Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Even under pouring rain, even with blood on his hands, blood on his shirt, the cold concrete under his knees, Ray Garraty still looks like a dreamer. His body is here, and his gaze is present—eyes tracing over Pete's face as if watching for breath, watching every twitch and movement and tear on his cheeks—but he looks at Pete like he's some marvelous, magical thing. Like he's too good for this world, or he has some wonderful brightness about him that no one else possesses.

Ray's hands clasp at the fabric of Pete's shirt, grip tightening and loosening like his muscles are seizing and relaxing, out of his control, and the thought of that—Ray's body, out of his control, growing weak and limp and relaxed—sends a stab of helplessness through Pete's heart. Maybe it's more than helplessness, he thinks, as it throbs through him. His legs are jelly and his feet are on fire but it's nothing compared to the pain in his chest, searing and burning like nothing he's ever felt before. 

“That's why I love you, Pete,” Ray is saying, and his words are as slippery as his stomach, slippery as his face when Pete accidentally smears slick red blood all over his cheek. The words are warm as blood, too, warm as they've always been when directed at Pete. “I love you.”

He says it like it's supposed to mean something. Like it's meant to help: an explanation rather than a fucking tragedy, a crime, a game custom-designed for Pete to lose over and over and over again forever. Pete wants to say that he loves him back, but his shoulders are shaking and all he can manage to cry out is Ray's name, again and again. Always another word, another loss, another shout, another step, even now when his knees are on the ground.

Pete shakes his head hurriedly. He presses his other hand against Ray's stomach, hot and wet with blood. He thinks that if he presses against it too hard he'd be able to stick his hand right into the bullet wounds, feel around the meat of Ray's body. The thought of it makes him sick, and he lurches forward, pressing his forehead against Ray's. “Get the fuck up,” he says, petulant. “You lied.”

It's unclear whether or not Ray had heard him, but he's still staring up at Pete with stars in his eyes. You can see it, he had said. I can't. But no one has ever really seen the good in Pete, not for long, not until Ray, and it feels so fucking nice, really, and he doesn't want it to go away. He'd rather die than lose it. He would rather die. “I love you,” Ray says again, and now that he really thinks about, Pete's not sure anyone has ever said that to him, not for his whole life. He moves to hold Ray even closer when there are hands hooking under his arms and yanking him back.

He thinks he might be screaming, but the only thing he can do is watch Ray's face, watch him struggle to sit up on his own, watch him look up at the Major with barely-there eyes, watch the red stain of blood on his shirt grow bigger and bigger and bigger. Pete doesn't feel his knees give, but he feels the sting of muscles relaxing, finally stopping, finally sitting down, and he feels the burn of the concrete underneath him. It's hard to breathe in the rain. Impossible. It chokes him.

Ray mouths something Pete doesn't understand before the Major shoots him in the head, and he collapses unceremoniously like he had never been alive in the first place. His eyes are immediately empty, that warm, soft face of his smushed against the ground as if he were asleep. A line of blood slides down from his lip like drool. There and gone, like a shooting star, like the fireworks booming over his head, shining an ominous red light that reflects off the rain-wet streets.

Amongst the suffocation, Pete thinks, begrudgingly, of winning. He thinks of his wish: two winners, for hope, forevermore.

That's really fucking goddamn beautiful, Ray had said, early on in the Walk. It was early, but since the first time their eyes met, hands touched, Pete felt like he had known him forever, water and a bandage over a dried-up wound; maybe it wouldn't heal the infection, but it was a hell of a good place to start. He'd been so sincere, so himself, from the very beginning, happy to hold onto anyone's hand and then watch them die, anyone except for Pete, it seems; he'd rather hoist Pete up with an arm under his shoulders and kill himself than watch Pete die. He'd seen straight through him, arrow-pierced his heart and held the very lifeblood of his soul and called it beautiful.

It baffles as much as it kills him to look up at the sky and remember his arm slung around Ray's shoulder, just one hour ago, and twenty four before that, and twenty four before that, and before that, and before that.

He wonders: Stebbins had said it was impossible to stop at the same exact moment, the same exact step, but falling into pace with Ray was easy as air, easy as a sweaty forehead under the blistering sun, an inevitability. Maybe if he'd just been paying attention. If he hadn't let the lie fall over him with the rain—the promise of more time, a few minutes more—then he would've paid attention, and he would've noticed, fallen into step with Ray, and perhaps he would've at least gotten a few additional minutes while the soldiers waited for commands over headsets or however it was they got their orders to see who to kill. Maybe it would buy him enough time to glue himself to Ray's side, wrap himself around him like a bow so that you couldn't shoot at one without killing both. Would've, could've, should've.

Why should two boys get to live, when he looks over the curve of the Major's shoulders and Ray Garraty is a blur of pale skin and red blood on the ground behind him? The whole point of the Walk, the whole point of any of this, was for a man like him to walk on, forever: to win, to make the right choice, to send money to Olson's girl, to leave the world a better place than it was before he'd set foot on it. Why should someone get to clap the shoulder of a friend, when soldiers had grabbed Pete by the arm and ripped him away from his?

Friend didn't feel like a big enough word, anyway. Brother never quite sounded right, either, but that doesn't matter now.

When the Major asks for his wish, Pete asks for the carbine.

They give him the money, anyhow. Turns out the Major was nothing but a figurehead, to be replaced for next year, and Pete's rebellion earned him nothing but a barrage of slurs thrown his way should he dare step outside his new home in Freeport. 

Freeport reeks of Ray Garraty.

Or maybe Pete's brain does. Every step he takes, every crack in the road, every drop of rain, every bloodied scrape, three-quarter sleeve shirts, cookies, farms: it's all Ray Garraty. Every stare he feels pointed at the back of his head reminds him of the crowd, reminds him of the way they had looked at the two of them, the way they had silently let Ray fall behind.

Pete sticks around anyway. It's quiet out here, and being haunted is better than being alone again, even though he's probably both of those things at the end of the day. But if Ray's spirit is lingering around on this stupid goddamn plane for whatever reason—not quite ready for Heaven, forever undeserving of Hell—than Pete doesn't want to make him choose, doesn't want to make him wander: in Freeport, Maine, Ray can be near all the living people he loves.

It isn't like Pete has anywhere else to go. He had spent most of his life moving around, making a conscious effort not to get attached to one person, one place. Everything is better in moments, he always told himself. Friendships can't sour if they only last a few days, a few weeks; he'll never start taking any beautiful landscapes or clear night skies for granted. Everything would always be new, and there would always be something to wake up for. Getting attached would only result in pain. Maybe he should've stuck to his guns on that one, but part of him knows he would be dead if he did. Part of him wonders if that wouldn't be so bad, comparatively.

Regardless, in Freeport, Maine, he can drop off a substantial check in Mrs. Garraty's mailbox without ever having to worry over it getting lost in the mail. He worries too much about a lot of things like that, now; for days on end, everything was life or death, and it's as if his body doesn't know how to move on from that, so even the little things activate fight-or-flight.

How could he know if Mrs. Garraty got her money, if he wasn't there to see it into the mailbox himself? What if she didn't, and she relied on it, and without it she sunk into her grief and went and died right alongside her son? What if she thought that Ray had died for Pete, only for Pete to abandon her? What if she thought her son died for a horrible man, unworthy of such love? Such sacrifice?

It gets so bad he eventually resorts to sitting across the way from Mrs. Garraty's house, hat pulled over his head with a shadow to cover his scar, just to make sure no one steals it from her mailbox.

It takes a few months of this for her to catch him (or maybe she had caught him weeks ago but gave him the dignity of not saying anything until now), but she doesn't deem him a stalker like he thought she would. She invites him in and bakes him cookies, and tells him to just knock next time, deliver the mail in person, and she'll make him Ray's old favorite pasta.

He thinks about it for a moment, and then thinks of the way Ray had run after her, apology after apology; he'd thought he'd been selfish, leaving her alone. Pete would make sure he'd have nothing to regret. “Alright,” he tells her.

Mrs. Garraty—or Ginny, as she insists he call her—tells him one day that she hadn't been able to bear to watch the events of the Walk as they happened. That every time she looked at Ray's face, out on that Walk, no matter what expression he was wearing, no matter whether the rain tamped down his hair, no matter the bags under his eyes or the stubble that started to grow on his chin, she could only see his father's face, picture-perfect framed in the darkness as the Major put a bullet between his eyes. When Ray had told the story, he made his father sound like a hero. Like it was some magical moment of bravery. She makes it sound more like Mr. Garraty was but a lamb to the slaughter, just like her son. Just like Pete, if not for her son.

Before the Walk, Pete never thought that dying could be heroic, choosing the end of life over its continuity, choosing numbness over beauty, leaving a still war-torn but now grief-stricken world in your wake. When Pete tried to die for Ray, he thinks that he did it selfishly. He wanted the last thing he saw to be Ray's face, and then Ray's back, continuing on into the sunrise. But he doesn't like to think of Ray as selfish, even with that cruel trick of his: the promise of more time, dangled like a carrot before it was yanked away. Ray was just a lover. From the very beginning, he lifted others up, like it was second nature. It hadn't been second nature to Pete since he was very young. He always had to think about it. Always had to try, until Ray came along. That's true love: what once seemed so hard fading into reflex. So Ray Garraty must have truly loved all of them, even when the world made it hard.

Without thinking, he tells Ginny that there are worse things to be than a lamb, kind and gentle and giving, even in its anger. She looks at him, suddenly, the way Ray used to do, like his skin had gone translucent and she was able to see right through to the meat of his thumping heart, his ever growing-and-shrinking lungs, and watch them both shudder with grief, for Ray as much as for himself. Her eyes grow misty, teary, but her mouth forms a little smile.

That is the day that she takes Pete up to Ray's room for the first time. Pete hadn't dared to ask about it before, and he wasn't even sure that he wanted to see it. He never knew a version of Ray who spent his time in there, who slept in there, got dressed and read books or whatever else he did in his spare time, but Ginny is leading him there like she's reading a page from her diary, and he would be cruel to dismiss her, so he doesn't.

Ray's room is plain, simple. Ginny shows Pete his closet and the big stack of journals under his desk, his favorite pens and favorite shirts and favorite not-banned books. There's not a speck of dust to be seen, more a mausoleum than anything else, but despite Ray's mummified life, mummified presence here, he's never felt so far away. Pete looks at his bed and imagines the bloodied lump of him resting there, spilling red all over the freshly washed sheets.

Ginny offers him some time alone in the room, and discreetly nudges at a shoebox under Ray's bed with her heel before turning and heading out, gently pulling the door shut behind her. Pete kneels to the wood-paneled floor and pulls it out, carefully, like it will disintegrate under his touch, and finds it to be full of books, DVDs, tape recorders. With a gentler touch than he's ever used before, Pete picks up one of the books and flips through it. Some lines are highlighted, with gangly, illegible notes written too-small in the margins.

“He had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.'” Out of context, Pete pegs it as romantic, but pre-Walk Ray didn't seem the type. And he wasn't very religious. Pete wonders if he believed in an afterlife, as he keeps flipping through the pages.

“To die hating them,” another quote reads. “That was freedom.”

Pete almost finds himself scoffing before his eyes grow wet. When he thinks back to Ray's eyes, Ray's hands, he doesn't think he died with an ounce of hate in his heart at all. He thinks it was all full of love, all boiled over and bubbling and steaming like a pot over heat. I love you, he had said, and, fuck, Pete can still hear his voice clear-as-day and right-as-rain in the back of his head, like he's here, leaning over his shoulder and whispering the words in his ear right now: I love you.

The corner of the page grows wet, so Pete slams it shut before pausing and slowly putting it back in the box as if in apology. He spends a long time in there, tracing a finger over the loops in Ray's letters, un-folding and re-folding the dog-earned corners of the pages, resting the books on the ground by their spines and trying to see which page they fall open to. Where had Ray taken it and folded it open, broken at its very foundation? Where had he chewed his cheek in concentration?

There are a few photos in the box, too. One of a young Ray with a mustached, sad-looking man who must have been his father. There is an emptiness in his eyes that Pete doesn't recognize, but Ray is absolutely beaming. Another is just of Ray, here, in his room, hand halfheartedly blocking his face, not wanting to be photographed. He looks about the same as he did the day Pete met him, so this one must have been recent. It makes sense, he thinks, that Ginny would want to catalogue his final days here. Pete would've done the same, had he the choice. Would've written down every word he said, took photos from every angle so he can put them all up on the wall and see him like he's really there.

Instead, he takes the photo and shoves it deep into his pocket before putting the shoebox back where it came from.

“Find what you needed, sweetie?” Ginny asks. Her voice is faux-casual but doesn't cover up the melancholy that's always there when Pete comes by. 

Pete nods but finds he can't hold her gaze, the photo feeling like it's burning a hole through his pocket.

She doesn't seem to notice, straightening a crease on the corner of Pete's shirt before escorting him out.

Pete hangs the picture on his fridge with a single magnet someone had left behind. Its color has peeled all the way off and it's a little sticky, so Pete carefully wipes it clean before using it to stick the photo right near the handle. When he reaches to open the door, it's almost like Ray is cowering behind his hand, palm outstretched as if asking him to stop. It makes Pete's chest feel pleasantly warm, and he wonders why this photo was relegated to the shoebox under Ray's bed.

Maybe it hurt his mom, to see how he looked at the end. In those last days. But this was the only Ray Pete had ever gotten the chance to know. Closed off but friendly. Burdened by knowledge, maybe. Burdened by revenge. By solitude, and fear of sharing that knowledge, that revenge, that everything, with anyone else. Sharing sucked in theory. Pete always hated the idea of it, too: that someone had to know about all these horrible parts of you and your life in order to not just look at you but see you properly, all of you, a real person. But for whatever reason, it hadn't been so bad when Ray looked at him.

Luck of the draw, he supposes, that they ended up near each other in the first place. It feels ridiculous to call anything about the Walk good luck, but a trojan horse is always confusing when the outsides don't match what's in the heart. Pete feels all inside out, since it ended.

He moves the picture to the other side of the fridge so it sits next to one of Pete's parents, young. He doesn't remember their faces, not really: only this photo. He hadn't brought it with him on the Walk, and he'd ended up regretting that, eventually. The hunger and the exhaustion blur your mind, a heavy fog over everything that isn't right in front of you, everything except the warmth of Ray's back under his arm. When he tried to recall the lines of his parent's faces, all he got was a blurred mess, and when he fell asleep against Ray's shoulder, he dreamed that their faces were distorted, voices coming out as morse code through a maze of eyes and mouths and noses.

He tried not to let it freak him out too much. There was plenty to freak him out already, so he settled himself by telling himself that they would be glad he was thinking of them at all. Fuck the details, the fine print. They'd want him to be happy as he can be in his last moments. That's what parents do, isn't it? Hope that one day someone will love their child the same way someone loved them, if not more, if not better. His uncle hadn't talked much about his parents except to insult his mother, and Pete knew better than to trust anything he had to say, anyway, so he couldn't know for sure what they'd want from him, but he liked to believe it was something nice. He liked to hum to himself when Ray slept and imagine they'd be as comforted by the companionship as he was.

Most of the country had been watching him that day, but he had never felt so much like he wasn't a part of the real world. At a certain point, the people watching disappear, about as worrisome as the trees on the side of the road, caging them in but existing so far on the periphery that they don't matter anymore. That's what happened to everyone except the other boys and, occasionally, the soldiers, but even they felt more like robots or too-sharp picket fences than they did people.

The feeling didn't go away when the Walk ended, and Pete thinks it never will. He looks at the photo of Ray, at the photo of his parents, and traces around all of their silhouettes like he always does when he comes in here, and reminds himself that, even if it's not real anymore, it was. For at least a few fleeting moments, the world was a beautiful place to be. Happiness exists, and he had felt it potently.

Pete closes his eyes and hates that, instead of appreciation, hope, love, his stomach curdles with a fiery-hot sort of grief.

“They picked their way in silence up a steep and gloomy path of darkness. There remained but little more to climb till they would touch earth's surface, when in fear he might again lose her, and anxious for another look at her, he turned his eyes so he could gaze upon her. Instantly she slipped away. He stretched out to her his despairing arms, eager to rescue her, or feel her form, but could hold nothing save the yielding air.”

Pete didn't care much for mythology—it always read too straightforward, its virtues and morals too black and white, without understanding of life and depth and nuance—but he had gone through all the other books stashed under Ray's bed, so he couldn't exactly go and ignore the last one. Orpheus and Eurydice seemed a tad sentimental for Ray's taste, what with his pre-Walk bitter view on humanity as a whole. Perhaps it was the dreamer part of him that liked the love story and the bitter cynic that liked the ending.

“Dying the second time, she could not say a word of censure of her husband's fault; what had she to complain of—his great love?”

Ray hadn't highlighted this part, but he did draw a box around “his great love,” which Pete took to mean he was quite skeptical of that conclusion. Pete scoffs, tracing over the pencil marks with his thumb.

It seems horribly ironic, knowing where they all ended up. Pete spends every night dreaming of what might have happened had he looked back, kept his eyes on Ray, never let them pull away. He would've had no opportunity to fall back, slip away, into the hands of Hades, or the Major. Maybe, if only he'd stared, they could've walked together in perpetuity, until their legs gave out. Maybe that way they could've gone together.

To not look back is to take for granted, he thinks. After all those hours walking by Ray's side, never drifting more than a few feet apart, there was no part of him that imagined him falling away, falling behind. If only he loved like Orpheus did. He would traipse into the Underworld if he could to pull Ray back, pull them all back; what's another walk, at a time like this? And this one with a finish line, no less.

Ginny knocks on the frame of Ray's bedroom door, eyeing the book in Pete's hands. “That was his favorite, back when he was younger. Mythology and Melville.”

Pete had read through Ray's copy of Moby Dick a few weeks prior. It was obsessively highlighted in many different colors, all kinds of pens. Read and re-read, well-loved. Pete had traced over every single drawn-in line; it made some part of his brain deeply uncomfortable not to: just more evidence that all of it was real. He forces an awkward laugh. “Those are two very different things.”

She smiles, sad. “He just wanted to be like his father,” she says. “His father preferred Melville. I think Ray preferred Orpheus, but he didn't want to admit it. Not until…” She trails off. “...the end.”

“All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.” Ray hadn't highlighted the passage, but Pete's eyes had caught on it; he'd read it once and then again. It made him think of the weight of the carbine in his hands, his reflection in the Major's glasses. “He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.”

Pete doesn't want to think about the end. He doesn't want to think about Ray, kneeled on the ground, curled over a gunshot wound. He doesn't want to think about it, but he always, always does. “...Did I kill his white whale?” he asks. It's meant to be a joke, but it comes out all funny.

Ginny lets out a breath. That's what she always does when she's trying not to cry. She doesn't like to get upset in front of Pete, he knows; he thinks that she doesn't want him to feel bad. Little does she know, guilt is all he feels, most days. Guilt and fear. “Yes. I think you did.”

Pete thinks of Ahab: his obsessive desire for vengeance, so deeply ingrained it almost became a friend of its own. He's not sure why he asked the question at all. Mrs. Garraty doesn't like to talk about the Walk, and he shouldn't make her talk about it, even if he so desperately wants to. He's a guest, and guests are supposed to behave a certain way, but Ray's book is in his hands and he wishes he could live in the ridges of the pencil in the paper, and he can't quite get his voice to work when he asks: “Would he would hate me for it?”

“No, sweetie,” she answers, immediately. “He would be very happy. You didn't do it for vengeance; you did it for him. You're a good friend.”

Pete shakes his head, unable to meet her eyes. A horrible feeling flows through his body like a shiver. He shouldn't be saying any of this, asking any of this. What if he gets kicked out, and doesn't get invited back? He still hasn't watched Ray's DVDs, looked through all of his journals, listened to all of his music, and what the fuck will he even do, all on his own? “I don't know how you think you know that," he finds himself saying anyway, the difference between vengeance and...friendship, as Ginny calls it. "I can't tell the fucking difference, and I'm the one who wished for the goddamn gun.”

“It's what I would've done,” Mrs. Garraty admits, not sounding like she's sick of him, not quite yet. “Well, maybe I would've wished for him back, but that's probably against the rules, so the whale would've been my second choice.”

There's nothing to be said in response to that. He traces over the “great love” box in the Orpheus story again, imagining Ray with his pencil.

“Why don't you take that one home with you?” Ginny offers. “Come eat, for now.”

Pete wants to take the book home, but somewhere in the back of his mind, he has become convinced that there is someone watching him. He's a Walker, after all. A winner, sure, but a Walker first and foremost, and being a Walker meant cameras pointed at your face. People watching, all the time. The picture on his fridge feels like contraband enough. A lot of days, living at all feels like contraband enough.

Pete is grateful for the days he has it in him to get up and walk to Mrs. Garraty's house, and resentful of the days he doesn't, when his mind spirals down and down and down into the pits of paranoia: you killed Ray, it tells him, and now you're going to kill his mother, too. She's breaking the law for you. And when she dies, Ray will really hate you, wherever he is, and then you'll truly be alone, for all eternity.

The thought of more blood scares him stiff. He doesn't get up until sun has morphed into moon and then back into sun again and his sheets stink of sweat and rot and his head feels like he's deep underwater. He crawls out of his room, legs jelly, and throws up bile until he can stand and drink some water from the sink faucet.

But when he sleeps, dozing in and out as the hours pass by, he dreams.

Ray is walking by his side. Pete is not allowed to look, though he wants to. Even without turning toward him, in his peripheral vision, he can see the way Ray’s arms swing, all big and clumsy, like he was walking without a care in the world. Above their heads is rain and behind them is a crowd and in front of them is the Major, on one of the halftracks. There is only one camera pointed at them, right in the center, but even one means the world is watching. Even in dreams, it's hard to shake the weight of eyes on him.

“Is this your white whale?” Ray asks, stepping slightly out of line, just enough so that their fingers brush. “Or am I your Eurydice?”

“You sound like Olson now,” Pete dismisses. “Goddamn bookworm.”

Ray laughs, a shy sound. “I didn't want you to think I was lame, before.”

Think he was lame. Pete doesn't think it would be possible for him to sit here and think anything negative at all about Ray, even if he hadn't saved his life, if he hadn't died for him. He thinks of Ray, hands on Curley's elbows, running back for Art, even comforting Barkovitch, toward the end. Even the way he had introduced himself to Pete right at the beginning, warm smile and hand outstretched to shake. Ray was kind. Kind people are hard to come by, these days. It makes Pete's heart burst, the thought that he is lucky enough to walk alongside him.

“You're not lame,” Pete assures, nudging their shoulders together, uncaring about the crowd. The easy lightness walking next to Ray, even for a few moments, gives him is incomparable to anything. “It would take a lot fucking more than that for me to think you're lame.”

“Sounds like a point toward Eurydice, then.” Ray's voice is half a tease. He would probably be smiling, if Pete could look at him. “Though I don't think I, personally, am your white whale. It must be... fucking, I dunno. Society or something like that. Everything that leads to where we are right now.”

Pete shrugs, holding back a smile. “Something like that,” he agrees.

“I hoped you wouldn't have one at all,” Ray continues. “A whale. The same thing I had. You looked at the world like it was something good. It needs someone like you.”

Pete just walks quietly by his side for a few moments before saying: “I don't know about all that. I'm sure you saw my fucking wish. So much for something good.”

Ray tilts his head. Pete wishes he could look into his eyes, just for a second, but that would mean this would all be over. That would mean he wakes up, and he's not ready to leave Ray's voice behind, not yet and not ever. “Oh, come on. It was a good wish. You made people feel something. You know there are uprisings—”

“Yeah, and about as many people are rising up as there are people fucking threatening to shoot me in the head every time I go outside.”

“They are?” Ray asks. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees his head dip toward his feet. “I didn't—I didn't know that.”

“Yeah, well, how fucking could you." Pete is suddenly uncomfortable, tightness spreading over his shoulders. He rolls them, hoping to relieve the pressure, the guilt of surviving. “What about you, huh? If you'd won. What would you have wished for? I know about the carbine, and the Major, but was that still what you wanted? It was all so fucking different than before, toward...” the end, he still doesn't say, can’t say. Those last few miles, just Pete and Ray, Ray and Pete, side by side.

Ray nods, understanding anyway, as he always did, somehow. “Oh. Yeah. I guess I didn't have anything specific in mind, really. I didn't want to win anymore. Especially when it was down to the two of us.”

“Me neither.” Pete's voice comes out somewhat bitter, though he doesn't mean it to. “But things happen, Garraty. You know that better than anyone. What if I had managed to sneak away from you, instead?”

Ray's gaze burns the side of his head. Pete wants to turn away. He wants to lean closer. He doesn't know what he wants anymore. “I just didn't want you to die,” Ray says, voice weak rather than defensive. “I know it had only been a few days, but I couldn't picture—I couldn't imagine what it would be like, after.”

“Me neither,” Pete says again. Ray doesn't speak up this time, just stares at him, until Pete continues: “What would you have wished for, Ray? If it came down to it?”

Their steps move in sync, as they always did. Pete looks down at the concrete road to watch his shoes move through Ray's shadow. It's the closest thing he can get to watching him, watching his arms swing, his throat work, his toothy smile brighten. A man devolved to silhouette: an injustice.

Ray thinks on it for a few moments. Pete imagines him chewing his lip. “...I think I still would've asked for the carbine,” he says, carefully. “I didn't see the Major ask for your wish, so he does it after the second-place guy dies, right?”

Pete swallows. His throat feels raw. “Yeah.”

“So you would—you would be dead.”

“That's right.”

In his shadow, Ray's arms stop swinging. He imagines he's holding his backpack sleeves, hands crossed over his chest like a vampire; it's a self-soothing thing, Pete knows. It doesn't take a genius to deduce that much. A type of cradling. “Then, yeah. I would ask for the carbine, like you.”

“And shoot the Major,” Pete finishes. He can't say he isn't surprised. He thought Ray would've wanted something different, after everything. Especially if this was just his own mind dreaming him up.

“No, I wouldn't shoot the Major,” Ray says, very quiet, the barest lilt of correction there. “I think I would've shot myself.”

Pete's head almost snaps up to him—reflex, instinct, but he manages to look off at the trees in the horizon, instead. “What the fuck are you on about? You would've won, Ray. It would've all been fucking over.”

“I would've lost my mind.” Ray sounds more sure of himself now. “I don't even know I would've been... there, enough, to ask for anything at all. But if I had, I would've asked for the carbine, and I would've shot myself.”

His quite certainty hits Pete like a slap to the face. He's not sure he visibly flinches, but it feels like it, a sudden tightness to all of his muscles, a sudden pressure on the back of his head. “Fuck. Don't say shit like that.”

“You asked.”

“I wanted you to say something, like—like—” He tries to imagine what Ray would say: Ray Garraty, practical as Eurydice with the heart of Orpheus. “—like for all the families of the boys to get prize money, too. Or for a proper gravesite. I don't know. Things that mean something. Beautiful things. Things that could change something, like with your dad.”

“You were the one who had all the nice ideas for wishes, Pete. Not me." That's not true. Is it? Pete huffs out a breath through his nose. "Either way, I think dying for you would change something,” Ray says, thoughtful. “It would turn into something bigger than just the two of us.”

“Fuck—maybe, I guess, but you shouldn't have to fucking die for things to change.” And that's the crux of it, isn't it? Ray shouldn’t have had to die for the world to be better. Pete shouldn't have to live without him.

If the world were good, and if the world were fair, maybe Pete would've met Ray somewhere else entirely. Maybe on a road trip, as he was passing through farm-town number one-thousand, and suddenly, there he was on the side of the road, carrying groceries home to his mother.

“Okay. If you don't like your wish and you don't like mine, if you had a do-over, what would you ask for?” Ray asks. He sounds unimpressed, like this is a dare that he doesn't expect Pete to be able to complete.

Pete had spent a lot of time thinking about this, after the Walk. It’s near impossible not to, really; you’re given the hardest choice you’ll ever make after the most horrific few days of your life, and you have forever to stew in the consequences of it. Pete has been stewing in it, indeed. “Do you really think you can wish for anything?” he asks. “It shouldn’t have been possible to get that kid an elephant so soon, but—”

“You want a magical wish, then? Like a fucking genie? It’s all hypothetical anyway. Go for it.”

Their feet move in tandem, like soldiers. The horrible ache in Pete’s stomach has gone away. This is the only time it ever goes away: here, in a dream, with Ray. “Well, I’d ask if I could just go on walking with you forever,” Pete says. “No warnings. No soldiers. No aching muscles or sicknesses. Just you, me, and the road, and the trees, and the rainbows.”

Ray takes a shaky breath, like he’s been wounded. “You can’t mean that.”

“Course I do,” Pete frowns. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“You could have anything in the world, Pete. You could change anything. And the thing you’d want to change is that—I’d be alive again?”

Something close to embarrassment lands heavy on Pete’s chest. He hadn’t thought he’d said anything wrong. They had both tried to die for each other, hadn’t they? Was living for each other a bridge too far? “You’re making it sound like bullshit. It's not bullshit. I'm fucking serious.”

“No, it’s—it’s not bullshit. I just didn’t expect it. That’s all,” Ray says, though his voice still has that high-pitched anxiety to it, the raspiness Pete recognizes from that first night of the Walk: the warnings, the hill. “Aren’t we walking together now?”

“Yeah. But this is just a dream, right? I can talk to you all I want, but it’s not you. Not really. I’m not even allowed to look at you.”

“Says who? That why you’ve been staring at the ground like an idiot?”

“I don't know, Garraty; it's a goddamn dream. Sometimes you just know things in dreams.”

“Come on,” Ray complains. “I want you to look at me. I thought you liked my face.”

“I do,” Pete says, easy. “But I will proudly admit I like it a little bit fucking less with a bullet in your head.”

“My hat covers the bullet wound.”

“You think you’re somehow living and breathing with a bullet wound in your head, and this ain’t a dream?”

Ray laughs. “I guess that's a good point. You're right, Pete. As always.”

“As always. You always choose the wrong times to get sentimental, Garraty. Trying to trick me into looking at you. I know exactly what you're doing,” Pete says, though his voice sounds fonder than he had intended it. That was a byproduct of the Walk—or, not the Walk, really, but walking with Ray. Everything came out like a song. A love letter.

“I swear I'm not trying to trick you again,” Ray says, sincere. “And I don't think it's a trick at all if I'm actually just telling you, straight up, that I want you to look at me. That's a request, not a trick.”

“A wish?” Pete asks.

Ray considers this, then: “Yeah. How about it, Pete? Grant my final wish? I won't let you see any blood. Promise. I got my flannel on. You can barely tell it happened.”

Pete looks at Ray's socked feet, the one part of him he can see without the whole thing disappearing, dreamscape into abyss. He hesitates. “I don't know.”

“You can't walk forever and never get what you want,” Ray argues. “If this is your wish—to walk with me—you should be able to look at me. Otherwise, you're no better off than Sisyphus.”

“Orpheus, Sisyphus. What's with all these pretentious goddamn names you're dropping?”

“Sisyphus,” Ray repeats. “That's Camus. I was telling you about him, the French guy? He’s an idiot most of the time, but he wrote The Myth of Sisyphus. It's this really cool existential story. It's about this guy, right, and he tries to cheat death. Like Orpheus, but not Orpheus, 'cause he was doing it for himself. Trying to make himself immortal like the gods, which the gods didn't like. They sent him to the Underworld, where he was forced to eternally push a perfectly round boulder over a perfectly rounded hill until he could get the boulder to balance right at the top.”

Pete hums. He knows all the stories in Ray's shoebox, forward and back, but he asks anyway, just to keep him talking: “Did he ever do it?”

“Nope. But that's not the point of the story,” Ray says. His arm wraps around Pete's shoulders and his finger pokes at the center of his chest. Pete looks down at it, but not at his face. “The point is, like Camus says, 'one must imagine Sisyphus happy,' or whatever. We humans—just like you, Pete—find joy in the boring, shitty parts of every day life, so even if our whole existence was just pushing a fucking boulder, you would find something to be happy about.”

“Doubt it,” Pete says. “No way he's happy walking all by himself.”

“You walked all by yourself, too. That's what you told me. And you were happy.” His arm is still wrapped around Pete's shoulder, and he doesn't seem to have any plans to remove it anytime soon.

Pete shakes his head. “I don't think I would've walked if I was happy. It took less than 24 hours for me to make peace with dying. I think I already found it, the second you shook my hand at the fucking gate, Ray. Maybe I'm gonna fucking die, but at least this one last nice guy shook my hand, hm? Ain't that silly.”

“No. Not silly,” Ray says, chuckling. Pete pictures his toothy smile and wishes this dream could last forever. “It made me feel better, too. I probably would've ran crying back to my mom, if I didn't see you.”

“Might've been better off.”

“Nah. I don't think so.”

Pete can feel Ray's eyes on him. Warm. Fond. He wants to meet them. “Would you be upset?” he asks. “If I looked? Ended it?”

Ray scoffs, twisting a little on his heel. “No way. I've been begging you to, man.”

“I know. But it's nice,” Pete says, oddly tentative. “Walking.”

“Sure,” Ray agrees. “But we can do it again, tomorrow.”

So Pete looks up: he gets about a millisecond of Ray's face. He still looks haggard, exhausted, bags under his eyes and a few-days-over five o'clock shadow on his chin. But he was right, and his hat is covering up the blood on his forehead, and he's smiling, that smile of his, and Pete wishes he could take a picture. Wishes he knew how to draw, paint. Wishes he had the right words so that he'll never forget what it looks like. Wishes he could freeze this moment forever: Ray's face and the rest of the world morphing into nothing behind him.

Instead, he wakes in a boring bed in his boring house in Freeport, Maine, in the dark of night, and wishes for what must be the thousandth time that he had wished for something else.

On Pete's 19th birthday, he had laid his coat down in overgrown grass and slept alongside a river in the woods: camping, but a little less glamorous, he supposed. Late summer was balmy and pleasantly warm, though he couldn't deny the chill of the night sky under the moonlight was more to his taste. Stars poked out through the line between the trees. It wasn't often that he could be somewhere and be quiet, be to himself. Usually, he had to be on, all the time, charming and just the right amount of mysterious, enough so people would invite him in, trust him.

He didn't like to think of it as manipulation, though sometimes the thought was impossible to ignore. You do what you have to do to get by, and Pete liked being a friendly person, liked hearing other people's stories, so it wasn't a lie as much as it was a hyperbole, or a secret. It's not a bad thing to keep your cards close to your chest, and it's not a bad thing to fashion yourself into the kind of person people want to see, if it means surviving another night.

Pete liked to think he was happy, all things considered. When he looked up at the sky, the stars were as bright as they ever were, and the smell of the grass was as earthy and warm, and his canteen had kept his water just the right amount of cool. Those were all things to be grateful for, weren't they? Someone couldn't dream up a world like this if they tried. They would've missed the shimmery flecks of dirt, the reflection of the moon glittering off the river water, the way it felt to sink his toes in deep and wiggle them around like he was knee-deep in syrup.

Those past few months—few years, really—it had been harder, though. Gratitude and belief in the kind-hearted perseverance of the ineffable human spirit didn't feel like enough in the face of the exhaustion that grated on the backs of his eyes, cheeks indented with lines from plastered-on smiles. He was old enough that people had begun to look at him a funny way, leer at him, and he was certainly old enough to know what those looks are supposed to mean.

He sighed to himself, taking a swig from his canteen before falling back against his jacket. The grass itched at the back of his neck, so he scooted a little further down so the fabric could keep it away, eyes still on the sky.

It was at that moment that a streak of light spilled through the middle of the stars, quick and bright, gone in a flash: a shooting star, like something right out of a fairytale. He laughed out loud at it, unable to hold it back and not having any reason to. It was almost ironic, the thought of a wish. The only wishes that came true these days were government-sanctioned through the fucking Long Walk.

Still, he found himself closing his eyes, racking his brain for something, the best thing. He could always play a trick, wish for unlimited wishes, wish for never-ending money, never-ending life. There were the sentimental things, too: love, family, safety. But all of those felt too big. Perhaps that star sat up there in the sky judging all of them, every wish it received, and only entertained the most worthy ones, the most attainable ones.

Pete had a simple wish, an easy wish, something that crossed his mind from time to time, as he lugged his bag town through town, house through house, manufactured a smile to artificially lift tired eyes: a shoulder to lean on, to help with the weight, to rely on, just for a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, if he was lucky.

Asking for forever was unreasonable, he knew, so he only asked for a few days, just enough to know that a shoulder like that—a person like that—even existed at all. That would have been enough, he thought, to bring back the hope. Enough that he could look at another person and assume the best in them.

Pete sits in Ginny's living room and pores over some perfectly legal books about the Long Walk. It had been four years ago that the kid had requested an elephant. The first day of his Walk had been his 18th birthday, right on the dot. Pete wonders if he lost his mind, too, and that's why he picked an elephant. Thought he was in a fucking fairytale because then that would mean none of it had been real. Another asked for a house for his family by the beach, with sweeping windows and an ocean view, and it had been constructed for him in a matter of days.

“My favorite,” Ginny says, putting a cup of tea on the table in front of him. “Was the boy who wished he could fly, so he'd never have to walk again.”

“Oh yeah?” Pete asks, flipping back to the table of contents. “When was that?”

“I'm not sure. Before Ray was born. William and I stopped watching it live after that,” she says, looking over the pile of books Pete gathered. “I think it was back when I was in school. They gave him a private plane that could take him wherever he wanted to go, whenever he wanted to go there.”

That's not such a bad wish. It wouldn't change the world, sure, but it seems that no wish any boy has made for as long as this thing has been going was enough to change the world, or it would be different by now. “Kinda missed the main part of his wish: no more walking.”

“You're right. But there were rumors, like there always are. Most of the time, the winner goes off somewhere, never to be seen again. William thought they were being killed, but I think their wishes were too special. They didn't want us to know how much power they had. Maybe I was right, since you're here.”

“Too special?” Pete asks. “What does that mean?”

Ginny looks toward the door, to the window, and then across the ceiling, like she's looking for something. An uncomfortable feeling settles over Pete's chest, and again, he fears Ray's mother being hurt because of him. Because she wanted to impart her lessons and her thoughts and her dreams on someone, and her son was too dead to do it, all because of Pete. He squeezes his eyes shut, takes a breath. She wouldn't have him over if she didn't want him here. She wouldn't tell him things if she wasn't comfortable doing so. Pete had never asked for any of it. He doesn't need to feel bad.

The reassurances only provide momentary relief, but that's enough for him to lean closer, waiting to hear the secret.

“I was in high school,” she explains, soft. “And everyone was spreading rumors that he had grown wings: feathered ones, like a bird, or an angel. Someone in my English class had said she was there, and she saw him. She said he screamed, and bled, and then he grew wings. He promised all the money to his family and flew away, and no one ever saw him again.”

Pete flips through the book and furrows his brows. He traces over the words: “Paul Walton, number 19. This says his wish was to live in a plane. Not fly.”

Ginny shakes her head. “It was to fly. I know it. There were so many technicalities; everyone was debating it in class the next day.”

Pete remembers Ray, in his dream. A magical wish, like a fucking genie. It wasn't supposed to be possible, and yet, and yet. If the bounds of reality were just a joke, if the rest of the world would never learn the truth anyway, the cameras conveniently going out, the footage conveniently different than what the people alive to tell the tale remember, maybe he really could have asked for anything he wanted. Maybe he could have asked for what—who—he really wanted, and maybe it would've come true, but they didn't want him to know; they wanted to hide it from him.

What would the books have said about him? Maybe that he wished to live forever with his brother. Not quite right, but close enough to sound right, for all the emotional and obsessive and eager and hungry superfans. Maybe they would've said he lost his mind and just kept walking, forever, and he didn't wish for anything at all. A kid had done that before, too, decades ago. That's what Ray said he would've done, in his dream. Kept going.

A heavy feeling falls over his shoulders like a fog. Could he have wished for them back, instead? Ray, the Musketeers? Could he have wished to walk forever? Could he have wished that everyone at least got the chance to say goodbye?

“I'm sorry,” he finds himself saying. “I'm sorry I didn't wish for him back.”

Ginny had been looking out the window, but she turns to Pete, now, almost alarmed. Her face creases with sympathy, folding over on itself, and Pete can only imagine what his face looks like. “Oh, honey. Don't apologize for that.”

“He said he picked me because I could see the beauty in the world. I could choose love. But I didn't.” He laughs, sardonic, and then finds that his face is wet. He thinks of Ray, in his dream, so accepting, with that stupid smile of his. Pete's brain's absurd attempt at comforting him, he knows. Maybe he'd be able to fucking live with himself if Ray thought it was okay. Isn't that pathetic? “I didn't. I should've tried. I should've tried anything. I—I wanted to wish that, for all future walks, two people would survive. But I couldn't do it because I thought: why should anyone else get to survive, when he won't? Why the fuck does any of this even matter?”

The room feels like it's spinning, and he's not sure when Mrs. Garraty came over and wrapped him up in a hug, but she's there now, arms steady and secure even though he can feel her crying, too, tears sinking all warm into the fabric of his shirt. “You were his friend,” she assures him. “And he wanted to save you. It's what friends do.”

“But it's not fair,” Pete argues, and it comes out petulant, like a child throwing a tantrum, and his breath feels like it's running away from him, just like how it felt in the worst stretches of that goddamn Walk, heart lurching out of his chest. “I wanted to save him. I tried! You saw that I tried, right? I didn't just—I didn't just fucking let him. He tricked me, and I—and he wanted me to be better and I fucked it all up. I fucked it.”

“Shhh. Shhh. It's okay.” Ginny's hand rubs across his back before landing steady over his neck, and Pete feels suddenly sick, remembering Ray doing that same exact thing to soothe him, back during the walk. He must have learned it from his mom. He must have cried like this, too, in front of her, and she wrapped him up and soothed him better. Bile sours in his stomach. He wants to go home, but what does he have there? It's no better than here; just lonelier, where he can sink far, far away with no one to stop him.

“I'd do it different if I could do it again,” he assures her, anyway. “I'd do it all different.”

He thinks of Sisyphus, and the boulder, and thinks that he'll never be happy again.