TW MCD + SUICIDE BRICK YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
It’s a funny thing, dying.
Despite what many probably assumed, Ilya hadn’t actually considered the act of dying all that often. Depression, he found, was more about the desire for life to end, not a craving for Death itself. It was distinct in his mind, in a way that he could never really explain to anyone who hadn’t experienced it themselves. Someone like Shane, for whom Death was something a little scary and thankfully very far away.
Well. That’s what they’d assumed.
Because why wouldn’t they? Shane and Ilya, they were both so young and so healthy and so in love. They were supposed to be at the top together, immortal perhaps, surviving off the pure beauty and adrenaline of a life so perfect, finally so perfect, that nothing could starve their light.
That’s what they’d assumed.
But Death had always clung to Ilya. It lived under his skin, in this taste buds, beneath his fingernails. It took his mother, and many years of his youth, and came close to sweeping him into its grasp a few times, Ilya only escaping its clutches by the skin of his teeth.
And really, that made all of this his fault. He was contaminated, infected, poisoned by Death. And he had selfishly let Shane crawl under his skin too, with his quiet humor and pretty freckles and unwavering obsession. And when Ilya flayed open his chest and let the prettiest man he’d ever seen crawl between his ribs, he’d sentenced him to this. Because a host so pure and good could not survive such close contact with the thing that rotted Ilya from the inside out from the moment he was born.
It was Ilya’s fault. He hasn’t felt Death’s cold breath on his neck for so long, he has almost forgotten. But Death shrouded everything good and golden in Ilya.
The hit, and all the sensations that followed, were too familiar. The way Ilya’s breath froze in his lungs, and his body skated instinctually to his husband’s side, and his fingertips brushed the drip of blood falling from Shane’s perfect nose, unburdened by breath. Familiar too was the blanket hand of something beyond slipping under Shane’s chin to tilt his head toward what comes next.
And now, six weeks, one funeral, four memorials, and the unending drag of time later, Death sat next to Ilya, shoulder to shoulder. It was the first time they were truly alone together since Shane died, though Death never left his side. The Centaurs and Yuna and David and Hayden and Cliff and J.J. and Rose and so many others had held the hand not caught up in the invisible skeletal grip, had cried with him, had fed him, had washed him, had kissed his head and begged him to stay. Sveta had, at least. But maybe she had accepted the inevitable here. The look in her eyes when she walked out the cottage door for the last time told Ilya that perhaps she had.
But now Ilya and his eternal shadow could he truly alone. Death did not say anything, but it did not have to. It just handed him the bottle of pills—left over in their medicine cabinet from some injury—and pulled its cloak around Ilya’s shoulders. It was not warm, but there was some comfort, because in the darkness that blanketed them he could see Shane’s freckles, like diamonds in the sky.
His fingers were steady as they twisted off the plastic top, set it carefully on the floor. His breath was even. His chest was an empty cavern.
He had known, from the moment the thread of fate tying he and Shane together had snapped, that this was the inescapable end. There was comfort in that. Knowing that the only place in the ever-expanding universe for Ilya was wherever Shane was. He swallowed the pills, one by one, and thought about his mother. About how scared she must have been, because she was running from something. How he wished, if her life had to end the way it did, that she could have at least had this. The comfort of knowing she was not escaping, but searching. Not running from her life, but running toward it.
Sunlight, like the morning rising over a moonless night, filled the cavern in his chest with every second the pills chased life out of his veins. He heard, in the distance, his mother’s soft laughter. And the disappointed click of Shane’s tongue. Their voices, soft and mumbled together, words indistinguishable but fondness undeniable.
“Does he hate me?” Ilya whispers, voice horse and cracking under the weight of his guilt. “For bringing you with me into his life?”
Death, of course, said nothing.
But it pulled its cloak tighter around the two of them, until Ilya could rest his head against the cool, thin crux of its shoulder. And he felt a hum in his bones, in his ears, in the very core of his being, and that hum washed away his fear that Shane would never forgive him, even in the afterlife.
Perhaps the best Death could do for its old friend, telling him no, Shane was not upset the only way it could.
So no, until six weeks ago, Ilya had not considered the act of dying much, other than to pray that his mother had gone easily, peacefully. But now, as his head starts to swim and his body bows in on itself, he is grateful for Death’s firm, unyielding grasp, the one it’s kept on him in some form or another since he was too young to understand.
Because it leads him gently, so gently, from the emptiness of a world without Shane.
And only lets go when the thread between their souls is reconnected once more.
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