you left in a hurry.”
“Good.”
He kisses you and you can almost taste both halves of him in it at once: the half that’s yours, and the half that's already gone. You give it back to him like you can hold him in the room by your mouth alone. But you can’t. And you feel the precise instant he decides to stop, the breath he takes to force himself away.
“Lock the door behind me,” he says.
And the velocity is back. He swings the duffle bag up onto his shoulder, and he’s past you before you’ve turned, out the bedroom door, and you spin and rush after him with his name tearing out of you, your bare feet slapping against the hardwood.
“John! Please! John!”
But he’s already at the foot of the stairs, already crossing the hall, always faster than you, and you’re only halfway down when the front door swings open and the cold of the night pours in over the threshold to meet you. You reach the bottom step, lurch for the door.
The street is empty.
You look left, you look right. It’s as if you dreamt the whole thing. As if you made him up, boots to beard.
Behind you, the speaker’s still playing music from the kitchen. The onions have started to catch, the sweet smell tipping over into something bitter and charred.
a/n: after writing this i decided to turn these two into a series of vignettes called ‘all we ever do is say goodbye’ 🧡
okay so not sure if im just ovulating but i’ve been thinking A LOT. and maybe. i might just write those thoughts here. oh god i haven’t written anything let alone smut in years
And yet he can't help but think of it as a burden, not only to him but to Nikolai. The man who'll have to lay him to rest when the inevitable reaches his door.
Nikolai had taken the brunt of his anger when he was presented, not with the statistical chances of remission but with the likelihood of years he had left. He had taken John's ire without a word, his fury at the shitty cards life had dealt him and the unfairness of it all. And he did so without complaint.
He never said a word when John went from smoking ten a day to an entire pack. Never uttered a word of judgment, the week John spent drunk, nor the night he passed out in his own vomit on their kitchen floor.
He takes on cooking their every meal when John is too fatigued to come up with an idea for dinner, let alone cook it. He quietly pads around their flat during John's daily naps because he cannot stay awake throughout an entire day and function to what is now his maximum. He drives to the hospital and back, finds books for John to read through transfusions, and holds a tissue under John's nose when his nosebleed lingers on and on.
The relationship is unequal, the load-bearing is anisometric, and it's weighing on the both of them.
So, for the first time in his life, John decides to be truly selfless and let Nikolai free from the imprisonment of his illness. Let Nikolai leave cancer in his past as a stepping stone to build his future.
"No."
In his haggard state, he forgets that Nikolai's obstinacy is what attracted him to the oilot in the first place. That and the look of his lips pursed around a lit fag.
"What do you mean, no? This isn't up for debate; our relationship is over. It's going to end anyway when the worms get me, I'm setting you free before it gets to that point."
Unlike the other people around him, Nikolai doesn't treat John like he's frail and delicate just because he's ill. In fact, the Russian puts some force into his smack when his hand catches the back of John's head.
"You are being cowardly. You do not like vulnerability, so you would rather run and hide than let me care for you. Tough, what do you want for dinner?"
It's one of the rare times in their relationship that the other man's words have hit John like a gutshot. Bleeding him out to dry in the open. Inadvertent cruelty that comes from love is often the most painful kind.
"Nik, it's over. That's it. I'm giving you an out, take it."
They're both a mess. John is pale and gaunt. His skin bruised along his arm from repeated needle punctures. Nikolai's hair is greasy; the bags under his eyes could carry the weight of their conversation, and the faint sheen of sweat, paired with the way his hands shake, is a dead giveaway that his blood sugar has tanked again. Neglecting his own health to give way to John's, the prick he is.
"Упрямый мерзавец."
While his liveliness has fled him, his hearing has not. Nikolai does not wilt under his glare.
"What do you want for dinner?"
John is exhausted, and it's one of the rare instances in a week when he actually feels hungry. He decides there and then that he'll approach the conversation again after dinner and drive it through Nikolai's thick skull that the life they once shared together is over.
"Chippy."
He passes in his own bed, head against Nikolai's shoulder and ring loose around a cold, scrawny hand.
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