Wednesday 25 December 2013

Being That For You #4

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