Mhm, so when I tell my lawyer about this little post, what will your defense be?
The idea of Price going from fine in the morning, nothing wrong, perfect day, to dead by the evening from something no one could prevent is so gut wrenchingly horrific, it’s one of my favourite ideas to do with NikPrice.
The confusion Nik would be left in, the whirlwind he would go through. The funeral, the planning of said funeral. Having the team find out, Laswell too. His family, if he even had any. Everything descending into chaos within Nik, the questions that need answering, that he will never receive.
Those blue eyes closing for the final time in front of him fearful and guilt-filled, it’s a memory forever burned into his mind, the paleness of them, forever haunting him.
No because like imagine Nik and Price just went out the day prior.
Everything was amazing, with no signs of what was to come. Lovers falling into bed together, hands familiarising themselves with sun kissed skin.
Then the next morning, John wakes up throwing up blood. Too much blood. It paints the sheets red, staining the mattress below as Nik panics. A peaceful morning, turned into chaos as John falls over from his feet, unresponsive as Nik shakes him. He didn't wake up when the ambulance came, didn't wake up as Nik sees him wheeled into the emergency room.
Hours later, and Nik stands there in the lobby, desperately hoping for whatever it was to pass, for the doctors to come out and declare that it was just a wound that John could get over. (He would be fine, right? I mean, after everything he's been through, the fact that he's a captain in the SAS accounts for something, right? Nik assures himself, calming the ringing in his ears)
Everything seems too loud, the clocks, the chattering, it buzzed like wordless drilling into his ears. He hears people around him, sobbing, laughing, he wants nothing more than for them to shut up. The doctors are chattering now, something about losing too much blood. He stands there, helpless as he sees people rushing in and out. Nik wants to go home, to lay down on silk sheets with John in his arms. He wants John to be safe, he wants to cry, and he wants to yell. He wants a lot of things right now.
But maybe God is nothing but an unfeeling mass, capable enough to give humans hopes and dreams before crushing them down with malevolence in his fist. As the ringing in his ears comes to a stop, he could focus on the two way mirror in front of him. It has been an hour? Two? The clock was still faintly ticking in the background, though he could only focus on John in front of him. Broken, helpless, hooked up to far too many machines. John seems...wrong... Too pale. Too green, too... Everything. He didn't come back right, what went wrong?
He stood there, hands trying to reach into the room, to hold John against him, to ensure himself that he'll recover. The words of the doctors slips into his mind as mindless chatter. His brain barely processing the few details it could make out of.
Total organ failure. Spurred on by his drinking and smoking habits. Hereditary. Barely an hour to live.
No, no, this can't be right. John was healthy just days ago. He should be fine, should have been fine. Why is he dying? Why is he laying there on the bed, rotting in front of his eyes??
It took him an hour to process the news, and an hour for the machines to fall into a synchronized rhythm, a flat tone as doctors whizzed past him into the room, trying to fight the grim reaper for whatever time he had left.
When he comes to, he was sitting in John's apartment. Three things came to mind as he slowly sits up:
1) John was gone
2) His throat was dry
3) John was fucking gone. Not away on a mission, or somewhere in a pub. But gone. Gone forever, to be buried 6 feet underneath the dirt, to be remembered for however long people around him lived until he became nothing but another headstone in the cementary. His body rotting somewhere.
He didn't leave the apartment for days afterwards, his voice barely keeping it together as he breaks the news to people John was close to, Laswell, the 141, Farah, some relatives, his old captain... The phonecalls seems endless, the sounds of people crying over the phone and condolences merges into one entity in his mind, shoving themselves down his throat until he couldn't breathe.
The pain still vast, endless. With so many things to do on the way, funerals to be planned, people to meet. It had barely been a week and he's already tired. Like a child left without any answers, it hurts in parts so deep in him, impossible to reach, impossible to carve out.
John's pillow was still sitting there, stained with brown crusted up blood. The bedsheets that would never be warmed again sits haphazardly on the floor. He feels cold, empty in parts of his heart that he doesn't want to move. His limbs feels numb, and everything else seems so boring now that John wants beside him.
He misses the mornings with John, misses the smell of his cologne when it was still clung onto his pillows. He misses everything about John's from his scarred skin to the tattoos that decorated his body.
Nik doesn't stay in John's apartment now, with too much memories there waiting for him. The pain of a love lost, the pain of memories not yet made too much for him to bear. The pain that there was nothing else to remember John by now, nothing but the tattoo on his wrist and the home he had abandoned.
Months past, and Nik grows a little older. He refuses to think about how John would have gone grey now, how he would have pinched Nik for teasing him.
No, instead he reverts back into his old ways.
Nights spent in hotels with another person next to him, desperately trying to fill the void that John had left, clinging onto whatever remains of John in this world.
He gives up after one night, stands at the edge of a rooftop. The cars below him whizzed by, he could feel the wind on his face from up here. Blue eyes still haunting him from some crevices of his mind. He doesn't intend to jump, to just watch the skies above. Familiar cologne wraps around his body like a snake, the only remnants of John he could carry around with him.
The night sky seemed so inviting when he falls.