Archive of Our Own ^beta

He'd made it to Christmas. Cards opened from the hospital bed, small gifts of food and memorabilia unwrapped. Grateful? Happy? More docile than usual, anyway. That mercurial discontent – the thing that made Rick Dalton, Rick Dalton – might've been frozen in a lump inside him. It might've still been there. But it wasn't showing anymore.

Not technically senile, not so old a man. It's funny the things that cancer takes away.

He didn't make it to New Year's Eve, which left Cliff and Francesca on their own in that house. House full of memories. That felt like a shitstupid thing to say, but then again it was.

Neither one of them felt like ringing in 1980 with a party. Go figure. But both of them wanted to get drunk. On champagne, why the hell not? Call it a celebration of life.

The funeral, scheduled for January second, would be a big deal, and that meant it would be unbearable.

Cesca was all in black. Turtleneck and palazzo pants, because in recent years she'd gotten self-conscious about both her neck and her legs. Cliff had dredged up a black t-shirt to match.

The champagne made his Italian better and her English worse.

(Don't worry, they don't hook up this time. Tonight is all about Rick.)

Some time before eight, two hours into the drinking, the Betamax tapes came out.

Cesca made the first pick: Rick as Leontes in The Winter's Tale, with that hard-won British accent the critics had admired so much. From a distance of nine years the accent didn't sound so impressive, but it wasn't the main attraction to begin with. He had a face like a silent star. Television, with its square, obvious framing, had capitalized on that by happenstance, but it took Roman Polanski, of all people, to bring it out deliberately on the big screen.

The Polish director had talked about doing a second Shakespearean picture, maybe one of the tragedies. But after Winter's Tale bombed, there wasn't a chance.

More champagne, and what next? Cliff pulled out The Man with the Golden Gun. A nice, meaty role. A heavy, sure – a heavy's heavy, with a midget henchman to boot – but in movies the stigma's not the same.

He'd needed a stunt double for that one, just for a scene or two. A young guy named Bruno Sinclair. He was good, too (even two-fifths of the way to blotto, Cliff watched the kid's work with a professional eye) but he wasn't a keeper. After Cliff's injury, Rick had never worked with the same stuntman twice.

The movie skittered forward – weirdly, discursively, the series's baggy plotting already setting in – and then came Rick's big moment, that wonderful speech: “Can I say my prayer, mister?”

That long suspenseful track in. And then bang bang bang and it became the John Gavin Show again.

Cliff set the tape to rewind while Cesca fetched another bottle of bubbly out of the fridge. She had been drinking too fast, had gotten a bit sloppy. She couldn't get it open by herself.

It was fifteen minutes to midnight. “Tratteniamo,” Cliff said. He wasn't sure how he knew that word – “let's hold off” – or whether all the syllables had come out in the right order.

And he thought Cesca was drunk.

They sat together, side by side on the sofa. Arms without a body, feeling the absence between them. They'd both lived there for a decade, but it was still Rick's house all the way – a little more overstuffed than it used to be, the private shrine of a man in love with his own mortal face. Someday, maybe, some of the stuff would have to go. Someday they'd both have to move out, maybe even move on.

But not yet, please dear God not yet.

Cliff toyed with the idea turning on the TV, catching a little of the revelry. It was traditional, after all. But in the end, the only countdown came from the clock on the wall.

He popped the cork and they toasted. It was strange not to feel the weight of Rick leaning on them. Maybe they'd have to learn to lean on each other, just to keep from floating away.