#jemma is (from a quick google) the name of daniel's highschool gf lol for context

[lilyrizzy]

i'm sorry but sometimes things need to be banished from the WIP word docs folder even if they are really morbid! cw: early onset alzheimers, major character death

Max remembers thinking, let it be over, towards the end.

Let it be over, I want it to be done.

Only when he was weakest, when Daniel was too, but too quickly that became all the time. When he couldn’t hold his head up anymore, when he couldn’t swallow. When he stopped looking like Daniel because Max realized it had been a week and he hadn’t seen him smile. When he stopped being Daniel because he was someone who didn’t remember Max.

Daniel before Max was a stranger that he didn’t totally know how to talk to, how not to hate because he wasn’t his. He would run his tongue across his teeth over and over as though surprised they were free of metal, would talk about being late for meetings with the race engineers of Formula One teams that didn’t exist anymore. He’d ask for his mum. He’d ask Max what his name was, had they met before?

He’d ask for Jemma, a girl he hadn’t spoken to for ten years, or at least as far as Max knew.

In his bad moments, Max had to bite his tongue so hard copper would fill his mouth, the only way to stop a scream of, she’s not fucking here wiping your nose and watching you die, and you cannot even remember me?

I am the one you are supposed to remember.

In his worst, he would make up elaborate reasonings for the way her memories didn’t seem to slip through the sieve of Daniel’s brain, sand through spread fingers, like every trace of Max did.

Daniel had to have been in love with her still, secretly. Maybe this whole time Max had been filling a void. Maybe nothing had been real so really, Max would be losing nothing when Daniel finally left for good.

Then as though he wanted to punish Max for his moments of spiteful selfishness, Daniel would say, “Max,” and he would be there again. Something in his eyes that made it impossible for Max to doubt that they were real while they lasted. “Max,” he would say, “I’ve missed you. Where have you been, baby?”

Like Max was the one who was leaving.

They had something real. So real that with every part of it chipped away by prions and time, it was slicing parts of Max away with it too. His ears, his nose, his fingertips, whole chunks of his flesh cut from him bloody and raw. Or at least it felt that way, each time Daniel looked at him and didn’t recognize the man he’d once called his, my Maxy, when in the mirror they both looked the same.

Now Daniel is gone gone, there is so much more for Max to regret. If he got home from a race and Daniel was in their apartment asking for her, he thinks given a second chance he could be kind. He would tell him, she will be home soon, but I am here now though and isn’t that enough? He’d make Daniel some food, his mum’s pasta that Max knows the recipe off by heart, but that he still has the card for stuck to their fridge with a little magnet in the shape of a kangaroo.

He made it once, after the funeral. Midnight on Daniel’s ranch- Max’s now, he supposed- in Perth. A whole saucepan full that he ate and then threw up within the same hour, so quickly the swirls of pasta were their whole shape in the toilet bowl.

Closing his eyes, he’d started to cry when he realized he couldn’t quite remember what it felt like to have Daniel’s fingers with their stubby nails stroke across the top of his back, or through his hair when he was sick. Couldn’t remember Daniel’s touch at all really, because at the end it had been so rare to get it.

Why would Daniel want a stranger to touch him, after all.