Delicate, small fingers brushed at his cheek, feather soft. He’d never realized that he’d never really felt her hands before. Or even noticed them, really. How often he’d wished she would touch him so sweetly like that, how often he’d imagined being alone with her, telling her everything. But the shock of scarlet dirtied the image. Blood tainted the edges of the daydreams now, ruining the stark cleanliness he hadn’t noticed it held before, staining it in bigger and bigger patches the longer he stared. His voice was broken, gone, shock paralyzing his vocal cords. Everything in his mind froze with the pain.
As his eyes remained locked on her face, her fingers held in his, Owen watched the last breath leave her lips.
It was unlike anything he’d imagined watching someone die would be. He had considered the possibility that they might not truly be gone, that they were really just struggling for breath and closing their eyes helped with the effort. There was also the chance she had merely slipped into unconsciousness, her body unable to take the pain anymore and conserving its energy to focus on healing. Yet as he watched, studied, waited, there was nothing. No more rise and fall from her chest. No fluttering of her eyelids. No slow breathing escaping her parted lips. It wasn’t like sleep at all; the life was entirely gone from her.
At this realization, tears finally filled his eyes. They rose so rapidly, the boy had no time to react before they spilled down his cheeks, crashing against her cooling skin and still-warm clothing. With harsh sniffs and struggling to see, he gently set her hand on her stomach, careful not to look at the injury she had, the one he’d caused. It seemed to rip into him, creating a new hole, tearing out his heart and gripping it too tightly, restricting his breathing and making his head spin. Forcing himself away from those thoughts, he returned his gaze to her face instead.
Her eyes were slightly open, the familiar blue, now lifeless, peeking through a sliver. Hands shaking violently, he reached up, lowering one hand slowly over her face, scared to touch her but feeling compelled to give this last bit of respect, and carefully, reverently, closed her eyelids. Stray strands of hair were stuck to the blood that had dribbled from her mouth. Although Owen found himself incapable of touching it, a sure admission of guilt, he removed the strands one by one, placing them neatly among the rest of her hair. His head turned this way and that while he worked. A childish image of a man creating a doll came to mind, the delicate work something that was so precise, it was entrusted to the rarest of men, and Owen certainly wasn’t one of them. His bloodied fingers kept touching her cheek and chin, leaving marks and spreading more blood where there hadn’t been any. The last of the hair gone, he sat back on his heels.
Fresh guilt swept through him. It wasn’t real, he told himself. He would wake up in the morning and be greeted, albeit awkwardly, by the small girl at breakfast, if she emerged for it. If not, he would knock and make sure she was okay.
If it was a dream, however, why hadn’t he woken up?
Wasn’t this the part where he woke up and realized it was a dream? A nightmare?
This had to be real. The ache in his chest was overwhelming. The tears that were now flowing freely down his face were too wet. The shake in his hands was inhibiting, frustrating, truly, but not like the limited movement he often experienced in dreams. And the warm, sticky feeling of blood was too unnatural, nothing dreamlike about it, soaking into the knees of his pajama bottoms and drying strangely on his fingers and hands. It was dark on her face.
He was going to be sick.
