Curate, connect, and discover
Prologue
Hello, my darling doves
Suprise! The fanfiction began.
Before you dig into it… Yes, it is in a different timeline than the actual book, and not all things are same as in the book, but you will find out eventually:)
I hope you will like it and I’m always open to hear your opinions on it!
xoxo, Rosemary<3
warnings: none:) maybe alcohol use, but this is tsh so nobody really cares
summary: just some warming up
word count: 1.3k
Some nights, I am still at that hotel. We all are. Charles with a gun in his hand, Camilla sobbing, Francis and I frozen, and Henry… Nearly smiling at the gun. The next events happened barely in a mere second. The screaming, the gunshots, the warm feeling in my stomach, the red wine and blood splashing. Henry lay dead on the floor, his pale face covered in blood. He was pronounced dead on the scene when the police arrived, while they were on their way Francis put a blanket on him, I don’t remember those moments very well. I only remember the blood on his face and his closed eyes. Francis was the only one who attended the funeral, I would have gone with him to Missouri, where he was getting buried, but I was laying in the hospital with a gunshot.
I never saw the twins ever again. Charles ran away and Camilla went silent. We nearly couldn’t care less about Charles after what he had done, but Camilla was a hard pill to swallow.
Me and Francis tried everything we could for a good while, brought her to the best psychiatrist, and we stayed with her patiently. Until she finally spoke to us again. But only a few words, she kindly asked us to leave her alone to deal with her grief, Henry or Charles, we never knew. We understood and left her alone like she asked. We tried our best to get our friend back and figured that she would contact us if she wanted to.
—
Me and Francis kept in touch over the years, calls and visits were engraved in our daily routines. He visited me in Chicago and I visited him in Boston. I analyzed literature and sometimes gave lessons in big named schools. Francis wrote detective books, he started writing them as a distraction and they blew up, people loved him. In the end, both of us were steady on our feet. I wasn’t in possession of a family fortune, but I became a bit wealthy myself.
However, there was one name we never dared to speak. Until today.
We were at Francis’s huge apartment, on the couch, whiskey in hand. We already drank a bottle of Irish whiskey. Suddenly he laughed to himself in a drunken manner. “What is it?” I laughed to myself too at his odd manner, the whiskey really managed to get in my head, I felt dizzy and floaty.
His laughing slowly went away and he stared at the maroon wall dreamily. “You know what I think about sometimes?” He looked at me with a sly foxy smile. “What if Henry never died?” I suddenly sat up and a little part of me was relieved that he said Henry’s name, he might have been drunk out of his mind but still. He knew Henry for a longer time than I did and his death was harder for him, he is also a sensitive fellow so that was not the greatest mix. I started snickering at his foolish question, but I stopped it when I saw his serious face, he was lost in thought.
“Francis? Where did this come from? We both watched him fall to the floor.” I tried studying his face, he wouldn’t look in my eyes.
“I know, I know. But those parts are so blurry, I barely remember how we got out of there. What do you remember from it?” He finally looked at me.
“Oh yeah, I remember every single little detail that happened. Especially the gunshot wound in my stomach and the blood oozing out of it!” He angered me a bit, the alcohol made the moment more dramatic than it actually was.
“Okay, I see your point…” He bit his lip, as if he was in distress. “What if he didn’t actually die? That was the last time we saw him and we got ushered out so quickly that we didn’t even register what hap—“
“Aren’t you a detective murder mystery writing novelist? Your mind is more creative day by day.” I point to his shelf, where he displayed the awards his books and stories won, in a joking manner. He was really good at what he was doing, no wonder everyone always begged for the new novel of his, even my students who I eventually taught from time to time.
He was not laughing, not appreciating my joke. I could see it in his eyes that he really was thinking. “Richard, have you ever seen him after that?”
“Weren’t you the one who sat through his whole funeral?!”
“It was a closed casket.” He shrugged.
“Closed casket?” I straightened up at the new information. “Didn’t he always say that he was going to have an open casket funeral?”
Francis’s eyes widened. “He did, because he wanted people to really see that all of us end up in the same way.” It was silent for a few minutes, until Francis turned to me. “Richard, if he could write his car to your name, then he could have had an open casket funeral. He wrote what he wanted for it when he was like sixteen, and the way he was looking at the gun?” We turned more serious by the second.
“Maybe he had a closed casket to spare Camilla?” I brought up my only explanation, but even I barely believed it.
“Camilla is not as weak as you think, and Henry was or is not that soft to change what he always believed in for a girl.” My biggest problem was that he actually made some sense, there was something about what he had said.
“So, let me get this straight. Henry may be alive and we didn’t think of this for five years?” I scoffed and turned to Francis. I put my hands on both of his shoulders and sighed deeply, as if I was a father who is about to tell a life lesson to his child. “Look Francis, I know that this Henry being alive and well alternative is way more sweeter, but it is not the truth and not the one we live in.”
“I know, but what if—“ He tried to interrupt me.
“No, no more what if’s… Henry is dead. We watched him shoot himself in the head and drop to the floor. You sat through his funeral, closed casket or not, he was in there. He is gone, Francis. Fuck… I wish he wasn’t, I wish we found a better way to deal with everything going on without anyone dying. I wish that Charles never came in with a gun in hand…” He had tears in his eyes from my little speech, maybe I did too, but I needed him to open up his eyes and see our sad truth.
He smiled sadly, a fat tear running down his freckled cheek. “I wish for anything that could have kept our group together…” he said as he stared into the crunching fire in the fireplace. I believe that in that moment he tried really hard for the first time to accept what we came to.
“We’re here now. Maybe up there, Bunny could give that goddamn slap back to Henry and even bang him in the head with his stupid latin diary.” I nudged his shoulder, trying to ease the tension. What I didn’t expect was a proper laugh from him. Half a genuine laugh, half a grieving sob.
“Yeah, you’re right… Thank you, Richard. For everything.” He lifted his glass and we clicked them together.
“To new beginnings.”
“To new fucking beginnings.”