Don't Wake Me Up | Chapter 9 [End 2/2]

            When Darcy came to, it was to the sound of a patient monitor beeping. His eyes drifted slowly open, and he saw the white ceiling of the hospital he used to work at above his head. A sunbeam from the window made it look golden, however. For a long moment, he just sat there, blinking every so often as he stared straight up. He was confused.

            The last thing he remembered was pain in his shoulder and back/chest area. He had looked up and seen Ose. He still remembered the words that had been said to him.

            “You always were a pain in my a*s.”

            He had died again, he was sure of it. Yet, once more, he seemed to be very much alive. His shoulder still hurt like hell, but his chest and back felt fine. It wasn’t until then that he recognized the feeling of a full-chest shoulder cast wrapped around his body. Well, that might explain the pain. Trying to sit up, he unconsciously produced a low grunt from the back of his throat, and that prompted someone sitting in a chair to his right to look up.

            “Darcy?” Just by the sound of his voice, Darcy knew it was Bradley, but he glanced over anyway. The computer teacher gave him a small, relieved smile, but he didn’t return it. If they were alive, it meant that Ose was gone, and if Ose was gone, that meant Ansel was gone, too.

            “How did we get here?” The doctor asked. As he spoke, he realized how much his face hurt. It felt like he’d been in a massive fist fight, though he had no recollection of one.

            “I called an ambulance for you. There was a lot of blood.” The teacher looked down somewhat. “No wound, though.”

            Of course.

            “Where’s Ansel?” As he hesitantly toed this topic, Darcy looked down at his own lap. He wasn’t expecting an answer that would do anything but make him cry in grief, so instead he changed the question: “Ose?”

            “Ose is in Hell.” Bradley replied. “I think.”

            “You think? We need a little bit better than assumptions about this, Bradley.”

            “Well, it’s just that I didn’t exorcise him.”

            Darcy glared at him, but didn’t say anything.

            “I mean, I couldn’t. I didn’t have any rituals, and hell if I know how to exorcise supreme Night Demons from memory alone. Plus, you would have died if I did that.”

            “But then why is Ose ‘in Hell’? You didn’t exorcise him. Shouldn’t he still be here?”

            “Funny story,” Bradley scratched his beard, “involving something I didn’t know: demons can exorcise each other without any chants.”

            Darcy raised a brow, prompting Bradley to attempt an explanation.

            “I wasn’t there for a lot of it, but when I was dragged to you two, you were wearing a cloak, too. Dantalion took over your body after…” He looked at Darcy’s chest. “… y’know, that happened. Anyway, he and Ose started to fight. Something about a conflict of interests, I guess? Like I said, I wasn’t there for a lot of it.”

            Already, Bradley’s story was a lot for him to take in, but still he asked, “Then what happened?”

            “Dantalion pinned Ose down, and then there was a lot of fire. He said something about keeping his side of some sort of deal. Ose was screaming. Man, it was so loud. All of his demons were making the most horrible sounds. Then, next thing I knew, it was over. It was just you, Ansel, and myself in that park.”

            “Whoa, hold on,” Darcy held up his free hand, “let’s backtrack a little bit. Ansel was there?”

            His answer came in the form of the room’s door, off to the left, opening. Ansel stepped in, looking like he, too, had been in a huge fight judging by the bruises on his face. He held a can of soda in his left hand, a cup of coffee in his right, and had a pastry sticking out of his mouth�"it looked like some sort of fritter. He seemed to try saying something to Bradley through the pastry (unintelligibly, of course), but froze the second he noticed that Darcy was awake and staring at him. He was so stunned that he ended up dropping the can of soda, and when it hit the floor, he looked down in apparent horror. “Oh no!!” He tried to shriek, but it was heavily muffled by the fritter in his mouth.

            Half from amusement and half from a whole mix of positive emotions, Darcy beamed at his friend. “Ansel…!” He couldn’t figure out how the young man was still around, much less alive, but he didn’t care. They were together again, and that was all that mattered.

            The former insomniac put the cup of coffee down on the table beside Darcy, then bent down and picked up the can of soda�"it was dented now, and he frowned at it. After putting it down on the table as well, making sure it could stand, he finally took the fritter out of his mouth, placing it on the top rim of the can. Then, he wiped his hands down on his pants and finally hugged Darcy. “Oh, man, I thought you were dead!” He told him.

            The embrace hurt his left shoulder, but he ignored his pain and wrapped his right arm around Ansel. He laughed a bit, then responded, “I could say the same about you!”

            Bradley smiled gently and stood up. “I’ll leave you two to your own devices.”

            As the computer teacher headed for the door, Darcy felt a pang of sympathy and what could have been guilt. “Bradley?” He called after him. The teacher turned to look at him from the doorway, so he continued, “I’m sorry about your�"”

            Before Darcy could even finish, Bradley’s fiancée stepped into sight from the hallway and looked at her to-be-spouse. “Are we going?” She asked him.

            “Don’t be,” Bradley said to the doctor, “she’s alive, too. Take care, guys.”

            As Bradley left with his fiancée, closing the door behind himself, Darcy shot Ansel a confused look. The younger man merely shrugged.

            “I guess everything turned out okay in the end this time.” The former insomniac remarked. He walked around the bed, picked up the chair Bradley had been sitting on, and carried it over to the other side of the bed. There were more chairs in the room, but as was his way, he only seemed to want to move the one that had already been displaced.

            “Hey, do you remember anything?” Darcy inquired. “About last night, I mean.”

            Ansel finished sitting down and lowered his eyes to the edge of the bed. “I remember a little bit too much.” He admit.

            “Was I really possessed?”

            Ansel pointed his finger at him off-handedly and awkwardly confided, “That, I don’t remember. The last thing I remember is literally stabbing you in the back.”

            Darcy looked away and sighed quietly. He supposed he would just have to take Bradley’s word for what happened and let it remain a mystery beyond that. There was a short silence in the room that was interrupted by a brief sniffle from Ansel.

            “Hey, uh… Darc?”

            “Yeah?”

            “Those things that demon said… about Jay and I conspiring against you? It, uh… It wasn’t�"”

            “You know what?” The doctor revealed, “I don’t actually care either way.”

            Ansel blinked. “You… You don’t?”

            Darcy shook his head. “Poppet, I love you like family; unconditionally. God knows why,” he quipped, “because, really, we’ve only known each other for four and a half months tops, haven’t we?”

            Ansel chuckled softly. “When you put it that way, it sounds like we’re reckless.” Then he randomly joked in a low whine, “Oh no, Darcy, you never told me you were a chick!”

            “What?” Darcy, completely confused, laughed.

            “Just for the record,” Ansel picked up the fritter and took a bite, and as he chewed he concluded, “if I was a chick, I would totally let you bang me.”

            “Ansel!”

            The two of them shared a hearty laugh, which was one of the things Darcy had desperately missed when his friend was gone. In that moment, he was incredibly thankful that he’d met Bradley Carlisle, even despite yesterday being among the worst days of his life. He had his best friend back, and all it had cost was one day of torment and another one of his seemingly unlimited lives�"however, he didn’t intend to die anymore. He didn’t want to test fate, since the saying “third time’s the charm” kept coming back to him. Surely his next death would be his last, especially if Dantalion had followed Ose to Hell.

            Pushing all of that aside, he focused instead on the moment, continuing to laugh with Ansel. They had a lot of lost time to make up for.

---

 

            He was standing in his bedroom, trying to look for something Christmas-y to change into at Ansel’s request, but had found himself distracted by the jar of ashes on the shelf. They were Ansel’s ashes, but Ansel was alive and kicking downstairs, so he found himself somewhat perplexed; should he keep the ashes or scatter them somewhere? He figured it was probably easier to just keep the ashes, unless Ansel grew uncomfortable at the sight of what his prior body had been reduced to. So, instead, he stood there, holding himself with both arms, the left of which hadn’t been too badly broken, and had thus been freed from its cast four days prior.

            It was the 24^th. While the days leading up to that date were some of the happiest days of his entire life, tonight he was very nervous. With everything that had happened between him and Ansel, he’d come to learn at least this much: his time with the young man was not unlimited. For some reason, probably due to the event exactly two years prior, tonight was what Darcy couldn’t help but consider the limit of their time. He worried that something bad would happen. He wouldn’t be able to handle it again if Ansel didn’t come out of the night well.

            “Darc?” Ansel called up for him from the foot of the stairs. “You comin’ down or what?”

            “I’ll be right down,” Darcy hollered back. He waited for a minute or two, trying to work up the strength to go downstairs, before he finally thought, “F**k it,” and forced himself to leave the bedroom. As he was walking down the stairs, he realized that Ansel had started playing some soft Christmas music from the computer against the far wall of the living room�"specifically The Carpenters’ version of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas. When he stepped down the last step and turned to his right, he saw Ansel standing beside the back of the couch. He had changed into one of the ugliest red Christmas sweaters Darcy had ever seen, and he looked like he was fighting back a fit of laughter.

            “Like it?” He sniggered. “Molly got it for me as a joke.”

            Darcy gently shook his head. “You two were made for each other.”

            As the two of them sat down on the couch, Ansel laughed. “I’m just surprised that she and I are still together.”

            “It’s only been two weeks.” Darcy pointed out.

            “I’ve never had a relationship last longer than half a week.”

            “Well, who’s the loser now?” The doctor teased.

            “Oh, right, because you’re a regular Mr. Steal Your Girl.” Ansel gibed back light-heartedly.

            They laughed, and then they were quiet. There was a decorated tree in the corner of the room that glowed at them as they idly watched a yule log burning on the television. The longer they were silent, the tenser Darcy grew. Eventually, he glanced over at Ansel, who was lost in thought.

            Finally�"abruptly�"the younger man spoke, albeit somewhat vacantly. “I’ve changed my mind.”

            “About what?”

            “I think I want to start a family someday. Settle down with someone.”

            “With Molly?” Darcy offered off-handedly with a small smile.

            “I don’t know,” Ansel admit after a beat, “maybe.” Then he stretched his arms and upper body, groaning as he did, before falling back into a less deliberate sitting position. He seemed tired, and that only made Darcy that much more anxious. “I mean,” he continued, “I think she might be my soulmate, but like you said, it’s only been two weeks, so who knows.”

            “Time will tell,” Darcy mumbled.

            Ansel smirked and briefly raised his eyebrows at him. “Que será, será.”

            “I can only imagine how long you’ve been waiting for an appropriate time to say that.”

            “A helluva long time.”

            “Thought so.”

            Ansel yawned. Noticing how Darcy stared at him in mute apprehension, he managed a small chuckle and waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna die on you again. I just didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”

            Darcy nodded his head slowly. Sure enough, a few minutes later, Ansel’s head was laying gently against his left shoulder. The doctor felt an anxious pit in the bottom of his stomach, but he was soothed every time he felt Ansel’s head bob ever so slightly, being moved by his slow, rhythmic breathing. So, Darcy didn’t move for several minutes, just glancing between Ansel and the fireplace on the TV screen every so often. When he finally felt the younger man was comfortably asleep�"or at least close enough for him to move without waking him�"he carefully pulled up the arm he was laying against and draped it over his shoulders, pulling the former insomniac slightly closer to himself. Then, gently, he rest his head against his friend’s. A tear ran down his cheek, but he wasn’t sure what emotion was causing it. He figured it was happiness. He felt truly peaceful in that moment. He never wanted to get up.

            “Merry Christmas, Poppet…” Darcy whispered, and then he, too, closed his eyes and allowed himself to fall into a deep, contented sleep beside his best friend.