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Heart heavy, eyes red and puffy, loss so strong it brought him to his knees, he’d failed her for the last time but he wouldn’t fail her again, couldn’t, this time she’d paid the ultimate price. The world swam in blurry circles as he found her broken body, he reached out dragging her into his lap, blood pooling around her, matting the tight blonde curls staining his clothing signalling the loss of her life as it leaked around him. Words wouldn’t come, he couldn’t feel anything but sorrow and loss.
The vampire arrived not long after, big burly thing making so much noise, disturbing Cassie, the strangled cry matching that of his own. The entourage arrived, but they were too late too, always too late for her. The bad guys won this time, the next Pythia wouldn’t be any better than her, couldn’t be better than a demi-goddess. They were defeated for the last time and he welcomed it, maybe finally he could rest, with her, wherever the other side of life took you.
They finally got him up and into the suite, he wouldn’t let anyone else carry her though, she was his responsibility. He laid her down on the pristine sheets, covering her as if she slept, he sat with her, until nightfall, waiting for the next attack for the end which never came, he would have to live without her and he wasn’t sure he knew how.
She was buried in the Pythia’s tomb, with all those who preceded her, she looked at peace, quiet and resting, he didn’t cry, he couldn’t, the numbness had filled his very being and he no longer felt anything, he would make those that hurt her pay, but he would do so cold and dead like the woman he loved before him, he would move and talk and kill but he was dead too, where it mattered.
The fat vampire died first, he hacked his head off with the cold efficiency of someone with nothing left to live for, Rhea was the new Pythia now and she was good, she was strong and capable, not Cassie, but the best option available to the power. She helped him take them down, one at a time, not for the war, not for the betterment of humanity but for Cassie. To avenge her, to tell her it would not happen again to the girls in her charge, for her only.
After it was over, the others picked up the pieces of their lives and moved on but not him, he had nothing else. He left the earth which had cursed him twice and returned to his father, back to the hell he so obviously deserved. Even Rosier kept his mouth shut about Cassie, he didn’t push and he never asked about her. He drank with him, regularly, to forget, to go on somehow.
Months passed into years and still his grief consumed him, he knew she wouldn’t want him to pine, yet he did it anyway because she was gone. He wondered if she’d had time to slip her skin and find a life to live after her life served, she would come to him though if she had, he thought. Even if only to say goodbye, but he held that hope, that her soul was still here, in some form or other, with him.
He added the picture of them to his memory box, replaced the guilt of one lost love for another, only this one had loved him back, this one had died to save the world, not to improve herself. He had loved Ruth and spent a century living in the guilt and self-loathing of his actions but Cassie would be his ultimate guilt. He would never love like her again and he would never move on, drowning in the knowledge that he could have saved her.
Once, in a foggy drunken haze, he had finally talked of her to a demon he had just met, she reminded him of her a little it seemed, crazy blonde curls, a twinkle in her eye. She had listened and she had made him quiet for a time, it didn’t work to heal him, but it gave brief silence, his thoughts concentrating on his feeding and not his guilt. She had listened though and that had helped more.
He sought her out, over and over, the blonde who listened. She welcomed him, talked with him, she was so similar, so familiar, but she wasn’t quite right. Yet she never judged him for it, his inability to let the dead woman go; she just enjoyed him without the heart, without the emotional connection that others would have wanted.
Day after day he returned, she smiled and welcome his return, until one day, months after their first meeting she called him Pritkin and he froze. No one called him that, he was Captain, John, Emrys, Myrddin but never Pritkin. Only to her, he hadn’t told this face his other name, yet here she was saying it anyway, asking him what was wrong. He saw it finally, the hair, the eyes the twinkle, the turn of her head and the way she walked, the feel of her under him; he had found her even through time and space and dimension. She wasn’t aware yet, but she would be, he had her back. One life to serve, one to live.