The comfort that Dallas' jacket brought seems absent it's usual warmth as Ponyboy trudges through the hall. There are only a few days left in the semester, with less than usual for him. He doesn't much care for it; he feels worn out by it all.
Even if Dallas had been there, the holidays have been hard since his parents died, and harder once Johnny and Dallas both had died. The first Christmas he'd had at fourteen, all four of them had been gone, and it had been hard to even acknowledge it in the house. Two years on, and while the situation for his brothers and his friends hadn't changed, well.
For Ponyboy, it was going to be agony in an entirely different way.
Without Dallas there, it's harder than ever to make it through days. Before, having Dallas even in the more embarrassing moments of every day life made it all easier to work through from those little moments where Dallas had remembered where Ponyboy had placed an assignment to when he'd been able to do something like the sink, able to move Ponyboy's hands on his own, get him walking even through a day where it felt as if Ponyboy was a visitor in his own body.
He hardly registers his classes, he forgets half of his assignments in his locker, and even hardly takes notice of the Soc kids that pass him. He's only mildly aware of James, the Soc that Dallas had touched in defense of him months back, was now in school again, wary of Ponyboy.
What did it matter? Why did he care?
The Kools he smokes on the way out of school don't have their usual flavor. They don't make the hole in his chest any smaller, they don't make the new feeling of grief in his chest any smaller, they don't even really remind him of Dallas anymore.
They simply taste like cigarettes he's grown accustomed to in flavor.
Resentment, anger, and loss builds up in him as he goes through the motions of the day. He goes to the DX for lunch and hardly speaks to Soda. He goes back to school, does his assignments half heartedly, and when he's dismissed for the rest of the holiday, there's none of the usual relief or excitement as he sets about the rest of the day, no real pleasure in it.
Ponyboy just wants to sleep. He wants to take some relief, to not have his body be his anymore, to not have to navigate around a new kind of loss that he didn't even know existed before. Even eating with his brothers seems hollow, and when he finally hits the bed, he's grateful for it, to be pulled into sleep.
He's not pulled down into a vast nothingness. Instead, he's pulled into the memory of it all, of having to watch Dallas die again. He can see the bullets spitting fire into the night, he can see them hit Dallas' body one after the other. The streetlights illuminating his hair so brightly, the way his eyes widened, and the last gasps, wet and horrific as he breathed out Ponyboy's name for the last time. He's helpless in his dreams as he was in reality to stop it, and in dreams he can't even call out Dallas' name.
He collapses like he did then, only this time he opens his eyes in his bed. He doesn't gasp or cry, Soda's arms clutched tightly around him. He's just left, staring at the ceiling, seeing, hearing Dallas gasp his name, seeing his body fall over and over and over again.
The more he thinks about it, the more he remembers it, the angrier he gets, the more desperate he gets. The weeks that have played out, with Dallas beside him, Dallas within him, something that Ponyboy has tried so hard not to think about, to conceptualize fall beside it. How he had felt so much more, so less lonely, as if a piece of him had come back home.
Ponyboy is so tired. Two years without Dallas had been empty and weeks of him back, even if it wasn't in a normal way, had already felt changed for the better. Everything wasn't perfect, no, but it had been better than what had been, the loss.
There was no going back to this loss. He didn't want to make it permanent again, didn't want to have to live without Dallas again.
He had come back to Ponyboy however briefly. So there had to be a way, he decides, to bring him right back again. Even if it wasn't the same way those stupid kids had done it, there had to be a way to pull Dallas back to him.
In the dark, Soda breathing beside him, he decides that he'll do it. He'll do anything and everything in his power to bring Dallas back to him.
In the bed he turns, wraps his arms tight around Soda. He'd do it. Even if he didn't quite know where or how to begin.