Burn
Another one for a prompt from Athena, with a predictably sadder slant. :3
"Do you stay awake at night burning...tell me I do not live in your dreams"
He has, and she does; more than once, more times than he can count, as if even death (real, imagined, hated and wished for in the selfsame breath) could neither dull her presence nor blunt the need that had woven into his flesh, his bones, his very soul. He had dreamed her then, in a house forever haunted by the shapes her ghost had taken (flowers and a portrait, half-remembered laughter and broken cries, a locket that weighed him down far more heavily than tarnished filigree ought to and anchored him to life without her even as it shackled him to the past), and he'd dreamed her in Paris even after he knew she lived, and he'd thought (as he'd let her, bade her, forced her to go) that he might in doing so free them both from what had been, but she's never gone, and he thinks (hopes) that she never will.
And now they stand here, on the precipice of something unnameable, and he looks at her and thinks of the endless nights when he'd tried to blot her out with wine, with endless hours of drills, with sleeplessness that never fully drove her presence from his mind, and thinks that if she only haunted him in his dreams it would be easier by far, because at least then in his waking hours he would have a reprieve. But the woman before him is even more of a ghost than her memory, little more than a shadow, something that might once have been and that he – they – have shattered beyond mending; and if, he thinks, she drags him down into hell alongside her, then it is no more than he deserves for the sins of his past (and at least she will be there, and not her wraith).
He swallows, forces moisture into a mouth parched, hot, fights the sudden need to drink her down to ease an endless aching thirst, and says, in a strangled voice, "Why ask what you already know?"