#cod bell oc

A staccato exhale slips from his lips, and there’s a slight tremor in his hands as he watches on with a clenched jaw, how she converses with Hudson not too far from the aircraft hangar. The cigarette between his fingers burns on, sifting into ashes on the asphalt, until it burns dangerously close to his skin.

He stares at her.

Slung over her shoulder are her bags, in her hand the duffel she keeps her small amount of belongings in. Not far off from where they stand is the aircraft ready to ferry her across the country to D.C..

Frustration builds in him, clawing at the inner linings of his throat until the flesh burns from torn layers of the epidermis. It sets off a deeply uncomfortable sear in his chest, but all he can do is stand there, drowning in his air of bitterness.

She stands there, gaze so emotionless and cold and dead, like how she once was back in ‘82. The death he tried so dearly to resuscitate her from triumphs and looms over his conscience like a taunt. A slap, even. Like a rude awakening that he never once had truly been what he thought he was to her — a presence to replace her Death, her once-companion.

It shouldn’t sting, yet it does. The frustration that burned his throat now settles into something akin to sharp stings of disappointment.

“Russ,” Hudson calls. Flickering away the cooled ashes from his fingertips, he steps closer.

It’s a standard debrief. He can’t focus, not when his eyes are drawn to the stoic soldier that stands by his side, whose presence he will soon lose.

“Are you really going?”

The question leaves his lips before he can stop himself, as she’s hitching the bags on her shoulder. He’d asked if she required help, to which her expected answer of ‘no’ had come. Part of him wants to grab her shoulders and shake her until he gets his points across. Yet even that, he fears, is not enough.

His jaw is clenched, his teeth gritted. Each word leaving his lips is something he’s spat out like it’s utterly distasteful to even think about. It tastes bitter, and off, and so utterly full of despair. He hates it. Perhaps his reluctance is petulant and child-like. He can’t give a damn. Not when she drowns him with each stifling moment of her silence, when she refuses to turn around and face him. Like the damned coward she is at times—

He’s bitter. He sees it now.

She straightens up, facing him fully.

Oh.

A part of him curdles at how he is acting. The moment she turns, the slight modicum of her attention on him is enough to quell the bubbling, rising spats that crowds his throat.

“Where else would I go?” She asks, in her usual detached tone.

It sickens him. She used to smile. He’s seen her smile. He’s seen every inch of her, he’s tasted her, his hands memorised every part of her.

Why has she changed? What has changed? Why does it warrant her change?

She bared herself to him. They carved and etched viscera and their hands were stained. Yet now he is left alone with this visceral, bloody thing they had between them— Did this mean nothing to her?

He hesitates. A grimace curls on his face. “I’m sure there's stuff on the market you’ll like.” A pause. “I’ll figure something out.”

Something for us. The unspoken words linger.

Oh he might as well have been on his knees begging until his legs grew raw and sore from kneeling on the harsh asphalt. But for her, he would have, he could…

His fingers itch by his side. Itching to reach out, itching to grab her arm, her shoulders. To relish the feeling of the warmth of her flesh against his hands once more at the very least. To know her embers, the spark in her eyes (when she laughed at his banter, oh her smiles…) he witnessed were not a mirage but in fact the god-honest truth. To know he had fulfilled what he had once vowed to do, and to know he still holds a goddamn chance because he just needs a chance, a slim possibility—

He can’t do this. Not without her. Not anymore.

Not when he’s already tasted the salty tang of the ichor. Not when he’s already fallen down her depths and embraced her as Death once did. Not when he vowed to replace the constant companion Death she once held so dearly, and he thought, he thought he had managed to.

Ah.

As he stares at her, through the shield of his shades, his heart plummets. She knows.

Of course she knows.

“I’m not interested.”

He just needs to reach out, he just needs to pull her closer to him, to ask her to reconsider. He needs to know, just know what all of that meant to her, if they even meant anything to her as they did for him. He needs to know, he fights the urge to claw at his chest to dig out his heart and place its beating, pulsating form in her hands where it belongs, where it can beat freely. It pulses far too suffocatingly in his thoracic cavity, he can’t take it, he can’t take it anymore—

He stays.

Staring as she leaves.

———