Dead.
The word echoed through Lee's mind, resonating. Bouncing off the walls of his consciousness, refusing to quiet itself. To let itself slip away, replaced by the usual thoughts that occupied his brain when he trained.
He had come out here to escape the pain, to escape the tears the threatened to spill; he had come to run away from tightness in his chest, letting him know that what he had been told…was true. It seemed like a different person, though, that watched his fist smash into the training log, some detached sense of self.
He didn't feel the pain when the skin over his unwrapped knuckles split and bled, leaving rich red marks on the wood that he pummeled.
Dead.
He stopped in his blows, arm trembling, fist pressed against the rough wood. A means of connection to the world, a sense of…self preservation. Self preservation that he didn't want, that he didn't feel he needed. Not now…not when he was dead.
He had gotten the news hours earlier, when his sensei had appeared in his doorway, face tense with emotion, words coming in broken intervals. Lee had been eating soup…he remembered dropping the bowl he had been holding, sinking to the floor. Earlier, he had lost control in an instant, sobbing brokenly into his hands, and then into his teacher's shoulder, tears darkening the green fabric of his mentor's shirt.
He remembered crying until his stomach ached, until his ribs throbbed with the pain of his wracking sobs. All he could think of was that he had lost him; lost him in the worst was possible.
If he had been left, he felt that the pain of that would have been worse. In the least, he would have seen him again, even if just for an instant.
But death was permanent. He had died far away, in a distant place…
He had been alone and scared.
It took Lee a moment to realize that he had slumped forward against the training log, clinging to it with the desperation of a drowning man to a flotation device. It took him a moment longer to realize that he had started crying again.
He missed him already. The purring monotone that he had spoken in, the way that his green eyes could make him gasp from across the room. He wanted the feeling of skin, long protected by sand, soft against his, arms wrapping around him at night. His shoulders shook with a sob when he realized that he wouldn't have him to go to at night, to be held by someone that he knew would be awake and guarding him…
Dead.
It was a word of such finality. A word that brought even the most steady of men to their knees, by themselves in the middle of a training field, brokenly sobbing.
It was a word that left even the strongest of people…alone.