Imagine person A of your OTP arriving home after person B's funeral. They've held themselves together so far and, afraid of being idle in the now very empty house, decide to take a shower and go to bed. As they step out of the shower however, they notice the steam has fogged up the mirror. Written on the glass is a mushy "I love you" from person B, who must have scrawled it there on the morning of their death. Person A finally breaks down, sobbing on the bathroom counter as the fog - and the message - fade away.
Dirk was too broken to even cry, or maybe he had cried out all his tears sitting next to his best friend Roxy Lalonde on the pavement while begging her to come back to him and kissing her cold lips over and over, praying to finally be the Prince Charming to her Snow White.
No, this was utter despair, despair so thick it was suffocating and it made Dirk wish he could trade places with her, wish it was him they had just put in the ground. Even if this sadness was soul crushing at least she would be alive.
He closed the front door of their; his, apartment and stood still for a moment. It was quiet. No Owl City blared from Roxy's bedroom, no one sprinted up to him and wrapped their arms around his neck as they yelled how glad they were that he was home and exactly how bored they'd been in his absence. It was cold and empty and it wasn't his home now that his heart was gone.
He made his way to the shower, if only to give himself something to do so he wouldn't think about her.
He sat on the floor with hot water cascading over his head until he could barely breathe through the steam.
He emerged an hour later still filled with a numb sense of mourning and an unrelenting storm in his heart. The steam was almost impenetrable but it revealed just enough that Dirk could see the condensation-covered mirror, and the faded message on it. It took a moment to decipher Roxy's messy scrawl but he could guess well enough what it said. I love you was scribbled there, probably from a the morning of her death, with a hastily drawn heart around it.
All at once Dirk was reminded of that beautiful girl whom he had loved with all his heart and how broken her body was when he found her lying on the concrete. He fell to the tiled floor shuddering, partly from the cold but mostly from the gut-wrenching, gasping sobs that shook his body. Roxy was gone. Gone and never coming back. And Dirk couldn't stand to live in a world without her.
