WHO: Caitlin Holloway WHAT: Mourning WHEN: The night Nik died. WHERE: Her room in the X-Mansion WARNINGS: Depression, mentions of death
The movies didn’t get it right. They never did when it came to death and sadness. The mourning widow always looked absolutely stunning save for the fact that she would be dressed in sweatpants (that’s how you knew she was sad, as she wasn’t bothering to dress ‘pretty’), and the sadness would last a couple of frames as she realized the dead character wasn’t coming back. There was music playing in the background; it was always a sad instrumental piece, or some indie slow rock song that perfectly summed up her feelings. And then a sudden epiphany would come and her life would go on. End credits. Fade to black. No more problems.
What the movies didn’t encapsulate was the silence left behind when death had come and gone. The suddenness. How anticlimactic death was when the person you loved was dying from disease in the hospital. There weren’t a large group of doctors rushing to provide a miracle; instead, there were only a few sympathetic faces whose voices faded into the oceanic sounds and rhythm of your pounding heart. The lights around you dim. The floor greets your knees like an old childhood enemy, leaving behind bruises and dull pain that doesn’t compare to the pain in your very gut.
Most of the day had gone by in a shocking blur, slow motion as Nik breathed his last breath and then fast-forward through the motions so quickly that she continuously felt dizzy. She remembered Frankie forcing her to leave the clinic and she hadn’t put up a fight; there was no fight left in her to give. Only Kitty was keeping her from allowing herself to go intangible and sink into the earth itself. Hours of silence went by, pierced constantly by phone calls that she elected to ignore. Nate. Connor. Other superheroes. Shae was the only one she’d answered, her body curled up as small as she could make it in the corner of the room that was now far too big for just one person.
Kayleigh was with somebody. Frankie, or Shae, or maybe even Connor. Most of her teammates were at the clinic with their sick friends like she had been just last night. Which left her alone with nothing but her thoughts, the ache in her chest, and a dimly lit room that was too much Nik to be comforting.
She pulled herself off the floor slowly, the ache in her stiff limbs more comforting than anything else she had done that day. With heavy footsteps she moved to their shared closet and yanked open the doors hard enough that it pulled them of their tracks. Before her hung his clothes; shirts, pants, sweatshirts, and jackets. All clean and smelling of laundry detergent, all waiting for their owner to put them on again. She stooped down to the pile of dirty laundry on the floor, sifting through until she found the sweatshirt he’d worn right before he’d gotten sick. Bringing it up to her face, she breathed in, the smell of his aftershave and cologne overpowering her senses. It smelled like him still; she quickly pulled it over her head, her torso swimming in the sweatshirt that was far too big on her.
It was the only way she’d be able to be close to him again, and in the back of her mind she knew the smell would eventually fade until she was left with nothing. No remnants of Nik. Just herself, raising a baby on her own and explaining to her daughter why daddy wasn’t coming back. With that she felt a warm flush of anger in her belly. It wasn’t fair. Piotr and Kitty were never allowed a happy ending, and this was supposed to be their second chance. Her second chance.
She lashed out at the clothes in front of her, ripping article after article off of their hangers to deposit them in a heap on a pile in the middle of the floor. When there were no more clothes she started throwing the hangers themselves, the room full of nothing but the sounds of her raking sobs and plastic bouncing off of walls and floor. She only stopped when one of the hangers bounced off the lamp on his side of the bed, sending it crashing to the floor in a wave of broken porcelain.
And with that, she collapsed onto the pile she made, curling in on herself to sob.