This is unsurprising to say the least. The image still haunts you behind each brief flick of your eyelids. Each fraction of darkness leaves behind an afterimage, a yawning chasm of red, where there once was unbroken skin and bone.

You'd yearned to kiss that once--the smooth plane of his nape, olive skin beneath a smooth sloping hairline. You'd seen the muscles there quiver many times, tense under the weight of unsteady words, and how you'd wanted to soothe him, cut the strings holding him taut and restless while the rest of the world slept soundly. For a time you did--held him gingerly in your arms as though he would crumble away at the slightest disturbance.

He sleeps now, in a different sense, the kind spoken of in poems and soliloquies. You know now the metaphor is a pretentious one, but still the comparison comes. He 'sleeps' with his eyes wide and unblinking, and the darkness there does not belie a depth in soul and emotion, as they had just seconds prior, flickering with shock and fear. His voice still rings in your ears, slips between the cracks of your skull when silence falls. You hear him, you hear him, loud and demanding--'who are you?!'

God, you scream when you awaken the first time, when your clammy palm meets the cool, uncaring surface of a vacant place in the bed. You scream and scream until she is rushing in, all bright ginger and wild eyes, the skin beneath mottled from a similar exhaustion. She holds you while you forsake your duties, wail and gnash your teeth like a child, like a madman. As you curse this stinking rotten world that took away your brown-eyed boy, she holds you.

He comes again and again, night after night in the same copse of thick trees, plummeting limp and dead-eyed to the forest floor. Sometimes he speaks, sometimes he fixes you with  stagnant, muddy eyes and asks for help. Asks for mercy, for release, for anything so long as you are have acted in his stead, as long as he did not die alone and unassisted, hanging in that ugly, blood soaked place.

you left him there you left him there you left him behind and god what is the point of moving forward, what is the use in your empty idealism, in a world without him, without the steady ground beneath your feet, the slow, weighted burn in your chest as he looks at you and smiles, the pressure, the hurt is enough to empty your stomach time and time again, and the grief still rots you away like a dead branch 

He was ahead of you, scouting the horizon for threats as you turned your back and joked, and teased and nagged, and all you can think about, the thought that shrieks and claws its way to the forefront of your mind as you wring out your eyes into the pillow is you should have been in front

And you know this all amounts to acute personal failure. In the preventable slaughter of a subordinate and the mandatory recovery you will never bring yourself to make. You can see Captain's furrowed glance from behind his teacup, pity mingled with the bitter lines of disappointment. You should be saddened by this, driven to change, to regain a semblance of the brightness you'd held so close to your proud chest.

But all you see is the carmine trickling from those parted lips--lips you know to be full and soft, that open for little, yet convey so much. You hear the symphonic crunch of bone when he hits the tree, neck bent and broken, you hear the screech of wires, the cacophonous roar of your pulse as his own cuts out entirely.

God you miss him you love him you need him you want him back, you cry it into the untouched pages of his journal, you beg him to emerge from around a darkened corner or the looming silhouette of a tree. 'come back' you choke into the parchment 'please--'

'come back'

and for a moment, there is a breath of wind, a cool, sweet sensation that sweeps along your cheek as his hands once did. fireflies stir behind the thin blinds of your eyelids, and for a moment, you can feel his steady arms, you can hear that low, deliberate tone that trickles warmth behind your hollow ribs "...eldin"