He moved through that final night as if he’d made a private truce with pain: it could have his bones, but not his courage. The tuxedo only framed the truth he no longer tried to hide, and when he joked about “medicine,” the crowd laughed, not knowing he was naming the only cure left to him—love, roaring back at him in waves. He stood inside that ovation like a man at his own wake, savoring every second he had no right to. Then, when the lights went dark and the stage fell silent, he left without ceremony, the way he’d always gone—no monuments, no marble, only memory. What remained wasn’t his fame or the numbers his films once drew, but the image of a battered figure refusing to bow to anything but gratitude, walking straight into the dark with his spirit still, impossibly, unbroken.
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