#ronfitzgerald

Naturally, when Ron didn’t make her coffee on a Tuesday morning, Alison noticed. It was such a simple thing, and she could have easily made it herself, but she’d never had to before. Ali wasn’t the type to be too lazy to make her own, but it was rather that it was a small thing that Ron always, always, did. It worried her, but for fear of being selfish for wanting to drag her boyfriend out of his shower to make her coffee, she said nothing. She went to work and begged her brain not to focus on it, despite the piece of her heart that screamed that something was deeply wrong.

It’s only on the seventh day of him not making her coffee that she finally cracks, dropping her mug in frustration. He ran into the kitchen at the sound of smashing, worried for his girlfriend’s safety. She was glad that hadn’t changed.

“Al, are you okay?” he asks as he enters, immediately grabbing the dustpan to clean up the mess around her feet. She stops him though, desperate for answers. She can ignore the ceramic shards on the floor and the liquid mess, but she can’t ignore the fact that it was her that made the coffee that spilt.

“No, I’m not fucking okay. What the hell is going on with you?” she replies, running her hand through her tangled hair, fully aware that her morning grouchiness was making this much worse than it probably should have been.

“What is that supposed to mean? I was just shaving…” His eyebrows are furrowed and she finally notices the shaving cream all over one half of his face. She realises the other half is cover with patches of blood. Lots of men cut themselves while shaving, but not Ronald Fitzgerald. He’d never been the type to do so, and the small abnormalities in all of their daily routine were starting to make her heart beat even faster.

“You didn’t make me coffee.” She’s aware of how ridiculous she sounds, and the fact that her pout is far too large for such a minor issue of no coffee made for her in the last week, but it matters to her, and them, so she doesn’t back down.

“I…” His eyebrows knot together even more, and the confusion all over his face increases her worries. “I didn’t?”

She nods, her arms folded across her chest. Her eyebrows are raised, and her eyes are full of dulled down anger. It’s only the fact that he seems so lost by the news that he’d forgotten to make coffee that causes her eyebrows to return to their normal position.

“I must have forgotten,” he whispers, glancing down at the floor, shaking his head. “I’ve never forgotten before. I’m so sorry, love. Want me to make you some now?”

“I tried to make some myself, but this happened.” She flails her hands at the floor, sighing in frustration. “You forgot all week, Ron. Plus you cut yourself while shaving…you never do that. What’s wrong with you?”

She doesn’t mean her words to come out so harsh, but the lack of coffee in her system is still bothering her, and she slowly becomes more and more convinced that he must be cheating, or mad at her, or something, because this isn’t him at all.

He raises a shaking hand to his face, pulling away once he feels something damp on his cheek. The blood on his fingertips makes him all the more scared, and her words should upset him, but they don’t. He knows he hasn’t been himself, and the fact that he forgot her morning coffee and cut himself while shaving only confirms that. She doesn’t even know about his dizziness, or the headaches, or the fact that the reason he hasn’t been out is because he’s too ashamed to admit the motorbike is getting fixed after he had an accident and crashed it.

It seems as though the new information is too much for him to take, and before Ali can even register the way his eyes are rolling back, he’s on the floor.

---

A week later they’re in the Doctor’s office, hearing how lucky Ron is that he hit his head on a kitchen counter and needed stitches since the tumour might not have been found otherwise if he didn’t come in when he did. Alison doesn’t even process the words the Doctor is spewing about needing more tests and hospital stays because the only word that registers is ‘Tumour’ and it’s enough to send her mind reeling.

Ron hears every word, and squeezes his girl’s hand. For some reason he needs to comfort her, to make sure she’s okay, because he knows deep down that he isn’t, and won’t be ever again. He doesn’t tell her that, and as the Doctor’s leave he whispers his ‘I love you’s over and over, and begs her to look at him. He finally realises she’s crying and pulls her into his arms, rocking her back and forth, never letting his mantra of those three words stop. She listens to him, but only because a part of her fears convince her that it’ll be the last time he says them.

The Doctor starts to walk in to give the young man the dates of his next MRI, but he stops when he sees the pair. His heart breaks when he notices Ron comforting his girlfriend. He was so used to the patient being comforted, and from that moment on he knows that Ron was not an ordinary man, and Alison and Ron weren’t a normal couple.

Ali prays to a God that she’s never believed in for them to go back in time, for it to simply be that he was cheating, or that he just forgot because of work stress.

Each time she opens her eyes the painful white of the office is a reminder that nobody is listening to her prayers and her heart breaks a little more.

Ron simply prays for Alison to be okay, but that doesn’t happen either.

----

It’s only three weeks before he gets the news that it’s further along than the Doctor’s thought, and it’s too late to operate. They give him two months at the most, and apologise for giving him hope in his initial meetings. He shakes their hands and tells them not to worry, and tries to ignore the pity in their eyes as they gaze at the twenty-two year old who’s been told he’s dying. They have to tell that very dying twenty-two year old that he’s dying though, so he pities them too.

----

He tries to tell Alison a dozen times that he’s going to be dead soon, but she can barely handle the idea of him being sick, and he can’t find the right time to say it. After all, when’s the right time to say you’re dying? He lies and says he’s got surgery in a week, but really he goes to a hotel and gets his affairs in order for a few days. He shaves his head before returning home, and thanks his past injuries for leaving scars on his scalp. Alison knows that they’re old, but he convinces her that modern medicine allows people to heal faster. She feels the doubt still swimming in her brain, especially since he refused to let her visit him in hospital, but she stops voicing it. Why would he lie about surgery? She says she’s glad he’s okay, even if they taste like lies in her mouth.

----

Ron proposes to her for the second time in their relationship when he knows he has a month left, and she agrees. He tells himself that it must be out of her love for him, and their commitment, but he can tell that somehow she knows.

Ali always knows, it seems.

----

They prepare a small wedding at their home, glad that they upgraded from their old apartment over a year ago. Nova wears a suit, thankfully not scratching at it. Ron has the genius idea to use his bizarre need to shake things once put in his mouth and they use him as their flower dog, the audience laughing as the Siberian Husky shakes the basket of flowers all the way up the aisle as he bounds towards the treat that Jasper is holding at the end. Alison walks down the aisle next, and her large smile feels foreign after all the worries from the last few months. The crowd of family and close friends whisper to each other about how beautiful she looks, and it causes her smile to grow even more when Ron mouths his own ‘You look perfect, love.’ Ron smiles too, but nobody tells him how handsome he looks. They all know that something is wrong, especially because of how thin he looks in his suit, but they clap and cheer regardless, congratulating the young couple. Nobody knows that their friend, cousin, brother, nephew and son is dying. They convince themselves that it must just be that he got too nervous about the wedding and stopped eating. Everyone lies to themselves because Ron is lying to them, and he hates himself for it each time they try and pass him more of the wedding cake Amelia made them, saying he needs to fatten up. Nobody hears him throw it up in the bathroom a few minutes later.

They end the day as Mr and Mrs. Fitzgerald, and a part of Ron feels guilty for taking on a bride that will be a widow in less than three weeks, but he allows himself this one selfish thing. She’d once asked him what he wanted to do before he died, over a year before this whole mess started. He said he wanted to get married to her, have children, move to a beautiful country for a few years and show his kids the world, and grow old with her by his side. He had no children, wouldn’t grow old, and had no time to see the entire world. Marrying her was the one thing he could do, and needed to do.

He asks her to promise to never take her wedding ring off until he’s long gone, claiming it’s a family tradition to not take off a wedding ring until the other one is dead. She knows it’s engraved, and curiosity teases her every second that it’s on her hand that day, but she agrees. A part of her knows that’s important for reasons beyond family tradition and the mention of death causes the worry in her stomach to grow, but suddenly he’s tugging her into a car to drive to their airport for their honeymoon and she shakes off the thoughts.

----

Ron kisses her in the backseat for the entire ride, but she notices him having to pull away for air more often than he used to. She asks him why at one point, and he grins and says it’s because he takes her breath away. The brunette calls him cheesy, and he says that it’s her fault for marrying such a cheesy man.

“Somehow I don’t regret marrying you despite that display of your poor taste in humour,” she retorts, kissing him once again.

He silently begs her to still not regret that in a few weeks as he slides his tongue along her bottom lip, requesting entry. She lets him in like she always does, the familiar battle for dominance beginning. She wins for the first time in a long time, but says nothing. Her mouth has found much better uses than expressing her fears, after all.

----

His hands shake just the tiniest bit as he undresses her, his eyes growing darker as each new inch of skin and lingerie is revealed as her dress slides down and off her body. The lacy bra and underwear make him shiver, but it’s the white thigh-high stockings that cause him to growl. Soon enough she is on her back in their expensive Italian hotel room, those damned stockings being the only item to remain on her.

“You are the most beautiful woman I will ever meet,” he whispers against her neck, one hand trailing up her thigh as the other palms her breast. The juxtaposition of her soft skin and her hardened peaks cause him to groan, and his movements cause her to whimper. He knows that he could die happy in that moment, preparing to make love to his wife. Suddenly the idea of collapsing dead in that instant causes him to chuckle, always being one to use humour to distract from his fear. Alison freezes, her eyes going wide.

“Why are you laughing?” she asks quietly, her insecurities as present as always. He was glad that some things were always the same, even if it broke his heart that she had no idea how stunning she is.

“I thought to myself ‘I could die happy right now, being married to her, about to make love to her’ and then imagined how awkward it would be if I died while fucking you.” He laughs loudly, and so does she, blissfully unaware that it was actually a possibility.

“You’re such a loser,” she teases, rolling them over so that she can straddle his bare hips. “Now enough foreplay. We have the rest of our lives for that. You know, if we don’t fuck tonight, our marriage is technically void,” she teases, her teeth grazing his ear.

Her words hit him more than she could have ever thought they would, and he immediately grabs her hips and aligns himself, thrusting inside of her as she begins to chant his name, occasionally calling him her husband. It was enough to distract him from thinking about his mortality.

----

Two weeks later and his sickness is too obvious for him to lie about and for her to deny. She begs him for answers for days, pounding on the bathroom door as he throws up, throwing pillows at him in frustration when he falls asleep every thirty minutes. Alison knows that her anger is unfair, and that if he was sick she was being too hard on him, but that little bit of denial still lingered. Each time she yelled, she expected him to roll his eyes. But he never did. Each time she threw pillows at him, she waited for him to throw them back, only for him to try and only make them move an inch. He was weak, and tired, and the sadness in his eyes was growing more and more. She finally cracks after he passes out as he’s cooking dinner and refuses to go to the hospital. He sits on the couch as she paces in front of him, her hands moving fast in random gestures as she screams. He doesn’t hear most of it, but he knows what she’s asking. She’s asking questions that he doesn’t want to answer, but he can feel it in his bones that he’ll be gone at any time and he wants to tell her before she has to wake up to a dead husband. He’s so impossibly tired, and he feels as though the little tether that’s been slowly easing him towards death is now yanking harder and harder. So he finally decides to tell her, his eyes shut tightly.

“I’m dying, Al.”

His words come out so quiet that he thinks she might not hear them, but she does, and her crying stops. For her, everything stops. It’s as though the world has stopped spinning, and she thinks it might as well. It was three words that stopped her world once before, that first ‘I love you.’ It seems oddly fitting that three words also tear it apart.

“What do you mean you’re dying?” she whispers, and he can feel her sitting beside him on the couch.

“I never got surgery. It was too late for that.”

She wants to be calm, and comfort him like he’d done for months, but suddenly all the little pieces add up. It all passes through her mind at a rapid pace: the way he said ‘I’ll love you till death do us part, and forever after that’ in his vows. The weird little mentions of his mortality. The weight loss, the lack of breath, the sleeping, the passing out, the way he kept writing her letters despite never leaving her side. It all clicks into place, and it makes her angry. She’s furious at him for not saying, and at herself for not begging for answers sooner. Had she not noticed every change? Had she not asked? She should have asked more. As she always does, Alison blames it on herself, and gets mad at him all at once. Her pacing resumes as soon as she jumps off the couch, her hands no longer gesturing wildly but shaking violently instead.

“How the fuck could you not tell me something like that? God, you…you knew before we got married? An-and you just thought you’d leave that out? I…How could you do that to me? Just let me marry a dying man and not fucking mention it? What, didn’t think it was important? You lied to me all this time, and…and you just didn’t care? Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

She’s screaming so loud that it takes her a few seconds to realise that Ron has begun to cry quietly, but she can still hear the little intakes of breath, and soft sniffling now that her screaming has stopped.

It takes less than a second for her to begin to cry herself, sitting beside him. The mood shifts from anger to agony as he buries his head in her lap, her shaking hands beginning to stroke his short hair. Finally, after months of him silently comforting her, it is her turn to comfort him.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” he sobs against her skirt, his hands clawing at the material with the desperation that only a dying man could possess.

“I’m sorry for yelling.” Her voice is distorted by her tears and the way her throat seems to be closing in on her, but he understands, and he simply shakes his head as if to tell her not to apologise. They remain like that, both crying as if it’ll make a difference for nearly an hour before they move to their bed. For the first time Ron asks her to help him walk, and she realises that this must have been harder on him than on her. He’d gone months without asking for help despite needing it, leaving himself post-it notes on his bedroom door so he’d remember to make her coffee before she woke up, ordering in take-out so she’d not have to cook, all the while struggling to even walk normally so she wouldn’t have to worry.

Ali doesn’t say anything, but as she helps him remove his jeans and aids him into sweatpants, she knows that she could never regret marrying him. He was strong for her, impossibly strong, and she loves him all the more despite her frustration. A part of her knows that nothing would have been different except for both of them being sad for months instead of him bearing the brunt of the anguish. He knows this too, and he’d rather carry the weight of the world on his shoulders instead of sharing it with her. Without realising it, she’d given him his dying wish; All he wanted was for her to be happy, even for a while.

They curl up in bed, his arm wrapped around her, her hands twining with his as he kisses her every few seconds. The two of them seem to have a silent agreement to not expect too many words from the other, only talking in short sentences. Alison knows terrified he must be, and Ron knows how shocked she must be too. They excuse each other’s bluntness.

“How long have you known?”

“Ever since the results of my last MRI. They told me then.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted us to be happy for my final weeks…I didn’t want to feel like you were only with me out of pity. I wanted to just be…us. Ron and Ali, not the poor young couple.”

She pauses, gripping his hands a little tighter. He’s so fragile now that it hurts him, but he says nothing. He uses some of his strength to squeeze her hand too. “Final weeks? I…But…I…How soon?”

He buries his head in the crook of her neck, tossing one of his legs over hers under the sheets, needing to be as close to her as possible. “Any day now. I wouldn’t have told you, but I feel like it’s going to be soon.”

“How soon?”

She hates his honesty, and so does he, but there’s no time for lies anymore.

“You know how they say you can tell when you’re hours away from death? Despite knowing for months that you’re dying, soon you just…feel it one day?”

Alison doesn’t need him to continue. His rhetorical questions are answer enough. Her sobbing resumes, but he can’t cry anymore. He’s too tired.

He uses his last bit of strength to make love to her slowly once her tears have stopped, and as he kisses her scars like he always has, she allows herself to pretend. He does too. As his hips roll against hers, and his thin arms pin hers down, they pretend that she couldn’t easily get out of his grip these days. They pretend to ignore the way Ron has to stop occasionally, gasping for air. They pretend dozens of things, but most of all they pretend that this isn’t the last time they’ll be like this together.

It’s one last act of betraying the truth, of running from it, and Ali can’t help but smile back at Ron when he grins at her as they both reach their orgasms together, because this was them. They weren’t death, or tumours, or a future widow and her soon-to-be dead husband. No, they were Ronald and Alison Fitzgerald, the couple that defied the laws of time and space to be together. They were Ron losing 93% of arguments, even if he was right because his anger always turned him into an asshole, and Alison apologising 99% of the time regardless. They were Ron spending half his money on things for her, despite Alison only asking for 2% of them, and feeling guilty 97% of the time. They were Ron feeling jealous 99% of the time Alison mentioned other men, and him denying it almost all of the time. They were Ron knowing deep down from day one that he would marry this bizarre girl from another world who let him make murder jokes on their first day in an abandoned mental ward, and Alison knowing that, at the end of the day, leaving behind her world was the best mistake the entire Universe ever made, because her world was always meant to be with Ronald Fitzgerald.

As they fall asleep, both of them aware that Ron would most likely not wake up, they realise how little so many things matter. It doesn’t matter that Ron would have survived if he forgot to make Alison coffee two months earlier. It doesn’t matter that Alison could have helped him if he admitted he had headaches at least four weeks before he got diagnosed. It doesn’t matter that Ron forgot to shut the blinds over 92% of the time (though he claims it’s more like only 23% of the time.) It doesn’t matter that Alison said she didn’t love him during three arguments, or that Ron broke his promises over eight times. It doesn’t matter that Alison refused his first proposal, or that he proposed before she was ready and still got mad. It doesn’t matter that he ate food she bought especially for herself 60% of the time, or that he forgot to buy things she asked for 29% of the time.

All that mattered at the end of it all was that Ron loved Alison every second of every hour of every day of every month of each year since he met her and Alison loved him all the same.

They tell each other this fact, this absolutely certain fact that was more certain than even Ron making Alison her morning coffee. They whisper “I love you” to each other over and over as sleep pulls Alison into dreamland and Death finally tugs Ron into its waiting arms.

----

Alison doesn’t attend his funeral, refusing to leave her bed. She might feel guilty for it one day, but she got to say goodbye to Ron already. Saying goodbye to a box means nothing to her. Instead she wears the smelliest shirt of his she can find in the clothes hamper, needing to breathe him in. She’d practically screamed at Jasper when he tried to help her by cleaning. She wanted every little piece of Ron left just the way it is.

It takes her a week to read the letter that he left her, too scared to read the ring just yet.

“To the love of my life,

I felt like I should be really romantic in this letter, but I’m an artist, not a poet, and basically this is my way of telling you that I gave up on fancy language after the ‘To the love of my life’ bit.”

She begins to cry straight away because the letter was already so Ron, and she can hear his voice in her head.

“I hope you forgive me for not telling you. I really did think it was the best thing for you, I promise. I love you so much, and nothing I write here can express just how much that is. You’re my soulmate, and that gives me some comfort. They say soulmates always meet again in their next life, right? This isn’t goodbye, not really. This is ‘See you soon’ and ‘I hope you’re as gorgeous in our next life.’ That was a joke. You better be as gorgeous in our next life. That was a joke too. Man, jokes sound horrible on paper, babe. I promise I’ll love you even if you’re  like…a whale. Oh man, imagine if we’re whales in our next lives? This is officially the worst farewell letter. I should keep it short.

You’re everything, Al. You were always everything, and will always be everything. The time I had with you was far too short, and I wish I had time to see our kids, to watch you grow old with your hand in mind, but life didn’t work out that way. I don’t mind though. I died happy, right? I died with you by my side, hopefully, and that’s all that mattered to me. You’re all that ever mattered.

Be happy, love. That’s all I want. I want you to be happy, and do whatever it takes to do so. Move on from me if you need to, but let’s face it, nobody could love you more than I do. It’s impossible. That’s the one impossible thing about us that can’t be changed. Nobody could ever, ever come close to loving someone like I loved you.

I can’t wait to see you again. If the world is any good at all, it’ll happen. I’ll skip Universe’s if I have to. I figure it’s my turn to do that next time.

I love you, I love you, I love you.

Forever yours,

Ron.”

----

She takes the letter as his final goodbye to her, and considers the part about doing whatever it takes to be happy as permission as her hands reach for the bottle of pills. She takes the entire bottle before grabbing a pen and paper, writing a quick letter to whoever finds it first. She tips out the entire jumbo bag of dog food for Nova, knowing that someone would come before he ate it all anyways.

She listens to the song Ron recorded for her as the haze begins to set in, throwing on every shirt of hers that she can manage to breathe him in all the more before crawling in to bed. The ring is slid off her finger, desperate to read it before Death’s arms take her too.

Inside is a simple message, one she’s heard before, but loves all the same.

“To my everything, I love you more than life itself.”

A small smile makes its way onto her lips as she slips the ring back onto her finger, refusing to die without it attached to her hand. Death does not scare her, because life held no meaning anymore.

----

The newspapers take of a tragic Romeo and Juliet-esque death of two young lovers, unable to face life without each other. People mourn the loss of the pair, their family and friends unable to bear the funerals so close together.

Years later, and miles and miles away, a lonely male whale has swum much further than he should have, singing a gorgeous song to the depths of the ocean. He is sure that nothing will answer him, as nothing had answered since his mother left him once he was old enough.

A short distance away, a female whale sings back as she approaches, unable to process the bizarre feeling of contentment that her large body is suddenly filled with.