Great swathes of darkness were fading into the places where he had existed - to Thomas, it was everywhere. Every recess bore his traces; Thomas had long since woven their histories together out of a need for the feel of another human heart, whether or not it was freely given. He sharpened his memories as best as he could, allowing his present to slip by without notice. If he remembered his present, he would forget him.
The burden had fallen on him without his consent, but its weight heaved against his back and pressed through his ribs until it swallowed him whole. It insisted to Thomas that if he forgot him, he would no longer have existed. Not as he was. There would be traces of a First Footman tucked away in the annals of Downton, but that wasn't Jimmy Kent.
It hurt to think of, to put words to the facts, so he tried to stick to the images. At night he would catalogue the minutia of conversation that he remembered - the quirking expression, the fluttery hands, his smile around a cigarette (Thomas had switched brands; he couldn't look at the packaging of the other without seeing his hands over them). A panic would tap his fingers onto his chest that he was making things up. That he wasn't remembering correctly, that what he was doing was cataloguing his dreams and that wasn't fair. Thomas was the only one to keep hold of him in this way and he wasn't doing it properly; he'd disintegrate and it would be his fault.
The sound of his voice was the first to go. Thomas could think of it, so very nearly remembering, but the vibrations against his heart when he had spoken were gone. He couldn't imagine its quality or the timbre. His voice had disappeared from the constantly replaying reels and now it was just Thomas responding to himself.
He didn't tend to cry. He couldn't, usually, because this wasn't right, wasn't real, but when he realised what had finally gone, what would never again be found, he'd spoiled his glove with tears wept hard enough to cleave his skull.
His life was carried out with the perfunctory skill of a wind-up doll moving in rote. Precise. Nobody tried to talk with him anymore and he didn't want them to, didn't want their voices and faces smashing through the glass ghosts he tried so hard to protect.
Yet one by one, the ghosts would crack and their blood, black and old as history, would trickle over his eyes and corrode his days. Days swelled into weeks into months, all a darkness with something unseen writhing just beneath the surface. He wished, almost, that he could forget him. Him and everyone like him, everyone whose death had chipped away at Thomas's heart, because it wasn't fair that he had to keep all of them under his surface. They pressed through his skin until he wasn't himself any longer, just an amalgam of haphazard memories of these people who had never loved him anyway.
He was marionetted in sorrow which tangled him beyond recognition, with no one to cut the threads that bound him. Those with the power to do so had fled him long ago; he'd never needed them, really. Only now his hands were tied.
The bray of love whose beating had expanded into that nothingness covered him at night like a sheen of cold sweat. His dreams were pleasant, now, and that was the worst of it. Each morning was to rise from his arms and into a lonesome nightmare.
Thomas lost track of when, but the animation of his face had faded. To think of him was to see those sterile portraits and, try as he might, he couldn't get hold of the way that he had moved. The way his face lit up. Even Thomas's dreams had begun to dim; the love he shared was with no one but a shadow who he could call by different names, each of which begat a particular pain upon waking.
He would wind his heart every morning so that it beat fire, but, god, he was tired of loving. To love the living had only ever brought him happiness extending for months of his life, but to love the dead was a hell extending to its end. Eventually his key grew too heavy for his slackening grip and he allowed it to slip from between his fingers.
He no longer needed, no longer wanted that fire - it had burned its way through him too many times. As its last embers dimmed, he took to greedily tending the vast barren expanse that had been left in its wake. He wanted nothing new planted, now new seeds sewn. He'd been burned to the ground for their sake too many times.