Burn (Barlyle) (COMPLETE)

68

When they checked on him, some few hours later, he was unresponsive. Face pale, lips blue, just as Phineas Barnum was.

Blood in his gut, they said. The wound had re-opened, internally, and nobody had known - not until it was too late. He'd bled out from the inside and, when he'd fallen unconscious with a Ms. Anne Wheeler in the room, he'd simply never woken up again. Unlike before, they had simply been too late for any attempt to try to save him. It was a fairly painless way to go, all things considered.

When they received the news, the circus acts simply - deflated. There was no trying to save the circus this time. There was no trying to rebuild from the ashes that the Barnum fire had unleashed upon their lives. Life was funny like that sometimes - spend twenty-five years building a dream, and it all comes crumbling down with a simple match.

So it goes.

The Carlyles were notified, and the charge on Mr. John Carlyle was upped from attempted foul play to murder. It was the talk of the town - Phillip Carlyle, stabbed to death by his very own father. And with P.T. Barnum, the circus king, the man Phillip Carlyle allegedly had an affair with having succumbed to the fire not forty-eight hours before—

Some called it bittersweet, even going so far as to compare the case to that of Romeo & Juliet. Most others said it was God's punishment for embracing the sins of homosexuality in the first place.

The doctor in charge of Phillip Carlyle's case sighed and shook his head as he covered the man's forever-sleeping face with a sheet. It really was a shame, what happened. But such is life.

So it goes.

*

The circus laid abandoned by the docks, the oddities having given up all hope of ever restoring it to its former glory. As the sun set and evening settled over New York, a homeless man snuck into the tent. Using odd bits and pieces of abandoned equipment lying around, the homeless man sparked a fire. He sighed as he held up his cold, trembling hands to the flame - the only light in the otherwise dark, silent docks. Slumping against an old cardboard box, the man closed his eyes and soon fell asleep.

And the fire burned.

End

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(my next Barlyle fic - titled Ashes to Ashes - is coming as soon as I have a cover!)