The Letter 1/?- "Prelude"

[a_midsimmers_night_dream]

Author's Notes: Inspired by this Writing Prompt. I'm not sure where this'll go but it's a bunny that isn't leaving me be.

Trigger Warnings for death, grief, and suicidal thoughts

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The letter arrived on the 19^th. By the 23^rd she’d taken to her bed, wracked with fever. By the 24^th, she was dead.

McQuoddy couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t comprehend it. She’d been well the 19^th. Been herself. Been normal. Been alive.

In the span of five days, Rose Quartz Hawthorne had gone from alive to dead. Here and gone. Then and now.

And he couldn’t understand it.

-

The funeral was a decent size for a woman of her position. Businessmen and ‘businessmen’ from across the city came to pay their respects to the last of the Hawthorne heirs to rule over Roaring Heights. Regardless of their opinions of her (and McQuoddy wasn’t naïve enough to think they all had unanimously loved her, or even approved of her) this was the end of an era. Never again would a Hawthorne reign over the city of sin. She was dead at 27, having left no child for the family name to pass onto. When that coffin closed, a door closed with it.

A family tree had been felled by a great unknown. And the city was here to see it laid out.

Nobody was quite sure how to treat him. Everyone in town was aware of his relationship to the dead princess. How could they not be? The circumstances of their meeting had only happened the summer before. The blood was barely dry in that house across town that he dared not ever go near. He could feel the eyes of half a dozen mobsters on him as he moved through the gathering, not sure where to place himself or what to do.

What was he to do?

What was he to do?

He could not look at the coffin. Could not. Would not! The thought of drawing near that plain box with its contents made him physically ill. His stomach churned at the thought of what laid inside, the wreck of a soul long gone.

She was gone. She was gone. She was gone and had left nothing behind but what remained in that box, not even her anymore. She was never so still. So cold. So…inanimate.

His hand pressed against the wall of the church, his mind screaming for his stomach to revolt. His mind screaming.

Gone.

Gone.

Gone.

The next thing he remembered, he was in a chair, a glass of water in his hand. Possibly Sugar or Chiffon’s doing. Rose Quartz’s bodyguards and closest friends had seemed even more adrift than he. What is a bodyguard to do when they have no body to guard? When they had failed in their task not against an enemy, but against disease. They scuttled about the room, eyes low and heavy. They couldn’t even meet his own.

Good. He was afraid of what he’d see there. Sorrow would be awful. But pity? That’d be even worse.

His throat closed, the desire to cry, to scream coming to him again. To cry out to this crowded room of sinners pretending that the thing in that box was her. To beat his hands against the floor of this church and ask whatever higher power lurked out there how this was fair, how this was justice that she be taken from him in such a way, at such a time.

For the first time in nearly ten years, Jimmy Reddly wanted his mama.

But Dr. McQuoddy couldn’t do that. He had a part to play. The part he’d assumed when he came to find her. And he couldn’t break that now. He couldn’t allow himself to be what he was. It wasn’t what she knew. To be anything else than the doctor felt akin to infidelity. He would be Dr. McQuoddy from the moment she left him to the moment he returned to her.

His mind hissed that it wouldn’t be a long wait. He put that off. He had no stamina, no courage, to think of that now.

Whatever happened next was lost to him. He remembered only flashes of it, and only much later. Communion, a paltry spiritual feast made of stale bread and wine that tasted of blood in his mouth. A crucifix being offered to him by Chiffon, a rose quartz crucifix that seemed almost parodic to his heated brain. He held it though, held it as if it’d bring him the peace he knew was beyond him forever.

He heard the priest’s words, but didn’t comprehend them. He shook the hands of the gangsters come to pay court to the dead queen, but didn’t feel them. He watched the shovels pour the dirt into the hole one by one, but didn’t see them.

He was lost. So lost.

What was he to do?

What was he to do without Rose Quartz Hawthorne?

What was he to do?

-

The funeral was on the 28^th. He laid in bed all day on the 29^th. Stared at the wall in the 30^th, feeling the weight of everything and the nothing beside him as acutely as Atlas and the world. He told himself that on the 1^st, he’d consider the thought of his own destruction.

On the 31^st of October, the letter arrived.

 

“Come find me.”

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