Red couldn't sum up love in a sensation, or a memory, or a specific phrase that was told over and over, but he could point it out in a crowd, or maybe in a ghost's aged face. He could show you pictures, and he could recite certain lectures, and tell you life lessons he himself had been taught, and he could imitate a stance or facial expression in a heartbeat. He could mimic a voice, tell you stories, anything, really, if it concerned a certain Professor Trevor Brutenholm.
To Red, that was love, the man that had been everything; a friend, a teacher, a father.
He had been everything for so very long, and in a single instant he was gone, gone just as if the past 60 years had meant no more than time already passed by. Red can't say that it didn't hurt, or that he didn't feel destroyed, like every part of him had been ripped asunder and stitched back together a thousand times over, and the aching hole such a death left within him never quite healed.
Maybe time passed on, and that's why it got better, or maybe it's because he had friends; good, honest friends.
Friends like Abe, who never said anything with a double meaning, and never understood the joking laughter Red showed him. Abe, who talked with his hands more than his mouth, who beat Red at poker just because Red was "easy to read", who had a way of putting things logically that no one could argue with, his mind a one track course.
And then there were friends like Liz.
Liz, who distanced herself because she thought it would make a difference, who smiled at the ground when she laughed, who didn't pull back when he took her hand. She'd hug him and rub his back like a child, and then she'd slap him-never too hard-if he made her angry, and she was probably the one foundation he had to lean on.
And then she was the air he breathed, the face he couldn't bear to go a day without seeing, the eyes that made his heart pound.
She was everything, and he couldn't imagine her being gone for a single moment.
Because what life would that be, living without the air and sun and clouds and sky and very earth beneath him, living for just a second without any of the vitalities?
It was unimaginable.
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