Title: Five Ways Thomas Mitchell Doesn’t Die
(And One Way He Does)
Rating: R
Warnings: Death!fic, mentions of
suicide, the Holocaust and cancer.
Summary: Five ways
Thomas Mitchell dies. This is a tie in to Fade
to Black, number four is a continuation of it
and this story contains the same characters. Slash.
The S.S. guards order them to line up
in front of the giant pit they had spent all morning digging, calling
out numbers to line up in front of them. Thomas sees a guard grab
Anthony roughly by the arm and shove him into the growing line, sees
Nathan, the only guard who seemed to care about the prisoners and
feel bad for what they were doing, bite his lip and stare at his
feet. Thomas doesn’t even stop to think. As soon as the other
guard’s back is turned, he lunges forward, grabbing Anthony by the
arm, the same place the guard did, and throws him towards the other
line of prisoners. He watches Michael grab him and hold him back and
Thomas faces forward, where Anthony was meant to be, feeling Nathan
walk by him and brush his shoulder as gently as he can.
When they’re marched, single file, to the edge
of the pit, they’re forced to kneel in front of it one by one. As
Nathan’s gloved hand, heavy on his shoulder, pushes him gently to
the ground, he blocks out everything. He blocks out Anthony’s
distant shouts and the feel of cold metal on the back of his head,
focusing on the only the memory of the songs Nathan would sing as he
slipped Thomas and his friends an extra crust of bread, and the feel
of Nathan’s hand on his shoulder.
When Nathan gets the call on his cell
phone, Thomas’s mom frantically screaming something about Thomas’s
balcony and too many pills and oh god, what if he fell, he runs out
of his house, and he doesn’t even think to get help as he leaps
into his car. He only thinks to call 911 when he gets stuck behind a
three-car-pileup on the highway, and he gets to Thomas’s apartment
only a few minutes before he can even hear the sirens, staring up at
Thomas’s crumpled body on the balcony.
Thomas never wakes up.
They’re out hunting the vampires
again, and Thomas runs over to help two screaming girls, and Nathan,
who had been missing for days, is right there, sucking on his neck
like a lover.
The only light he sees from then on
are the stars reflecting in Nathan’s eyes.
It’s the end of the world, and
Thomas’s seen hellbeasts and the four horsemen of the apocalypse
and the living dead and all of his friends die in front of him, so
he’s not at all surprised when Nathan, covered in blood, walks up
behind him and whispers his name. He puts one hand on Thomas’s
shoulder and the other around his throat, and Thomas isn’t
surprised at all that just before everything turns black, he thinks
he hears Nathan say the word ‘love.’
Nathan stares a long time at Thomas,
dwarfed in clean, white, starchy sheets and bandages and I.V. lines.
He stares at his shoes, the x-ray chart of Thomas’s brain and the
dark blot on it. He stares at all the flowers on his bedside table.
He stares at everything but Thomas’s heart monitor, as the doctors
and nurses pile in and lead Nathan outside. When they try to talk to
him, all he can hear is the long, droning whine of the flat-lining
monitor and failing heart.
Every time Thomas looks at Nathan, he
dies a little bit more inside.
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