Title: Grief

Summary: What if it hadn't been Gael who had been killed?

Rating: PG-13 for violence, angst, insinuation of rape

Spoilers/Timeline: End of the first book

Characters: Gael, Geoff, Alan, Mel, Adrien

Note: ANGST, lol. Hypothetical drabbles are rather satisfying, I find

“No One Ever Told Me Grief Felt So Like Fear"

----- C.S. Lewis

After Gael’s death, life fell apart, but over time, tried to heal itself. Mel left Adrien, afraid that the Gael’s fate might come to him. That, compounded with the loss of Gael, looked to be enough to truly sink them. But the way they held on to each other at the funeral, the looks they still gave each other, spoke volumes. They were broken up, but not willingly… and there was hope that one day they would be able to right themselves again. Rufus and Nik, for the first time, were afraid to hold hands in public... but their love for each other... and their pride soon squelched that fear. Geoff and Alan floundered, but were there to catch each other, to reassure and take care of each other more than ever. For the first time, they were able to say “I love you” to each other without machismo shit getting in the way. Gina cried for her cousin at night, operating blindly during the day, not letting emotion show on her face… until she and Alan turned to each other for love and relief. Sex forged a connection between them, an intimacy, and reminded them they were alive even while surrounded by so much death.

The only ones who were to remain unhealed were Gael’s family. His parents... who had to bury a child. Maria and Bernardo, who grieved for their brother. Alan watched the Torres’ grief and felt guilt wash over him. Gael had a mother and father who had loved him and would never get over losing him. Alan was an orphan, and though he’d found a family with his friends, he still accepted the facts. He was an orphan and Gael hadn’t been. There are no words to describe a mother’s tears, and Alan just wished he could have found a way to tell Gael’s mother the one thought that had been plaguing him. “It should’ve been me instead. If only it hadn’t been him. It should’ve been someone else.”

After Adrien’s death, everyone did their best to tiptoe around Melanie. Her fairytale way of smiling through life came crashing down, and all the butterfly colors in her face, her eyes, her very presence became washed out and gray. Grief sponged out all the radiance in her. She didn’t cry, she just became bleached out. Adge had a quick and tidy Jewish funeral and buried in a nondenominational cemetery so that when the rest of them died, they could join him. Everyone did their best not to cry, for Mel’s sake. Mel still didn’t cry at the funeral, just stood there in her best black dress, looking tragically beautiful in Alan’s mind. She didn’t cry, but there was something wild behind her eyes, screaming bloody murder, begging her to do something. Cry, scream, kill Ben for what he’d done, kill herself, just do something to make the pain stop. She didn’t do anything. Rather, literally, she stopped doing everything. She stopped dancing, even stopped practicing. Stopped singing, even in the shower. The boys wanted to go to her, wanted to help. But how can one try to help someone who had stopped wanting to talk, to eat, to even hear music again?

Mel felt herself breaking down. She could hear Adge singing to her everywhere she went, terrified of the day when he would stop. But she just couldn’t let her pain out the way Adge’s parents did. Poor Sylvia and Eliot, the bleakness in their faces, their tears and all-consuming grief for their son. Their only child. Their pride. Their baby murdered by Ben’s sadist friends. Sylvia was the only person Mel could really talk to anymore, sharing in their bereavement of a man they’d loved.

And Mel grew angry with herself for not seeing it coming. And angry at Adge for getting killed. Angry at him for making her love him so. Angry at Ben. Angry at God. And then she’d wake up in and stare at his empty half of the bed and the grief would hit again and she’d forgive him, and beg with him to come back to her. And she promised herself that she would never love another man the way she’d loved Adrien. She just couldn’t imagine waking up next to anyone other than him. And so in her heart, she made that promise, and became a “widow” at the age of nineteen. They’d promised to never love anyone the same way until the day they died. He’d made out with his end of the deal, and so would she.

There came a night when she and her family were eating dinner and Ben was being himself, acting like nothing was wrong, that Mel finally cracked a little. She met his eyes, and her own began to well, and then she said something, and she couldn’t have hurt Ben anymore if she tried. “I wish you had killed me instead.”

After Mel’s death, everything, plainly put, went to shit. She’d given everyone so much warmth and so much love. She readily gave love to her darling friends--her boys-- a love that was best defined as maternal. She had damn near been a mother to Alan and now Alan resembled a lost child, all raw vulnerability, orphaned for the second time. His friend, his surrogate mum, the smiling fairytale that she had been was gone now, left beaten and raped with her throat cut on their hilltop by Roger and John.

Everyone drifted without her. Everyone shuddered to think of her being violated and killed by those two sons of bitches. Even Ben shut down. He didn’t say a word to anyone, or give hateful looks. His eyes had just gone bleak and staring. And everyone knew that if Ben ever saw Roger and John again, he would murder them himself.

Everyone was very careful around Adge, whose face had turned gray. His eyes were always purple and swollen, unable to sleep, afraid to because of the dreams that would visit him. The memories. Melly, grinning and wild haired, lying with him in his room, her head at the opposite end of the bed than his. Her, playfully singing Dire Straits: “Juliet, when we made love, you used to cry, you said: I love you like the stars above, I love you til I die...” The adoring way she nudged his side with her foot as she sang the last line, before flipping over and scrambling up the bed to grin down at him. “Hullo,” he’d smiled. “ ‘Lo.” She’d echoed, kissing his forehead.

Memories came at night as well as nightmares about her death, the pain she must’ve been in, taken and then left to bleed to death. And then he would bolt awake and not be able to fall asleep until he’d exhausted himself from sobbing.

Part of him died and turned bitter. Hating Ben. Hating a world that would let something so vicious happen to someone like Mel. Hating the looks he got from people that just radiated pity. In each of those looks, beneath the sympathy was a layer of condescension. You were her boyfriend... you should have taken care of her, the looks whispered. Men protect the woman they love… they don’t let them end up raped and murdered. So where were you? What’s your excuse? Adrien tried to ignore those looks, but they got to him eventually. And then he hated himself too.

With Mel, a part of him had died. Something soft went out of his eyes and he knew he’d never love another woman the way he’d loved Mel. She had been it. His strength, his wholeness, his love… and he’d let her die. He hadn’t been there to save her. And for the first time in Adrien’s life, he allowed a selfish thought to pass through his mind. I wish it had been someone else.

He’d been the glue that held them so close together, made them into a real family because that’s exactly what they had been to him… his family. They felt broken now without him. His endearing awkwardness and smiling way of bringing people back to their senses. His dinners on Thursday nights and his Sunday morning breakfasts to bring them together at one table like a real family. They missed the gentle way about him, the ability he had to trust everyone, to trust his friends especially, the way he tried to please them… something that before had broken their hearts. They even missed his occasional burst of temper at Geoff’s teasing. And all of them found themselves wondering just how they’d make it through this.

Mel and Adge clung to each other, more than ever, agony clear in Mel’s eyes for the loss of the little boy she used to rock in her arms and sing too even though they had been the same age. Agony for the loss of the wonderful man he had began to become.

Gina went on with life, running like a windup doll, getting through her days stoically so that she could cry at night… for Alan, for herself, and for her broken cousin.

Gael said very little to anyone. Pain and regret washed out the green in his eyes and left them dimmed and stark. He didn’t laugh or try to console anyone with his ever-present optimism. The optimism was gone, and for a very long time, Gael stopped smiling all together.

Geoff, for a long time, everyone was almost afraid to leave alone. When they went to the police station to identify the body, Geoff had refused to believe. Then he saw Alan and his face had gone unnaturally pale. “ALAN!” None of them had recognized Geoff’s voice in that moment. That voice wasn’t his… it was stretched and cracked, like an animal’s. Since then, Geoff had been terrifying silent. He didn’t cry, didn’t speak in his glib way, didn't make a sound at all, not even at the funeral. But in his eyes, they could see he was screaming. Bitter and enraged at everything in this fucking world, at the god Alan had believed in so readily, and at himself for not protecting Alan the way he always promised himself he would. Suddenly, the love and safety he’d given to Alan over the last sixteen years meant nothing… because he hadn’t been there to protect his Alan that one last time… and it’s the last time that really counts, isn’t it?

All the love, all the nursing, all the reassurance they’d all given to Alan to help him get through his childhood… all the work and joy that was poured into turning out the wonderful, smiling young man that Alan had been…snatched away in one night. And now, Alan was dead and buried and Geoff haunted the cabin that had been their home, not ready to leave, but tormented by the memories, the emptiness, the very echo of Alan in that house. He tried his best to keep away from Alan’s room for his friend’s presence was just too concentrated there. But hints of him still made themselves known. His things scattered around the house. His shoes by the door. A crumpled t-shirt on the couch that smelled of him… so clean and so Alan… that it was enough to make Geoff’s heart break and want to bury his face in it and take hits of it (better than any drug). But at the risk of making himself feel anymore insane than he already was, he didn’t. But he left the shirt there, praying that the scent of it would last.

More than anything, Geoff regretted that never once, in all their years together, had he ever told Alan just how much he loved him. He’d hinted at it, true, but the words “I love you”, simple and straightforward, the way Alan needed them, had never been spoken on his part.

After Geoff’s death, life tried to move on but got consistently stuck. Without his humor, his smirking, his laughter, his jokes, his silly swaggering way of cheering everyone up and making them realize the truth in things… life had a hard time getting restarted.

Everyone pained, missing his familiar, lanky presence, but in away, they pained more for Alan. Alan, who still tried to smile, trying to reassure them that he’d be ok, but somehow, they just couldn’t believe that. It was in the way he accidentally set places for Geoff at the table. The way he hadn’t touched Geoff’s mess of a desk, which had always driven Alan crazy with it’s crumpled balls of paper and ink stains across the desktop. He didn’t touch a single thing on that desk, didn’t sweep the balls of scrap paper into the dustbin the way he used to when Geoff wasn’t paying attention. Didn’t sort through the Biro pens, tossing out the broken ones and the ones out of ink the way he used to. He didn’t go near Geoff’s beloved typewriter, as if it were a holy shrine. He just left it, letting his eyes touch on it once in a while, both loving and hating it for the reminder it gave him of the man he’d so adored.

In one night, Alan had lost both someone to take care of and someone who’d always taken care of him. With all Geoff’s teasing and occasional, playful acts of blackmail, when it came to Alan, Geoff had been wholeheartedly selfless. He’d have taken a bullet for Alan, and although neither of them had ever said it, Alan knew just how much they had loved each other. They knew each other better than anyone else, completed each other entirely, watched out for each other. Alan had failed there and it was if he was suddenly carrying a new a burden of grief and guilt, but never let it show in his face, not when there were others around trying to cope with their own pain. They didn’t need his too.

But he didn’t know what to do with himself. He was listless and almost desperate to find an outlet to relieve some of the pain. He found none and suffered in silence. It’s unbearable to live with half of yourself missing. The cynical half with scruffy blond hair, that cracked bad jokes and made a mess wherever he went. Alan needed that half, and everyone knew that.

Gael hated watching Alan close in on himself this way, loving him so, and knowing it was Geoff Alan needed, not him. Alan loved Gael, certainly, but he needed Geoff. Like air. Like water. And Gael knew that. He watched Alan’s struggle to go on, and desperately repeated to himself again and again, as if repeating it like a mantra would make it come true, “I wish it had been me instead.”