"They're a rotten crowd," I said to him, and didn't know quite how right I was.

"You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."

It was not a lie.

Not then, and not now, even though I know the whole truth now — all the ugly parts of it, the secrets he never told anyone, the ones that would have gotten him shot and burned, had anyone known.

I will take these secrets to the grave with me, as well, and well beyond.

It was not a lie, and it might have been the thing that saved Gatsby's life — in a manner of speaking, of course.

You see, he might not have admitted to it, but he had given up.

He didn't believe in love anymore, not the loud and irrational and yearning kind of love that he'd been in with Daisy. He'd given up on getting her call, had given up on waiting for her.

But, hearing me say that, and knowing, a moment later, that it had not been a well-meaning, placating kind of lie — well, that changed something.

It changed something for me too. Seeing his face break into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on the fact of his worthiness all the time, his gorgeous pink rag of a suit a bright spot of color against the white steps, it made me think of the night when I first met him, three months before.

It made me think of the lie I'd been telling myself, all this time, an uncomfortable realization about the truth of my own personal nature.

I was in love with Jay Gatsby, and James Gatz, and all the other personas he created for himself or simply was.

I was in love with Jay Gatsby, and six hours later, he was dead.

After two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and the next day, only as an endless drill of police and photographers and newspaper men in and out of Gatsby's front door. It all blurred together in a wild mix of grief and anger and dread, like smoke in water, or ashes in the sky.

The world just didn't make any sense, not without Gatsby in it.

I found myself on Gatsby's side, and alone. People asked questions and flashed cameras, but they didn't stay — not like me.

As Gatsby lay in his house and didn't move or breathe or speak, hour upon hour, it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested— and what a pretty way that was to say that no one else cared.

I was in love with Jay Gatsby, and I was responsible for his earthly possessions, for his burial, and to ensure that he wouldn't—

And that's when it hit me, and I still feel stupid that it took me quite this long.

Gatsby had left me all the cues, scattered through all the times we talked, traded secrets.

It was due to Dan Cody that he drank so little, Gatsby had all but exclaimed that. Had gone on a tangent about how sometimes people used to rub champagne into his hair, how he himself had formed the habit of letting liquor alone.

He was clever, and did extraordinarily well in the war. He escaped wounds and those inconspicuous deadly scratches that many other men lay their lives down to; that they rose to undeath from.

Gatsby was mysterious and careful and alive — and it all seems to come down to the same thing.

He knew about the zombie outbreak before it happened, knew about how the virus transmitted before the scientists ever figured it out.

And, look. It's nice to be oblivious sometimes, to be the one that nobody would suspect — but at some point playing stupid just isn't worth it anymore.

So I gathered all my suspicions, and planned out my case, and I left Gatsby's body alone for the few hours it took to get to New York and back.

Meyer Wolfshiem stood solemnly in the doorway, holding out both hands. He drew me into his office, remarking in a reverent voice that it was a sad time for all of us, and offered me a cigar.

I listened as he reminisced, and asked if he started Gatsby in the business, and then I dropped the act.

"So you can get me a dose?"

Wolfshiem blinked at me.

"He's dead," I emphasized. "I want to make him not so."

Wolfshiem blinked at me, and then he closed the door.

And he stopped making excuses.

When I left his office the sky had turned dark, but there was something like a light in my chest. 

Not as bright as the green light at the end of the dock, but enough. A little candle's flame, maybe, small but fierce, and capable of so much hope in the dark, of so much destruction if left in the wrong hands.

I think the hands I chose to place my heart in are the right ones.

(Rough but soft, both gentle and less so, always cold now, but still irrevocably Gatsby.)

All the bright precious things fade so fast, and they don't come back.

The words had always stuck with me. So filled with melancholy, or nostalgia, a yearning for something never forgotten, but so irreparably past. A yearning for something impossible, something that had been good, but wasn't anymore.

The words had always stuck with me, but after that day, it was because they were proven so wrong.

The bright precious things can come back, if you just want them to badly enough, if you're willing to go all the way, to take the paths that sane people probably shouldn't.

They don't have to fade, if you just hold on hard enough.

Nobody came to the funeral. In retrospect, maybe that was a good thing.

Daisy hadn't sent a message or a flower. I couldn't care enough to work up any resentment.

I was too anxious, too sick to the stomach to waste my thoughts on Daisy — Daisy, who had had her chance and chose to miss it.

No, I wasn't bitter. Of course not.

Dimly I heard someone murmur "Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on," and then someone else screamed. Or maybe they were the same person.

I blinked the rain out of my eyes and saw that Gatsby had sat up in his casket. He brushed his wet hair to the side and looked a little affronted.

I smiled, helplessly affectionate.

And one fine morning, two years later, we have made our way to Europe.

The American Dream is far behind us, as are the gay parties and the drinking and the drama, but I'm happier than I remember ever being.

How could I be anything but, his undead hand in mine, as we watch the sun rise over an ocean where there's no dock with a green light at the other end of it in sight, as we finally leave the last dredges of the past behind us, and as Gatsby feasts on the remains of Tom Buchanan's useless brain.