He stood there, a dark figure underneath the gray sky, the wind blowing in his face. His eyes were on the gravestone, but he wasn't really looking at it. In his mind he was a million miles away.
Or maybe not quite that far.
He had held her as she took her last breaths, blood seeping from her chest but still looking at him, her eyes still showing her strength. She had told him not to worry, that he would be okay, that she loved him. She had seen the expression on his face and smiled. And then she had died.
Her sisters had blamed him. He hadn't even been able to go to the funeral.
But no one could stop him coming to her grave.
Maybe it was his fault. He had been the reason she was there, after all. He had told her a hundred times that she shouldn't go with him to the underworld, and she had never listened. That wasn't the kind of person she was. She had died because she loved him too much to let him go alone.
Despite that, he believed with every fiber of his being that it was better to have loved her and lost her than never to have loved her at all. Without that belief he would be dead by now, if not physically then mentally. He owed it to her to stay sane, to keep going, to keep fighting, even though he had lost the only person who had ever meant anything to him. He hadn't been able to stop her from dying, but he could damned well keep her death from being pointless.
He played with the single red rose in his fingers as his eyes finally focused on her name, engraved in the marble. He took a step forward and knelt down, carefully placing the flower on the earth. He put his hand out to touch the cold stone, gently going over it with his fingers.
"I love you, Phoebe..." he said softly.
He crouched there for a moment, not blinking, tears stinging his eyes. Then, slowly, he stood up, took one last look at the gravestone, and left the cemetery for another year. Another year of fighting. Another year without her.
And, somewhere, she stood watching.
And she smiled.
fin