*sniffles* I'm sorry. This was just gnawing away at my brain and demanding to be written and I couldn't fight it.
The icy air whipped around them, ruffling their hair and the white lilies in their hands. They felt nothing. The chill was nothing compared to the cold that had settled in their hearts and minds and bodies the moment he'd been taken from them, the chill which had not left them for an instant in five days.
Everything was black. The casket, his mother's dress, their suits and ties, their vision, the world. They felt like they were in a daze from which they could not escape. Nothing made sense. People talked, and their words went unheard. People hugged them, and the touches went unfelt. They couldn't speak, they couldn't think, couldn't sleep or eat or smile. They could do nothing except exist, which took all the energy they had left, and try not to be crushed under the weight of all the pain.
They didn't understand how it happened. He'd been right by them, he'd run in after them and barely left their sides. Then there'd been the explosion and everyone had flown in different directions and it was chaos. There was heat and panic and heat and panic, panic at the roaring, all-consuming flames that pursued them, at the thought of what was happening to their friends, and, most of all, at the fact that they'd been separated. It was all a blur for a while after that, but the things they remembered with startling clarity were the deep blue of his eyes and the fact that he did not seem to be panicking, though surely he must have been. They all fought to find each other, fought to find a way out before they were eaten alive by the blazing inferno. He found them an exit, and he was last, making sure everyone else had crawled out the window to safety. They'd all called to him, begging him to hurry up, to climb out before it was too late and be okay. He had just moved towards the portal to safety when there was an ominous cracking sound. He looked at them, at them specifically, and his eyes were flashing with realization and regret and some other emotion they didn't have time to identify and now would never know. He opened his mouth to speak, and then he was gone, smashed to the floor by the collapsing roof and taken before he had much of a chance to feel it.
The whole cruel process, from his step towards the window to the soul leaving the body, took about 15 seconds.
They stared in shock, not believing it had happened, waiting for him to get up and climb out and possibly scold them for running in at all, waiting to see his blue eyes and his smile again, just like always. They stood frozen, blond statues covered in soot, planted outside the burning building with no intention of moving, eyes locked on the place where they had last seen him. Gradually, they heard voices screaming, and felt arms wrapping around them as they stared, blind to the firefighters putting out the blaze and the paramedics rushing in to pull out a broken and singed body. In another few moments they realized the screaming was coming from them. They screamed and cried for him, bodies wracking with pain as it finally sunk in that he was gone, gone to a place they couldn't follow, gone and not coming back. They fought against the strong arms that held them (which belonged to Justin and Logan, though if you'd asked either twin, they'd never be able to tell you whose arms they'd struggled in for nearly ten minutes), shaking and weeping and calling his name, begging him to get up, to come back, screaming that they were sorry, that he couldn't leave them, that they had things they had to tell him, that they would give up nerf guns and pranks and Alice in Wonderland and all the vast wealth they possessed if only he would come back to them. Their knees buckled, bodies giving way under the trauma, but their brains and hearts and mouths kept screaming for him. They screamed until their voices were hoarse, until they couldn't anymore, until the darkness slid over their sight and they collapsed into the arms holding them, the physical evidence of their shattered hearts still leaking from behind their closed eyes.
The next five days were spent in a silent whirlwind of agony and confusion, the faces of Audrey and their parents and their friends and a therapist flashing before them. They stared blankly at the people around them, communicating only when necessary and through nods or shakes of the head, frozen blue eyes matching the cold radiating through their bodies.
They couldn't remember getting to the funeral or many of the minor aspects of it, but they knew they would always remember in perfect detail the casket being lowered, the wave of nausea that overtook them at the sight, and the looks on his parents' faces when they tossed the lilies in after it. One by one, each of his friends went up to the grave, saying their goodbyes and covering his coffin with the flowers. They went last, kneeling next to the hole, tears streaming down their pale cheeks as they placed soft kisses to the petals of their lilies with shaking lips, gently tossing them down. They stared at the black box that held the one thing they wanted more than any other, wishing with everything in them, for the millionth time, that this could just be a bad dream. They clung to each other, whispering brokenly, speaking the words they'd kept hidden for years, the ones he would never get a chance to hear.
"We love you, Charlie."