One Place

Summary: A shadowy stranger visits the cemetery post The Gift. 15minuteficlet, the word was elegy.

Rated: PG

*

The man in black blends seamlessly with the pitch dark of the cemetery. He’s not sure if he picked a night with a new moon on purpose or if it just happened that way.  He finds her grave by feel more then sight, just as he’s always found her. It doesn’t feel like her though. She was light, life, love and laughter. There is none of that here.

He kneels beside the headstone. He doesn’t want to touch it, doesn’t want to know how cold it is, how cold she is now.

“You’re shaking like a leaf.”

“Cold.”

“Let me get you something.”

He can’t help it. His fingers trace the letters of her name of their own accord. He lays the white roses on the grass and closes his eyes. He doesn’t have any tears to cry, not anymore. They were spent days ago in a hotel along with screams that left his throat raw and his voice hoarse. It doesn’t matter. There’s only one person he has to talk to now.

Her.

He hestitates, not knowing what to say to her.  There are so many things he was sorry for. He had told her he was leaving because it was better for her. That hadn’t been true. He had left because it was better for him, easier not to lose his soul, easier not to touch her when she wasn’t right there. He wondered now if he hadn’t left, would she still be here.

“I should have an elegy to read to you,” he chuckled dryly, “but then you wouldn’t know what it was, just pretty words. Pretty words that can’t bring you back, that can’t save you,” his voice cracked. “You’re my forever and now I don’t know how to live without you in the world somewhere. I could face a life without you. I could even face a forever without you, but I can’t face a world where you don’t exist, a world without your smile, without your laugh. “

He wonders only briefly where she is. He knows she jumped into a portal to Hell and the thought of her in Hell cuts through him like a knife. The image of her smile, that particular look that was his alone, comes unbidden to his mind and he knows that it doesn’t matter what she jumped into, there’s only one place she could go. He dips into his pocket and his fingers brush cool metal. He takes the object out and wraps his hand around it. Smoke rises from his skin. He clenches his fist tighter until finally the pain forces him to let go. A glint of silver tumbles to the grass and he looks at his palm. The cross burned there reminds him there is only one place she could go.

He crumbles then, crumbles in a way he can’t in the hotel, a way he can’t with everyone watching. He is their leader, their savior. Leaders don’t stumble and saviors don’t’ fall. There had only been one place in the world he could break down completely, only one place where he didn’t have to be anything but himself and now that place is gone, lying six feet under ground.

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