David was playing “Music Box Dancer” in the drawing room. Hyacinth smiled. He had been rather out of sorts lately, not in his usual dramatic fashion, just sort of quiet and distracted. It had been a relief, for a few days, but now she was tired of it. She was used to crazy. She missed it when there was a lull. If it was “Music Box Dancer” now, perhaps he might be persuaded to invite over some insufferable people and insult them later.

She knocked politely on the door, opened it a few inches and asked, “David, are you being sarcastic in here?” This was the equivalent of serving a high lob to an expert tennis-player.

No, Hyacinth, he would reply, without missing a note. I am performing Wagnerian opera. It’s only the man with the furs and the horns is a little late.

No, Hyacinth. I’m building a new automaton. Do see if you can figure out what’s wrong with this blowtorch.

No, Hyacinth. There is a very clever mouse in the piano and I am providing him a bit of accompaniment. He’s treble and I’m bass.

He stopped playing and sighed. “No. I don’t know. It’s sort of pretty, don’t you think?”

She wavered in the doorway and nearly pulled the door shut trying to steady herself. “Oh, very funny,” she managed with a smirk.

“I wasn’t really trying to be,” he said. He began to play again, from the beginning of the last phrase. “I’ve spent such a long time making fun of it, I never really listen to it. It’s not really bad.”

“It’s precious,” Hyacinth said, which was low praise. “It’s cute.”

“Maybe that’s all right,” he replied.

She entered and sat on the sofa, considering him with her head in one hand. “I’ve never seen you so vicious.”

“I wasn’t trying to be.”

She shook her head. “Is this a new game or something?”

“No, just… New thinking, I suppose.” He continued to play. “I’m dying, Hyacinth.”

Oh, now that was more like it. She rolled her eyes and grinned. “Yes, David, a little more each day. Shall we cover the mirrors?”

“No. Kind of a lot all at once, actually. They think maybe a few months. Probably not a year.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” she said. “Who thinks that? The astrologer over at the Times?”

“The doctors over at the hospital. Well, I mean, not all of them. Apparently it’s not impressive enough to warrant all of them. It’s just a little cancer.”

She hit the couch cushion with one hand and stood up. “David, this is not funny.”

“I don’t know. I think it is a little. I was always so scared of getting old.” He smiled at her. “That’s a little funny, isn’t it?”

She left him, she slammed the door, and then tramped up the stairs to Barnaby’s room. She did not knock. She opened the door, she pointed a finger and she said, “Barnaby, make him stop it!” She was crying.

He abandoned his papers and bundled her in his arms. “Why? What’s he doing?” He heard “Music Box Dancer” coming from the piano downstairs. “Is he being sarcastic?”

“He says he’s dying and he thinks ‘Music Box Dancer’ is pretty!”

“He’s teasing you,” Barnaby said. He retrieved a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed her eyes.

She snatched it from him and blew her nose. “Then make him stop!”

“All right, all right. My gods,” he replied fussily. “Hyacinth, I should think by now you’d have a bit of a thicker skin.”

“Yeah, I’m a real delicate goddamn flower!” she snarled. “You go down there and make him stop!”

Barnaby went down there to make him stop. “Music Box Dancer” stopped. Hyacinth crept to the top of the stairs and heard voices arguing. One voice, anyway. Barnaby. There came the sound of another door slamming, the same door slamming. Barnaby exited the drawing room and mounted the stairs. He climbed three, noticed her standing at the top, and motioned her down. “Come on. There’s no law that says we have to put up with him. He’s just being cruel.”

“What if he’s not?” Hyacinth said weakly.

“Of course he is,” Barnaby replied. He put a hand on her back and guided her to the front door. “You’re old enough to drink in pubs now, aren’t you, Hyacinth?”

“Not really,” she said, shuddering. “But they won’t mind if I’m with you.”

“Then we’ll let him stew for a few hours. That man will do anything for attention. It’s best if we just ignore him for a while.”

They did not drink. They ordered one round and stared at it.

“He’s teasing us,” Barnaby muttered. He tipped his glass and examined the ice. There were no portents of particular note. A small gold cube stating, He is definitely teasing you, and perhaps, David Valentine is a reprehensible human being, would have been welcome.

“This is a little beyond teasing us, Barnaby,” Hyacinth said.

“All right, he’s fucking with us!” Barnaby replied. He slammed the glass down. “That better?”

“No,” Hyacinth said.

They did not look at each other. They looked at the drinks and did not drink them.

“I suppose if he’s this desperate, he might do something to himself,” Barnaby said.

“Up on the roof waiting for us to get home so he can threaten to jump,” Hyacinth agreed with a snort.

“Playing the album,” Barnaby said.

Hyacinth looked up and grinned. “If he’s playing the album, I think we should set it on fire.”

“Matches in the kitchen, aren’t there?” Barnaby said.

“We could put it in the oven.”

“He might have his head in the oven.”

“Good, then he has to watch.”

Barnaby considered his drink and still did not drink it. “We really shouldn’t leave him.”

“No.”

He was still in the drawing room. He was playing “Love of My Life.”

Barnaby smirked at Hyacinth. “Now I know he’s being sarcastic.” They breached the drawing room together.

David stopped playing and looked up. He sniffed and scrubbed his sleeve across his face. He did not look over at them. “I haven’t been a very good friend to you two, have I?”

Hyacinth wavered. Barnaby remained firm and folded his arms, “Frequently you have not been. That is true.”

“I lie a lot.”

“Yes.”

“And I’m stupid. I say stupid things.”

“Constantly.”

He sighed and played a few errant notes with one hand. “If I take you to the hospital with me tomorrow, will you believe them?”

“David…” said Hyacinth.

Barnaby stopped her with a hand. “I’m not entirely certain I would. You might have someone in on it.”

“Yes,” David said. He laughed weakly. “I’m a very clever person. I’ve burned all my bridges, haven’t I?”

“Gleefully,” Barnaby said.

“It’s no good if I cry. It’s no matter if I start making out my will. Or my obituary. I’ve done it all before.” He turned to look at them with a pained smile. “I don’t suppose it makes any difference if I tell you it hurts and I’m afraid?”

“Barnaby, I think he really means it,” Hyacinth said. She was crying again.

“You are going to feel like an utter idiot when he drops this in a few days,” Barnaby said.

“Oh, you really are,” David said, nodding. He was smiling. He was crying too.

Hyacinth sat down next to him on the bench and put both arms around him. He was thin. He had full wardrobes for every size he might be, you couldn’t tell from the way the clothes fit him. But if you sat next to him and held him, he was thin.

“Please make me feel like an idiot, David,” she said. “Do it right now.”

“I’m so sorry, Hyacinth,” he replied.

◈◈◈

“Fuck you, you fucking, lying pigeon!” Barnaby howled from the kitchen. “Fuck you and fuck all of your friends!”

Hyacinth peeped in the door, barefoot and wearing a nightgown. He had been going on for a good half-hour. David said she probably ought to go. “He sounds a bit hostile. Besides, I’m not allowed in the kitchen. Sharp objects, you know.”

Barnaby had gone through several, including the scissors. He had also gone through half a dozen pigeons. The cage was on the floor, open and empty. There were white feathers and blood clinging to every surface, and also to him. A few flecks of down were drifting through the air. There were assorted organs on the cutting board. A kidney had been pinned to the wood with a paring knife. Two of the carcasses had been flung at the opposite wall and Barnaby was preparing to heft a third one after them.

“Barnaby, what do they say?” she asked him.

“Lies!” he cried. “Slanderous, lying, cheaply-made inferior pigeons! Rats wrapped in feather dusters! Useless animals! Offal! Tripe!”

“Barnaby…”

“I’ll not repeat it!” he said. “I’ll not lend it credence by repeating it!”

Hyacinth lay a hand on his shoulder and gently coaxed the knife from his hand. “Do you believe him now?” she said.

“I believe nothing,” he replied. He lay both hands on the countertop and bowed his head. “I believe nothing.”

◈◈◈

“Couldn’t it all be replaced?”

“No. Not all of it. Not if you’d like me to live through it, no.”

“What about the gods? What use is it having gods if they can’t fix a little thing like this?”

“It’s not very little. It’s kind of far along. This yellow gentleman did a touch-know on me. It’s the nature of the thing. It grows fast. They could knock it out with medicine, but it grows back.”

“What about both? Medicine and mergers?”

“Well, it would hurt a lot, and I’d probably die anyway. Maybe after longer.”

“Probably and maybe are better than definitely!”

“I-I’m just not very excited about the idea of pain and prolonging the experience.”

“I can’t believe you’re just going to give up! Don’t you like being alive, David?”

“Well, it’s been hard sometimes, Gray, but… I wish it wasn’t happening.”

“Then why don’t we do something about it?”

“Did the pigeons say anything about medicine and mergers, Gray?”

“The pigeons are liars, David. I put no stock in pigeons at all.” He rapped on the drawing room door before opening it. Hyacinth scuttled away and tried futilely to conceal herself behind a potted plant, but he strode past without even a glance in her direction.

David peeked out and smiled at her. “What are you doing back there, dear child? You’re going to dirty your lovely dress.”

“Thought I saw a mouse,” she said.

He offered his hand and shooed her nearer. “Come into the kitchen, then. We’ll make him a tiny little cheese sandwich and leave it. Cat’s away, let the poor creature enjoy himself while he can.”

◈◈◈

They threw a party. They called it “The Last Hurrah.” It wasn’t obvious enough to arouse suspicion and they told no one of the circumstances. David frequently threw parties with morbid overtones. Anything birthday-related would be entitled, “(name) is One Year Closer to Death!” David had been one year closer to death more times than he’d had real birthdays, at least ones that he would admit to. “The Last Hurrah” was practically quaint.

He bought a new dress. A debutante gown. A white one. He thought it was really hilarious: “Well, Hyacinth, you never let me debut you. Certainly you can’t object to letting me debut me.” They had to have it altered slightly, on the day of, taken in. He thought that was pretty funny too.

He didn’t really look too bad. The dress fit him, and he was good with makeup. He had been thinner during the heady days of the band organ, and he hadn’t bothered about makeup then. He played selections from A Night at the Opera, which was fast becoming a new favourite of his, and of course Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and he took requests.

When a laughing woman in pink crinolines asked for “Music Box Dancer,” Hyacinth stamped on her slippered toes and ejected her into the street without ceremony. Her escort, a woman in yellow, followed her, looking somewhat mystified but not too put-out. It was one of David’s parties, after all. There would be another one in a little while.

He hit on Barnaby for a good hour, following him around with a drink in one hand and a woman on each arm, proposing mathematical combinations. “Oh, Gray, you’re going to regret this for the rest of your life! What if you never get another chance?”

“A silver lining,” Barnaby replied pettishly.

Midway through the evening, David disappeared. This was not out of the ordinary to a lot of giddy guests who were familiar with his idiosyncrasies, but Hyacinth was worried and looked for him. She was usually in charge of that anyway, as well as shaming him down from the roof or getting letter openers away from him as necessary. She found him in the upstairs bathroom. He was not gazing raptly into the mirror with his hair hanging or sitting on the edge of the bath and weeping with his hair hanging. He was throwing up into the sink with his hair hanging.

She pulled it back for him.

He smiled faintly at her when he was through. “Bless you, dear child. Have I got any in it?” He had got a little. She helped him rinse it out.

“Hyacinth, I wonder if you might bring me a few of those pills and a shot of vodka?”

She frowned at him and shook her head. “You’re really not supposed to have those with liquor.”

“That’s nonsense! Liquor and pills go together like… Like peanut butter and jelly!”

She folded her arms. “I have a real hard time believing you’ve ever managed peanut butter and jelly, David. That’s poor-people food, isn’t it? Aren’t you more of a chicken-croquettes-type person?”

“I was a great aficionado of peanut butter and jelly in my misspent youth, Hyacinth!” he declared. “In fact, a very dear friend and I once argued over the appropriateness of strawberry jam versus strawberry jelly in the makeup of such a concoction. I was a purist! Naturally, it came down to a duel…” He paled and clutched his hand around the lip of the sink. “I… I really can’t do this, Hyacinth. Please, will you just bring something?”

“David…” She put an arm around him to hold him up.

“No,” he said. He put both hands on the sink and leaned against it. “Please just bring something.”

She brought him liquor and pills. He followed one with the other, then he filled the shot glass from the sink and had a bit of water as well.

“How’s my face?” he asked her.

“Needs a little powder, that’s all,” she told him. She helped him do that.

“All right then,” he said. He smiled. “Let’s knock this bastard out of the park.”

“Round two, everyone!” he cried, taking a seat at the piano. “Let’s have everything the same but more! If there’s not a Brandy Alexander in my hand within the next three minutes, I shall have you all rounded up and shot!” He began to play “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.”

He went to bed with three people that night. Two girls and a boy.

Barnaby locked himself in his room and ignored multiple entreaties that five was a prime number and thus very auspicious.

◈◈◈

It had to be gold. That decision had been made when he had his nose fixed after the duel (whatever it had been about and whenever it had happened). A body could be persuaded to accept other materials as its own, but not disparate ones. With David, it was metal.

The doctors were optimistic about it. Gold for flesh worked best, if not phenomenally. Stone frequently did not work for organs at all. Fleshwork was new and finicky and a bit unsavoury, requiring bits of real dead people. Plant matter was primitive, porous and ineffective. So, if you ignored the extent of the damage and his general physical state, he might be able to come back from it.

Best-case scenario, there would be a lot of pain and a long recovery and he’d never be able to eat what you’d normally call food again, but he wouldn’t be dead.

He had his own room. Because he had quite a lot of money and you could have anything you wanted if you applied enough of it properly. He probably could’ve had his own room with a piano and pretty ladies in it if he wanted that, but he just wanted to be alone. He was scared, and beyond that, he was embarrassed. It was so humiliating to be in pain and have people looking at it. The doctors and nurses were bad enough.

He requested that Barnaby and Hyacinth visit him anyway, even if he was vicious to them, and pay him lots of attention. But no flowers. Flowers were obnoxious and smelly and the whole time you were looking at them they were dying. He only liked flowers when he was having his album.

They brought him an automaton. Hyacinth selected the silver swan that ate fish.

The doctor was yellow and had a serious chain-smoking problem and kept calling everyone “child.” If that was the doctor. He appeared regularly for three days, splitting his time between several extensive surgeries that had been scheduled concurrently. Then he disappeared.

David was quiet for the first three days. Well, they couldn’t see him the first, and he was asleep most of the second. For the third, he was in and out of it, but he seemed to have some idea where he was and who they were. Mostly he told them he was okay, it hurt but he was okay, and no flowers, please — ta. After the doctor (or whoever that was) left, that was when the screaming started.

They were used to screaming out of David, at least they thought they were. Words, most often, but sometimes just howls of indignation. I swear to the gods, I’ll really do it! was popular. As was, You’re horrible! and, Leave me! But it was all the same, even the leave me. It was, I want attention right now! Give it to me!

This wasn’t that. This was pain, and hardly any words. Maybe, oh, gods, or, please, stop. And then, in between, very softly with his eyes closed, he would say that he wanted them to go away, and he seemed to mean it. Please go, okay? Just for right now. I can’t right now. And then another scream.

They spent a lot of time sitting outside his door and pretending they had gone away. Listening, in case he started to sound like he might want them — or at least not mind them — and that it might help.

Barnaby demanded to know where that yellow doctor who kept him quiet had gone. “Not available,” was the answer once. “Recovering,” another time. They were patiently informed that David wasn’t really in more pain, he was just less calm about it. Also, no, there were no drugs and no magic that would put any kind of a dent in it. He was adjusting to the metal, to as much metal as they thought he could stand. That meant a high fever and full-body misery until he either accepted it or it killed him.

But they could try to give him something so he couldn’t remember it very well, if they wanted that.

“Of course we want that!” Hyacinth cried. She also inquired if a medical degree required the removal of a certain percentage of brain matter. “Because I’m midway to my doctoral thesis here!” she snarled, pointing to a scar and a steel plate that could not be seen. Barnaby quite agreed with her, though.

After the fifth day, David started saying that he wanted to go home.

A direct application of money did not get them the results they wanted. Something about “shock” and “shouldn’t be moved.” There was no sufficient sum for allowing a wealthy patron to die of needless trauma. That sort of thing was a reputation-killer and would endanger the patronage of all future wealthy people. Barnaby promised private physicians and a staff of nurses and ‘round the clock care and a new wing for the hospital and none of it made any difference at all.

So they did what David usually did when money and bombast proved insufficient: they went ahead anyway.

Maybe they did it a little more subtly than he would’ve managed himself. Barnaby and Hyacinth had nearly twice as much brain between them, and a little more sense. David might’ve gotten out of the zoo with that penguin if Hyacinth had been there to tell him that obviously it wasn’t going to fit under his coat.

No attempt was made to smuggle David out under a coat. They did not act rashly. They waited until he finished the course of medicine he had been prescribed and the hospital had nothing for him but pain, and then they asked him if he still wanted to go home. When he told them he did — sincerely, in the quiet spaces between his cries — they hired an ambulance.

Money could get you an ambulance, or at least some people who knew how to operate an ambulance and were willing to hitch up the horses and borrow one from the hospital during the quiet hours of an early weekday morning. You could also pay a few nurses to look the other way during the midnight-to-dawn shift when there were fewer of them and any stray patients would be in bed and drugged asleep.

You could not pay David enough to stop screaming, especially if you were going to be moving him, but you could stuff a silk hanky in his mouth and then weld it shut with a steel plate — if you were a determined twenty-year-old woman who had an excellent tutor in metalworking and a flexible sense of morality.

“Oh, he probably won’t remember it anyway,” she said, shielding his eyes with one hand while Barnaby pinned his head to the pillow.

“It’s not as if you’ve never wanted to,” Barnaby agreed.

“Ha,” she managed, faintly.

They got him onto a stretcher and out of the ward and into an ambulance with the doors closed so they could take it off of him as quickly as possible, and then they were sort of afraid to take it off of him.

“It doesn’t make any difference,” Barnaby muttered. “He’s in pain either way. This way he’s quiet.”

Hyacinth sighed. “The other way he can breathe and throw up if he needs to.” She undid the bonds with her hand and threw the metal away. It landed on the floor of the ambulance with a clack.

He did not call them horrible. He didn’t even cry out, not right away. He just cried.

Hyacinth held his head and apologized to him. Barnaby held his hand and said they were taking him home. About halfway there, he either believed them or understood them or just exhausted himself. He quieted and slept.

They woke up half the neighbourhood getting him into the house. Barnaby and the pet doctor they’d hired had to field an inquiry from the police. It helped matters somewhat that you could still hear him going on from downstairs and they obviously hadn’t killed him.

After that first day, when he had once again exhausted himself and slept, he was quieter. It was a combination of things. He’d had almost two weeks to get on top of the metal by then, and to heal from the surgery. Their pet doctor was a little bit freer with the drugs — his payment being contingent upon satisfaction. Also, David was home and he knew it — they knew he knew it, because he didn’t ask to go home anymore, though one time he did sort of fuzzily inquire as to the whereabouts of his swan.

“You’ve accidentally donated it to the hospital,” Hyacinth told him. (They had forgotten to take it with them and they were afraid to go back and get it. Years later, visiting on an unrelated matter, Hyacinth found that they had set it up in the lobby, on a nice little fountain. She broke it for them.)

“How accidentally nice of me,” David said softly, and faded back to sleep.

He came back to them in little pieces like that. The fever lessened, and with it the pain and the drugs. He was having some difficulty with memory, which was only natural when they’d had him scrambled on purpose. They had to keep telling him that, no, he did not have to go back to the hospital. He’d already had it. He was done. They also had to keep telling him how they got him out of the hospital.

Never once did they give him the true story. That would have been an unforgivable failure of imagination.

Barnaby changed the ambulance for various other conveyances, a handsome or a delivery caravan or a victoria. He also claimed they had got David all the way dressed and walked him out the front door.

Hyacinth added a bottle of vodka and a handful of random pills stolen from the nurses’ station as a concession to plausibility. She also invented a police chase, and Barnaby made it bigger.

They were never quite sure which one of them came up with the giraffe. It was possible David had improved enough to start teasing them without letting on and he had added it himself.

The better he was feeling, the worse he behaved, of course. He couldn’t build automatons or play piano or blow things up, but he could play with people and blow them up.

Barnaby and Hyacinth were not so easily rewired, he didn’t really even try with them. They weren’t worth the effort. And there was only the one doctor and he wasn’t in the room very often. He prescribed things and looked at papers.

Oh, but there was a constant supply of nurses! Very young innocent ones and very old jaded ones and every flavour in between. Lots of nice new ones who had no idea what they were getting into, also, because they just kept quitting.

Barnaby and Hyacinth did try to warn them. At least at first. “No. No, no, no. He is not a sweet older gentleman with a slight memory problem who is on a lot of pain medicine. He is entirely used to the pain medicine, he knows exactly what he is doing, and he is evil. He is setting you up to torment you for his own amusement. Please believe us.”

It never did any good. Maybe they’d be suspicious for a few days, but David could be absolutely precious when he put his mind to it. A treasure.

His favourite game was convincing a given set of nurses that another given set of nurses was abusing him. Varying in number and composition depending on what sort of entertainment he desired at the moment, a fair fight or a bloodbath.

He once turned the entire staff of them against one poor little eighteen-year-old girl who thought she was the only nice one. He would just end up with these awful bruises, which he appeared to be making every attempt to deny and hide. Because he was such a dear, helpless person. (Barnaby and Hyacinth knew that bruises were the least of what David was willing to do to himself for attention, and he bruised very easily these days.)

But he invented lots of other games as well. Even Barnaby and Hyacinth, who had to deal with the fallout and find more nurses constantly, would admit to being impressed sometimes. Two matronly women once had a shrieking, hair-pulling fight in the kitchen because one of them was absolutely positive the other one had said something insulting about teacup poodles, for instance. 

David wanted details. Hyacinth said they discussed it civilly and departed friends. Barnaby backed her up on it. David wanted to know what all the screaming had been about, then. “Oh, dear. The poor thing is confused again,” Hyacinth said, patting him. 

“That amazing intellect,” Barnaby added, shaking his head. “It’s sad, really.”

“I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve such vicious, miserable friends,” David replied.

“Would you like us to make you a list?” Hyacinth asked him, grinning.

…Or he would persuade the whole staff that he was a really nice man who had a bad reaction to a particular medication. He could insult them however he wanted then — as long as he timed it right — and they would forgive him. Hyacinth just couldn’t believe it, no matter how many times he did it. “Honestly! How could anyone believe a person can’t handle aspirin?”

The first indication that he had started to fail again, before even the doctor noticed, was that he had stopped eating his nurses. They kept one staff for an entire month with no turnover. Hyacinth speculated that he was planning some larger-than-usual destruction, Barnaby said he was just grateful for the break.

David first claimed to be fine, then bored of nurses, then maybe a little tired. By the time he had got down to admitting he was tired, it was big enough to show up on the touch-know, and the doctor’s expression removed all doubt.

David did not wait to be told or comforted or attended in any kind of rational manner. He lifted a hand for silence, smiled and said, “Wait. Don’t tell me. I’m going to live forever, aren’t I?”

“Naturally!” Hyacinth said, laughing, crying.

Barnaby left. He didn’t even close the door, he just walked off and kept walking.

The doctor stood near the bed looking confused. He had long since come to the conclusion that they were all irretrievably insane, he just didn’t know how best to manage that. The person he spoke to most often had just run off, but the one signing his paycheques was still here. (Hyacinth was actually signing his paycheques. She had learned to forge David’s signatures ages ago. He had helped her with them.)

“Get him, Hyacinth,” David said. “I’ll stay and comfort the poor doctor.”

Hyacinth didn’t need telling twice. She was a little ashamed to need telling once. David had been coping with this better since day one, screaming aside. There was pain, and then there was pain.

“Is there any chance the newly-immortal might be released from certain draconian dietary restrictions?” she heard David saying behind her.

“Barnaby, where are you going?” she called out.

He was halfway down the street. If he got into a taxi she was never going to catch him. She was sort of afraid if she didn’t catch him, he’d never stop. She might get a postcard from an island in the south seas someday.

“I’m going to go kill something!” he snapped at her.

“What, and look at the pieces?”

“No! For no reason at all! Something helpless and completely undeserving… and cute! Just to make myself feel better!”

Hyacinth was uncertain as to whether this was meant as sarcasm. “Do you really think it will?”

“Of course it won’t!” He sat down on the curb with his shoes in the gutter and he put his face in his hands.

Hyacinth sat down next to him with a sigh. The hem of her skirt began to wick up mud.

“I’m going to get myself committed to the Walled Garden,” Barnaby said. “Completely involuntary. Permanent. Basket-weaving and public tours on Sun’s Days.”

“This is a new plan or just something you’ve seen?” asked Hyacinth.

“I’m going to drink until I can’t see straight and then throw myself off a bridge!”

“Would this be before or after the asylum?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said softly.

“Well,” said Hyacinth, “I guess we’re going to go back in the house and do our very best to help him die.”

“Help him die?” cried Barnaby. He snatched her by both shoulders and shook her. “Have you been talking to those damn pigeons?”

“No, but what else is left to do?” she answered calmly. “There won’t be any more hospital or surgery or desperate measures. All we can try to do is keep it from hurting him too badly, and make it so he doesn’t have to be alone.”

Barnaby looked up at her. “Hyacinth…” He looked away. “No. You’re right. That’s all. I wish I’d just believed him. I wish I’d never asked those pigeons anything. I wish my tutors had poked out my third eye with a stick and told me to go into business accounting.”

“I don’t think you would’ve made a terribly good accountant, Barnaby,” Hyacinth said, regarding him.

“I might never have met him.”

Hyacinth drew herself upright and planted both hands on her narrow hips, “You would’ve left me to deal with him all by myself? At twelve? With brain damage?”

“Oh, Alice,” said Barnaby. He put his hands on both sides of her face and kissed her on the top of the head. “Without a second thought.”

David was sitting up in bed with a tray in his lap. He had a small dish of something that he was stirring but not eating, and a glum expression. When he saw them, he smiled. “Apparently I can have fruit juice and applesauce or intractable pain. I have decided to go with the fruit juice and applesauce. Gray, if you could keep a couple of chocolate éclairs in the icebox in case I experience a sudden bout of masochism, I would really appreciate it.”

“Will you be needing any whips or chains, or…?” Barnaby said.

“If it would amuse you,” David replied. “Or you could always ask Hyacinth to scour me with her tongue.”

“That sounds sort of obscene,” Barnaby said.

“And really unappetizing,” Hyacinth added.

“Oh, I assure you, I meant that metaphorically. I know one such as myself is simply not to our Alice’s tastes, not even in a dress.”

“If I’m going to taste anything of yours, it will probably be one of those chocolate éclairs,” she said. She smiled. “How is your applesauce, David? Inoffensive?”

He threw it at her.

◈◈◈

Pretending it was all right was a good game, if an increasingly difficult one. David was too tired to manage real deviousness, but he could pull off annoying, and occasionally scathing.

He didn’t bother about the nurses, he neither charmed nor vexed them. He tolerated them as one large single entity and sometimes muttered insults about them in general. He saved all his energy for Barnaby and Hyacinth. He smiled at them, though whether it was genuine or sarcastic depended on how much pain and how much medicine he was dealing with at the moment. Past one threshold and he was like one of those spoiled little rat dogs that hates everything. Past another and it was all just sort of okay, thanks.

Barnaby and Hyacinth preferred him vicious. He knew it and he tried to provide it for them as much as he could.

Crying was accomplished in individual rooms. If Barnaby caught Hyacinth, he would go in and sit next to her and offer a handkerchief. Then he would take her into the kitchen and make her a gin and tonic. If Hyacinth caught Barnaby, she would not go in, but she would leave an iced whisky on the table near his door. He never mentioned this, but she assumed he drank them; sometimes she saw him putting the empty glasses in the kitchen sink.

It was entirely easier when they caught David. He was much better about crying than screaming. Hand-holding and sympathy were all he wanted; he was never particularly put out about dying, just about doing it with a bellyful of gold that was starting to let go and a lot of inevitable pain.

He did not nail Barnaby to the wall on that score, though he certainly could have, at least at the beginning. Not even when he was in rat-mode and he despised everything about Barnaby, including his ties. David had a really twisted but ironclad moral code. Poor fashion sense? Unforgivable. The fact that this is going to hurt a lot more and take a lot longer because of what you made me do? Off-limits. Even when Barnaby apologized about it.

“Honestly, Gray, don’t you like me being alive?”

“I don’t know, David. Apparently,” Barnaby admitted, face in his hands. “Maybe I just like having someone I can blame for all my problems.”

“I’m not taking the blame for that suit. You are fifteen feet away from better clothing, you congenital idiot. Hyacinth has better taste in suits. You want to know why I’m dying? After thirty-five years I am finally sick of trying to dress you. You are absolutely hopeless. I prayed for this. ‘Oh, gods, please give me something easier to cope with than Gray’s taste in clothes!’ This is a blessing!”

But that sort of thing took a lot out of him, and he had less and less to give.

It would’ve hurt anyway, being eaten alive from the inside, but the gold exacerbated things. As the damage got worse, the mergers started to let go. He was literally coming apart at the seams. Pain and drugs and disintegration were fighting a battle inside of him and they all wanted a piece. What remained got paler and vaguer and thinner until it seemed like he was hardly there at all. Just a scarecrow they dressed in David’s nightshirts with the lace cuffs who made occasional smart remarks.

The first time he forgot Hyacinth, she thought he was putting her on. He had just finished throwing up a serving of applesauce and pills into a bucket, along with a certain amount of blood and gold flecks.

“Oh, gods, I am actually vomiting glitter,” he said. “It’s payback for all that metallic eyeshadow.”

“You’re like a hellish new species of fairy,” Hyacinth said.

“How descriptive of you,” he muttered, regarding her blearily. “Are you a new one?”

“A new one of what?” she said.

“Cannon fodder,” he said.

“Yes, David,” she replied. “A brand-new Hyacinth for you to annoy. Were you bored of the old one? This one slaps ridiculous old men who tease her after she’s just got done cleaning up their bucket of glitter.”

“Hyacinth?” He sighed. “I suppose you’ll quit soon, anyway.”

“I haven’t for eight years.”

“Has it been so long?”

“It feels like longer.”

“Yes.” He closed his eyes. “Please don’t quit, Hyacinth. I like you.”

“He’s got a new game, Barnaby,” she told him later. “He’s pretending I’m a nurse. I hate it.”

“Maybe he’s feeling better,” Barnaby said.

She winced. She knew it couldn’t be that.

She made herself a name tag before she went back into his room. HELLO! MY NAME IS HYACINTH, DAMN IT! When he was finally awake enough to notice it, he blinked at it.

“Are you that sick of us calling you Alice?”

She laughed and hugged him. It felt like she had to get through an acre of nightshirt to find him, and he was frail and hollow like a wicker basket. “David! No more games about me being a nurse! Promise me!”

He smiled at her. “No, Hyacinth, no more games about you being a nurse. I was only teasing.”

It wasn’t a game, of course. She knew it then. If he really had been teasing, he never would’ve admitted to it.

When it happened again the next week, she sat down on the bed and she held his hand and she very patiently told him who she was and what they meant to each other and that he’d saved her life two times and that she loved him.

He said, “Oh,” and went back to sleep.

It didn’t really matter.

So, after that, whenever it happened she was just whoever she wanted to be. A spy. The police fielding a noise complaint about all the damn parties. A woman looking to rehome her tiger. An interior decorator with mad redesigns for David’s room.

Usually he’d just say, “Oh,” but sometimes she could get him to go “What?” or even laugh. She counted those in the victories column, with all the other small things that were not completely horrible. He insulted Barnaby. He kept his lunch down. He wanted to know if cat meat was okay to feed a tiger or if he would need to find a bulk supplier of horse.

His body started to reject the gold. This was not strictly a thing that should have happened, not unless they were adding more, but he was so broken in every other way that even the magic wouldn’t hold. The fevers came back, and the shivering, and the pain that even the heavy drugs couldn’t dent. Not the screaming. He was just too tired. He would breathe hard and clutch his hands in the bedclothes until his fingers were pressed even whiter than the rest of him.

The lines of the merger around his nose had begun to weep a fine mist of blood that kept needing to be wiped away.

He was either confused, in a great deal of pain, or gone. None of these was a good option, although gone was a little bit quieter. It wasn’t like he was really out of pain when he was gone, just like he didn’t know where he was or that anyone could help him about it. Increasingly, they let the nurses deal with him, because it wasn’t like he knew they were there or even necessarily recognized them when he did know. They spent time in David’s room (not really with David) to make themselves feel better, and it didn’t work very well.

He was confused and begging for something to help with the pain (he’d had something, but it didn’t help) when Hyacinth brought up the pigeons again. She had been increasingly considering the pigeons, and had finally reached the threshold of despair necessary to hurt Barnaby by mentioning them.

“I don’t suppose those damn birds happened to say when it was finally going to kill him, did they?”

It had been nearly ten months since “Music Box Dancer” and “He’s teasing us” in the drawing room. Now it was gin and tonic and an iced whisky and a sound of desperate pleading they could still hear through the closed door. The piano hadn’t been played since “The Last Hurrah.” They had covered it with a sheet, like a dead animal.

Barnaby rested his elbows in his lap and his head in his hands. He had also been thinking about the pigeons, but he had never really stopped doing that. He had always been aware of the pigeons, even right after the surgery when he had been telling himself hourly that they were liars. “They didn’t say it would kill him, Hyacinth,” he replied. “They said we would.”

◈◈◈

“Steven Raven is a pet, Barnaby,” Hyacinth said. But she didn’t say “no,” or “don’t.”

Steven Raven liked to smoke cigarettes and drink hot buttered rum out of a silver teaspoon. He had a perch in the kitchen next to the liquor cabinet. The newspaper under it needed changing. He had been somewhat neglected due to recent circumstances. He knew how to open the icebox, though. (He had eaten some of the chocolate éclairs.)

“I’m not having any more pigeons,” Barnaby said. He had a carving knife. Steven Raven appeared mildly suspicious. “He’s been in the house the whole time, so he’ll be more accurate. Ӕther or vibrations or some damn thing.”

“What will we tell David?”

“Nothing.”

Barnaby snatched him on the third try. He was not a terribly agile flyer. Probably all the liquor and cigarettes. He had a bit of a smoker’s cough.

His lungs were pitch-black. Barnaby discounted them. Steven Raven had enough to say on the matter without his lungs.

“Frig’s Day. Pills in applesauce. He’ll keep them down that way. There’s a street festival, for Ghost Week. We can give the staff the afternoon off and it won’t look suspicious.”

“That’s how we’re going to do it or that’s how we should?” said Hyacinth.

Barnaby sighed and shrugged. “Does it really matter?”

◈◈◈

He was humming tunelessly against his pillow with his eyes half-open. He was so thin, like not-even-a-person thin, with blue veins and dark bruises on his hands where they’d been trying to give him shots. There was a lot of grey in his hair, not all of it by any means, but a lot. He hadn’t dyed his hair in months. He hadn’t seen his hair in months. He was in no condition to be vain about anything. Or vicious or selfish or fabulous. He was just a very tired man in a bed where he wasn’t allowed to rest.

He didn’t look up at them when they came in.

Hyacinth caught a few words, something about seeing what was real, or not seeing it. He might’ve been trying to recall the words to “Grey Seal” or just hallucinating. He hissed and twisted against the sheets.

“I won’t do it when he’s like this, Barnaby,” Hyacinth said. “Not when he doesn’t even know what’s happening. I don’t care what Steven Raven said!”

“It might be kinder,” Barnaby said.

“I don’t care,” she replied, hands fisted. “I won’t let him go without saying goodbye.”

“We’ll see what we can do about it,” Barnaby said. He sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Twisted… Phoenix flies…” David muttered. So it was “Grey Seal,” then.

“Do you want your album, David?” Barnaby asked gently. They had the phonograph in here, but he hadn’t used it much. He hadn’t even wanted it loud.

David blinked at him for a few long moments. He had an easier time remembering Barnaby. Barnaby had been with him for so long. He smiled. “Oh, Gray. I must be pretty bad if you’re offering it to me.”

“Maybe a little bit better just now,” Barnaby said.

“I don’t know,” he said faintly. “Have I been away from you again?”

“For a little while.”

“What day is it?”

“Frig’s Day.”

“Oh.” David shook his head. “I have been away. I had an idea it was Sun’s Day. I wondered if they were using that pipe organ.” He shut his eyes and put a hand over them. “It kind of hurts a lot.”

“Do you want medicine?” Hyacinth asked him.

He nodded without taking his hand down, then he looked at her.

She smiled at him. Maybe I’ll tell him I’m a cheerleader this time. She had no idea what a cheerleader might be doing in David’s room, but she was sure if she started talking, her mouth would come up with something.

“All the young girls love Alice,” David sang softly.

It was like a needle in her chest. She shed a pair of tears and scrubbed them away with her sleeve. “Absolutely right, David. Spot on.”

He closed his eyes and turned his face against the pillow. There was a faint red stain on the case; his nose had been bleeding again. “My live-in mistress,” he said with a smile. 

That was the last one they’d told him. He’d wanted to know why she was so ugly. She grinned and nodded, “Yeah.”

“It kind of hurts a lot, Alice,” he said.

“We’re going to see what we can do about that, all right, David?” she said. “Do you think you can do some applesauce?”

“Mm-hm.”

She already had the bottle in her hand. They were capsules, and she broke them and stirred them into the applesauce one at a time. This was how they usually gave him pills, but she just kept opening capsules.

“It’s a lot,” David said.

She stopped. “You don’t have to have this many.”

He shook his head. He smiled again. “No. I think it’s very kind.”

They both helped him with it. He had to eat slowly. Hyacinth’s hands started to shake after a while and Barnaby had to take over the bowl and the spoon.

She had taken a few paces away and was facing the wall with her eyes brimming over. David called her back.

“I wonder if… I wonder if you two might tell me again how you rescued me from the hospital?” he said. “I can’t seem to recall.”

“We hired a full coach with a footman,” Barnaby said immediately. “I knew you wouldn’t stand for anything less. We got you properly dressed with a frock coat and striped trousers. I brought several different outfits so you could choose. I have atrocious taste in clothes.”

“I stole pills from the nurses’ station,” Hyacinth said. She bowed her head and covered her eyes with both hands, but she kept talking. “I set off one of your old bombs in the hospital lobby to distract them. A small one,” she added. “It had birds on it. I put everything that looked interesting in a brown paper bag and I left them the empty bottles on the shelf.”

“Naturally, we had a bottle of vodka,” Barnaby said.

“Oh, I mean, of course. We wouldn’t dare leave the house without several bottles of vodka.”

“We had the spares in the coach.”

“Chilling in ice buckets!”

“Of course, somebody must’ve called the police, because of the bomb…”

David ate applesauce, and then sat quietly with his eyes closed and listened to them. Sometimes he smiled a little. Barnaby and Hyacinth omitted no detail, though time must have been short, and even added a few more.

“You wanted to stop at a pub,” Hyacinth said.

“The police were chasing us, so I said we could only stay for one round,” Barnaby said. “We ended up staying until closing, of course.

“You beat Barnaby at darts!”

“The police had us surrounded by then, of course. Fortunately, the giraffe had escaped from the zoo at just about the same time.”

“It was a very famous giraffe. Saved the Emperor’s life. Took a bullet for him! Truly a selfless creature.”

“They were following it with an airship. It just happened to turn the corner in front of the pub.”

“Couldn’t have asked for a better distraction! The police didn’t know what to do about it. I mean, imagine, a giraffe, galloping up Century Avenue…”

“It was almost as big a sensation as your Valkyrie getup.”

“So while they were dealing with the giraffe, we slipped out the back door.”

“The front door, Hyacinth. We got back in the coach. The coach had all the vodka.”

“Oh, yes, of course. What was I thinking?”

“Too much gin and tonic, Alice.”

“And pills! We were almost halfway through the bag by then!”

“Naturally, when we got home, we had to settle up about the dart game.”

“Barnaby fits very well into your Bo Peep outfit if you get him into a corset first, David. It was a remarkable transformation.”

“We took photos! They’re not back from the lab yet.”

“We really must call them, Barnaby. I think it’s just possible they may have given them away to some well-paying individuals with a strange fetish.”

“We went to bed together, David!” Barnaby declared suddenly.

Hyacinth burst out laughing. Usually Barnaby just passed out because of the corset. She nodded immediately, though. “Oh, it’s true! I tried to tell him not to bet you that. I tried to tell him you have excellent aim at darts when you are wasted. But he’d had so many pills by then I think he may’ve believed he was arguing with an animate coffee stain or something.”

“An enormous green lizard,” Barnaby said. “With a flat chest. I did not trust its opinion of my prowess at darts. I bet you my dignity and my heterosexuality. You collected both!”

David was quiet. Not even smiling.

“David?” said Hyacinth, faintly.

He blinked open his eyes. “To bed? Gray and I went to bed?”

“Absolutely!” Hyacinth said, sobbing.

“All night!” Barnaby added.

Now David smiled. “All worth it,” he said. He closed his eyes again.

He slept, and, a little later, more than that.

◈◈◈

It helped matters that he had so frequently and loudly threatened to do himself in. The pills were kept on a table in his room. He was not incapable of opening pills. (He was incapable of going down to the kitchen to get applesauce to take them with, but that never really came up.) He’d been dying, anyway. The inquiry was mercifully brief.

He left voluminous, irritating instructions for his disposal. He’d had plenty of time to come up with a lot of unreasonable demands, some of which were undoubtedly just to wind them up. The glitter was particularly vexing. Bulk glitter was apparently not a thing that is usually available to the public. He specifically stated he did not want shiny confetti. Glitter. Tiny pieces. They had to visit ten stores and open about a million little bottles by hand. Both they and the funeral home were covered in it for days.

They dyed his hair, and they had him in makeup and a dress, not that you could see any of it. You could sort of make out the tip of his nose if you knew where to look.

He made them play the album again. They did it once. They cranked up the volume until the police showed, and then they refused to turn it off or down.

There was a party at the townhouse. There were a lot of drunk people who claimed he was a wonderful human being and cried over him — Barnaby and Hyacinth refrained from correcting their assumptions.

Someone took the sheet off the piano and a few different people played it, not like he would’ve, of course. Not with that desperate need to have all the attention and lord it over the whole room. For David, piano-playing was just a means to an end, like everything else.

Some people handed Hyacinth a gold letter opener and asked her to do him. She did not want to, but even Barnaby wanted to see it, so she did. There was suicidal shrieking at a loud party at David Valentine’s townhouse once more, and then never again. Hyacinth didn’t “do David” like that again until she did him for Erik and Maggie and Milo in the house on Violena.

He also requested a piano bar to be opened in his name (it closed after a month), a life-sized statue in solid gold (“but a tasteful one, you two.”) a detailed cenotaph about what a terrific person he had been that would “make the angels weep,” and a decade’s worth of sackcloth and ashes from Barnaby and Hyacinth. They closed the house and had a black wreath on the door for about a month, until they got sick of it, but they never really got over it. David wasn’t really a thing you got over, or past. He would stand there screaming at you to love him until you gave in or punched him in the face.

Or both.

Hyacinth picked up A Day at the Races when it came out, about two months after he’d died. “The Millionaire Waltz” had her sobbing into her gin and tonic. He would’ve loved that one. All that piano. “Teo Torriatte” just about destroyed her.

She finished the song, she finished the album, and she chucked the whole thing in the trash.

She fished it out again five minutes later, but she put it in a drawer and she never listened to it again.

◈◈◈

“Mordecai, do you know ‘Teo Torriate’?”

“I’m sorry, Hyacinth. I know ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ ‘Another One Bites the Dust,’ and that one with the bicycles Calliope has on a record. The other stuff doesn’t get played a lot. I suppose none of it’s very appropriate…”

“What about ‘The Millionaire Waltz?’”

“No. I’m sorry.”

She stood up and pushed the empty glass away. “You are completely fucking useless, do you know that?”

“I’m sorry, Hyacinth. I know that’s got to be really frustrating for you. This is all so…”

“It’s bad enough you won’t drink with me, now you won’t even fight with me!” She wheeled away and stood against the counter, glaring at the toaster.

“No, I am not going to fight with you. This is an understandable human response to loss and I’m not going to get mad at you for expressing how upset you are. Your…” For the first time, he hesitated. “Your person just died.”

“My person!” She cackled and leaned over the counter. “Barnaby was my ‘person?’ Are you too sensitive or too clueless to say my ‘useless horrible ex-guardian who I ended up taking care of more and better than he ever took care of me’? Is that too many words? I guess ‘my jackass just died’ sounds like I’m sad my petting zoo is about to go out of business, right?”

He frowned at her with his arms folded and waited.

“They’re not even going to give him a state funeral, you know that? I can’t prove who he was. I can’t even prove he was here. I have an attic full of useless papers and nothing that says he existed. I poured one out with my raisin bran this morning. A little folded-up yellow slip of paper. He said he’d always wanted to be fired out of a cannon into a brick wall, and then have whatever was left of him fed to the pigeons. An ‘urban air-burial.’ But since I couldn’t manage that, I shouldn’t feel too bad about letting Maggie’s spell clean him up. He signed it with a smiley face. I have no idea how long it was in there.”

She tipped back her head and clutched her fingers in her hair. “I am going to be finding little bits of him hidden around the house for the rest of my life. Even if I burn the place to the ground and move, I’m going to end up getting a telegram he arranged a decade ago, or something. He’s still here, I just can’t yell at him anymore. The son of a bitch.”

“It’s all right to feel mad at him too.”

“Oh, my gods. If I knew this was what you were going to give me, I wouldn’t have even bothered telling you all that! I would’ve… I would’ve just picked up one of those drugstore booklets of daily affirmations!”

“What do you want, then, Hyacinth?”

“I-I want…” She scowled. “I don’t want a brain medic. I want a friend who has normal human responses to yelling and pain!”

“Then I’ll get…” He trailed off and his gaze drifted likewise. After nearly a minute, he shook his head. “I’m sorry, I can’t think of anyone.”

She emitted a low growl and yanked her purse out of the drawer where it lived. “I’m going to the drugstore and call Cerise, and if she’s not home, I’ll go to the Black Orchid… And if she’s not there, I guess I’ll drink with Pierre or something. I’ve got a whole Rainbow Alliance in my fucking first aid kit!”

She stomped out of the back door and slammed it behind her.

“All right,” Mordecai said, unheard.

◈◈◈

“Well?” said Hyacinth, rattling the ice with the stirrer in her third empty glass.

“Well, they both sound like pieces of shit.” The pink woman sipped her mimosa, with one finger raised for a pause. “Mmm. But I miss my piece-of-shit parents a lot, too, you know?”

Hyacinth nodded. She picked up her cocktail napkin and hid her face in it. Her expression was a snarl. Grudgingly, she allowed the tears.

Cerise put an arm around her shoulders and flagged down the bartender. “Rebecca? We need another round. Just put it on my tab, dear.”