Notes: This isn't proofread and it was written in about fifteen minutes after I watched the season finale, but I'm too emotional to give a shit, so I just hope it's coherent enough. I hope you like it nevertheless. As for the title - it's more aesthetically pleasing on AO3 where I'm allowed enough characters to actually write it down the way I want to.
Charlie knows all about loss. He hadn't, before; loss had been something distant and unfortunate that happened to people that weren't him. But then the war had started, and then the Shadowkin had come, and from then on, there had been only loss.
So when he first meets April, the look in her eyes is the first familiar thing he sees on Earth. It's a look of someone who's lost a lot, but who's managed to survive somehow in spite of it and is still sometimes surprised by that, even if they're trying to hide it, and becoming her friend is the easiest thing in the world – in this world, as it's the only one he's got left. She'd been kind to him, and she'd expected nothing in return – no special treatment, no riches, no place in his nonexistent court. Just Charlie – the new, strange boy who no one quite managed to understand – had been enough.
He'd unwillingly dragged her into his world and had brought her nothing but trouble and pain and death. He'd done that to all of the people he cared for so much, but she'd been the first, and she'd been the most affected.
And now, as he looks at her and wills himself into doing as he'd been told; wills himself into taking the shot, Charlie knows that he can't do it. He's lost enough, and it's not fair. She doesn't deserve this. She hadn't deserved to be there that night, and she doesn't deserve to share her heart with a monster, but she does, and it's all his fault.
He keeps on staring; trying to keep himself collected enough to keep his aim where it should be. He knows deep down that there's no other way, but he's spent long enough on Earth to cling to the childish hope that if he doesn't think about it, it wouldn't have to happen. It never seems to work for humans, no matter how often they do it, but he's desperate enough to try just about anything.
In reality, nothing changes. The world keeps turning and the room they're in is still full of people squabbling over a weapon that could kill them all, and April is still a breath away from death, and there's nothing else Charlie can think about just then.
So he doesn't. He thinks about everything they'd gone through, everything she had gone through all on her own, and everything she'd managed to survive. It's ridiculous for someone like her to die from his hand. She'd fought her way into being a king and she'd came all this way only to surrender herself, looking impossibly stuck between being the most helpless and the most powerful she's ever been.
Charlie thinks of losing her, and he can't bear the thought. Anything but that, his mind supplies, but.
But he tries to imagine her after everything is over. He tries to imagine her in the ruins of her own planet after the Shadowkin have done to it what they had to Rhodia; tries to picture what kind, wonderful, loving April would feel like after seeing through her own heart as the Shadowkin abandon Earth to its destruction and make their way through the rest of the universe.
And he sets her free.
It's a small mercy, he thinks, that her heart would put itself back together in death. But it's all that he can give her. He keeps watching as her eyes close; as she falls to the ground, because if she can promise to be brave, then so can he and seconds, hours, centuries later he looks away so he can say his goodbyes to Matteusz. It's fine now; he'd done what he'd had to. There's nothing left to stand in his way. He knows he's ready to die.