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The lake stretched out before him, its clear waters rippling under the weight of the falling rain.
It seemed as if the sky mimicked the sadness that filled his chest.
The once serene location, where he and Fadel had promised each other eternity, now felt unbearably empty.
Style stood motionless at the grave’s edge, his sneakers sinking into the damp earth.
The single tombstone stood out starkly against the forested backdrop, the only mark of death in the place Fadel had brought him to so many years ago. The night that Style thought would be the worst in his life.
He never thought that he would be back here again, much less without Fadel by his side.
That was supposed to be a past that they had left behind.
Style had promised himself that he would never let Fadel end up in the grave he had dug for himself—at least not until they were both old and gray and reminiscing about their stupid, reckless youth.
Yet here Style was.
Not a single gray hair lined his head, but somehow, he found himself seven feet too far from Fadel.
The furthest seven feet that not even his stubborn persistence would be able to close.
Style clenched his fists, nails digging into his palms, his fingers trembling as if he could still grasp onto something—onto Fadel and the life they had worked so hard to build.
Clutching at memories that felt as if they were slipping through his fingers like sand.
Even though he never directly admitted it to Fadel, he secretly had always thought him to be invincible. Fadel had walked through hell and high water, emerging unscathed—completed his missions, escaped Lily, survived prison with Bison, and dodged revenge plots that should have caught him ten times over. He had stared straight down the barrel of death so many times that it had seemed like death had finally given up.
But, in the end, it had been a car accident that took him out.
Not a bullet, not a knife, not even the ghosts of his past finally catching up to him. Just metal crumpling under force and lousy timing. A moment where the universe decided that Fadel didn’t get to walk away this time, ripping him away so cruelly from their small family—from Style.
Reality had shown him that no matter how much Style loved to believe in fantasy, Fadel had never been invincible.
He had only been human.
And humans didn’t get second chances.
Style swallowed hard, his voice hoarse with disuse when he finally spoke, barely above a whisper.
“I just… I hope it was quick,” he admitted, the words catching in his throat. “I hope you didn’t feel it. You already went through enough, Fadel.”
The rain kept falling, silent and indifferent, as he pressed his forehead against the edge of the cold stone.
“You were supposed to get through this too and come back home to me,” he continued, his voice breaking, “You always did. So why not this time?”
Silence answered him, as the words hung in the air, settling between them like an abyss.
Style squeezed his eyes shut, feeling the sting of tears threatening to fall but unwilling to let them escape. He didn’t want to picture it. He didn’t want to imagine Fadel alone in those final moments, surrounded by the cold, cruel finality of death that he had once expected, but now realizing that there was no escape this time around.
Fadel had always been the one who found his way home—no matter the odds, no matter the dangers. He always returned. It was what had made Fadel feel so damn invincible.
“But if you had to go…” He swallowed, “I just hope it that you didn’t have time to be scared.”
Style could only pray—if there were a higher being out there listening—that when his end came, it had been quick. That Fadel hadn’t suffered, hadn’t died alone, reaching for something—someone—who wasn’t there.
The thought of Fadel, alone as he took his final breath, made his heart splinter into a thousand jagged, little pieces.
Fadel had spent his life clawing his way out of darkness, only to have the happiness he found stolen from him when he had finally started to believe he deserved it.
He had earned a future.
But the universe had never been very kind to Fadel.
His chest ached. Standing here in the aftermath, part of him still couldn’t accept it.
━━━━━━◇◆◇━━━━━━
The knock at the door had come late.
A sharp, authoritative rapping that had sent a chill down Style’s spine before he even opened it. It had crossed his mind that maybe Lily had found someone dumb enough to actually try and take them out.
When he swung the door open, he had expected to put up a fight.
He never would have thought to find himself face-to-face with three police officers, far more somber than he would ever expect to see.
A heavy pit in his stomach had formed.
“Are you Style?” they had asked, their voices already muffled as they were about to speak the words that would shatter his world.
“Yes, that would be me.”
“We need to talk to you about Fadel.”
He hadn’t believed them at first. He was never one to trust cops, and he and Fadel never had reason to trust them, definitely not with Fadel’s past.
The words didn’t land at first. His brain had turned them into just sounds, meaningless syllables carried by the cold air. But the quiet sympathy in their stances, one he never thought he would see directed to him, sent ice through his veins.
A short, hollow laugh had slipped through his lips.
His heart pounded. A dull ringing started in his ear. “No,” he said, shaking his head vigorously at the officers. “Whatever you think happened, it didn’t. Fadel was just at the store; he said he’d be back in a few hours.”
But the words didn’t stop coming. Something about an accident, wet road, sharp turn, hitting against a truck—
There was no way that Fadel could be dead.
Not like that.
Not from something as mundane as a traffic accident.
“No, you’ve got the wrong guy,” Style had said, shaking his head. “That’s not possible. He—he would’ve called me.”
But there was something in their pitiful gazes that they met him with that stopped him in his tracks.
The moment they told him about their Jeep—how they had found it flipped over, mangled beyond recognition. How Fadel hadn’t made it.
The pain in his gut that had formed twisted. No. That couldn’t be possible, they had to be mistaken—
Jeeps weren’t hard to come by, he told himself. Plenty of people drove them. And cops made mistakes all the time—mixing up information, misidentifying victims. It wasn’t unheard of.
He couldn’t—didn’t—want to believe that they had seen their Jeep with Fadel inside.
Fadel wasn’t gone.
He just had to be the unlucky bastard who was mistakenly told his husband was dead when, in reality, Fadel was still alive, wandering through some grocery store aisle, debating what ingredients to get for their dinner that night.
Fadel would walk through their door at any moment, shaking his head and teasing him for believing in some idiotic cops.
If Style closed his eyes hard enough, he could already hear the warm laughter that caused his heart to skip a beat each time.
But the officers were still staring at him. Silent, as if waiting to see when he would break, while their home remained empty.
Style’s grip on the doorframe tightened until his knuckles turned white. His vision had blurred at the edges as hot tears had threatened to spill down his cheeks.
Then, without a word, he slammed the door shut.
Their home suddenly seemed suffocating. The silence swallowed him whole. His chest heaved, breath coming in too short, too sharp. His hands trembled as he slid down the door.
He had stayed there curled up, frozen, waiting for hours, days.
Waiting for the second when Fadel would walk through their door.
But the door never opened.
━━━━━━◇◆◇━━━━━━
Style knelt there in the rain, brushing dirt off a grave that should never have existed with a gentle touch, his fingers lingering over Fadel’s name. The inscription was simple—Fadel’s name, nothing else.
No dates, no epitaph.
Just his name, carved in the stone.
As if anything more would be unnecessary
As if Fadel’s pure existence was to be nothing more than a name carved into stone.
It was too simple. Too neat. Somehow, it carried the same mystery Fadel had grown accustomed to wrapping himself in, the same quiet enigma he had been trained to be his whole life.
Even in death, he remained frustratingly impossible to grasp fully.
Style hated how fitting it was.
“You always sucked at planning,” Style murmured, his voice barely louder than the pattering rain against the headstone, “But this? This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Fadel had spent so much of his life alone, with only his brother by his side.
Style had seen it in the quiet spaces in between his sharp words, had felt it in the way Fadel clung to him in the middle of the night when his nightmares threatened to bleed into their reality. He had seen it in the way Fadel never truly believed he was worthy of love—of someone staying.
He had expected his ending to be a lonely one. A sad one.
One where only Bison would find his grave and grieve.
But Style was here, soaked to the bones, fingers curled into fists with only their wedding ring grounding him into the hollow reality. He was here, breaking apart at the seams.
He didn’t care that his body was growing numb, that the rain had long since drenched him, and that the night stretched empty and unfeeling around him.
There was not much meaning to his life anymore, not without Fadel by his side.
He couldn’t find it in himself to care about anything other than the name etched into the stone before him.
The rough grooves beneath his fingertips as he traced the letters repeatedly failed to comfort him.
Fadel Kasemsan
“You promised that you would grow old with me, remember?” His voice cracked, lost in the wind. His hand curled against the stone as if he could grasp someone no longer there.
“This wasn’t the plan…” His chest heaved, the weight pressing down on him. “You never listened to my plans.”
The wind howled, carrying his words into the rustling of leaves. But there was no answer. No sarcastic retort. There was no dry laughter or kiss that would cover his lips to make him stop talking anymore.
No, there was just the rain and silence.
A suffocating silence pressed against his ribs until it hurt to breathe, as if grief itself had wrapped around his chest and refused to let go. The world felt hollow, vast and empty, stretching endlessly without Fadel to fill the spaces in between for Style.
Raindrops clung to the gravestone like tears, slipping down the carved letters. He watched them fall and felt them soak into his skin. With slow, heavy movements, he pressed himself against the grave, knees drawn up.
He had no reason to stretch them out anymore—not when there was no Fadel around sprawl across them, no teasing kisses that would cover his thighs. No soft hair that he could run his fingers through as they just enjoyed each other’s presence.
Time passed, but Style didn’t move.
He wasn’t sure if it was minutes or hours anymore.
The sky had darkened—maybe it had always been dark.
Style wasn’t sure. His whole world had dimmed when Fadel left him behind.
His clothes were soaked, the chilling cold settling into his bones. Style couldn’t even bring himself to shiver.
Instead, he rested his forehead against his knees, curling in on himself as if making himself smaller would make the ache inside him smaller too.
Maybe if he stayed long enough, Fadel would come looking for him.
Maybe if he stayed, he’d wake up and find that none of this was real. It was all just a sad prank that the deepest part of his subconscious pulled to make him realize how scared he was of losing Fadel.
Maybe he’d be woken up to the gentle kisses that Fadel had loved to cover his face in every morning.
Or maybe he’d look up and see Fadel standing with an umbrella over him, fussing and shaking his head, hearing his familiar warm voice scolding him. Teasingly calling him an idiot for sitting out in the rain like this.
But no matter how long he sat there, no matter how many of his tears got mixed in with the raindrops that soaked his body, the grave remained silent, and Fadel never arrived for him.
The lake lapped against the shore, indifferent to the grief that threatened to spill out of Style’s chest.
“You should have waited,” Style murmured, “You said you would.”
The words hung in the air, swallowed by the storm.
Style could hear them echoing inside his mind, over and over. Louder. Growing more desperate each time. Bargaining to bring the only man he loved back to him.
Yet, the world doesn’t mourn.
It never even paused. But he does—his love stood still, frozen in time and lost in the only place grief had left it.
There were no maybes that would come to fruition.
The grave before him never disappeared, and Fadel didn’t answer.
He clenched his fists, nails digging into his palms, the pain grounding him to an unbearable reality that he could only wish to escape. He would have traded anything—done anything—to hear Fadel’s voice again, to feel his warm embrace wrapped around him.
A part of him wanted to bargain with the universe, to scream into the void, to pray to every god out there to hear his pleas just to trade one more moment with Fadel.
But death wasn’t something he could fight.
It wasn’t something he could punch, curse, or trick it into backing down.
Style knew that intimately well.
Fadel had survived every damn thing that should have killed him.
Until a car accident finally did.
Fadel was gone.
The realization settled over him like a weight he couldn’t shake.
Being in front of the same grave that he had seen so many years ago, when they thought that five years apart would be the longest they would be separated, felt disgustingly visceral. Fadel had tried to say goodbye, but Style had never been one to let go so easily. Not when he had a choice in the matter.
This time, the choice had been ripped away from him.
Every breath dragged like shattered glass since the moment that Fadel had left his side. Sharp and jagged, cutting into the empty void that Fadel used to fill. Style had spent so much of his life running to find Fadel, chasing the man that he knew was meant to be his, laughing in the face of danger because they had each other.
But now their race has ended. Fadel is gone, leaving Style alone at the finish line, with everything they built together haunting him.
He saw the ghosts of what they had built together everywhere he looked—the simple dreams of their future that they had imagined together—lazy Sunday mornings, arguments over where to open their next store, the quiet certainty of waking up to each other’s warmth for decades to come.
But none of those existed anymore.
Fadel’s burger joint no longer had its owner; the heart of their little empire was now missing. Style had kept it open during the five years that Fadel had served his time. His efforts had been enough to keep the lights on and the doors open, but it had been Fadel who had truly loved their burger joint. Fadel had loved the long nights, the routine, and the small victories of a perfect night.
Now, Fadel’s grill remained untouched, the laughter in the kitchen entirely silenced, and the once-warm space felt so cold.
And their bed—God, that had been the worst of it all.
It had become the cruelest reminder of all.
It remained undisturbed, the sheets still faintly creased from the last night Fadel had slept there. The scent on his pillows was fading too fast.
Style had taken to sleeping curled in their living room as if that would make the emptiness less noticeable.
How was he supposed to move forward when he had designed his life to include Fade in every plan, every fleeting thought, and every damn breath of his?
His grief coiled tighter, heavy, and unbearable, but the world refused to stop spinning.
The rain still fell, the lake still rippled, the wind still stirred. The city bustled somewhere beyond the trees, cars humming people laughing, life pressing on.
And Style still lived.
While Fadel didn’t.
The unfairness of it made him sick to his stomach.
He clenched his fists, feeling the sharp press of his wedding ring against his skin, the metal biting into his palm. A reminder of all their promises. Forever, they had sworn.
He wanted to stay here forever.
But Fadel would have hated that.
“Don’t be dramatic, Style,” he could imagine Fadel chiding, his voice carrying no trace of sarcasm, instead full of fondness. “You’re not the one that’s dead, so stop trying to follow me.”
A breathy, almost maniacal laugh escaped him. Fadel had always hated being the center of attention. He had always scolded Style for being too reckless, too emotional, too much at times.
He had been right.
Fadel had once told him that the grief would pass.
“People always move on,” Fadel had whispered, his voice quiet but sure. “It’s just what they do—It’s what I did.”
But for once, Fadel had been wrong.
Because Style wasn’t going to move on.
And he was never going to be okay again.
Maybe if he stayed here long enough, he’d turn to stone, become another part of Fadel’s grave. He couldn’t find a reason to leave when he had nowhere else to go.
How was he supposed to live in a world where Fadel no longer did?
His grief was brutal. It gnawed at him, sinking its claws and hollowing him out from the inside. It was the sleepless nights staring at the ceiling, the deafening silence that surrounded him in an empty home. It was waking up to a moment of disorienting hope before remembering—before reality came crashing down again like the bullet that he took for Fadel so many years ago.
His grief was far from poetic.
So, Style stayed in this aching, endless moment where the rain blurred the world's edges, where time stretched into something meaningless, where Style existed only as a shell of what he once was without Fadel by his side.
Because in the pouring rain with nothing but the headstone of his husband, he found himself utterly,
devastatingly,
alone.