He had been in love with a child. A small, fragile child born of battles and bloodshed and broken promises.

All he can remember is digging him out of a stack of bodies to be buried after catching a glimpse of blue and blond moving out of the corner of his eye. His hands had been bloodied, the once-pristine white of his gloves now a dirty red-brown of mud and carnage, but the feeling in his chest after lifting the painfully-skinny boy out of the wreckage, still clinging to the half-rotten hand of a former parent, had been worth it.

He still had the gloves, stashed away somewhere he would never be able to find again.

It had been torturous paradise to watch him grow up. He had still been painfully skinny despite his voracious appetite. But he was captivatingly beautiful. The Others had snickered to themselves at his lavish attention to the boy, calling him soft and human and not even deserving of his Title.

But they Saw. Saw and Wanted and was not allowed to Have. Because the child was His, and His alone. His deathly beautiful little child as haunting as the last battle cry of a soldier destined to die the next second and just as heart-wrenching.

Only he was no longer a child but a man.

And it hurt.

It hurt him to think he was no longer needed. No longer needed to be there to keep and protect and to die for. He still would, though he himself was older and couldn't move as well as he forced his body to, no matter the cause. And he did.

The General who delighted in battles and bloodshed and broken promises was no more.

Gone.

Hell was different than he expected. It looked a lot like his Königsberg.

It was foreign, but he ghosted the streets as if it were Home. He chuckled into his scarf and scuffed at a pebble in his path, ignoring the people around him.

It wasn't Home. Home was his alluring little child with corpse-cold eyes and stone-cold heart.

And nothing in Hell could compare.