Chapter Text
England, 2024
The dry, leather-like skin on his hands is dotted with tiny spots of blood, mostly smattered around his knuckles. His joints are gnarled from arthritis, making his search through the storage containers in his cellar challenging and painful. He hasn’t laid eyes on any of this crap in years, purposefully going out of his way to avoid it, yet not having the stomach to throw it all away.
At least a dozen boxes contain his old watcher diaries, an era that caused him unspeakable pain. Vampires, demons, chaos, death. Unfortunately, looking back on it, his entire life has been that way. Surely there were some good times, but all he can seem to recall are the worst ones, when his heart ached so badly it felt like someone was carving it from his chest with a deliberately dull blade. Much of that was left behind years ago, and he hoped the passage of time would make him forget it for all eternity. But today is different. Today he desires something, and the only place to find it is in his troubled past.
Shoving the diary boxes out of the way, he searches deeper into the bowels of the cellar, until his eyes land on a few older containers in the back. The flickering light from above doesn’t quite reach that far, making it almost impossible to read the faded handwriting scrawled across the lid labels: Sun—a-e.
This is where he’ll find it, among the piles of high school yearbooks, snapshots of birthday and holiday celebrations, and other frivolous mementos from a former life. This item was held close to his heart, gripped firmly by what could have been, because it was all he had left of her; Jenny’s rose quartz, discovered by Willow and handed to him shortly after her death. How he cherished it, keeping it on a long gold chain hidden beneath his shirt. His chest still sports an indentation from where it pounded against him on his morning jogs, but for the longest time he never considered taking it off, never once wanted to take the easy way out and ignore the hurt, because that’s what grief really is…the most soul-crushing agony imaginable. To ignore it was to deny it, and he certainly didn’t deserve such grace.
As time wore on, it became less of a symbol for him until one day, he left it on his nightstand, never to be worn again. And then it was tossed into a moving box when he relocated to England, taking refuge in a remote farm home in Northumberland as far away from his previous life as possible.
He always knew he would wind up here, a place where the cold would envelop him, a place he can never escape. Cold used to be his shadow, following him around the world, but he was always able to resist succumbing to it. Not anymore. Now it has become part of him, and he refuses to fight another day. Like a peculiar old friend, it resides in his veins, or maybe it was there all along.
The dreams have stopped…mostly. When they do invade his sleep, they’re usually pleasant, with Jenny catching his eye over a cup of their favorite tea, or her warmth snuggled next to him while he reads aloud from her favorite book. Then he awakens, the smell of her perfume but a memory – dark amber with a hint of warm spice. His weary eyes focus, and he glances around to find an empty space next to him in bed, tattered curtains straining to hold out the sunlight, ceiling tiles stained from a leaky roof – these sparse dreams far better than his reality. Soon the day will come when he closes his eyes and never returns, leaving behind this harsh life, and the cold, forever.