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curt immediately regretted taking his shot. he was watching owen, his owen, the love of his fucking life, collapse to his knees with a hole in his head. god, his face was draining of colour, he looked sick, curt just wanted to hold him in his arms.
he stepped back a little and stared at what he didn’t want to let himself call the corpse, breathing heavily.
owen was slumped over, blood dripping down his forehead and seeping into his shirt. the bullet had pierced through skull with ease, and the singed hole it left behind covered nothing.
curt stared into it.
the gunshot was a raw, gaping hole in his head. curt could see the edges of torn flesh and the scorched remains of the bullet. there were streaks of blood running down his face, already drying dark against his lifeless skin, already growing pale.
he couldn’t walk away if his life depended on it. he just stared at owen, like you do with roadkill, when it’s so upsetting you can’t look away. he wanted to say goodbye.
he felt worse about it this time than he had before, somehow. this time it was deliberate, he meant to kill him, and that made it infinitely worse. it being a mistake means he was a fucking idiot, yes, but this meant he was a bad person, and that concept made him just as sick to his stomach as the corpse in front of him did.
the gun was on the floor now. he hadn’t moved, was still standing a couple feet away, was still staring unblinkingly.
after about five minutes of this, as he felt himself start to cry, he caved and ran towards owen. he tried to touch him but recoiled, sick at the sight of him. he’d always been just as scared of owen’s blood as he was of his own.
he needed a drink and a cigarette, and he needed to have them with owen. he needed to tell owen about this over the phone.
he had a third of that — no cigarettes, no owen, but he did have his flask — and that’d have to do. he downed it in one, obviously, stared at the reflection of the dingy lights above him in the metal. there was a steady, tinny pattering on the thin roof above him as it started to rain, and it was getting harder with every passing second.
this was the flask owen got him, with his initials engraved into the bottom left in his handwriting. it was expensive and cool and curt loved it even though it had been over a decade since he got it, which honestly represents owen perfectly.
he ran his thumb over the lettering. owen had touched this, he’d held it in his hands, he’d been here.
there wasn’t enough whiskey in his flask to fix his situation — not that there was enough whiskey in the world to fix his situation, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to go looking for more. he went to leave and looked back over his shoulder every five seconds, some shitty orpheus. he felt awful for leaving him there, of course he did, but what else did he do? pick up his body and bury it?
the idea crossed his mind for a second, but he couldn’t. picking him up and feeling his limp body in his arms, then digging a hole in the stiff november earth with his bare hands (he didn’t have a shovel on him, why the hell would he?) with the corpse beside him, then placing him in it and watching as his face slowly disappeared into the ground, then leave him there to rot and freeze? absolutely not. owen had wanted to be cremated anyway. curt already had a makeshift urn in his living room, an empty one with ‘owen carvour, august 27th 1927 to november 3rd 1957, loved by so many’ scrawled onto a label. he’d just have to keep crying to that, he supposed, as he unlocked and opened the back door.
it was torrential, driving rain. curt swallowed, pulled his jacket up over his head to protect his hair, and stepped out of the building.
“what’s on your mind?” tati asked at the bar two days later, sipping neat vodka (like owen used to do) as curt sipped neat whiskey. “you look sick.”
“owen.” curt said, softly. why lie?
“ah.” she ran a finger over the rim of her glass (like owen used to do). “do you want to talk about it?”
curt’s immediate reaction was no. “…uh, yeah, sure.”
she put her hand on his (like owen used to do). “you can tell me anything, curt, i promise. i’m here to listen.”
curt swallowed, finished his drink, and tried to focus more on the ice clinking around in the glass than on what he was about to say.
“i did the right thing.” he said, his voice still barely above a whisper, “like, objectively, it was right, a happy ending, but it doesn’t feel like that. it just feels like… like i’m a murderer.”
“curt, you’re not a bad person. i know you loved him, but he was a serial killer. stop thinking about him as the owen you used to know, because i have a feeling he wasn’t that owen anymore. you should separate them, mentally.”
“i can’t. he had the same face, voice, all of it. i just wanted to hug him. i’d been grieving for so long, i’d just got over it and it felt too soon, like i was betraying him, even though it had been four years. and then he… turns up, my fucking dreams came true and he was alive, and he hated me. what do i even do with that?”
“i know it’s hard. it’s never going to be easy.” she offered a smile (like owen used to do). “but you did the right thing, even if it doesn’t feel like it, alright?”
“i guess so.” curt didn’t seem convinced.
“it’ll get better,” she smiled at him, properly this time. “i promise.”
“but what if it gets worse again? i mean, it got better a while ago, when i joined up again, but now it’s back to shit.”
“and then it’ll get better again.”
he sighed, sat up a little. “tati, i don’t—“
“and it’ll get worse, and then better, and worse, and better again, until you barely think about it anymore.” she finished her drink. “you know, it’ll pass.”
curt didn’t believe her for a second (like he used to do whenever owen gave him advice, even if it was totally right, which it almost always was).
“alright. thanks.”
she looked at him for a second. “you don’t believe me, do you?”
“uh, no, i do! totally, just—“
“you will one day.” she said, shrugged (like owen used to do).