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Sometimes Nathan misses his grave. The first one that is.
He only spent a few hours in it, but it was a nice grave as far as graves go.
Not that he didn’t enjoy getting out of it. What he misses was that moment. The moment when he woke up and realized that he was alive and that everything was alright.
After he found the phone and the others got him out, Kelly spent an equal amount of time hitting and yelling at him as she did hugging him and telling him never to leave again.
Sometimes Nathan lived in the community centre, sometimes he slept at Kelly’s. And sometimes they didn’t do much sleeping at all.
Since he was a dead man and whoever had done the autopsy had been so kind as to remove his shackle he didn’t have to do any community service. He still hung out with them during the day, just generally being in the way and having a few laughs.
When he was just shy of twenty he got a job as a realtor. Apparently, his ability to run his mouth off until people gave up, was something that paid off in that particular business. The little “hitch” with him being dead didn’t really bother him. Simon had opened up an account for him in his name where all the money went.
A year later he got a flat with Kelly.
The thing with Nathan and happy endings was that to have a happy ending there had to be an ending. At the tender age of twenty-two it was rather obvious that he wasn’t ageing. Not on any level. He still wanted to muck about on the town and get drunk. And the others couldn’t always join him so he met new people who thought he was the same age as them. Nathan died from alcohol poisoning one night. His new mates rolled him to the hospitals doors in a shopping cart. He woke up in the hospital morgue, naked and cold and in a metal drawer.
Kelly yelled at him when he stumbled through the door with a smirk and feeling so stupidly, stupidly alive. He shut her up with an inelegant clash of lips and teeth and misplaced emotions.
Five years later Kelly started looking at him. She only did it when she thought he didn’t see but sometimes he did. She looked at him with envy and then she smiled at him in a way that didn’t reach her eyes and almost seemed sad, and he felt guilt.
So he left. Packed a duffle and walked out the door without a word. What fucking right did she have to making him feel guilty anyhow.
He hangs about in Liverpool for a few years. He gets by as most people do in Liverpool, they’re all bloody thieves there.
He’s thirty-five when he broke into the wrong house. The last thing he saw was the butt of a shotgun before his skull got smashed and he woke up as two blokes were digging a hole a few meters away. The looks on their faces as he gets up is something he savours for years when he needs a laugh. But it’s less funny when one of them pulls a gun, and he has about three seconds to consider that if he dies they will bury him and he will choke on dirt before he reaches the surface. He darted forward and grabbed a shovel from where the gun guy dropped it on the ground and slid to the forest floor as he brought the metal hard into his face. As blood spurted from the broken nose Nathan scrambled after the gun and shot the other bloke in the gut.
The guy with a face full of blood yelled after his mate, whose name, apparently, was Dave, and swung at Nathan with a meaty fist. The Irish boy got a kick in the stomach when he ducked the punch and doubled over in the freshly dug hole. His boot managed to find its way to the blokes groin and when he toppled over Nathan wrestled him until he could shove the gun in the guys face.
They paused for a second, both of them thinking ‘oh fuck’ for different reasons and Nathan pulled the trigger.
It wasn’t until the bodies were buried and Nathan was sitting in a starbucks, enjoying a chocolate cream frappochino and a lolly, that he realized that he might have done something stupid.
He left Liverpool the same day ‘cause you never know who knows who in this world.
He ended up in Brighton, for whatever reason and manages a reasonable flat with the money he got in his career as clumsy master thief extraordinaire. Not that he stops stealing, mind you. ‘Stick with your works’, his Nan used to say, and that’s precisely what he did. When he’s forty-one he had a kid with this pretty little thing called Susan from Norway. They’re happy until Cody is two years old and Susan started questioning where Nathan got his money from.
Even though Nathan suspected that Susan wouldn’t really mind, he took that as his queue to move on.
He moved back to London and got a big flat in Hammersmith.
Nathan thanks his clumsiness and inescapable ability to fall into trouble for getting him involved in drugs.
During fifteen years he manages to make a name for himself. People call him Soap, he never finds out why. The fact that he doesn’t age doesn’t seem to face anybody. Not that people manage to stick around in the drug business long enough to really notice.
People tend not to take him seriously because of his apparently young age at first. But then they hear the stories. Half of the storied about Soap aren’t true, but he’s in no rush to tell people so.
Nathan is fifty-nine when Alisha dies. He stands at the edge of the graveyard as she is lowered into the ground. He doesn’t say hi to the others who are all there. He just looks. He read about what happened. Apparently it was a mugging that turned into rape and murder. The public is appalled and calling for the bastard’s blood. What kind of a sick fuck rapes an almost sixty years old lady, huh?
The others are old and Nathan stares at them, a fag hanging on his lip, what the hell happened?
Suddenly Kelly, who’s wearing a black suit, looks up sharply and grabs onto Simon’s sleeve. She says something to him and he looks up as well. As they look around the graveyard Nathan realized that they’re looking for him because Kelly heard him. He puts the cig out and makes himself scarce.
A week later he stops by the graveyard and puts a condom on Alisha’s grave. He pauses for a moment before throwing it away. ‘What the fuck was it supposed to mean anyway?’ he thinks as he goes by Sheppard’s Bush on the Hammersmith & City line.
By the time Kelly dies, Nathan had died twice and he is sixty-three. Both times were drug related murders. People have no respect these days. Especially not when there’s a punk arse kid who looks like he is eighteen and acts like he owns the streets, which he practically does.
He goes in to the church this time and plonks down on the left side seats next to Simon. People glares at his jeans and hoodie. Which, admittably, he shouldn’t have worn.
Kelly apparently had two children with her husband Richard and she had five grandchildren and a sixth on the way.
Afterwards Nathan sits in Simon’s livingroom, a glass of scotch rolling between his hands.
Nathan tells him about his son, who should look older than himself by now, about where he’s been, about what he’s been up to.
Simon asks if he knows how many times he’s died and Nathan has to think for a moment before saying yes.
‘Well, if you haven’t lost count yet, I’d say you’re doing rather good.’ Simon says and Nathan blinks at him before laughing and resting his face in his hands, bent over in his seat.
‘I’m just so bloody tired, freaky kid. I’m just tired.’ he admits for the first time to anyone.
When Simon asks if he still thinks he has the best power Nathan just smirks before getting up and leaving.
When the third world war comes round no one knows that’s what it is until it’s too late. 2106 and Nathan is 115 years old when he joins up. His second hand man, Jamie Gunners aka Gunners, says he’s mad. Says he’ll die. Nathan just laughs it off and leaves the business running under Gunners watching eye.
He stays alive for ten years before he gets shot in the neck. His team gets forced back and he is left to bleed to death on his own.
When he wakes up he is buried in a shallow grave in the woods, somewhere in Norway. Or maybe it was Sweden. Well, whatever country the Russians and the old alliance has chosen as their middle ground.
Fuck this shit, he thinks and decides to go home. People were beginning to wonder why he looked so young anyway.
Gunners blinks at him where he’s standing in the doorway of ‘the hub’.
‘Bloody hell, Soap.’ he says a bit unsteadily. ‘I thought people were joking when they said-‘
‘Nah, I guess they weren’t. How’s things?’ Nathan says.
And things go back to how they were.
When the war ends, seven years later, Nathan goes to the memorial stone set up in Hyde Park. His name is right at the top and he has to climb up on the tribute to see it. Nathan Young it says, Died in the service of His Royal Highness
Nathan thinks absently that if the Queen had still been around seventeen years ago, the war wouldn’t have broken out. It’s not like anyone gained anything.
Now, Nathan is roughly four hundred years old. He lost count some considerable time ago. He runs a flophouse in the area of what used to be Paddington station. He himself doesn’t live in that hellhole but he spends so much time there he might as well.
Seven months earlier a new drug came to his atention. The dealers call it Dancing Shoes. Nathan, being the good dealer that he is, samples it before he lets it out to his subjects. It’s effectfull, sure, but not groundbreaking. But Nathan soon realized that if you take five red pills at the same time instead of one or two -- it’s unworldly.
Nathan had ODd five times in the past six months. He doesn’t want to get addicted after all.
As Nathan walks through his flophouse, kicking people out when they can’t pay, he’s got Shady trailing after him. Shady, or Shady Shane -- or Shane Wilson if you’re that way inclined -- got his nickname because he is usualy a very good substitute for Nathan’s own shadow. Shady’s got the list with people who need to pay or find some other way to cancel their debts.
‘We havn’t got nothing from Birdie in number twelve.’ Shady mumbles around the pencil in his mouth as he flicks his papers around in his own organized style.
Nathan nods and skips up the stairs. ‘Has she been out at all?’
Shady looks at his notes again. ‘Nah, Cris saw her two days ago when she got some new pumps, but that’s it.’
Pumps are Dancing Shoes, only bigger and pink to clearly show that it’s a different dose. Only, clearly isn’t always enough. Birdie was a sweet sixteen year old who Nathan knew personaly. She usually put the dancing shoes on.
‘Oh, well that’s a shame.’ he says and gets his keys out, not even bothering to knock.
Birdie was sprawled, or, well, as sprawled as one can be in a cubicle sized room, across the floor. The toes of her sneakers were kissing and her long limbs looked awkward when they were that still. One of her green eyes were bloodshot and looking in different direction from the other one. The bile on her chin that dripped down her hair onto the floor revealed that she had quite obviously drowned in her own vomit.
Shady is holding his breath behind Nathan as he scratches the tip of his pencil on the sheet of paper a few times. ‘I’ll call someone.’ he mumbles absently.
‘Nah,’ Nathan interrupts him with a wavy gesture. ‘I’ll do this one, just help me down to the car.’
Shady shrugs in a way that clearly says, each to their own before putting the papers in his shoulderbag and grabbing a hold of her feet. Together they lug her down two flights of stair. No-one really looks twice at them.
She is stuffed into the trunk together with the shovel he always keeps there. He doesn’t drive for long, just into Green Park. No-one really cares to go in there anymore.
As he struggles to lift her thin frame out of the trunk he briefly entertains the thought of working out, it’s not like he doesn’t have the time, before perishing it with a breathy laugh. He can’t be bothered.
Watching her face, as it disappears beneath the moist dirt, he can’t help but think that she looked like someone but he can’t for the world of him figure out who.
‘Too long ago.’ He thinks with a shrug and shovels down some more dirt. It is a shame that she doesn’t get a coffin, he muses, they are quite comfortable. Quite safe.
Yes. Sometimes Nathan misses his grave.