It’s been a few days since the fight with Trix, since Alexei died, and Freddie still isn’t used to having him gone. He still wakes up every morning and reaches out for him only to find him gone, the bed cold.
It hurts. Every time he looks for Alexei only to realise he’s gone it hurts. Some mornings he struggles to even get out of bed.
Today is particularly bad. He dreams about Alexei almost every night, but most nights it’s only nightmares, forced to watch him die over and over.
Last night was … different. He’d dreamt of Alexei alive, and happy, and the loneliness when he wakes is worse than usual.
He reaches for Alexei, as he always does, and as always there’s no one there.
It hurts more, having dreamt about him. Having had him right there, just to slip through his fingers.
The dream is already fading, but Freddie can still remember Alexei smiling, can still remember the sound of his laugh echoing in his ears.
He sits up, rubbing his eyes, and finds he’s already crying.
The others are probably already getting up, but he can’t bring himself to, not right now. Instead he buries his face in the shirt he’s been wearing for days (Alexei’s, a size too small) and tries to inhale as much of his familiar sea-salt smell as he can.
It’s already fading. He’s hardly been dead a week, and it’s already fading, as though he’d never worn it at all.
“I’m sorry,” Freddie whispers, absently twisting the thin gold band around his finger. Alexei’s is strung on the necklace around his neck, that he’d pressed into Freddie’s hands with shaking, bloody hands and whispered remember me.
As though Freddie could possibly forget.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, curling up under the weight of his grief. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”
He lays back down again, rolling over to face the empty space in their tent where Alexei should be.
“I miss you,” he says, reaching out to rest his hand in Alexei’s space. If Alexei were here he would link their fingers together, and Freddie would smile, kissing his fingers, and tell him I love you.
“I love you,” he says, though Alexei isn’t here to hear it. “I love you. I miss you.”
He exhales slowly, squeezing his hand into a fist. There are tears slipping down his face and soaking into the pillow.
“I dreamt you were alive,” he whispers, closing his eyes and trying to hold on to what’s left of the dream. “And you were happy. I wish I could have made you happy.”
Alexei had been happy so rarely, when he’d still been here. Always carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, and Freddie wishes now he’d done more to help. Wishes there had been anything he could do.
The happiest he’d ever seen Alexei had been their wedding, and even then they’d both known they had so little time.
Freddie misses him so much.
