Yomiel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
vengefulshades) wrote2014-01-08 09:20 am
vengefulshades) wrote2014-01-08 09:20 am
Try, Try Again (terrible fic)
cw: SPOILERS about Yomiel's past, suicide, a whole bunch of attempts, bloodless "fatal" injuries
He'd lost track of the time as he knelt there on the floor beside the sofa. It could have been minutes, hours, or even days. Her hand had long since gone cold in his, and he could feel her body getting stiff in his arms. He felt like he should have been crying-- fairly certain he had been, actually, but no tears had come out no matter how many racking sobs shook him. By now, even those had settled, and it was just the two of them in silence, curled together on the couch.
Yomiel could have stayed like that forever until he felt a vague nudge against the side of his leg. He lifted his head from where he'd laid it on her chest and glanced down to spot the black kitten, rubbing its face against his knee. It was still here, apparently. He'd left it sitting outside the police station when he went in to fetch his body from the morgue, and picked it up on his way to her house. Sissel loved cats, after all, and he wasn't allowed to keep them in his apartment. It would be a good gift to apologize for making her worry.
He thought, anyway.
"Shoo, cat," he muttered, and tried to push it away. The kitten stumbled on unsteady legs and fell back, but was quick to jump back up, mistaking the swat for a sign of affection. It mewed and went back in for another. This time, Yomiel ignored it.
Sissel looked peaceful, eyes closed and black hair draped gently over her shoulders, a few wisps on her face. She was dressed in her nightgown. If not for the rope burns around her throat, she might have just been sleeping. He'd taken her body down and laid it on the couch in his frantic attempts to save her, but it became quickly apparent he was too late.
Minutes too late. She had still been warm, and he had held her hand until all the warmth had faded from it.
The noose was still hanging from the ceiling fan, and her note still sat on the coffee table, carefully written in purple pen with her immaculate handwriting.
I'm coming to you, Yomiel.
It had been at least a few hours now. The initial shock was starting to wear off, leaving Yomiel completely lost for what to do now. The kitten, meanwhile, was furious in his attempts to get attention, purring and chirping and nudging to try and make Yomiel's hand do some worthwhile petting.
"Back" from the "dead," alone in an empty house with his fiancee's body growing cold on the sofa, and a hungry kitten nagging him. Yomiel decided to start with the easiest problem, heading to the kitchen to find something for the kitten to eat.
He cracked open a can of tuna and set it down on the floor. The kitten, hot on his heels, immediately dug in, ravenous. They'd last eaten a few hours ago when Yomiel was still inhabiting it--him, he mentally corrected himself. He knew that much by now. It was the least he could do to feed the little guy after all the time they'd spent together. Literally.
It was an old piece of programming wisdom: solve one problem, and the others fall into place. Surely enough, he left the kitten to his meal and by the time Yomiel returned to the living room, he already knew what he had to do. Sissel had tried to follow him into death, not knowing that he was stuck in some afterlife version of red tape. Some freak accident left him less dead than he was supposed to be. Now it was only right that he meet her there.
What other reason did he have to stick around?
Taking off his sunglasses, he slipped them into Sissel's hand, resting on her chest. Then he picked up the stool from where it lay on the ground, setting it back up beneath the ceiling fan. She was short, so she must have had to stand on top of it, but he could reach from the first rung.
The noose was tied out of a laundry line. It was awful, to think of how she must have gone through with it, meticulously tying the knot and affixing it to the ceiling fan. He couldn't know what she had gone through in doing it, feeling so lost and alone that she decided to take her own life just to rejoin him. How long did it take her? If she'd only waited a few minutes longer, he'd have been here, and...
It was no use thinking about it now. It was better to think of this as a new sort of engagement. As their rings still glinted on their fingers, so too, would her noose take his life, and marry them in death. Loosening the rope, he slipped it over his hair, then down around his neck, where he tightened it again.
Yomiel took one last look at her, forcing himself to remember her as anything other than the corpse on the couch. Her smile, the way her eyes lit up when she laughed. The cute way she'd stick her tongue out at him when he teased her. The way her shoes were always too big for her feet, even with the half-sizes she bought. The way her hair would let fly when she danced, and how her fingers felt raking through his hair and fixing the stray pieces.
Death was surprisingly easy to face when he'd already been there less than a week ago. With thoughts of her on his mind, he closed his eyes and kicked the stool out from under him.
--
He knew something was wrong when ten minutes passed and he was still alive.
The noose did its job, no doubt about that. He felt it rubbing his throat raw as he dangled from it, and he couldn't take so much as a gasp of air. But the lack of breathing wasn't seeming to bother him.
Come to think of it, he wasn't sure if he'd been breathing even before trying to hang himself. He thought on it, finally wriggling until he could reach the stool with his foot and drag it back over. Standing on its side, he undid the noose and hopped down to the floor.
Consciously, he took a deep breath. His lungs filled with air, but it was a sensation entirely unlike breathing. It just sat there, no matter how long he held it, not seeming to do anything but take up space.
He exhaled, and found he had no need to inhale again.
Of course. His body hadn't been working correctly when he retrieved it from the morgue. It was clumsy, and he felt "off" as though he wasn't truly inside of himself. This was only the latest of his realizations about his body. I'm dead, he confirmed in his head. I don't need to breathe. You can't suffocate if you don't need to breathe.
How annoying.
He made his way to the kitchen again, where the kitten was midway through the can of tuna. He regarded Yomiel with another cheerful, pleased little sound, but Yomiel ignored it in favor of grabbing a butcher knife from the cutlery block.
While hanging, he'd found himself wishing he could hold Sissel close to him somehow as he left the world for good. Since hanging wasn't going to work, he'd indulge himself this time. He knelt on the floor beside her again and reached for her hand, clasping her fingers in his own as he lifted the knife.
"Sorry for the mess, sweetheart," he said grimly. "But I'm on my way."
Yomiel had never had much of a taste for blood or injuries, but it was surprising what determination could make a person do. Like slashing his own throat from ear to ear. Life was a delicate thread, after all, and such a cut was sure to sever it. He expected it to be fairly quick, even if it was gruesome. He expected to feel the gush of blood down his neck, but little else.
--
He didn't expect to still be sitting there minutes later. For the gods' sake, he felt his throat open up-- but not a single drop of blood. Pulling the knife away, the blade was clean. He stared at it in shock before trying again.
He felt the metal slide across his throat and sink in. He left it there. There was still no blood. And more, he could feel the first cut closing up, like his flesh and skin was crawling back together. The second followed a few seconds later, and he ripped the knife out again, letting it drop to the floor. Frightened, he touched his throat. The cuts were completely gone already.
The rope burns from the noose weren't there either, for that matter.
"Damn it," he swore, and snatched the knife back off the floor. He turned the blade towards his chest and as hard as he could, plunged it in between his ribs, angled at his heart.
The knife slid into him like, well, a hot knife through butter. He could feel the dull sensation of it puncturing his flesh, his lungs, nicking the bottom of his heart. There, it hit something solid and slid off to the side. It didn't even hurt.
He pulled out the knife once more, grunting as he felt that strange crawling sensation again. This time, he took off his suit jacket and opened up his shirt. The front of his chest was untouched, not even a scratch to show where the knife had been. He tried to remedy that with another hard stab in the same spot. Again, it slipped easily between his ribs and stopped when it hit something solid where his heart should be-- something that made a grinding noise against the metal, a vibration he could feel in his bones.
Panic was rising in him, somehow, particularly as he realized he couldn't feel his heart beating at all. I'm dead, he reminded himself. He'd already figured that out before. But why aren't I bleeding?
He twisted the knife just to make sure. It hit the solid object once again, and the epiphany hit him instantly.
The meteorite. It was still inside of him. And this time, he got a nice, detailed, close-up view of the knife sunk into his chest up to the hilt, without a single drop of blood to go with the wound. In fact, his chest was healing around the knife. Yanking it out this time opened a whole new wound, though it was gone as quickly as the rest.
I'm healing. But dead bodies couldn't heal. Then again, they also couldn't get up and walk out of the morgue. Especially not when possessed by the ghost of their former owner. And ghosts weren't real, either, for that matter.
And neither was divine intervention. A meteorite, falling from the sky, shattering into pieces and hitting a man in the middle of the stupidest mistake of his life. It sounded like something out of a dumb story. But here it all was, right here for him to witness-- and Yomiel was the lucky protagonist who got to experience it all.
He stumbled up to his feet, feeling a growing sense of unease with the situation. What else could he do? Sissel didn't own a gun, so he couldn't try to shoot himself until he got ahold of one. Since he didn't breathe, he couldn't hang, drown, or otherwise suffocate. Every injury healed itself up within a few seconds, which removed almost every other possibility he could think of.
Except one.
I could break my neck, he thought. That would be quick, too. And he couldn't see how his body could possibly heal itself from that. The mechanics were a bit more difficult to figure out, but before he had it fully planned, he was already on his feet and running up the stairs.
Sissel's house was a little two-story cottage tucked back in a little grove of trees, the furthest house back in the neighborhood. There was a tall oak tree growing next to the back corner that went up a good 20 feet beyond the roof.
He used to be afraid of heights. But the fear was gone as he climbed out her bedroom window and up the gutter, onto the rooftop. The city lights were bright in the distance, and the shadow of the tree loomed over him in the dark of the wee morning hours. The tree branch was an easy reach, and it angled up towards the tree's trunk. He climbed, dress shoes slipping on the bark, and he halfway hoped he'd fall accidentally and spare himself the jump.
But he didn't hesitate, either. As soon as he reached a spot free of branches below, he stepped out onto the edge and let the teetering tree limb and gravity do the work. He turned in midair and the last thing he saw was the ground heading straight for his face.
Yomiel hit the ground with a thud and the crackle of bones, limbs and back twisting in horrible ways like a ragdoll discarded on the floor. He could feel the way his body wasn't supposed to go that way, though it was painless-- all the better way to die.
But he lingered. He didn't lose consciousness. He didn't do anything until he felt his back rotating beneath him like a twisted rubber band unraveling. He let out a grunt, air escaping his dead lungs as his whole body turned itself over, and he felt his arms and legs snapping back together from the inside out.
He lay on his back on the grass, staring up at the sky as the horrible truth began to sink in.
I can't die. His eyes weren't even blinking until he thought about it, and forced his eyelids to close. I'm already dead. I can't die.
Something chirped beside him, and he felt a fuzzy little face rubbing itself against his hand again. The kitten had found its way outside, apparently out of concern... though likely just out of wanting some scratchies.
Yomiel wasn't in the mood for scratchies.
--
He wasn't sure how long it had been, sitting on the coffee table and staring at Sissel's body-- long enough that the birds were chirping outside, and the darkness was starting to turn to twilight. But the sunrise would bring him no comfort. They were both dead, lifeless, without pulse or breath or warmth. But Sissel was somewhere else now, on the other side of death, and Yomiel found himself stranded without any way of reaching her.
One hand closed over hers, and the other reached to stroke her hair. His dead fingers couldn't feel much, just the numb fact he was touching something. This wretched curtain of undeath even stopped him from being able to feel her.
"Sissel," he whispered, with breath he had to force himself to take. "I'm sorry, baby. I'm so, so sorry." He said it again, and again, until the words lost all meaning to him.
As morning broke, he knew he couldn't stay here. As much as he'd like to lie beside her until he faded away, he knew she wouldn't stay like this much longer. Nor would he fade away, for that matter-- or if he did, he had no idea how long it would take. He had to find somewhere else to go, somewhere to hide as a wanted fugitive. A dead wanted fugitive. The cops probably wouldn't even be looking for him. Just his corpse. And he didn't especially relish the idea of being shoved back in a drawer at the morgue, or the specimen in a dissection as the freak of nature his body had suddenly become.
Wearily, he stood and went to the phone. He hesitated before picking it up and dialing the emergency line.
"There's been a suicide," he said as the operator asked what was wrong. "45 Samsara Court." Then he hung up without another word.
Having a deadline (ha) of a few minutes at least gave him the purpose to keep moving. He went back to Sissel and spent the last few moments he had with her once again memorizing how she looked lying there. He took his sunglasses back from her hand and leaned down to kiss her forehead, a touch as numb as the rest of him was. Then he put his glasses on and turned resolutely for the back door, just as the sirens became audible in the distance.
There was a coat rack by the back door, and hanging on the leftmost hook was Sissel's red bandana. She used to wear it in her hair while working in the garden, or around her neck as a scarf. "To match," she would tease him, and gesture at the outrageous red suit he preferred.
The irony right now was almost painful, but he reached out and took it anyway.
He was nearly out of her yard and into the woods when there came that familiar little chirp again. He didn't have to turn around to know it was the kitten. Sure enough, he appeared beside him, rubbing his face on Yomiel's ankle as apparently had become a habit of his.
For a moment, Yomiel was silent. Then finally, he knelt down and offered a hand to the little creature.
"I guess you've got nowhere else to go, do you?" he asked softly. The kitten occupied itself with aggressively rubbing on his fingers, maneuvering him into scratching behind his too-big ears.
Finally, Yomiel scooped him up and held him properly against his chest, giving him a few longer strokes down his spine.
"All right. You can stick with me, then, little buddy," he said. He settled the kitten up on his shoulder, and gave Sissel's house one last look over his shoulder, just in time to watch the ambulance pulling up the drive.
He turned around and kept walking into the darkness of the woods. He had no idea where to go. But at least the two of them could go together.
He'd lost track of the time as he knelt there on the floor beside the sofa. It could have been minutes, hours, or even days. Her hand had long since gone cold in his, and he could feel her body getting stiff in his arms. He felt like he should have been crying-- fairly certain he had been, actually, but no tears had come out no matter how many racking sobs shook him. By now, even those had settled, and it was just the two of them in silence, curled together on the couch.
Yomiel could have stayed like that forever until he felt a vague nudge against the side of his leg. He lifted his head from where he'd laid it on her chest and glanced down to spot the black kitten, rubbing its face against his knee. It was still here, apparently. He'd left it sitting outside the police station when he went in to fetch his body from the morgue, and picked it up on his way to her house. Sissel loved cats, after all, and he wasn't allowed to keep them in his apartment. It would be a good gift to apologize for making her worry.
He thought, anyway.
"Shoo, cat," he muttered, and tried to push it away. The kitten stumbled on unsteady legs and fell back, but was quick to jump back up, mistaking the swat for a sign of affection. It mewed and went back in for another. This time, Yomiel ignored it.
Sissel looked peaceful, eyes closed and black hair draped gently over her shoulders, a few wisps on her face. She was dressed in her nightgown. If not for the rope burns around her throat, she might have just been sleeping. He'd taken her body down and laid it on the couch in his frantic attempts to save her, but it became quickly apparent he was too late.
Minutes too late. She had still been warm, and he had held her hand until all the warmth had faded from it.
The noose was still hanging from the ceiling fan, and her note still sat on the coffee table, carefully written in purple pen with her immaculate handwriting.
I'm coming to you, Yomiel.
It had been at least a few hours now. The initial shock was starting to wear off, leaving Yomiel completely lost for what to do now. The kitten, meanwhile, was furious in his attempts to get attention, purring and chirping and nudging to try and make Yomiel's hand do some worthwhile petting.
"Back" from the "dead," alone in an empty house with his fiancee's body growing cold on the sofa, and a hungry kitten nagging him. Yomiel decided to start with the easiest problem, heading to the kitchen to find something for the kitten to eat.
He cracked open a can of tuna and set it down on the floor. The kitten, hot on his heels, immediately dug in, ravenous. They'd last eaten a few hours ago when Yomiel was still inhabiting it--him, he mentally corrected himself. He knew that much by now. It was the least he could do to feed the little guy after all the time they'd spent together. Literally.
It was an old piece of programming wisdom: solve one problem, and the others fall into place. Surely enough, he left the kitten to his meal and by the time Yomiel returned to the living room, he already knew what he had to do. Sissel had tried to follow him into death, not knowing that he was stuck in some afterlife version of red tape. Some freak accident left him less dead than he was supposed to be. Now it was only right that he meet her there.
What other reason did he have to stick around?
Taking off his sunglasses, he slipped them into Sissel's hand, resting on her chest. Then he picked up the stool from where it lay on the ground, setting it back up beneath the ceiling fan. She was short, so she must have had to stand on top of it, but he could reach from the first rung.
The noose was tied out of a laundry line. It was awful, to think of how she must have gone through with it, meticulously tying the knot and affixing it to the ceiling fan. He couldn't know what she had gone through in doing it, feeling so lost and alone that she decided to take her own life just to rejoin him. How long did it take her? If she'd only waited a few minutes longer, he'd have been here, and...
It was no use thinking about it now. It was better to think of this as a new sort of engagement. As their rings still glinted on their fingers, so too, would her noose take his life, and marry them in death. Loosening the rope, he slipped it over his hair, then down around his neck, where he tightened it again.
Yomiel took one last look at her, forcing himself to remember her as anything other than the corpse on the couch. Her smile, the way her eyes lit up when she laughed. The cute way she'd stick her tongue out at him when he teased her. The way her shoes were always too big for her feet, even with the half-sizes she bought. The way her hair would let fly when she danced, and how her fingers felt raking through his hair and fixing the stray pieces.
Death was surprisingly easy to face when he'd already been there less than a week ago. With thoughts of her on his mind, he closed his eyes and kicked the stool out from under him.
--
He knew something was wrong when ten minutes passed and he was still alive.
The noose did its job, no doubt about that. He felt it rubbing his throat raw as he dangled from it, and he couldn't take so much as a gasp of air. But the lack of breathing wasn't seeming to bother him.
Come to think of it, he wasn't sure if he'd been breathing even before trying to hang himself. He thought on it, finally wriggling until he could reach the stool with his foot and drag it back over. Standing on its side, he undid the noose and hopped down to the floor.
Consciously, he took a deep breath. His lungs filled with air, but it was a sensation entirely unlike breathing. It just sat there, no matter how long he held it, not seeming to do anything but take up space.
He exhaled, and found he had no need to inhale again.
Of course. His body hadn't been working correctly when he retrieved it from the morgue. It was clumsy, and he felt "off" as though he wasn't truly inside of himself. This was only the latest of his realizations about his body. I'm dead, he confirmed in his head. I don't need to breathe. You can't suffocate if you don't need to breathe.
How annoying.
He made his way to the kitchen again, where the kitten was midway through the can of tuna. He regarded Yomiel with another cheerful, pleased little sound, but Yomiel ignored it in favor of grabbing a butcher knife from the cutlery block.
While hanging, he'd found himself wishing he could hold Sissel close to him somehow as he left the world for good. Since hanging wasn't going to work, he'd indulge himself this time. He knelt on the floor beside her again and reached for her hand, clasping her fingers in his own as he lifted the knife.
"Sorry for the mess, sweetheart," he said grimly. "But I'm on my way."
Yomiel had never had much of a taste for blood or injuries, but it was surprising what determination could make a person do. Like slashing his own throat from ear to ear. Life was a delicate thread, after all, and such a cut was sure to sever it. He expected it to be fairly quick, even if it was gruesome. He expected to feel the gush of blood down his neck, but little else.
--
He didn't expect to still be sitting there minutes later. For the gods' sake, he felt his throat open up-- but not a single drop of blood. Pulling the knife away, the blade was clean. He stared at it in shock before trying again.
He felt the metal slide across his throat and sink in. He left it there. There was still no blood. And more, he could feel the first cut closing up, like his flesh and skin was crawling back together. The second followed a few seconds later, and he ripped the knife out again, letting it drop to the floor. Frightened, he touched his throat. The cuts were completely gone already.
The rope burns from the noose weren't there either, for that matter.
"Damn it," he swore, and snatched the knife back off the floor. He turned the blade towards his chest and as hard as he could, plunged it in between his ribs, angled at his heart.
The knife slid into him like, well, a hot knife through butter. He could feel the dull sensation of it puncturing his flesh, his lungs, nicking the bottom of his heart. There, it hit something solid and slid off to the side. It didn't even hurt.
He pulled out the knife once more, grunting as he felt that strange crawling sensation again. This time, he took off his suit jacket and opened up his shirt. The front of his chest was untouched, not even a scratch to show where the knife had been. He tried to remedy that with another hard stab in the same spot. Again, it slipped easily between his ribs and stopped when it hit something solid where his heart should be-- something that made a grinding noise against the metal, a vibration he could feel in his bones.
Panic was rising in him, somehow, particularly as he realized he couldn't feel his heart beating at all. I'm dead, he reminded himself. He'd already figured that out before. But why aren't I bleeding?
He twisted the knife just to make sure. It hit the solid object once again, and the epiphany hit him instantly.
The meteorite. It was still inside of him. And this time, he got a nice, detailed, close-up view of the knife sunk into his chest up to the hilt, without a single drop of blood to go with the wound. In fact, his chest was healing around the knife. Yanking it out this time opened a whole new wound, though it was gone as quickly as the rest.
I'm healing. But dead bodies couldn't heal. Then again, they also couldn't get up and walk out of the morgue. Especially not when possessed by the ghost of their former owner. And ghosts weren't real, either, for that matter.
And neither was divine intervention. A meteorite, falling from the sky, shattering into pieces and hitting a man in the middle of the stupidest mistake of his life. It sounded like something out of a dumb story. But here it all was, right here for him to witness-- and Yomiel was the lucky protagonist who got to experience it all.
He stumbled up to his feet, feeling a growing sense of unease with the situation. What else could he do? Sissel didn't own a gun, so he couldn't try to shoot himself until he got ahold of one. Since he didn't breathe, he couldn't hang, drown, or otherwise suffocate. Every injury healed itself up within a few seconds, which removed almost every other possibility he could think of.
Except one.
I could break my neck, he thought. That would be quick, too. And he couldn't see how his body could possibly heal itself from that. The mechanics were a bit more difficult to figure out, but before he had it fully planned, he was already on his feet and running up the stairs.
Sissel's house was a little two-story cottage tucked back in a little grove of trees, the furthest house back in the neighborhood. There was a tall oak tree growing next to the back corner that went up a good 20 feet beyond the roof.
He used to be afraid of heights. But the fear was gone as he climbed out her bedroom window and up the gutter, onto the rooftop. The city lights were bright in the distance, and the shadow of the tree loomed over him in the dark of the wee morning hours. The tree branch was an easy reach, and it angled up towards the tree's trunk. He climbed, dress shoes slipping on the bark, and he halfway hoped he'd fall accidentally and spare himself the jump.
But he didn't hesitate, either. As soon as he reached a spot free of branches below, he stepped out onto the edge and let the teetering tree limb and gravity do the work. He turned in midair and the last thing he saw was the ground heading straight for his face.
Yomiel hit the ground with a thud and the crackle of bones, limbs and back twisting in horrible ways like a ragdoll discarded on the floor. He could feel the way his body wasn't supposed to go that way, though it was painless-- all the better way to die.
But he lingered. He didn't lose consciousness. He didn't do anything until he felt his back rotating beneath him like a twisted rubber band unraveling. He let out a grunt, air escaping his dead lungs as his whole body turned itself over, and he felt his arms and legs snapping back together from the inside out.
He lay on his back on the grass, staring up at the sky as the horrible truth began to sink in.
I can't die. His eyes weren't even blinking until he thought about it, and forced his eyelids to close. I'm already dead. I can't die.
Something chirped beside him, and he felt a fuzzy little face rubbing itself against his hand again. The kitten had found its way outside, apparently out of concern... though likely just out of wanting some scratchies.
Yomiel wasn't in the mood for scratchies.
--
He wasn't sure how long it had been, sitting on the coffee table and staring at Sissel's body-- long enough that the birds were chirping outside, and the darkness was starting to turn to twilight. But the sunrise would bring him no comfort. They were both dead, lifeless, without pulse or breath or warmth. But Sissel was somewhere else now, on the other side of death, and Yomiel found himself stranded without any way of reaching her.
One hand closed over hers, and the other reached to stroke her hair. His dead fingers couldn't feel much, just the numb fact he was touching something. This wretched curtain of undeath even stopped him from being able to feel her.
"Sissel," he whispered, with breath he had to force himself to take. "I'm sorry, baby. I'm so, so sorry." He said it again, and again, until the words lost all meaning to him.
As morning broke, he knew he couldn't stay here. As much as he'd like to lie beside her until he faded away, he knew she wouldn't stay like this much longer. Nor would he fade away, for that matter-- or if he did, he had no idea how long it would take. He had to find somewhere else to go, somewhere to hide as a wanted fugitive. A dead wanted fugitive. The cops probably wouldn't even be looking for him. Just his corpse. And he didn't especially relish the idea of being shoved back in a drawer at the morgue, or the specimen in a dissection as the freak of nature his body had suddenly become.
Wearily, he stood and went to the phone. He hesitated before picking it up and dialing the emergency line.
"There's been a suicide," he said as the operator asked what was wrong. "45 Samsara Court." Then he hung up without another word.
Having a deadline (ha) of a few minutes at least gave him the purpose to keep moving. He went back to Sissel and spent the last few moments he had with her once again memorizing how she looked lying there. He took his sunglasses back from her hand and leaned down to kiss her forehead, a touch as numb as the rest of him was. Then he put his glasses on and turned resolutely for the back door, just as the sirens became audible in the distance.
There was a coat rack by the back door, and hanging on the leftmost hook was Sissel's red bandana. She used to wear it in her hair while working in the garden, or around her neck as a scarf. "To match," she would tease him, and gesture at the outrageous red suit he preferred.
The irony right now was almost painful, but he reached out and took it anyway.
He was nearly out of her yard and into the woods when there came that familiar little chirp again. He didn't have to turn around to know it was the kitten. Sure enough, he appeared beside him, rubbing his face on Yomiel's ankle as apparently had become a habit of his.
For a moment, Yomiel was silent. Then finally, he knelt down and offered a hand to the little creature.
"I guess you've got nowhere else to go, do you?" he asked softly. The kitten occupied itself with aggressively rubbing on his fingers, maneuvering him into scratching behind his too-big ears.
Finally, Yomiel scooped him up and held him properly against his chest, giving him a few longer strokes down his spine.
"All right. You can stick with me, then, little buddy," he said. He settled the kitten up on his shoulder, and gave Sissel's house one last look over his shoulder, just in time to watch the ambulance pulling up the drive.
He turned around and kept walking into the darkness of the woods. He had no idea where to go. But at least the two of them could go together.