april and other unfinished things

Jude has known since he was six that he’d never have a future.

Sometimes, in the quiet of the night, his parents sit him down at the table like he's a flight risk, a wounded animal, and they ask him gently how he feels. If he wants to talk, to be angry about what they deem “the injustice of it all.” And he always tells them it’s okay, because really, it is. Jude has had long enough to grow around it, to fit his way between its spiky edges, coiled tight so nothing can hurt him.

It’s just …

It’s just that he’s seventeen now, and his coach has pulled him aside to say the worst thing he could ever possibly say to Jude: I want you to be captain next year

Next year. As if Jude can promise that. As if he’s ever had any choice in the matter.

Because here’s what his coach doesn’t know: Jude was six the first time he ever brought someone back to life.

In the overgrown grass at the park that day, it didn’t feel significant. It didn’t feel like anything at all. He wandered toward the old lady on the ground like a siren call, something intrinsic, some instinctive part of his soul reaching out. He touched her once, quick, a hand around her ankle, and that was that. She came back to life with a dozen strangers crowded over her, and he ran back to the playground to get in line for the slide.

“See?” he told Will later, laughing. “I always had my priorities straight.”

It felt like nothing then, and he’d give anything in the entire world to make it feel like nothing now.

“I–” he starts, and has to swallow hard against the ache of it. He blinks at the volleyball in his hands, at the blinding lights of the gym above him. He says, through numb lips, “I’ll think about it,” and watches his coach walk away.

When Will finds him a few minutes later, he takes one look at Jude’s face and sighs. “Coach talked to you.”

It’s not a question. It never is with Will. He purses his lips together, snatching the volleyball from Jude’s white-knuckled grip, and Jude says, “Uh, rude,” like a reflex he doesn’t quite feel, half a beat too late and something unsteady in his voice.

Will gives him a long, piercing glance. It’s one of those kinds that usually precedes a lecture about “taking care of yourself, Jude,” and “not being a complete idiot absolutely all the time.” Jude must look particularly miserable though, because Will just kneels to start stuffing things into Jude’s duffel bag.

“No,” he says. “What’s rude is you coming to my house this morning and leaving an empty carton of milk in the fridge.”

Jude huffs. “Excuse you. There was still milk in there. It’s not my fault you’re a heathen who likes to waste precious resources.”

“A teaspoon of milk is hardly a precious resource,” Will points out, and stands again with a pop-pop of his knees settling back into place, one hand slinging Jude’s duffel over his shoulder.

Old man, Jude thinks, distantly, and then, Oh, god.

Will looks so much like his grandpa sometimes that Jude often gets lost between realities, catapulted violently into the past. He was six the first time he brought someone back to life, and he was nine the day Will’s grandpa died. Old enough and experienced enough to do something, to help. Old enough that he still has nightmares about the way he stood there, feet glued to the floor, a rotating cast of nurses trying chest compressions and electric shocks and yelling frantic jumbles of medical words Jude couldn’t understand. He’d watched and done nothing, and Will’s grandpa had died, and there was nothing more to it. Over and done.

He knew it then for sure, at nine, in the same way he knew most things without understanding the weight of them. But it rang out to him in the years after, under laughter, under the sounds of his friends playing together, on those sleepy and rainy days tucked away in the warmth of his bed.

Alone, alone, alone.

“You should take it,” Will says softly. “You’d be a great captain.”

Jude lets out a shaky breath. The world tilts dangerously under his feet. “I can’t,” he whispers. “You know I can’t.”

He wants to yell that Will knows he doesn’t have a next year, that both of them have known since they were kids that one day this gift he was born with would turn on him, would start taking his own life in exchange for every second given to other people. He wants to yell that he thought he would have longer than this, longer than seventeen years, but he doesn’t. He’s hit the point of no return, and he can’t stop it now. He never should have fallen in love with volleyball. He knows, he knows it with his entire heart, and, god, he’s made such a terrible mistake.

“Jude–” Will says, but Jude can’t listen anymore. Will is going to say what he always says: this doesn’t have to be the thing that ends you. You can give it up, call it quits. If you stop now, you can still have a future. You still have time.

Jude remembers Will at five, at eight, the way he used to confess, “I think I might love my grandpa even more than I love my parents,” in moments of stillness between them, like it was a mortal sin he couldn’t say too loud. He remembers Will’s grandpa teaching them how to tie their shoes, teaching Will to fish, to play chess, the two of them giggling as they stole cookies from the kitchen and slipped one to Jude, back before Will became so serious all the time.

Sometimes Jude wonders if Will would hate him if he knew the truth about his grandpa. If he thinks Jude had actually tried to bring him back at all.

“Please stop,” he begs, and Will does, because he’s lost this fight enough times to understand he won’t win it here.

Jude let Will’s grandpa die. He isn’t going to let anyone else die because of him.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly, watching the unhappy curl of Will’s mouth. He wishes Will smiled more.

“No, you’re not,” Will says, not angry but like it’s a fact. He stares at Jude a moment longer, another argument playing across his face, and then he grabs Jude’s shoulder and pushes him toward the doors. “You're such a pain in the ass.”

Jude twists in his grip, swatting uselessly at his hands. “Hey!” he objects, and leaves the gym and his imaginary future and his coach’s words behind.

He doesn't have too many memories of that day in the park all those years ago as a kid. Time has blurred most of its sharpness, and he's older now, a thousand lives between him and that boy.

What he does remember is this: the sound of the birds singing sweetly in the treetops above, and the way his mom looked at the old lady on the ground, alive and breathing again, given a second chance at life, and said softly, like someone had pulled the rug of the world out from under her feet, “Oh no.”