Someone's grieving in exactly 600 words. Post season-5 finale but pre-season 6. Slightly edited from before.

Warning: This is ridiculously angst-ridden. Either that, or I've written it so badly that it's become ridiculously funny...

I disclaim. Only in my dreams do I own characters this good.

Cross His Heart

He'd always known he would outlive her. It was the nature of his beast. He'd go on living, if that's what you could call it, for so much longer after she'd gone, forever. He would watch the sun rise and the trees grow and the world turn. Without her. He'd see all his friends move on to join her. He'd say more goodbyes than he could bear to imagine. He'd cry more tears and, maybe one day when this was all far enough into the past for his heart not to bleed at every un-beat, he'd laugh harder than ever before.

He snorted. As if that would ever happen.

The beer in his hand was as cold as his skin. He gripped its neck tighter and took a deep gulp. There was salt on his upper lip and he could no longer taste what he was drinking. He didn't care. The alcohol wasn't having any effect anyway. That was the nature of his constitution. He tipped it back into his mouth until the last pearly drop slipped down his throat, sleek as the tears that still flowed down his cheeks. He hadn't known he could cry so much, hadn't believed there was so much water in him, but she'd proved him wrong as she'd proved him wrong about so many things.

The cracking explosion of the bottle hitting the wall barely disturbed his pose. She was gone. The world went on. Bottles smashed, hearts broke, that was the nature of the place.

The sun burned his eyes more than ever before, but the world seemed a darker place without her in it. He was surrounded by comforters, hiding their own pain in the face of his greater anguish. He wanted to scream at them until their ears bled that nothing was any good any more because nothing could be. Not without her. Yet he tried to smile, tried to look less than he felt, tried not to wear his heart on his sleeve. Nothing worked.

The hands that she had once felt on her bare skin, once brushed with her golden hair, once held in her own tiny ones, hit the wall, opening it to the steel girder beneath and showering plaster all around him, turning him snow white, blanching him blonder than platinum. He kept punching until his skin broke, until his fingers bled, until his knuckles turned scarlet and purple, until his physical pain was almost one millionth of his emotional agony. He wept again, falling to his knees like the tiny boy he'd once been, wishing for his mother, knowing she couldn't come. Longing only for the people who were long gone. Praying for those to come only who were in the place where prayers were heard. The place he would never go, because death would never take him there. Even through the agony, he knew that.

The pain only worsened until he thought he couldn't go on, and then he hit the girder some more, his punches now kitten weak. No more tears came. Looking outside, all he could see in the daylight was the death that would not have him but too eagerly took her.

Eventually the dark came and he was alone. The pain stayed, an old friend by now. Life went on. Without her. Because when she'd needed him most, he'd failed her. She'd never know how hard he tried to save her because he hadn't tried quite hard enough.

The dark came with its victims. Every night saving them he was saving her; keeping his promise; crossing his heart… hoping to die.