His breath catches, hard as though she's hit him, and hangs still and dead in his chest. She folds down so tight and small, juddering against him as a miserable knot of tension. Numbly, wordlessly, he holds her.

There was no one to hold him when he cried like this. The only person left wasn't really a person, and wouldn't have wanted to touch him, and did not know how. He doesn't know how, now that it's happening: he is too aware of the soul in her body and the bones in the earth, the black-hole shadow of Augustine down the hall, and how much of himself he's left dead and sleeping. He is too aware of how long he's failed to make it ever mean anything. It sticks in his throat like bone shards, splinters with her every snuffle and hitch against him.

John shuts his eyes tight, lets her dent his shoulder to bleeding, and says nothing at all.