An Episode of Remnants.

Content Warnings

• Discussions of accidental death by drug overdose
• Descriptions of violent deaths in the context of war
• Descriptions of suicide attempts
• Discussions of suicidal ideation
• Discussions of grief

Transcript

APPRENTICE
I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.

SIR
No, I know.

APPRENTICE
I just wanted— I needed to get out of my head! To forget! But it had been so long, I didn’t think, I should have taken less, I…

SIR
I know.

APPRENTICE
I’m sorry.

SIR
I shouldn’t have left you alone. But I didn’t know.

APPRENTICE
Because I didn’t tell you! I’d spent months looking for— for the paperwork I knew that Charlotte Chatterley had that proved who I was, what I was. For years I’d worried about it. I thought she’d use it to undo me. My whole life would unravel if she showed anyone the truth. I wondered if— if Stephen Grenville had it. If that’s why he hated me like he did.
He’d killed Charlotte, Elio and I were pretty sure. I had this whole mythos in my head! That maybe the boy who’d died in the Blitz, the one whose life I’d stolen, maybe he wasn’t du Perier either, that it was really Stephen and I’d— fuck! Because what happened with Pearl, it was so small, and I’d taken almost nothing for myself. I’d got a good reputation for— for doing what I was doing. I’d meet these older people, help resolve matters of their estates, but I wasn’t interested in the money, I wanted access. Get me into rooms, into the places that matter. Let me escape.
I didn’t take any money from Pearl Grenville, I just helped her give it all to her niece, and she couldn’t even get me invites to places, nobody liked her.
So maybe he was du Perier, I thought. He couldn’t be a Grenville, not from the information I’d found. I’d forgotten him completely but Elio and I, we did our research, followed the threads of rumours and learned he almost definitely Pearl’s sister’s child. but I couldn’t get it out of my head. What if he was du Perier? What if?
I left Elio, I went looking, just to be sure. I found out about the woman who’d left her baby at that orphanage at the behest of a wealthy man who didn’t care about her. I could learn almost nothing about her, not even a name. I hoped she was alright. That she’d forgive me for what I’d done, for stealing the life that should have been her son’s. I wanted to look her in the eye but there was no finding her. Why isn’t she here?! Where is her Remnant?! I want to know if— did she ever learn her son was even dead?!

SIR
No.

APPRENTICE
I— how do you know?! How can you possibly—

SIR
Elio told me. She died, not long after she surrendered her child.

APPRENTICE
So I never could have found her.

SIR
No.

APPRENTICE
I wanted to. I wanted her to see me. I wanted to see her, so I could tell her I was sorry, so that—

SIR
What difference would it have made?!

APPRENTICE
How can you ask me that?! You know what difference— you know!

SIR
What would her forgiveness have changed? You only believe it would have made a difference because it didn’t happen. There are uncountable points that made your life into what it was, uncountable points that made mine.
Youngest of six boys, cherished by my mother, useless at school and on the farm. My mother did not want me to go to war. I begged her to let me. It was my father who made it happen in the end. I was only sixteen when I joined up, following all of my brothers. We wrote to one another. I noticed when one stopped replying, then another, then another, but nobody told me they were dead. By the time we pressed into Germany none of them were writing to me anymore but I could believe then that it was because they were all too busy. I’d stopped writing, too.
Years of fumbling incompetence and I learned the one thing I excelled at was death. I knew it the moment I first held my rifle and the more I trained with the the better at killing I became. There were no snipers, not at the beginning of the war, not the way we came to understand them, but as soon as we were designated properly as what we were, I was among them. I spent four years hunkered close to the ground, watching, far ahead of the front line, bringing back information, leaving a trail of the dead.
I did not count how many I killed. Most of them died for the crime of spotting the flash of my gun’s muzzle in the grass I was hidden in, the trail of smoke from my cigarette. It came so easily to me. I could shoot a man in the eye from two hundred meters, in the head from three times that. I was so fast, so good, that most of them did not have time to scream. They’d draw breath at the sound of the bullet but before they could call out it would strike them and they’d fall. Gone. Dozens of lives. Boys whose mothers loved and cherished them as mine had me, who had people who loved them at home.
I barely spoke unless it was to give reports. My commanding office, Robert, he was the only one who heard me. I’d had a handful of fumbling encounters with men during training, a couple since, but I adored Robert. Lying on the cold ground a thousand miles from home I’d day dream about his hands on mine. He never touched me. I don’t even know if he— I don’t know. I could have learned if he was married. If he had children. But it would have killed the thing in me that hoped, and I needed that hope.
As we pushed into Germany, we were cut off from support. They picked us off like animals. Robert was telling me to leave; I was good at being quiet. One of us should live, he said. A grenade went off nearby. Didn’t even hit us. One piece of shrapnel. It barely tore his clothes. The wound was only as long as my thumbnail. But the blood. The blood. Red and hot and everywhere. I tried to put pressure on it, screamed for a medic, but there was none. None left. He was trying to speak but there was only blood. It stained my sleeves. He lived a minute, maybe two, and then he was still.
I spent a week hidden in trees, picking of the German troops who’d done this to us. I don’t know how many killed. I wasn’t counting. Robert’s blood dried stiff on my clothes. I killed and killed and killed. put holes where there eyes had been. Felt good about it.
When they found me, they were going to kill me. The idea not to came from a man named Klaus. I didn’t understand what was happening. I didn’t speak German. They held me down, pressed a hot knife into my eyes, tore off my trousers, castrated me, and left me on the ground. It was another squad that found me. They assumed my injuries had been from a mortar. They took me to a prison camp, expecting me to die on the way.
Supplies were dwindling; it was the end of the war and though they would not admit it for weeks, the Germans knew they were losing. A rampant infection spread from he wound between my legs. Every day I thought I would die but I kept not dying. I begged for it. Pleaded for it as my wounds were debrided again and again. It would not come. Instead, I started healing, despite everything.
By liberation day, I didn’t know who or where I was. A man who’d been in charge of me right at the beginning of my war was the one who helped me out of my cell. It was the first time anyone had asked my name in a very long time.
I got home, and my parents were glad to have me, at first. All five of my brothers were dead. My mother was good. She helped me learn to be blind. My father was skeptical I could train a dog to herd his sheep just by listening to their hooves and the bells around their necks, but I did, and I think it was the first time in my life I ever felt he was truly proud of me. But though they could help me cope with the new limitations of my body, there were some things they couldn’t help with.
Horror had made its way inside me and stuck to my mind like tar. The first few months of me waking in the night, screaming, they were sympathetic.
But it carried on, became normal, and then an irritant.
My mother was sure it was because of my missing dick, as though in the absence of this piece of me I’d lost some masculine fortitude that should have helped me through it. I suppose I wondered that too. As I adjusted to my new, unseeing world, I wondered if it was this other lost thing that meant I could not let the war go.
We were an hour out of Bangor and I barely left the house except to herd the sheep, so I did not meet other soldiers. Did not know this was a common state of mind. Every night I dreamed about blood and gunfire and holes where eyes should have been. I felt ruined. The war had taken everything from me. When I allowed myself to think of desire it twisted through my guts like a knife. The mouths of now-dead men around a part of me left to rot on the forest floor.
As my mother fretted her worry got stuck in the tar in my head. Perhaps this was a divine punishment. I tried to hang myself in the barn, but the rope snapped the moment I kicked the stool away and I lay there, spring lambs bleating around me as I faced the humiliation of failing at even this.
My mother tried to set me up with the widow of one of my dead brothers. I loved my nieces, they could be daughters to me, if I wanted them to be. She already had children so my inadequacy would be less of a bother to her, my mother reasoned. I’d just have to let her get to know me, my mother said. Court her a few months, tell her I was saving myself, marry her, and have the big reveal after the paperwork was signed.
But by then I could not speak for more than a few words at a time. I had nothing to give this woman, even if my healed injuries were not a drawback for her, which they very well may have been. And I knew in my soul that even if I had never gone to war. Even if I could still see and there was still something between my legs except a knot of scars and a hole, even then I could not have been this woman’s lover. A husband, maybe. But not a lover.
I tried again to die, lines in my arms. My mother drove me to the hospital. When I woke up she told me off for getting blood on the carseats. My father would not speak to me. He died six months later, my mother six months after that.
In ways it was easier to be alone. Just me and my dogs. They expected nothing of me, were never disappointed when I was afraid. They were just there, close and warm and alive and so, so clever. I forgot what it was like to want more. That I had ever wanted more.
And then one day a man rang the old bell beside my door.

APPRENTICE
I’d been walking for so long. It was freezing cold.

SIR
Early January.

APPRENTICE
Yes. I’d tracked down where those documents were supposed to be. The paperwork that had haunted me and called to me as long as I could remember. In their place, I found ashes. It was gone. This thing that linked me to my past, it had been disappeared. For so long I’d been so afraid of that proof, for the power it gave Charlotte Chatterley or Stephen Grenville or whoever had it. But it was gone. No photographs of the real Edward Pocket, bruised and bloody on a steel table. No documentation of my aunt’s half-hearted attempts to track me down. All of it was gone. The contact lenses that Charlotte had me wear had gone stiff and cracked at their edges, blue turned to grey, the scales of a fish.
It should have been a relief, but it wasn’t. It was like I’d dug and dug, deeper and deeper into the core of myself and right there, at the very centre of my being was… nothing. Edward Pocket had become Edward du Perier, who had gone missing. Basil had taken his own life. Perry had died with Celine on the floor in the kitchen of my house in Valencia. Everyone I’d loved was dead, except for Amelie, who I could not face, and Elio, who I wouldn’t.
I thought about going to Stephen Grenville. I thought about letting him take me apart. But I couldn’t do it. In the end, the part of me that wanted to live beat out the part who didn’t.
Adrift, back in London, I wondered who to be. I stood by the building where Cratchett and Pocket had once operated. I wandered down the street where I’d lived with Joseph, past the house where his real grandson and died, and I’d nearly followed him. I wondered whether my Aunt Gloria still called. I’d gone to meet her, look her in the eyes before I claimed the du Perier fortune, and she hadn’t known me, and I didn’t want her to.
Who did I want to know me?
The answers that tripped out of me were ghosts, at first. Lucio and Celine. They were gone. Lucio, I knew almost nothing of. Elio had tracked down where he’d gone from, learned he had fought for fascists, and I told him to stop. He was better without a past. Maybe I was, too. Maybe Celine was right all along, and it didn’t matter who made the painting, what mattered was that the painting was. They loved her, unknowing it was her they loved, mistaking her for something else. Maybe that could be real. Maybe I should suffer the artwork I’d made of myself, face Edward du Perier for everything he was. Use his might and power to crush Stephen Grenville under my thumb.
But I wasn’t sure I wanted it. Wasn’t sure I’d ever wanted it. I’d wanted Charlotte’s approval, relished the way she relished me. But I wasn’t sure I’d ever wanted what she gave me even though I’d fought so hard to keep it.
I wrote and wrote, hundreds of pages, thousands. Traced back every decision that I could remember and tried to unpick them. The more I tried, the more tangled the knot became. Which decisions were truly mine? It got muddier and muddier the more I worked. I dosed myself with morphine whenever I couldn’t take it, let the velvet black envelope me for a while. Maybe I couldn’t be with any person who loved me, but the drugs, they were there. They always had been. Since I was a child, sipping liquid from a spoon held out in Gloria’s firm hand. A balm against reality.
The drugs were still there but I’d not chosen then, either, not really.
Not really.
I became obsessed with my father. Why had he sent me away with her? There was no war when I was born. It made no sense. My mother had died, but how was it he’d missed the monster that lived inside his sister? I couldn’t see, couldn’t make sense of it. And even then why would he not hand me to my mother’s family instead?
My mother’s family. I knew bits and pieces of them, I’d played at the edges of their lives. They’d never stopped looking for me, the real me, and in my place they’d painted their own picture, far more beautiful than anything real. I couldn’t go back to them, break the dream. My father had denied me the life they’d offered, and now that imaginary boy into an imaginary man who was so different from the real one I’d crumbled into. Better let them think me dead than force them to look at the mess I’d become.
The more I learned about my father, the less sense it seemed to make. He had been so genuine my mother’s family had warmed to him despite the circumstances he created for them. He was so kind, so determined to care for his wife after her accident. So ready to abandon everything to care for the child growing inside of her, leaving behind everything he’d known. So why had he not given up anything to care for me?

SIR
He had a dream of you, too. A dream of what you meant. He did give up something when he gave you to Gloria; he gave up you.

APPRENTICE
Well I see that now! But I didn’t know his father had beat him, that Gloria had looked after him. I didn’t know any of it! All I knew was that he was ready to sacrifice so much for everyone except for me, even his life, which he gave to save another soldier, a man he’d known for hardly any time at all. What was so important about this man he’d died for?! Why was he so special as to deserve the life of this person who, for all he’d abandoned me, provided the one thing in my life that was not a source of pain? This gateway to the memory of my mother, the access to her family and the love they had for me?! What had this soldier done to deserve that.

SIR
He didn’t.

APPRENTICE
I had hoped you were a medic. When I found out you’d been a rifleman, that you’d gone on to be a sniper so prolific there are disputed numbers in your record about the number of men you’d killed, I thought about ending it there. My father had died to save a killer. Dozens of men would have lived if he’d just let you die.
I hated you, maybe even more than I hated myself. When I came to your house that day I was ready for that. To hate you. To sink a knife into your guts before I slit my own throat with your blood still on the blade.

SIR
But you didn’t.

APPRENTICE
No. I didn’t.

SIR
You stood silent on my doorstep for a long time, and then I asked you in.

APPRENTICE
The house smelled like soup and bread and dogs and clean laundry.

SIR
You watched me make you tea, ladle soup into a bowl, not saying a single word.

APPRENTICE
There were photographs on the mantelpiece. Six boys in uniform. You looked so young, in yours. Young and unrecognisable. Shoulders too broad for your boyish grin. Proud. Your eyes were so blue that in the black and white photo your irises were pale silver.

SIR
I put your soup onto the table. I heard you move it closer, but you didn’t start to eat.

APPRENTICE
I was warming my hands on the bowl.

SIR
I asked why you had come.

APPRENTICE
I wanted to find you.

SIR
Are you death?

APPRENTICE
I don’t think so.

SIR
I was not sure why I had said it. Was not sure why you had not challenged me on it. We were both quiet a while. I tended the fire, and you finally started to eat. I went about my evening as though you were not at my table. Cleaned the dishes, fed the dog. The only change was to put more water in the kettle so I could make a pot of tea for two instead of one. Do you take sugar?

APPRENTICE
If you have any.

SIR
In the can by the sink. Would you mind?

APPRENTICE
Thank you.

SIR
It’s no trouble.

APPRENTICE
Do you live here all alone?

SIR
I have the dog.

APPRENTICE
I’m not sure she likes me.

SIR
She’s wary of new people. We don’t get many visitors.

APPRENTICE
I see.

SIR
I don’t.

APPRENTICE
Your expression was so flat when you said that. I stared into the scarred fog of your eyes for some sign of how to respond. You held yourself like that so long I was terrified I’d insulted you, but then you grinned, and I could see him. The boy in the photograph on the mantel. Under all the scars and the creases in your skin, he was there, and he was laughing at me. I didn’t expect to laugh too, this loud, startled thing. It turned strange in my mouth. I couldn’t stop it. I laughed and laughed. I laughed and laughed until my chest hurt and I couldn’t breathe. My eyes were streaming tears and the soup in my belly was churning and I was so glad you couldn’t see me crying.

SIR
I still knew that you were.

APPRENTICE
I know. I was pretending I could hide it. It was easier that way.

SIR
When you stopped, I got you a cloth. We sat and listened to the fire, and I matched my breaths to yours until they’d settled enough that I could no longer hear them. And then I asked, are you a soldier?

APPRENTICE
No. I was too young when the war started.

SIR
So was I.

APPRENTICE
Isn’t everyone?

SIR
Perhaps.

APPRENTICE
I was… how old? I forget. It gets muddled up. There’s so many stories.

SIR
I see.

APPRENTICE
But you didn’t.

SIR
No. And not just because I was blind. Because nothing you said made sense. It wouldn’t, not for a long time. Not until Elio explained it to me, long after your body was already cold.

APPRENTICE
I’m sorry.

SIR
I didn’t mind it. I wondered if I’d fought with you, if that’s why you’d come.

APPRENTICE
No.

SIR
So why, then, are you here?

APPRENTICE
I told you, I was looking for you. I wasn’t a solider, but my father was. George Peterson.

SIR
It had been so long since I’d heard that name that for a moment my tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth. George.

APPRENTICE
Yeah. He saved my life.

SIR
I wish he hadn’t.

APPRENTICE
It was like a knife in my soul. I wondered it that was how it had been for Lucio. I thought of his blood pouring over my hands.

SIR
I shouldn’t have said that.

APPRENTICE
No, it’s alright.

SIR
I don’t mean it. I am glad I am alive, most days.

APPRENTICE
My mother died when I was born.

SIR
I’m sorry.

APPRENTICE
My aunt brought me up, not far from here.

SIR
It is quite far. George told me where he’d grown up. That he had a son, there. That’s you, I presume.

APPRENTICE
Yeah. It is.

SIR
He didn’t speak much Welsh, but we’d share a word or two. Reminded us of home.

APPRENTICE
That’s funny. He’d lived in London for years before the war.

SIR
He never told me that.

APPRENTICE
No. I imagine he wouldn’t.

SIR
You don’t sound like a Welshman.

APPRENTICE
What do I sound like?

SIR
I don’t know. It changes every sentence.

APPRENTICE
Oh.

SIR
It’s not bad. I don’t speak with many people, most of them are local. I’ve not had enough practice to tell.

APPRENTICE
Do you speak Welsh?

SIR
Yes. My mother tongue, in that it was the language my mother spoke. I grew up switching languages mid-sentence. It drove my father up the wall, though not enough to make him learn.

APPRENTICE
I speak six languages.

SIR
And none of them the language of your home?

APPRENTICE
It isn’t that. It isn’t home.

SIR
So where is?

APPRENTICE
I don’t know. I don’t think I ever have.

SIR
I see.

APPRENTICE
Sorry. That was a ridiculous thing to say.

SIR
Not at all. It makes perfect sense to me.

APPRENTICE
I’ve lived plenty of places. I own, what, seven houses? I can’t even remember any more. I’d need to check my will to be sure. How absurd is that?

SIR
Quite absurd.

APPRENTICE
I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing here.

SIR
You do. You said you wanted to see me.

APPRENTICE
Yeah. Yeah… but I… I don’t know.

SIR
Would you like to spend the night? I have plenty of rooms, and plenty of blankets.

APPRENTICE
Oh. I— I should probably go.

SIR
It’s a long way back to the village, especially on foot.

APPRENTICE
How’d you know I didn’t drive?

SIR
Didn’t hear an engine.

APPRENTICE
Oh.

SIR
Don’t go wandering the hills in the dark and the cold. I’ll set up a bed for you.

APPRENTICE
I don’t—

SIR
Stay.

APPRENTICE
Yes, sir.

SIR
I laughed at that, but it made me shiver. I couldn’t place why. I set up the bed for you in the room just off the kitchen. I didn’t know it was the room where you would die.

APPRENTICE
I stared at the table and thought about leaving. I thought I probably should. What the hell had I hoped to achieve, coming there to see you? All that horror about the imagined versions of myself that existed in far better places than I’d ever been, and I’d dreamed up a version of you that was a monster.

SIR
In a sense, I was one. I was very good at killing.

APPRENTICE
Only when you had to be.

SIR
No. I shot more men than I needed to. I was good at it. I have some shame, for what I did. But I made space for it. After so many years alone in my parents house, I thought I’d reckoned with the burden. Come to accept that what happened to me afterwards was punishment enough. Perhaps too much.
I did not hate myself the way I once had, not anymore. But I could still see the monster. The one that reached for his rifle whenever he heard a loud and unfamiliar sound. The fear that welled up in me in those moments was visceral, but so was the need for violence. For death. My body had learned that the antidote to fear was violence. I think that’s why I kept myself to myself. That, and the way people whispered whenever I was forced to walk into town. I frightened them. Not because I was dangerous, but because I was a thing to be pitied. And they could only see my face, not the rest of me.

APPRENTICE
I hope they all choked.

SIR
What an odd thing to make of a sentiment so kind.

APPRENTICE
I love you.

SIR
I know.

APPRENTICE
I’m sorry.

SIR
I know.

APPRENTICE
The room was small, but comfortable. I only had my rucksack with me. I didn’t ask, but you brought me a set of pyjamas. The flannel was worn soft with age. They were too long for me, when I put them on. I wondered if your mother had made them for you.

SIR
Yes. She had.

APPRENTICE
I wonder what she’d have thought, knowing you’d put me to bed in them, if she’d known I’d come to kill you.

SIR
That isn’t why you came.

APPRENTICE
I thought it was, though.

SIR
I’m not sure that matters. And she would have been proud. Proud to know I’d made you stay, that I’d made you a bed. That I’d thought to bring you something comfortable and dry to wear. That my first thought, when I considered it, was those pyjamas she had made for me when I first came home from the hospital. I was so thin that none of my old clothes had fit me. It took years for me to fill out again, but I did, and she was proud when I put the pyjamas in a drawer.
I didn’t know I was keeping them for you, but I was.

APPRENTICE
Don’t say that.

SIR
Why not?

APPRENTICE
I ruined it.

SIR
No. Of course you didn’t.

APPRENTICE
You were happy.

SIR
Yes. I was. And I was happy after you arrived. Wrecked, when you died. Of course. That wound bled for the rest of my life. But if you would not have come, Elio wouldn’t have either. I would never have known a life like that was even possible for someone like me, who’d done such monstrous things, who’d grown so comfortable in his self-enforced exile that he’d forgotten it was self-enforced. Who had trained himself to want so little he’d stopped even wondering if it was possible for him to want at all.

APPRENTICE
What did you want?

SIR
To be a part of something. To have a life, outside of sheep farming. To be loved, not just by my dogs. To make tea for two at least every morning. To be held, and to hold.

APPRENTICE
I don’t know what I wanted.

SIR
I do.

APPRENTICE
What did I want?

SIR
To be loved. Which for you, meant to be seen.

APPRENTICE
In the morning, you made me breakfast.

SIR
Hardly. It was a pot of porridge, I made it every morning.

APPRENTICE
But you added extra oats.

SIR
Yes. I did.

APPRENTICE
I asked you what you did, and you showed me.

SIR
You called me sir, and yourself my apprentice.

APPRENTICE
You taught me how to call your dog, how to direct her to direct the herd.

SIR
You were quite bad at it.

APPRENTICE
Be fair; I was learning.

SIR
Right you are, Apprentice.

APPRENTICE
Thank you, Sir.

SIR
I was surprised how easy it was, to be around you.

APPRENTICE
I was surprised that you kept asking me to stay. That I kept agreeing.

SIR
So was I. It became a habit. Every morning, every night.

APPRENTICE
You’re welcome to stay another night if you’d like to.

SIR
Thank you. I should probably head off.

APPRENTICE
Either way, fine by me. Whatever you like.

SIR
Whatever you like.

APPRENTICE
I ran out of morphine six days in.

SIR
I thought you had the flu.

APPRENTICE
I couldn’t stop you caring for me.

SIR
You kept saying you didn’t deserve it, but it was easy to ignore you.

APPRENTICE
I’d wake up doused in sweat and shivering and find you asleep in the chair by the bed, a towel in your lap in case I needed it.

SIR
You tried to leave, collapsed in the driveway. That was when you told me what was really going on.

APPRENTICE
I’m sorry.

SIR
It’s alright. You don’t have to be sorry. But you need to get back to bed.

APPRENTICE
But it’s—

SIR
You’re sick. The reason why doesn’t matter. You need to rest.

APPRENTICE
I couldn’t fight you. I could hardly stand.

SIR
I put you back to bed, mopped your brow. You flinched, like I had burned you. The water was hardly warm. That was the first night I heard you screaming. I knew I had been like that; at times I still was. I held your hands, whispered to you. You hadn’t been to war. What could have happened to this man, I thought, that made him so afraid, if he’d not known the stink of death, had never watched the life leave a man’s eyes, had not feared for his life for so long that when he returned to a place where it wasn’t threatened, it felt more like a missing limb than the parts of him that were really missing?

APPRENTICE
And I— I never told you.

SIR
No. You didn’t. You got better, day by day. I kept expecting you to leave.

APPRENTICE
I kept expecting you to make me. But you didn’t.

SIR
No. I didn’t. It was so easy to let you fall into my routines. We started walking into town, taking tea at the little cafe. We caught the train to the beach. I felt the sea water on my hands for the first time since I’d come back from Europe.

APPRENTICE
Things were good.

SIR
Yes. They were.

APPRENTICE
I’m s—

SIR
If you apologise again, I don’t know what I’ll do.

APPRENTICE
I just wish I hadn’t done it.

SIR
I know.

APPRENTICE
It was so stupid. I’d been so happy. So fucking happy. For the first time in a long, long time. things started to feel real. They started to feel possible. I wrote to Elio, I told him where I was. I told him I was happy. I told him about you. I told him that I loved him.

SIR
I know.

APPRENTICE
It was supposed to be a goodbye, I think. One last hit, so I remembered why I’d done it, and then I’d never do it again.

SIR
But it had been months, by then. You should have taken a smaller dose. You should have told me what you were doing. You should have waited until I had come home with the bread. But you didn’t. I had been trying to figure out how to tell you that I loved you.

APPRENTICE
I know.

SIR
If you had waited one more day maybe you’d have never—

APPRENTICE
I know, I know. But I did.

SIR
What would you have said, if I’d found a way to say it?

APPRENTICE
I want to say I’d have told you that I loved you too. I did and I knew I did. But the peace still felt too fragile. I’d have been afraid that would have broken it.

SIR
Your love doesn’t break things.

APPRENTICE
Doesn’t it?

SIR
No.

APPRENTICE
I wish things had been different.

SIR
So do I, but they weren’t.

APPRENTICE
I can’t say I wouldn’t change things if I could.

SIR
Nor can I. There are many things I wished I’d done differently. But they happened as they did, and they cannot be undone. And there was a life, after things went wrong. Not the one I imagined, but a life all the same. And there was joy in it. Some of that joy was shared with you. Some of it was because of you.

APPRENTICE
Almost every masterpiece is painted over a dozen drafts and versions that didn’t look quite right.

SIR
Mmm. And a masterpiece would not be so if it was perfect.

APPRENTICE
I don’t know about that. But I do love you.

SIR
Yes. I know. And I love you. I have loved you. I will love you.

APPRENTICE
Does it matter, if it doesn’t change anything?

SIR
But it did! It changed everything.

SIR
Apprentice?

APPRENTICE
Sir?

SIR
I think we’re going now, aren’t we?

APPRENTICE
Yeah. All the dust has flown so far it looks like stars. On and on, winding forever. Separate but apart. Our stories are their stories are ours. Round and round. On and on. Forever and ever.

SIR
First and last.

APPRENTICE
We’re all I can see, now. You and me, and Elio.

SIR
I’m glad he came with us to the end.

APPRENTICE
He’s waiting for us.

SIR
Yes. Of course he is. He has been waiting for a long time. We go out together. It feels as much like a becoming as a coming apart. I remember you like I remember myself, like I remember him, and everyone. I feel younger, smaller. Do you know what I mean.

APPRENTICE
I can hear their voices. This same scene playing out a thousand times, a million, a billion, maybe more. All of it, everything. Dreams and hopes and fears and everything else. So much more than anyone could ever guess. One and many, all of us. And you and me, and Elio.

APPRENTICE
It was like falling asleep. No fear, no panic, just warmth. Knowing you would soon be home. That you were going to make soup, and we’d tear into a loaf just baked that morning with our hands. We’d laugh and joke, and I’d call you Sir, and you’d call me your Apprentice. And everything would be alright.

SIR
I am glad that’s how it was. I was so scared that you had hurt. I was so sorry you’d been alone.

APPRENTICE
I wasn’t. The love was there. It always was.

[THE SOUND OF MOTHS INCREASES]

APPRENTICE
Don’t lose me.

SIR
Don’t worry. I’ll always find you, in the end.

[QUIET, EXCEPT THE FLUTTER OF A FEW MOTH’S WINGS, AND THE SOFT TICKING, CLICKING WHIRS OF THE FIRST AND LAST PLACE, FADING INTO NOTHING]

This was Remnants, an audio drama written, performed, sound designed and produced entirely by Eira Major. It could not have been made without my wonderful sponsors on Patreon. A huge thank you to my patrons.

And to you, dear listener.

You do look, my friend, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay’d: be cheerful, friend.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

[BELL RINGS]

[INHALE—]