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Oh God. Fuck. What had he done? Fuck. He had destroyed everything. Nothing would ever be okay again.
Mikey’s heart beat in a weak staccato. Simultaneously violently displaced from himself and rendered horridly aware of his own body, he slid down to the ground. There was nothing left to do except curl into the tightest ball possible. So tight that he’d collapse in on himself and then he’d be gone forever. There’d be nothing left. Disappearing far too late to prevent the untenable damages he had wrought and for the purely selfish reason of escaping this world he had played a hand in creating.
How could he not have known? Not have felt it somewhere deep in the marrow of his bones? Mikey cast his mind back to the moment, retroactively burned into his mind. Freshly gouged into him but already evidently far too deep to ever heal -no, this was the type of wound that lingered, aching and eternally fresh from constant picking at the scab. He grasped, desperate and blind, for any hints of hesitation. Any evidence that his love for Edgar was something as insurmountable as it felt, standing in its devastating wake.
He sat there shaking. Searching. His mind projected shadows of his monstrous current grief onto the past. The Event. In his mind, he had nearly lost his dinner (the dinner he had eaten with Edgar. Edgar’s last dinner). In his mind, he had driven extra slow in order to prolong the inevitable. In his mind, his gun shook. He had to grip one hand with the other in an iron vice to keep it from trembling in terrible grief filled convulsions. In his mind, he had felt an immense loss, incapable of being expressed through words. He sat with it as he called H. It ate him from the inside out as the praise washed over him coldly like a bad omen. Like the presence of a ghost. Every word from H fed the unspeakable grief. It hollowed him until there was nothing left but a gnashing, bleeding emptiness. In his mind this is what he constructed.
His grief played elaborate shadow puppets with his memories, creating fictions that both comforted him and squeezed his lungs even tighter. After pushing through the smokescreen, the desperate narratives, the truth was… Mikey did have a wonderful day. He woke up feeling unusually good, in high spirits. He had a delicious meal (biscuits and gravy was always great, especially at the Old Brush Valley Diner) and caught up with a friend. Every part of his day had gone smoothly and felt easy in a way that didn’t occur often. Mikey had a lovely date with company that didn’t turn out to be half as bad as he had feared, and hoped. They had talked. Mikey had lent Edgar his coat. The two of them walked to Mikey’s car, his coat almost comically large over Edgar’s slim shoulders. They got in the car and Mikey drove them somewhere private. He hadn’t looked forward to doing it but it had hardly weighed heavy on his mind. The Hunters told Mikey to kill someone, and he did it. It was that simple. No need to worry about the morality or purpose of the action, whether he wanted to bloody his hands as their obedient attack dog. The Hunters ordered him to commit these acts of violence because they were necessary, and Mikey believed them. He had to. They were all there was in Mikey’s isolated world.
After all his frantic running Mikey finally found himself backed into a corner. The truth loomed over him, inescapable and terrible. The one that Mikey, curled up and drowning on land, couldn’t bear to look in the eye. His hands had been steady. When he pointed the gun at Edgar they hadn’t shaken once. He barely thought twice as he pulled the trigger. Edgar’s blood painted the glass of the window, slowly and viscously trickling down, creating an image not unlike that of a post-apocalyptic topographic map of an intricate river system. Watching the watercourses map themselves onto the windshield Mikey had thought about just how happy H would be when he heard just how well he had done, and smiled.
Now Mikey paid for this heretical lack of remorse, this lack of pure bodily response. His hands hadn’t stopped shaking since he had remembered. He hadn’t eaten, didn't think he would ever want to again and he knew that when he eventually gave in to bodily needs the food would only find its way up again. The grief had burrowed deep and hollowed him completely. It made its home inside him and there was room for nothing else. Mikey vacillated between grasping for more memories of Edgar and flinching away in fear of more pain. The only concrete memory he had was of the wedding, and it wasn’t even his own. He was left with this singular memory and a dull ache for how things used to be. Mikey sat there shaking on the floor, taking shuddering breaths as the enormity of the chasm between the two realities asserted itself.