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There's a voice. Then a face, then a pair of eyes. Then a smile. Then the lack of a smile.
And suddenly he's too aware of his body. The sharp bones and abused nerve endings, each little molecule of what makes him a breathing being lit up in a screeching cacophony of pain. Everything is so unignorably alive and thus, in pain; even the wound long closed running its jagged edges down his chest springs back to life. A phantom ache---no, not phantom, and besides, ache's too kind a word. It is burning and screaming and horrific in its irrefutable presence as the experience of pain. It is much too much and too present and too overpowering and he wants to scream, so badly does he want to scream, but in lieu of it he offers a smile, half-turned, a weak broken wing yet fluttering.
"Theo... Ah, Theophilus," he begins, the tone of his voice entirely devoid of its natural upturned chime. He is not there yet remains present nonetheless. A great gloom has overtaken what was once a pair of warm eyes; they have grown beyond what a kind of hollow dull could entail. Empty. Dead. Unsmiling. "I suppose I should've expected to find you here."
He wants to be elsewhere. He wants to be nowhere but here. He wants to be in a different room, different building, outside, six feet underground. He wants to feel the weight of Theophilus' arms around him, the steady sound of his heartbeats each marking another second of his life as it lulls him into a comfortable numbness. He doesn't know what he wants. And none of it matters anyway. "I... I am glad, though. I am."
This could be the last time, after all.
He considers taking a step forward, then grounds the waning weight of his body into a single place, locking his joints as if they were made of cold stone. But the mask still slips---his feeble smile falters further.
Vincent is a statue of a quiet saint chipping away in the wind; he is glowing with the particular sheen of sickness or death. There's a faint bite lingering on the left side of his neck, left by a mouthful of teeth that had marked him, not quite out of love or passion but the need to possess. It itches terribly under the weight of those eyes.
A display of needless cruelty he is an unwilling perpetrator of, his skin a pale canvas upon which someone else writ a statement of their superiority. Their victory, ever present.
The guilt stings as it should.
He thinks of Lupin, and of Nero, and of Amos, and it is then that he notices the lack of a wedding band on Theophilus' fingers as he is overtaken by a borrowed yet strangely personal grief, something he has no right to internalize as his own but does nonetheless. Because he is selfish, broken, tired, incorrigible, so fallible, and walking forward, then, step by heavy step, towards what is now just a ghost of an almost-lover. He is walking without the faintest bit of consideration for what his next movement could cause, how much it will or will not hurt - not knowing even what it will be.
There are voices all around them, none of them clear in his ears. They grow quieter with each millimeter of distance closed until they turn unrecognizable, until it is hard to tell if they even existed at all. Someone exclaims his name in the distance, their patience wearing thin. He overpowers the body's urge to flinch.
Vincent buries his face in Theophilus' chest and it is a punishment. He wraps his shaky arms around him and it is an apology.
No sob to stifle, no tear to soak into the material. He no longer remembers how to cry.
"For old time's sake," he whispers softly and if it was anyone else, he would not bother to assume they could hear it. But it's Theophilus. And he knows he will. The knowledge alone leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. "As good a farewell as any."
The click of a heel. Absence of warmth. Vincent is steadily walking away from Theophilus, not daring to look back. He slithers past faces familiar and unknown, past people he has spoken to and those that never thought to spare him a glance. None of them offer him a word.
If anyone notices the way he digs his nails into the vein just underneath the skin of his wrist, they do so in stone cold silence.















