He isn’t sure if this is an end or a beginning. There’s a silence to the whole event, as if the last moments of his life were destined to be played out in mime. He wants to tell them to talk, cry, laugh, something to fill in the static silence that roars in his ears. But they can’t hear him, or he can’t speak— he can’t tell if he ever stopped screaming.

It was never meant to last this long. Not the war, not the bond, not any of the bloody chaos his life has— had become. So it’s a relief, almost, to stumble to an end.

Only this isn’t death, not quite— he’ll be alive, only separated back into his component selves. And that’s a sort of death, although not in a way anyone who hasn’t been part of a bond can understand. To go from I to we… he closes his eyes, feeling a sluggish lag between the people he won’t be anymore.

With a final shiver, he falls apart.