Title: What hurts the Most
Fandom: Penguins of Magascar
Author: MydetheTurk
Rating: T
Characters/Pairings: Hans, Private, Skipper, Rico, Kowalski, Hans/Skipper
Warnings: Character death, depression, mentions of a m/m relationship, humanized AU that I normally play with…
Summary: A month after The Incident, Hans and Private are still recovering.
Author's note: So, this is written for a contest on DA. Set in the Moments!Verse, and after the "Team Dies" set, which you don't actually have to read to understand. All you need to know is that somewhere, Kowalski, Rico, and Skipper died, leaving Private behind and in Hans's care. The rest is explained.

I sat on the roof of my home, rain pouring down on me, washing away my tears.

It'd only been a month since that day.

A month since that horrible day.

Since my lover had died.

It would be almost as bad, if I hadn't done what I'd done.

I'd had to kill my lover, to spare the other the pain of bleeding to death.

I took a great shuddering sob, covering my face with my hands. Covering my face with my hands, sobs racked my body as I tried, and failed, to not break down.

I was exhausted.

I hadn't slept well – had hardly slept, period, now that I thought about it.

If I really gave it some thought, I maybe managed a couple of hours over the last two days.

I couldn't drink myself into oblivion like I wanted to – my promise to my dead lover to take care of his last teammate made sure of that.

And even if I wanted to sleep, I refused to combine sleep, drugs, and alcohol. I knew that combination would take me down a winding path of darkness.

I leaned back against the peak of the rooftop and shut my eyes.

Maybe I'd rest here, just for a little while…

...

Private had looked everywhere, trying to find the older man who's home he was staying at. He hadn't slept well in the last month, but he knew that the older man was worse off, having lost more than the people who essentially amounted to family. Private knew his teammates had died, had iseen/iRico go out in a whirlwind of fire and had glimpsed in the corner of his eye a person he was certain was Kowalski tackle Rico just before Rico took on a dozen of them.

He had nightmares about that day, even if he couldn't remember everything. It hurt to try and remember what happened between when he was hit in the head and awakening in the older man's home in Denmark.

But he had no idea where Hans currently was and it had started to storm.

That's when he remembered hearing the roof creak like someone was walking on it a couple of hours previous. And he hadn't heard it since. He limped up the stairs toward the attic and saw the door to the roof open as the rain was pouring in. Being careful not to slip on the wet stairs, he climbed up onto the roof and looked around.

Private found the man he was looking for asleep on the roof, completely unconscious to the storm and grabbed him, slowly dragging him back into the house.

He really didn't want to know if this was because of Skipper's death. He really didn't.

Hans would come to appreciate the storm, as it covered up the slight tear tracks that had formed earlier, before the storm. He had the kid to take care of. It wouldn't do to have the kid witness him in his moment of weakness when he needed to be strong and fulfill his lover's last wish.