Authors note: This is really dark and really short and I am so sorry.
Disclaimer: I own nothing aside from the plot.
Pairing: Tentoo/Rose implied.
Chapter Text
He woke up with a gasp, his arms reaching out to try and make purchase around a small, lithe frame. A strangled cry ripped its way out of his mouth when his hand fell through the air and landed mutely against empty sheets. He sobbed and heaved so hard that he had to crawl out of bed and empty what little content he had in his stomach into the loo.
He used to wonder how people slept after losing the people they so dearly loved. He found, however, that it wasn't the sleeping that was hard, It was the waking. It was forgetting for a moment that anything had even happened and thinking about seeing that person first thing in the morning. It was the dreaming and seeing their smile, their eyes crinkling at the corner and a flash of pink touching teeth. It was stirring from a dream that was so real that you could touch and taste the person and then waking to find that they were not within your reach and that they would never be within your reach again.
In the days that had followed her death he hadn't wanted to sleep. Sleeping put him further away from her, further away from the life they had had together. After three days had gone by he finally collapsed into tears on their closet floor, her clothes strewn everywhere from a fit of rage he had had previously at her sudden passing.
It was suddenly the little things he was appreciating, her tongue-in-teeth grin, the way her hand would fit so perfectly in his own, how she walked and how she talked and how she laughed and how she lived. It was every breath that fell past her lips and every sound that came from her mouth, it was her eyes when they twinkled with anger and fear and love and curiosity.
He regretted every day he had spent before he kissed her on that beach on that day. He regretted not kissing her every time they made it out alive, he regretted not wrapping her up in his arms every moment he had the chance and he regretted not telling her he loved her sooner than he had.
He knew that when he met her, on that fateful day in the basement of Henriks' and again in her flat the next day, that he was meant to love her until she drew her very last breath. He just never thought it would be so soon. He thought he would have every day of the rest of his life to shower her with love after that day on the beach, but nothing had ever gone right for them. How could he have been so daft, so naïve?
He stumbled his way from the bathroom, his clammy skin flushed with a cold sweat that left goose bumps in its wake, to the closet. He curled his hands around one of her favorite shirts, the first shirt she had kissed him in (though inadvertently), ripping it from the hanger that it draped from and pressing it to his tear streaked face. He sobbed, a hard gut-wrenching noise that left his throat aching.
How could he be so naïve.