By SkyFire

Rating: PG (death issues)

Summary: See A/N.

A/N: No names are given in this story; it can be about any two you think of (except the bad guys- I doubt your typical orcs or Uruk-hai would feel grief over anything), gen or slash. I guess I just had to write this out; the pen being my way of dealing with high emotion. If you like it, or at least if it affects you in a way that isn't horrible, leave a review. If you absolutely hate it, I really don't need that right now.

Warning: Deals with death.



By SkyFire


It comes in many forms.

It can be the small grief of a crushed flower. The pain of a friend leaving for distant lands. The agony of watching that friend go into heartbreaking convulsions before stopping breathing entirely. The grief of separation; temporary or not so. The grief of watching a friend struggle to breathe, and wishing for it to simply be *over*, one way or the other, so that they should suffer no more. The guilt of even daring to think of wishing for a quicker end for them.

Watching over them long after their death as the tears pour endless down your face and soak into your shirt. Remembering all that had come before. Before they were struck down by their final foe.

The one fight you could not help them win.

Mingled grief and joy at remembering the little things from before; the small joys that you shared, the things that bound you together tighter than blood, more firmly than any oath. Things that made you like family, only more so for being different.

And now in the same room, as so many times before. Only this time, one is breathing; one is not. One's eyes sparkle, shimmering now and again with the tears that never stop entirely; the other's glazed now in death. One warm and alive; the other cooling and... not.

A pain inside. So deep it wrenches at the very soul. Darkness inside, where once the other ruled. Darkness that spread like ink on water, coating everything in its bleakness, its obsidian despair. A soul's light dimming... dimming...

Is this what it feels like to die? This wasting away of light, of hope? This bleakness? Oh.

From far away, a call: Come back, come back. Don't go. Come back to the light.

But the siren call of the darkness....


Is it stubbornness? Pride? Something else unlooked-for?

It matters not. They call.

They are obeyed.


The dirt falls in on itself softly under the gentle rain. Death buried, hidden away beneath the ground where it can give new life.

And so the cycle of life and death and life from death again moves on.

Grief inside still, but not as immediate. Not as demanding. There still, and always, but bearable now.

Come back to the light.


Grief of parting, now and forever. One is dead; one is not.

It is time to live again.


:o( Before you all (or at least a couple) freak out on me, no, I'm not suicidal. That's not my way; never has been, never will be. Just had to work this out, having had that unwanted encounter with the death of a good friend.