lifeless-writer

Or when Henry Winter realizes that death is—indeed—something fatal and irreversible.

Snow falls thickly tonight, muffling even the cracking of the trees as they bend under the weight of winter. The old lamplights along the Hampden path burn dim and gold, softened by the fog of breath and cold. Henry Winter walks alone.

He no longer notices the cold. It passes through him like wind through a ruined house. His coat, thick and old, is buttoned up to the throat, his gloves dark and worn. He moves with the same careful precision he always has, but something’s missing. Something flickers behind his eyes—burnt out and unspeakable.

Bunny Corcoran is dead.

Buried beneath frozen soil and wet leaves, his mouth stuffed with mud and silence. The memory is a constant, a companion, a brand burned beneath the skin. The others are splintering—Camilla pale and distracted, Charles drinking at odd hours, Francis shaking hands, Richard always looking just over his shoulder. But Henry, by all appearances, remains unchanged.

And yet, he is not.

There is a type of silence that comes after violence, a hush so total it rings. He hears it now, in the soles of his shoes on the path, in the quiet rustle of leaves as the trees shift overhead. The silence of a room just after someone has screamed. The silence of a confession swallowed and never spoken.

He tells himself it was necessary. Still tells himself that. They had no choice. Bunny was reckless. Dangerous. He had pushed and prodded and joked and threatened. But then, hadn’t he always? And hadn't they—he—loved him all the more for it?

Henry lifts his gaze to the sky. A pale moon hangs in the dark like a watchful eye. And suddenly—terribly—he wants to hear that voice again. Bunny’s voice, nasal and warm, calling out across the Commons. That stupid laugh. “Henry, old man!” Too loud, always just a bit too familiar.

But there is no voice, and there will never be.

When he reaches the library steps, he pauses, gloved hand resting on the frozen railing. A group of students passes, murmuring. One of them laughs—high, sudden, nothing like Bunny. Still, Henry turns his head, heart leaping with something awful. But it’s no one. Just another boy in a coat too thin for the weather.

He used to feel such superiority to people like that. Now he just feels apart. As if he’s standing behind glass, watching them all live.

He remembers the quote, not from a book, but from the crackling speaker of a radio cassette Bunny insisted on keeping in their apartment—a chunky black metallic thing with faded buttons, always half-covered in crumbs and band stickers, forever threatening to eat the tape mid-song. One night, late and half-drunk, Bunny had put on some dusty recording—an old mystery drama from the '40s—and the line came floating out like prophecy: You will look into the faces of passers-by hoping for something that will for an instant bring me back to you. Bunny had laughed, called it corny. But Henry hadn’t forgotten. Now, it loops in his mind with the eerie rhythm of a ghost story, lingering like smoke after the candle’s gone out.

He cannot explain what it is that makes him miss Bunny most. Not his intelligence—though it was there, in its unruly, unsharpened way. Not his charm, which was clumsy. But perhaps it was the way Bunny needed him. Clung to him, almost pitifully. His dependence had annoyed Henry then. Now it feels like a wound.

When he dreams, he dreams of the ravine. Sometimes Bunny is there, sometimes not. Sometimes it's Henry at the bottom, looking up at himself. And when he wakes, the cold clings to him in sheets of sweat and ice.

Even now, in the library, he feels the weight of absence. The chair where Bunny used to drop his coat. The desk he never studied at. The way he used to say Henry’s name. As though they were closer than they were. Or maybe closer than Henry admitted.

He had told himself it was brave. That killing Bunny was a necessary sacrifice. That their secret knowledge, their pursuit of beauty, of higher things, justified the cost. That it was noble, even.

But now, when the moonlight falls on the empty quad, when the windows fog and the lamps hum and his hands tremble just slightly on the pages of a book—what brave thing feels like this?

This is not bravery. This is ruin.

Henry does not believe in God, but sometimes he wonders if this is a punishment. Not hell, but exile. To live long. To go on breathing while Edmund Corcoran lies still beneath the frozen earth. That is the true sentence. To endure.

He remembers once, in the orchard near Commons, Bunny picked an apple and threw it at his back. “Hey, Henry,” he’d said, laughing. “You ever stop thinking?”

Henry hadn’t answered. He rarely did. Now, he answers constantly.

He thinks. He remembers. He regrets.

And always, always, he searches.

In the laughter of strangers. In the rustle of leaves. In the whisper of snow on his coat. In the empty space beside him.

Bunny does not answer.

Время пройдёт и ты забудешь, всё что было (Time will pass and you will forget everything that was)

С тобой у нас, с тобой у нас (Between you and me, between you and me)

Нет, я не жду тебя (No, I won’t wait for you,)

Но знай, что я любила (but know that I loved)

В последний раз (For the last time)

В последний раз (For the last time)

В последний раз (For the last time)

В последний раз! (For the last time!)

henry’s scar on his forehead

bunny being a really good artist

richard’s inner monologue being much more casual compared to how he speaks

francis liking cats

franics’s funny little glasses

henry’s embroidered silk pyjamas

henry’s scar on his forehead

bunny being a really good artist

richard’s inner monologue being much more casual compared to how he speaks

francis liking cats

franics’s funny little glasses

henry’s embroidered silk pyjamas