Eli and Toby

Memory One

A/N: Keep in mind that this is a memory and not a chapter as one would originally see. You are seeing a snippet of their life and not a story with a "beginning" and an "end" because I don't see why the characters need an ending.

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"Coward. That's all you are. A coward." Toby gripped the edges of the hospital bed, tears cascading down his face like a memory, eyes glaring desperately at the white, sickening bed-sheets that reminded him of faceless nurses and death. Bed-sheets that have been washed over and over, erasing all those that were once loved, once cared for in the same hospital bed where Eli now resided. Those bed-sheets held the pain of a thousand souls, souls that had left from the sick reality of this world and into a better one, leaving loved ones like Toby behind to pick up all the broken pieces left in their waste. Broken pieces that consisted of happy, loving memories and a seven-year-old daughter just now learning her first times tables. Memories good and bad, such as the first meeting and pining, the relentless teasing, Eli's horrible driving to McDonald's at three in the morning for a large French fry and a diet coke. Memories of Eli.

Toby jerked his eyes up to the thin frame of his husband, his husband who was breathing in through his oxygen mask because he was too tired and too filled with the cancer to keep his heart pumping during his bad days. Days where he snapped at the nurses and attacked Toby with curses and shallow taunts, scraping at the bond of their marriage and love before he would break down into choked, wet sobs that left him coughing and wheezing in Toby's arms. Toby always forgave him, of course. He would calm him down with sweet nothings, running his hands through thinning raven-colored hair and brushing the overgrown curls from his sweaty and sickly face, kissing each tear away until Eli fell asleep.

"You're a coward because you won't even try, Eli. You won't even try getting better because you think it's fucking better to die than watch your daughter grow up! Better to die than to be with me! You think that dying is better than this, being around Lucy? You'd never see her grow up, never see the first boyfriend, her first prom, her wedding!" He was shaking as the words tumbled out of his mouth, a mouth that hadn't seen a toothbrush because Toby was too scared to go home and never see Eli again. Too scared to leave and get the phone call that he knows he'd get if he took one step out of this hospital.

Eli just gave him a tired, sickly smile that didn't reach his eyes. His gaze was dim from all the morphine in his system, dulling his senses and making him into a completely different man - one that Toby frequently struggled to find his husband in. Eli didn't seem like he even had the fire, the spirit, the willpower to fight back. To beat his cancer and return to his family. He seemed almost lifeless - like his diagnosis had already taken what was left of his husband. Like the cancer had seeped into his very being and coated him in a sickly skin of a man whose personality is only a whisper of what he once was.

"Tobias," he whispered. "I don't want you," he paused for a raspy breath. Toby elected to ignore the gurgle of the fluid in his lungs when he exhaled and the fear in his stomach when he had paused at that moment. The fear that Eli didn't want him. He pushed down his emotions. "To see me in that way. I want you to remember me for who I really am," Eli croaked. Tobias bit his lip harshly, trying to ignore the protests and sobs crawling their way up his already parched throat. He wanted to say so much but there was so little time.

"You could have tried, Eli. For me and Lucy."

"I've already done it once," he pointed out. "I don't want to go through that again. And it's better if Lucy doesn't see her father in that shape." Tobias leveled his eyes with Eli's, furious.

"So, you'd rather she sees you as a corpse?"

Eli turned his head to stare out the window, signaling the end of the conversation. You can't really call it an argument anymore, not when half of the conversation is coming from a dead man. Soon-to-be dead man, anyway, Toby thought as he angrily made his way out of the hospital room, ignoring the way Eli's eyes followed him as he gathered his wallet and car keys (Eli's keys... he can't escape him, can he?) and threw his jacket on. He ignored the way Eli coughed harshly into a tissue. (Toby already knew it had blood splatters in it. He'd checked when Eli was asleep.) He ignored the way Eli painfully, terrifyingly, reached over his tubes and wires for his wedding band and slipped it on his finger. Toby ignored the way it was too big for his thinning and cold hands, so skinny that he couldn't fit his wedding band from three months ago. The polished silver was still shiny from disuse. His heart cracked a bit.

Toby walked out of the hospital room, waving at the nurses when they tried to approach him after glancing at his tear-stricken face. They all knew Eli refused treatment - they were his nurses. They'd tried to get Eli to listen by using Toby and Lucy as backup arguments. It hadn't worked. He was so, so stubborn.

There was a good day, not long ago. The radio was on and Eli was smiling, laughing - although weakly - at Toby's awful, embarrassing jokes. He remembers it like it was yesterday, even though it was months ago; when the cancer hadn't swallowed his lungs like the ocean sea and settled into every crevice of Eli's being. Toby was in the middle of a joke about a milkman that was a little too inappropriate for Lucy's delicate ears when Christina Perri's "A Thousand Years" began playing on the old battery radio Toby had lugged in one day after spotting it in a cheap antique store and nearly bawling his eyes out after he realized Eli might never be able to hear music again if he didn't. So, he bought the crusty little radio and set it up in his hospital room while Eli was in the middle of his IV treatment - to get the cancer fluid out of his blackened lungs. Toby had immediately stood. It had been their song, their beginning in a new life: their first wedding dance. Eli's eyes brightened slightly and he slowly dragged his tired and aching body from the too-white bed-sheets and uncomfortable hospital bed, clinging onto Toby's fingers with thin, pale hands that seemed too small for a man of his height. So weak, Toby had dismayed. His stomach lurched.

Eli grinned down at him with his ever-cocky smile. It was a smile that brought butterflies within Toby's stomach, erupting into a swarm of tiny butterflies that still send chills down his spine. It amazed him - how much he loved the raven-haired man in front of him. He wrapped his fingers around Eli's and helped him stand, carefully placing his hands properly on Eli's waist, earning a small, hearty laugh that was as sweet as Christmas bells during the holiday season. Eli's laugh... he hadn't heard it so carefree in months. Eli's laugh, his smile, his everything brought Toby happiness. Eli was Toby's happiness, his salvation, his raven-haired little devil. He loved the inflated ego and the cocky smile and his lip ring and his entire being. He loved Eli.

Eli stepped forward first, bringing them around in a slow circle as the song drifted lovingly into the hall, brightening up the sickly-white walls and despairing patients. The song brought life into a place of death: a place for the ones that know they cannot survive the reality placed upon their souls and the suffering of those who watch it happen. Eli and Toby had always been Eli and Toby, dancing the night away in the middle of December - four months before the decline - moving faster than Toby thought was possible for Eli's swollen lungs. But Eli was still Eli, and forever a gentleman. He dipped Toby slightly and held the pose with a loving grin, all teeth, and leaned forward to press a soft, lingering kiss on the pale skin of the blonde's neck. The kiss felt like a promise to survive, to live through the cancer sucking away at his lungs like the world's best ice cream sundae, and for a while Toby believed it was a promise.

They had gathered quite a crowd with their slow slow-dancing. They couldn't dance too fast or too far from Eli's bed, for he was hooked up to IVs, but they tried, dragging the pole of clear liquid with them as they slowly spun around the room. Their dance was a symphony, marking their presence within the hospital walls until the demolition years and years from now. A crescendo amid despair. Nurses watched with tear-filled eyes as the couple danced even after Christina's song ended. They danced and danced and danced, the last display of Eli's stable health before his deathly decline.

...

A/N: I'd love to hear you guys' thoughts so far! I rarely share my writing due to anxiety, and these pieces are not edited. Thank you for your time!