His head is heavy against my shoulder, curls brushing my throat, no breath from parted lips. Blood soaking into everything, clothes and skin alike.
Five minutes. Five minutes since that bullet ripped the midnight air, through carotid and jugular and trachea alike. If I'd been faster, had been there to catch him as he went down, could I have plugged the hole? Have at least tried to stop the bleeding? Unlikely, but it would have been something. Would have been more than finding him sprawled on the ground, unconscious already, almost gone, most of his blood pooled on the concrete beneath him, murderer already vanished.
Suffocation. Exsanguination. Equally to blame. What isn't soaking into me and him got pumped into his lungs. Nothing to be done, all of my efforts coming too late. (At least it was a quick death, unconscious in only a handful of seconds.)
I try to wipe the blood off his face, succeeding in only spreading it more, smearing it across alabaster skin growing cold. (Everything is growing cold, the night air, the sticky blood, his body pressed to mine. I feel as if my own internal organs have been scooped out and replaced with ice. Only explanation for the shudders ripping through me and shaking his limp corpse.)
How many times have I half-wondered – realm of idle musings – about him lying pressed to me? Now that it is here, everything is different. He was meant to be breathing, meant to have a beating heart and blood trapped, flowing through his veins not coating everything. (It could never have happened anyway.) At least his eyes are closed, staring sightlessly only at the backs of eyelids, not at me or the sky or the darkened alleyway.
There are things I know that I should do. Calls that I should make. But for what? For them just to say that he's dead and carry him away? Cut him open, determine a cause of death (though it's plain to see, ridiculous formalities to observe, marring his body with more wounds), clean him up and lay him out in a coffin to bury him six feet under and forget about him then? (My hands won't work, anyway. Can't seem to let go of him long enough to fish out a phone and dial those numbers with shaking fingers.) Know I should be tracking his killer or doing something useful, but that involves movement too.
A water droplet splashes onto his face, slipping slowly across his pale, blood-smeared cheek, warming the cold face. He doesn't notice. Doesn't berate me for sentimentality and crying. (Though it is only now I realise that I am crying, and it makes me feel even colder. No warmth gained from clinging tighter to him, yet I find myself doing it all the same, hiding my face in those dark curls. No blood here, thank God.)
How can he be gone? How is he allowed to be dead? Surely they issue amnesties for people with brilliant minds, so as they can't be snatched in a moment, blood spurting, spewing, pumping out of veins and arteries. This is only meant to happen in stories, heroes felled with a single bullet, unable to be saved yet heroes all the same. But this is the real world. How can it all have come down to this, to this alley and this case and this bullet marked out for him?
(But it has, and that's the horrible truth. Because he's dead, and this time there can be no miraculous return.)