#they are like one of three things out of fury i adore unconditionally

[hoperaypegasus]

Ryuga, walking away from a disaster: Okay. I get it. You've had a really hard time lately, you're stressed out, seven people died- 

Kenta, hurrying after him: Twelve, actually. 

Ryuga: Not the point. Look, they're dead now and really whose fault is that? 

Kenta: Yours! 

Ryuga: That's right: no one's.

[ts-virgil-angst]

TW: none that i can think of but hmu if there is

Word Count: 1229

Prompt: You and your friends download an app that tells you how old you will be when you meet your soulmate. Theirs say things like 25 or 30, but yours says 500. You all have a laugh, brush it off, and it becomes a memory. 10 years later, you notice you haven’t aged at all. (via @writing-prompt-s)

----

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was just a dumb app. It was just a game. A silly stupid game. As much as Patton missed them—all of them—he couldn’t help but feel a little resentment upon thinking of Roman. He was the one who had brought it into their lives. Patton knew logically that it would have happened anyway, but his heart couldn’t help but ache at the memory.

They were twenty years old.

“Patton!” Roman sang, swinging into his room and plopping down heavily on the bed. Logan, who had his notes spread out everywhere let out a disgruntled groan at his now crumpled papers. Virgil, who had been curled up in Patton’s lap napping quietly, jerked awake, startled. Once his eyes landed on Roman, he sighed and settled back down on Patton’s lap.

Patton never minded when Roman came singing into his room. Usually it meant he had something interesting to talk about and Patton was always willing to lend an ear. At the moment, he just wasn’t sure his bed was really suited to all of them. It was a queen, sure, but it was getting quite crowded.

“What’s up, Roman?”

“I found this wonderful app.”

“Last time you said that,” Logan said, trying to gather all of his notes. “You had me download Tinder after saying it was an app that gave you daily facts about fires.”

Roman snorted. “I still can’t believe you fell for that.” Logan snatched the rest his notes from under Roman and settled on the floor. One of these days Patton would get a desk. “No, this one is literally just a countdown app. You just answer these questions about yourself and then it countdowns to the birthday when you’ll meet your soulmate. Isn’t that romantic?”

“Having a machine tell you when you’ll find love is far from romantic.” Virgil spoke up from Patton’s lap, slowly rising, his hair falling into his eyes. Patton couldn’t help but notice how cute he looked when he first woke up. His face was little puffy, his hair a tangled fluffy mess, and his eyes were just a little squinty. Adorable.

“Says you, Hot Topic.” Roman huffed and held his hand out. Without too much fuss, Virgil handed over his phone. Despite their spats with each other, Virgil and Roman trusted each other explicitly and unconditionally. So much so that they could unlock each other’s phones.

After a moment, Roman handed his phone back, then help his hand out for Patton. “It’ll be quick, you guys.”

Virgil stared down at his phone, eyebrow slowly raising. “These are some very person questions.”

“I mean it’s not like anyone will see them.” Roman said flippantly.

Once Patton got his phone back, he started to go through the questions, most of them very generic: what is your favorite color? Do you prefer beaches or mountains?

But when he got to question ten, his expression began to mimic Virgil’s. What is the one thing you can’t forgive yourself for?

Patton couldn’t really answer that. Not honestly, at least. As far as he knew, there was nothing he couldn’t forgive himself for. After a moment’s hesitation, he skipped it.

They were thirty-three years old.

“Damn, how did you manage to stay so youthful?” Roman was standing in front of the mirror, nervously picking at his dress. Patton stood behind him, adjusting the back of it, smiling gently as he looked over Roman. He looked beautiful in the red and gold dress. A high low, off the shoulder dress that went to his ankles in the back, golden swirls and flowers dancing around the trim. He looked just like a princess—exactly what he deserved today.

Patton blinked back tears as he fluffed out Roman’s hair. “I’m just as youthful as anyone here.” He paused, the laughed. “Maybe it’s because of that app.”

“Five hundred years old. Can you believe it said that?”

“Well,” Patton said, adjusting his own dress. It was a simple golden dress to match the hem of Roman’s. “It did tell you when you’d meet your soulmate and you did.”

Roman laughed. “Imagine my surprise when it said seven years old.” Surprising most, Virgil was Roman’s only friend for a long time since they had met at seven. It was very cute that 20+ years later they were getting married.

“Are you ready?”

Roman took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m ready.”

They were seventy-three years old.

When forty came and passed and Patton still hadn’t changed a bit, his youthful appearance unchanging, Patton had nervously waved away any comments about how he looked. And he kept waving it away with each year.

But his friends were up in their age, their bodies no longer spry, aching and creaking. Still, he stayed. He stayed his twenty-year-old self, unmoving while everyone plowed ahead.

Logan had tried his hardest to figure out why Patton didn’t age, why he stayed so stagnant. Even to his last days, on his death bed, he could never figure it out.

“It’s okay that we can’t figure this out. It-It doesn’t matter.”

He sighed, gripping Patton’s hand. Patton couldn’t help but notice how thin his skins was and how they seemed to take the heat from his hands. “Perhaps that app had something to it anyway. Perhaps…”

And that was that.

He was one hundred and fifty years old.

All his loved ones were gone. Once Virgil had passed, Patton couldn’t find it in himself to go out and make friends. If this app were true, if he was meant to stagnate until he met his soulmate, then what was the point in making friends he would outlive.

He was two hundred nineteen.

Everything was coming easy to him. He had lived for so long, he had so much to his name, he had nothing to do. Nothing to work for. It was so sad.

He was three hundred and one.

His great-great nieces and nephews kept him company as he became more and more of a recluse. He was tired of living. Tired of staying when everyone else moved on.

He was three hundred ninety-seven. He did his best to live with grace and kindness. Patton refused to let his loneliness claim him anymore. He wanted to live.

He was five hundred. Patton barely registered his birthdays now. They were just another day of the year, just another moment to pass him by.

“Patton?”

He looked up from his book, eyes looking at the man that walked up to him. Patton was currently sitting at a booth for the charity he had started to help the homelessness pandemic. Right now, he was at a convention selling t-shirts to help the profits. He was doing fairly well, people were talking to him about it, happy to help out, though they always had questions with his semi-immortality.

The person in front of him was vaguely familiar in his features. Something about his high cheek bones or the frame of his glasses.

“It is deed me. What can I do for you?”

He smiled shyly. “Oh, um, I was just wandering around and stopped here.”

Patton held out his hand out and smiled. The man smiled back and Patton finally, finally, felt something move in his chest. “Patton, and you?”

“Oh, um, I’m Logan. Nice to meet you.”

-----

@wikkedwolff @mira-jadeamethyst @genderqueerwriter-blog @raisin-oatmeal-cookie @finiteframe3 @frustratedwaffle @queerweare @zoeyheys @analogically-prinxiety @polysandershell @prinxietys @jadorefreedom @inalandofmythandtimeofmagic @thebaagelboy  @vampyrsarah  @winds-and-stardust @cisnesincorbata @fugitive-angel @ataleofire @angsty-anxxiety @saltequeen @theanxofthethomas @irish-newzealand-idian-dutch @miniritzcrackers @ninjas-forever @thesmallestalien @stjernemaskin @deathshadowrules @kenanscloud @tea--ghost @massivehoagiepastahumanoid @aznasalon @lilreadergurl @fury-of-rome   @lunareclipse-13 @probablysomeproblems @choppedfestdelusion @julia-loves-cupcakes @aropicanipie @seukizuo @dragonetteeye @dontquestionmeagainsanders @romananalogicality

[marshmarrowsans]

What about ut sans proposing?

(Yasss thank you I LOVE writingmarriage proposal fluff~ -Mod Kasha)

 Sans had beenmeaning to propose to you for the past three months.  Every time he tried, he just couldn't get itdown right.

 The first time hetried, he just plain chickened out.  Youwere stargazing together and he was going to do this really cute thing where hemade a really big deal about some star in the sky, made you try and find it forawhile, then brushed it off with an 'oops, my bad, it was a diamond this wholetime' just before presenting you with the engagement ring.  But in the middle of gushing over how prettythat star that wasn't there was, he was consumed with doubt.  Maybe you weren't ready.  He knew he could be a little bit...  much to deal with sometimes.  He wouldn't blame you if you weren't ready tocommit to putting up with his weird bullshit for the rest of your livestogether.  Besides, this was stupid.  This was cheesy.  You'd be embarrassed telling this story toyour kids one day.  Wait, kids?  Slow down, Sansy, one thing at a time.

 Needless to say,he turned his failed proposal into a weak joke by telling you, 'oh, oops,that's the moon.'  At least it made youlaugh.

 The second timehe tried, it was just the two of you at home, cuddling and watching an oldfavorite movie from your childhood.  Hefelt more comfortable there, in the walls of your shared home.  He wasn't going to chicken out thistime.  He wasn't going to make some kindof spectacle or joke out of it.  He wasjust going to take the pillow lying next to him, plop it on the floor, get downon one knee, and show you the ring in his pocket.  But... you had your head on the pillow. And you were asleep.

 Shit.

 The third time hetried was the closest he got to actually doing it.  He was sure that it couldn't go wrong.  He'd practically trapped himself into doingit, and trapped you on that path with him, by arranging to go to a fancyrestaurant with you.  He set aside enoughmoney to fund your Grillby's trips for weeks, bought a suit for the first timein his life, reserved the table and everything. You looked absolutely beautiful, and you told him that he lookedadorable, so he was riding that confidence-boost high all evening, all the wayuntil dessert came, all the way until the restaurant manager approached yourtable.  It turned out, while Sans wasmonologuing about his feelings for you as a prequel to his proposal, the peopleat the table next to you felt uncomfortable at the way you two were holdinghands and, oh so scandalously, even going so far as to kiss a couple of times.  Andapparently, that was your problem for being together, not theirs for buttinginto other people's business because they didn't like the sight of a human anda monster being affectionate with one another. You were kicked out of the restaurant.

 Understandably, thatkind of ruined the entire night.  How washe supposed to propose when you had so much sadness and fury in your eyes?  When all you could talk about was how fuckedup that was, how fucked up the world was, how sorry you were that humans couldbe so rotten, as if you were a part of the problem somehow despite loving him completelyand unconditionally?  He just held you inhis arms, reassured you that it wasn't your fault and that yeah, the world waskind of fucked up, but it was still worth living in together.  Then he teleported you home to sleep on it.

 What he learnedfrom those failures was as follows:

1. Don't be acoward.  So what if you turned him downor thought it was cheesy?  It wouldn't bethe end of the world.  It wouldn't meanyou didn't love him.

2. Don't do it athome.  It's too comfy.  One of you or the other would get too cozyand fall asleep for sure.

3. Don't do it ina place with a lot of humans.  A lot ofthem were still weirdly bitter about monsters existing in society.

 With all of thatin mind, he swore to himself, this would be the time that he did it forreal.  For the first time in a long time,he asked you to go to Grillby's with him, on Friday, right after work.  That had been your routine before you gottogether as a couple.  After you gottogether, of course, you pretty much went with him whenever he went.  To go there again, specifically when you usedto, was somehow kind of nostalgic, even though it was by far your mostfrequently-visited date location.  Youeagerly agreed.

 Everything wasjust like it always was between you two, just as it always had been.  Neither of you dressed up for it.  You ordered the same food and drinks (andcondiment) as always.  You got into yoursame old pun war with each other and he let you rant about the same oldbullshit at your workplace.  He preferredit that way.  He just smiled, rested hischin in his hand and thought about how nice it would be to spend the rest ofhis life just like this.

 "Sans stopsmiling that asshole stole my lunch from the fridge again."

 He only smiledwider.  "you did not just tell your skeleton boyfriend tostop smiling.  that's like me telling youto stop being cute."

 "Yeah, wellI..."  You blushed.  "Okay first of all, I'm not cute, I'mbadass."

 "i thinkyou're living proof that those two aren't mutually exclusive."

 "And second of all, you smile differentlywhen you're actually smiling like a human would.  It reaches your eyes."

 The fact that youcould tell the difference made him feel a rush of love for you.  "awwwh. i love the way you analyze me like one of your specimens."

 You reachedacross the table and patted his cheek. "You're my speciman."

 "heheh."  He put his hand over yours, leaned into yourtouch a little, and looked at you with an eager and bashful expression hehadn't quite replicated since your first few dates together.  It was the expression he used to get when hewanted you to kiss him but didn't know how to ask.  You were expecting him to say something sweetand mushy, but all he said was, "you want an onion ring?"

 Okay.  Shakespearean it was not, but coming fromSans, that was a tiny bit romantic.  Dudeloved his onion rings.

 "Oh sure,thanks, honey.  I want to see what allthe fuss is about," you chuckled, letting go of his cheek to hold out yourhand for one.  "They must be prettydamn good if you never even share them with the love of your life overhere."

 There was amischievous gleam in his eyesockets.  Youwere sure he was about to prank you, but since you were curious where the hellhe could be going with this, you just let him do his thing.  Instead of reaching into his onion ringbasket, he reached into his pocket.  Heheld something in his hand, but kept it concealed for a moment, a light blueblush dusting his cheeks.

 "oops.  did i say onion ring?  i meant to say union ring.  my bad." He felt physically incapable of it, but he knew that if there was onetime in his life that he needed to look you in the eyes, it was now.  So he did. You just looked shocked.  It was anatural reaction.  He stifled the anxietyrising in the pit of his stomach and presented you with the ring he'd been holdingon to for ages.  He'd picked it outbecause, rather than a traditional clear diamond, the center gem was a deepblue, and cut into the shape of a tiny heart. What would be a minor detail to most human couples was a major one tohim, because he wanted it to resemble his soul, as if he were literally handingit over to you to hold and to take care of and to cherish forever.

 "heh.  i, uh, know it's gotta be disappointing,compared to one of these tasty onion rings you thought you were gonna get.  you still want it?"

 You stillseemed frozen in place, but he felt his nervousness fade when he saw thegrowing smile on your face.  You weregoing to say yes.  Oh, stars, you wereactually going to say yes.

 "...  Yes." Your voice came out soft and shy, nothing like it usually did-- you wereusually bold compared to him.  But youwere certain.

 As coolas he'd been trying to play it, he couldn't really contain himself anymore whenyou agreed.  He jumped off his stool andpulled you down from yours into a long, tight hug, his face buried completelyin your chest.  You barked out a laugh,ecstatic.  Both of you were shaking inyour excitement.

 "God,Sans..." you mumbled as you pressed kiss after kiss to the top of hishead.  It seemed you were just as much ata loss for words as he was.

 "thanksfor saying yes," he whispered back. "i...  really, really neededto hear that from you."  He pulledaway a little, but only to smile up at you and slip the ring on to yourfinger.  It fit perfectly, and he wasoverwhelmed by the sight of you finally wearing it, a symbol of his love foryou, and your love for him in return. "i dunno what else to say besides i love you.  and, uh, fyi, i was tryin' to do this formonths."

 Youlaughed and nuzzled his forehead with yours. "That's awesome.  BecauseI've been daydreaming about marrying you for months."

 That wasofficially the cutest thing he'd ever heard. He could hardly imagine you sitting there and thinking about marryinghim, of all people.  No matter how longyou were together, he could never fully understand how you could be so in lovewith him.  But he didn't doubt it for amoment, and he was so, so grateful for it. "...  have i mentioned that ilove you?  because holy smokes, i adoreyou."

 "Hehe,yeah, you mentioned it.  About thirtyseconds ago.  But it's always nice tohear it again.  And I love you too,"you assured him.

 "sweetheart.  babe. you saying 'yes' is all the 'i love you's i'll ever need."

[i-am-very-very-tired]

‘What makes me so sad about Lee’s killing himself is that there are so few people with that kind of talent mixed with that fury of originality. Now we have one less of the few who are amazing. Why did he have to go and do that?” wondered Sam Taylor-Wood, the British artist. She was throwing out the big question that has consumed the fashion world since the suicide of her buddy and sometime subject Alexander McQueen, the 40-year-old designer, known to his friends by his given first name, Lee. His body—a physique that he’d worried over and tried to sculpt at the gym—was found at 10:30 a.m., February 11, hanging in his wardrobe, by his housekeeper in the apartment he’d been renting in London’s Mayfair, a far cry (and six or so miles) from the working-class East End neighborhood where he’d grown up. The tragedy was compounded in that it came just a week after the death of his beloved mother, Joyce, who at 75 had succumbed to an undisclosed illness. But even though McQueen’s brutal act of self-annihilation ultimately did not surprise those who knew him best, and were aware of his dark moods and inner agonies, plenty about his death didn’t add up.

After all, he’d been busy preparing for his autumn-winter ready-to-wear show in the days just before the tragedy. He’d been tweeting and texting his nearest and dearest, and apart from his obvious sadness about his mum, there wasn’t anything particularly unusual about his actions or his messages. In retrospect, some of his pals say they see portents in how loving his greetings were, but even they caution that they may be reading too much into this. The photographer Steven Klein, who was close to the designer for years, found him to be in good shape at the lunch they had in London at Christmas. “He was very together, in great form,” says Klein. “We made plans to do several new projects together.”

McQueen had even put in a surprise appearance at a dinner for Tom Ford, given by *Vanity Fair’*s editor, Graydon Carter, at Harry’s Bar in London on February 1. McQueen, who lived nearby, popped in uninvited; he sat at the bar, had a drink, chatted with Ford, and split. Ford had initiated the purchase of a majority stake in McQueen’s label in 2000 when Ford was the guiding force at the Gucci Group, owned by the French luxury-brands company PPR, and thus was McQueen’s old boss. So there was plenty of symbolism in this encounter. But then again, symbolism is everywhere in this story, as it was in the presentations of McQueen’s collections.

At their best, these shows were feats of magic, drama, and the sheer beauty of high fashion. McQueen was a traditionalist and an avant-gardist both. He liked to provoke with his ideas and shock with his ability to create unforgettable, original, sometimes extremist, often breathtaking clothes. He designed for both sexes, and in between, but soared highest with the women. His signatures were strong shoulders, strong tailoring, and a love of the corset. His collections were so specific, so true to himself, and so visceral that they are easy to remember. It helps, too, that they earned nicknames nearly as evocative as the clothes themselves—“the Shipwreck Collection” (spring-summer 2003), “the Chess Collection” (spring-summer 2005), “the Hitchcock Collection” (autumn-winter 2005). Among the most memorable was the now iconic “Highland Rape Collection,” from autumn-winter 1995 (one of his earliest shows, when he was starting out with his then-shoestring label), which mixed flesh-baring see-through material with eruptions of tartan, the clashes and juxtapositions intended as condemnation of England’s historic bullying of Scotland. (The folklore: one model hit the catwalk with a visibly dangling tampon string. To this day McQueen’s intimates aren’t sure whether that was accidental or intentional.) The rawness may have been polished as time went on, but it never went away. “The They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Collection” (spring-summer 2004) was presented as if in a Depression-era dance-hall, a marathon where the models had to dance till they dropped in dresses that started out as perfect specimens and ended up in tatters. “The Wolves Collection” (autumn-winter 2002) was shown at the Conciergerie, in Paris, where Marie Antoinette had been held before she was sent to the guillotine. The opening model came out in a lavender hooded leather cape, walking a couple of trained wolves on leashes. (I think I only imagined their howling.) McQueen was the king of metaphor.

The immediate reaction to his death reinforced the notion that his wasn’t just another name on a label. Beyond the front-page stories and worldwide headlines, beyond the reports of his clothes’ selling out in department stores, there were Diana-like tributes. Students, artists, and fans left farewell notes and bunches of flowers outside his boutiques in London, Milan, Los Angeles, and New York, all of which were shuttered after the news broke. (The designer Diane von Furstenberg was spotted adding a bouquet to the ones that had already been dropped off at his shop on 14th Street in New York’s Meatpacking District.) McQueen’s death also coincided with the opening of New York Fashion Week, and there were nods to him in a number of the shows, including the beautifully elegiac opening of the Marc Jacobs presentation. No question: Alexander McQueen had become a name for the ages, the James Dean of fashion.

To call someone an artist in this milieu is tricky, because that can connote pretense, a rarefied air, a certain self-conscious preciousness—all things that were not true of McQueen. But fashion has produced genuine artists, designers with deeply iconoclastic visions such as Charles James and the painter and sculptor Lucio Fontana, who made clothes and jewelry for a short while. Although McQueen was very much a fashion person, working with a fashion vocabulary, his clothes and presentations had a true art streak. He even behaved like an old-fashioned artist, never letting the fact that he worked for giant, powerful fashion corporations—first for LVMH, where he was installed in 1996 as the designer of Givenchy, and then for PPR—curb his creativity or freedom. This wasn’t someone who’d suck up to the bosses or important editors or celebrities. Elton John, who befriended the designer and respected his talent, says, “McQueen was never anybody’s boy. He was never going to bow down and kiss ass to anyone, which made him rare in that world.” He was freakish in terms of his natural abilities too. Mark Lee, the highly respected former president of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent (also owned by PPR), remembers, “Besides his eccentric vision, he really knew how to make and cut clothes. All the seamstresses, technicians, and product-development people who were around from the Gucci Group would talk about it all the time. He would just take a bolt of fabric and, in front of their eyes, would cut the pattern for his clothes. People said it was like watching Edward Scissorhands. There are not many designers around who can do that.” Similarly, McQueen often displayed a fearless, tour-de-force way with materials. There was nothing too fine or too common for him: neoprene, plastic, crocodile, paper, rose petals, antique lace, lamé … there was no stopping him. The finale of his autumn-winter 2006 collection, a pale-gray organza spiral ruffle dress, worn by Kate Moss, was as dreamy as it gets. That was highbrow McQueen; for lowbrow, look to his witty “bumster” pants from 1993—a feat of anatomical engineering described by one aficionada as “as low as you could go without having your trousers fall right down.”

McQueen used to call himself an East End bloke, which was code for saying he was not born into the world of caviar, champagne, and fine cloth. On a couple of occasions I had what he called “a proper English lunch” with him (I remember picking out the kidney in my steak-and-kidney pie), and each time he wanted to discuss the painter Francis Bacon. The combinations of gruesomeness and beauty, of raw flesh, homoerotic desire, and highly sophisticated execution that Bacon brought to his painting are not so far away from the concerns and approaches of McQueen’s work. There are personal parallels, too. I think of Bacon’s predilection for sex with men who were streetwise and of his finding refuge in the old London gay subculture. I think of the fact that his lover took his own life in 1971, on the eve of the opening of Bacon’s big retrospective in Paris, at the Grand Palais. (Camping it up, Bacon is supposed to have said, “Oh my dear, she’s gone and committed Susan-cide.”) For McQueen, too, a vociferously open gay man, there was an unforgettable combination of tough and fragile that was intrinsic to his emotional makeup. By all accounts, the designer’s childhood, growing up in the 1970s and early 80s, was like something out of Billy Elliot. His dad, Ronald, a taxi driver, reportedly had plans for his youngest child to become an electrician. (The designer had three sisters and two brothers.) McQueen, though, had fashion dreams, and as if that didn’t already make him a misfit in his environment, he had to put up with early torture about his sexuality; in his later life he often spoke about having been taunted with the nickname “McQueer” when he was young. Throughout, his mother was his shield, his advocate, the parent who eventually turned up at his shows, believing in his talent and adoring him unconditionally. Their bond was unbreachable from beginning to end.

McQueen’s formal education and professional rise are now part of fashion lore: the old-school tailoring training on Savile Row, where, as he later admitted and denied in equal measure, he had scrawled a punk-style slur—i am a cunt—inside the lining of a jacket being made for Prince Charles; the graduate fashion-school training at Central Saint Martins College; the meteoric trajectory of his career as a designer, which saw him going from overnight sensation after his last student collection to taking the reins for his bumpy five-year tenure at Givenchy, to finally having a house of his own, as Virginia Woolf might say, and really stretching his wings as a designer, to the sad, sad end.

The search for an answer as to why McQueen decided he’d had enough is really a struggle to find meaning in an act of nihilism. But as an old friend of his said to me, McQueen’s life was like an onion, and you have to peel away the layers to get to the center; it’s a process that can sting and bring tears. There was the loneliness, no doubt made all the more visceral by his mother’s death. Despite the surrogate family that McQueen created with a tiny clutch of fiercely close and protective friends—including Shaun Leane, the jewelry designer; Philip Treacy, the milliner; Daphne Guinness, the heiress, editor, and most daring dresser in fashion; Annabelle Neilson, a sort of sidekick; and Sam Gainsbury, who produced nearly all of McQueen’s shows—he had no long-term Mr. It. People remember how he’d say he was unlucky in love: he’d had a failed marriage to George Forsyth (Kate Moss was a bridesmaid at the 2000 wedding), and in the last years he seems to have had on-and-off liaisons with men, some of whom he met online. (Word is there was at least one porn star, a so-called Mr. Stag. There was also an older East End gangster he had a longer romance with.) Then there was his well-known history with drugs, especially cocaine. He was open about his substance abuse, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the autopsy told the same story when the results are released.

But it is my belief that all these traits were symptoms of something else. McQueen loved and collected art, and it is no coincidence that one of his favorite photographers was Joel-Peter Witkin, whose bleached and scratched images of masked figures, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, and corpses occupy a sometimes grim, sometimes joyous netherworld. The more one talks to those who knew McQueen, on and off the record, the deeper one goes, the clearer it becomes that what friends refer to as his “darkness” is where the truth of his death lies. Virginia Woolf and her struggle with depression is a kind of specter here. Sam Taylor-Wood says, “Lee would just sometimes go into this void, and we’d wait for him to resurface.”

He was not the only one in his circle to have terrible bouts with deep depression. Isabella Blow, his over-the-top, born-to-the-manor-but-without-a-pot-to-piss-in pal, who had an unlimited clothing allowance at his company and was often credited with discovering McQueen when he was in art school, also committed suicide, with weed poison, on her third attempt.

When Blow died, in May 2007, McQueen dedicated his next show to her, but some say he was angry at her for taking her own life. The rub is that he leaves behind a similar sense of frustration. There was a suicide note—what McQueen wrote hasn’t yet been disclosed—but it’s likely no one will ever know his whole story. Some have speculated that he may have felt he was done in fashion, sure of his legacy, and that his suicide was a kind of deliberate statement to that effect. Or was it something more uncontrollable? Sam Gainsbury says, “I appreciate that some people who were close to him think it was purposeful. But I think Lee got to a really dark place and could not get out of it. It was in that instance on that night. On another day maybe he would have gone to sleep and gotten out of it.”

People have commented on how, as the years went on, McQueen would disappear with lightning speed after his shows, rather than sticking around for the ritual backstage congratulations. “It always made me think of J. D. Salinger,” says Kerry Youmans, one of McQueen’s publicists. His suicide is perhaps the ultimate version of that impulse to withdraw. But PPR has announced that the McQueen business will continue. Fashion insiders have raised their carefully shaped eyebrows at the notion of replacing someone with so strong and individual a voice. McQueen’s friends remember his infectious laugh, and I wonder, could he be out there somewhere laughing now—maybe at the prospect of what will surely be a hard, hard search to fill his shoes? Or maybe in happiness that the line will go on?

I’m reminded of a show that McQueen did for autumn-winter 2007. It was known colloquially as “the Witches Collection” and was inspired by the fact that his mother, a genealogist, had discovered a relative who’d been a victim of the Salem witch trials. Like so many of McQueen’s presentations, this one had a high element of performance art to it—and a theme of death. The venue was very dark, people had difficulty finding their seats, the show started very late, it was raining outside, and there was an all-around bad mood in the air. Editors, who normally worshipped at McQueen’s feet, were yelling, “Who the fuck does he think he is? How dare he keep us all waiting like this?” The way people feel today, they’d be happy to wait for a much longer time to see one of his spectacles again, and they’d probably pay almost anything for his clothes.