First up: have you read this miniseries
before, if not catch the first 3 here
NOTES ON THIS STORY
So, this is the end for Jake
and Mike. I’m feeling a little nostalgic about it all, like they’ve been a part
of my life for more than this year. But then, in my mind, they have.
I hope you enjoy the end of
this miniseries, I’m hoping to flush them out, fix them up, edit them, and have
it available as a free ebook in the coming year—but we’ll have to see how things
go (though it will be happening, I’m just not sure how fast)
This is a sad story, short
and to point. Its me grieving slightly for my mother sickness, for my
grandfather’s passing, and my grandmothers illness.
But mostly, it’s allowing me
to get rid of the images and the thoughts of a man that lay in the bed opposite
me in hospital. A man dying of, what we think was cancer.
His gasping breaths of those
two days we shared a room, still linger in my mind.
But truly I am sorry for this
story has to come, they need peace in the end, and I have nothing else to give
you for Christmas but this.
Being
that for You
A snap in the night was the only things that Jake
could think about. Mike’s fingers culled around his flesh as he tried to
breath.
“No,” Jake spoke, his voice raspy from sleep. His own fingers
rolled along Mikes, letting him know he wasn’t alone. That it was going to be
fine.
This hadn’t been the first time Mike had woken this way, but it
was defiantly going to be the last. Jake understood that with a pain in his
chest that wasn’t every going to go away.
He gript around for his phone, a button pressed as he waiting
for them to come and get his husband.
The phone call wasn’t all that important, just something to
occupy Jake’s mind as he gript his lovers hand and prayed what he was seeing
wasn’t actually happening.
He wasn’t ready for this. He wasn’t ready to be left alone in
this life. But he knew. They had all known, Mike’s battle was a losing one
before it had begun, all they had left was to live the life they were given.
“Please, babe,” Jake wanted to cry out, he wanted it to stop. He
wanted everything to go away so that he could wake up tomorrow with the love of
his life still whole and complete and ready to start the day with him like they
always had.
Jake wanted them to be young again. He wanted those moment of
heart ache when he’d been nothing but another hole for Mike to put his confused
dick. He wanted that moment when the man he loved because his lover for life.
He wanted those days and weeks and months and years to never
have happened so he could live them all again and again.
Though, mostly, he just didn’t want to be the one living at the
end of this. He didn’t want to be left alone in this world while he’s lover was
off living in another.
But most, and more currently, he didn’t want Mike to leave him.
He didn’t want this reality to be, well, reality. He wanted to blink his eyes.
To have this be nothing but a dream and the settle back next to his lover and
fall back to sleep.
Life, however, had other plans for them, and number one was
taking the man he loved away from him.
Mike’s gasp had Jake looking down. Mike’s face didn’t look
anything like it had originally. It had weathered badly threw the steps of
grief that lay before him. They had gone through them together, and strangely,
Jake hadn’t managed to take one-step. He’s denial of what was about to come
locked around his heart so strongly it took his breath some days.
Jake just couldn’t think about it. He couldn’t, not and be happy
for those moments he had with Mike. Not and be able to stand strong and
shoulder all Mike needed strength in his times of pain and misery.
Maybe, if the cancer had been slower. If they caught it early,
they’d have had more days, and more time for Jake to come to terms with his
loss. But as it was, all Jake could manage was to be what Mike needed him to be
through those times.
Mike’s once brilliant eyes filled with tears, both from the lack
of air flowing into his lungs, and that he knew he couldn’t hold on any long.
And Jake’s, eyes filling of their own, did the hardest thing he’d ever have to
do in his life.
“It’s okay, love, let go.”
A chocked sob came from Mike, it sounded painful, which broke
Jake’s heart more. He didn’t want his husband to suffer.
“We’re okay, everything is fine. I’ll be fine,” he spoke for
Mike, for himself. He wanted—needed to believe every word he said. Not only so
Mike could stop suffering on his behalf, but because if he didn’t, he’d be
following Mike on the death train moments after he succumbed himself.
And Jake’s life wasn’t over yet. He needed to live. He had
people counting on him. He had grandchildren who didn’t need the last memory of
their grandparents to be a Romeo and Juliet moment.
But more so, he needed to fulfil his promise to his husband. A
death bed wish all on it’s own, dancing around all the other promises and
wished of a future Mike wanted Jake to live without him.
Luckily, for Jake he was an old man, so the need to find love
after his lover wasn’t something they’d ever spoken of. There was no love after
Mike, not the heart and candles type. Only the love to see grandchildren become
adults and have children of their own.
The promises hadn’t gone that far into things. They had
considered on Jake outliving Mike by years, decades. That wasn’t realistic,
Jake suffered from as many aliments as Mike had, and the fact of him living for
more than five years was going to be a stretch in his own mind.
He’d not been optimistic since Mike’s condition and later his
prognoses from a doctor who could barely grow his own beard. He’d been kind,
understanding, and realistic. With everything else that had been starting to go
wrong with Mike’s mind, there wasn’t any point in radiation, not if the result
was another three months. Three months of pain and punishment, that Mike’s mind
probably wouldn’t have been able to cope with.
Plus, as Mike and he had seen, there wasn’t much point in them
working that hard on an old bugger like him. He’d lived his life, and he didn’t
think someone young shouldn’t have his spot, his drugs, when they could use it
more than he needed it.
It had been a hard fight, which Mike had won. They’d agreed, it
had been important for Mike to win, as well as make Jake see the points he was
saying. He’d been diagnosed with onset dementia six month prior to his cancer.
The specialist had said that they weren’t sure if he’s outlying problems were
separate or related to the cancer, but it didn’t matter. None of it fucking
matter where Jake was concerned. At the end of it all, Mike had made his mind
up before they had left the office. To him, all that was needed was for Jake to
be talked into his madness.
And he had been, because, like always, Mike was everything to
him. And his happiness was something that didn’t give Jake pause. He wanted
Mike around forever, but as Mike had put it, he was going to die anyway, he may
as well do it now, then in a years’ time as he wasted away in some nursing home
bleeding dry the money that was going to go to Jake’s House. Which had expanded
and now held one in each major city.
A gag sounded, it was hard to handle, Jake wanted it to stop. He
wanted Mike to stop fighting and to just let go. But for all Jake could see it
was harder than that. Something about the fight or flight in a human body that
just kept on trying to live when clearly there wasn’t anything left working inside
of them.
Jake bent down, brushing his lips against the cold blue lips of
his lover. Clinging to that moment of life before it disappeared forever.
Jake wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to say goodbye to the man
he love more than anything else in his life. But he was able to let him go. And
though he’s never considered himself a religious believer, he had a moment of
hope that he’d meet the man again in the afterlife.
Taking in a deep breath, as he wiped the tears and snot off his
face, Jake uncapped Mike’s cold hand from his own. Kissing the clammy skin, and
lay it down on the body of his lover.
A chest that would not rise again. A smile Jake would never see
in person. Arms that would never hold him again, lay there, a shell of skin and
bones, as Jake got off the bed. He pulled a shirt over his head, and looked
down at his lover.
Jake wasn’t sure how long he’d stood there, watching. He’d not
noticed anything but Mike until the doctor came into the room, but he gathered
it had been nearly twenty minute if what the doctor had promised them when
they’d arranged for Mike to dye at home.
“Grandpa,” a small voice nearly screamed as he was wrapped up in
thin arms and lanky body of one of his granddaughters.
Of course not by blood, but birth to Craig’s eldest boy. He’d
been considered all the children he’d saved as grandparents, especially from
the boys and girls who’d been banished from their own parents. Jack and Mike
had loved that from them, more than any of them could ever understand.
Especially after, they’d declined to have a child of their own.
He breath in his granddaughters hair conditioner as he let his
tears overwhelm him yet again. And took another step into the grief he felt
from the bottom of his soul. A pain that he would have to learn to live with,
because there wasn’t any way he’d be able to forget.
The End
Happy Holidays Everyone J
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