Sometimes he thinks it would be easier if there had been a body - something real and tangible that he could cradle to his chest, cling to, just a little, before burial. It haunts his dreams - that pale face and trickling blood, rough stubble and long hair.
Instead, there is nothing. A gaping hole left by the fluttering of a veil. He should never have died - should have only been stunned. There would have been time for intervention then. Better than an abyss ripped in an instant, unacknowledged in the midst of so much else.
Some nights, he dreams he is not alone in this room, seems to feel a warm back pressed flush to his chest, long limbs curled up like the dog he could become. Vaguely acrid smell of old cigarette smoke and Firewhiskey. He can delude himself that everything is back to normal, that a man long dead is still living. There was, after all, no body.
Those nights he sleeps best, dreams not of death but of life, of bark-like laughter and flying motorcycles. And in the morning, if there's a hollowness in his chest, well, that's all right. There is a war to be fought, work to be done. Deaths to be avenged, though of course he fights for more than that.
(And most of his worries fell behind that tattered veil.)