A/N So this comes over a year (?) after my last update. Ooops. Life got away from me. Explanation at the bottom, if you care to know why I have been absent.

This chapter is really angsty. I've been looking for some angst fics to fill the emptiness in my soul in the wake of Novus Ordo Seclorum. I couldn't find anything like that, so I wrote it instead. This focuses on Ichabod.

I hope to have a fluffy chapter up soon to make up for all the sadness. (Sooner than another year, anyway)

Ichabod had never felt so numb. Not when he was camped out during his first North American winter, fingers blue, breath frosting before it even came out of his mouth. Not when he had found out he had a son. Not when he had to stab his own wife. Not even when he died had he been as bereft of feeling as he was in this current moment. The shard was gone, and so too was Abbie.

Take care of each other, she had said. Ichabod's mind was addled. More from her absence than the blast, he had to assume. He had withstood harsher beatings than this, that was true, but none had left him as ravaged.

Looking once more at the tree where his partner very obviously wasn't, he stood on legs he could not feel and took steps he did not register over to where Jenny lay on the stone slab. She still breathed. The rise and fall of her chest was apparent, and her pulse was weak, but there. Ichabod took out his cell phone, still present and miraculously unharmed from his pocket. He laughed quietly. How fragile these modernities, yet how durable. It had survived and Abbie hadn't.

Ichabod started to dial when he heard a voice behind him. "What are you going to say, Ichabod?" Joe sat up, rubbing his head.

"I intended to call for some medical attention. You and Miss Jenny—"

"I got bumped on the head. Minor concussion, probably. Jenny?"

"Breathing," Ichabod said.

"Oh thank God." Joe moved to stand, painstakingly leveraging himself up. Ichabod watched for a few moments, but turned back to Miss Jenny. He couldn't find it within himself to walk over to his companion and help. "We need to get her to a hospital."

"Hence the call I was on the cusp of making."

"Yeah, a call to the paramedics, then the cops would arrive, and the feds would come and there is no way we can explain this much firepower, let alone to two mythical figures…where are they?" Joe had limped his way over to the plinth where Jenny lay and ran his fingers over her jaw, her cheekbones. The relief in Joe's face felt like a kick to the stomach.

"I do not know." I care not, he wanted to say.

"Abbie?"

A slice to his heart. He was numb, numb. He wouldn't feel the full blow of that word. A few moments passed and Joe didn't pursue the topic again. Instead, the military man attempted to lift Jenny into his arms, only to begin to fall backward.

"Here," Ichabod said. "I will take her. I am uninjured." Both he and Joe knew that was a lie.

"She'll live, just needs some time to rest," the doctor said. Ichabod didn't know her name, hadn't paid attention when she'd introduced herself. Hadn't particularly cared.

The Corbin boy almost cried from joy.

"Do you want to go see her?" The doctor peered at them both, and Joe nodded enthusiastically. Ichabod started to follow behind, his steps leaden and slow.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. "Only one at a time, I'm afraid," the doctor said. "She's stable, but still in rough shape."

Ichabod nodded. "Alright."

He turned and left the hospital, caring little enough about telling Joe where he was going that he didn't say anything at all.

Through some twist of fate, or maybe on purpose—he didn't know if Abbie had subconsciously planned for these sorts of contingencies—her house was relatively close to the hospital. He walked the three miles, not noticing the chill in the air or the cars that honked when he walked across the streets without looking. Let an automobile hit him. He wouldn't feel it anyway.

His key had been lost during the fighting and used the spare she kept hidden under a fake rock in the landscaping on the east side of the building. The key turned smoothly and the door opened without a sound. Ichabod closed it behind him and left it unlocked. Maybe Abbie had just run through the tree. Or maybe it had transported her somewhere. Or maybe a thousand other things could have happened that didn't mean she was gone, but could mean that she misplaced her own keyring and would need unimpeded entrance into her own home.

That's what he had to tell himself.

He looked around the rooms, filled with things, but empty without her in them. The crocheted afghan thrown carelessly over the arm of the couch from where they had been watching musicals a few nights previously, her jacket hung over the back of a chair, their matching coffee mugs, hers big, his small, drying on the rack in the kitchen. You can't handle as much caffeine as I can, so I get the bigger mug. She'd grinned as she said it, and winked when she put them in the basket of their shopping cart. Ichabod felt tears prick at the edges of his eyes. He made his way to the mudroom, stripping off his boots and overcoat, each covered in muck and dried blood and who knows what else. Ash, maybe, from incinerated Abbie. The thought literally choked him and he coughed, trying to bring in enough air.

Abbie, Abbie, Abbie.

He went to the bathroom, double-checking that the door was locked behind him. His hand was still when he turned in the water. Nerves, apparently, could get so shot that they didn't make him shake any longer. Ichabod stepped into the tub fully clothed and let the water run over him, rushing, dripping down his body, the streams of it trickling reddish-brown down the drain. His clothes were hard to peel off once he remembered they were still there, but he did it, throwing them with abandon over the curtain rod. Scrubbing the floors of their filth would give him something to do now that his life had ended.

It was when he accidentally opened Abbie's bottle of shampoo instead of his that he was finally shocked into feeling. The water was scalding hot, beating against the skin of his back like a whip. Ichabod cursed below his breath, still not brash enough to say it too loudly. He adjusted the water quickly, and pretended to ignore the smell of her that now permeated every corner of the shower. He cleaned himself roughly and thoroughly, not knowing why he had to rub so hard but knowing that he must. He must get the memories of this day behind him, he must clean himself of Pandora, of Anubis, of the knowledge that Abbie was gone. It had to be a dream. It must be a hellish nightmare. Nothing this bad could ever happen. Hadn't he already paid enough? Hadn't the Bible said that the witnesses were protected? That whatever dare hurt them would be hurt doubly, like a Mark of Cain without the curse they would bear. But what was this hell if not a curse?

He rinsed the shampoo from his hair and stepped out of the stream onto the rug. His hand shook this time as he turned off the water. Shook as he reached for his towel. He was wracked with shaking as he dried himself, as he stepped over the wet pile of mush that was his clothing. Ichabod almost tripped as he put on a pair of flannel sleep pants, ones that Abbie had to roll up the hems five times in order for her to not trip on them.

"Get your own, if it's such a struggle for you to wear mine," Ichabod had said when she complained about the extra effort.

"Well technically," Abbie had said, "since I paid for them, they are mine. And boys' flannel always smells better than girls' does. Like man."

"Oh, stop being so irrational,"he'd said, feeling a blush creep up his neck and onto the curves of his ears.

"Ask anyone," she'd replied. "It's why girls steal their boyfriend's clothes. They smell nice, and it's easier to relax when you feel safe and secure and surrounded by the smell of your man."

"So I'm your man?" Ichabod had responded almost without thought. He laughed when he saw her blush in return. He had one that one, even though she still stole his pants every so often.

He wished he had a pair that hadn't been tainted by her memory. One scrap of cloth that didn't have her tattooed over its history. But if she wasn't wearing his clothes, she was buying them, washing them, stitching them up when they ripped. He found her hair woven in the fabric sometimes.

"The price of living with a girl," she'd said when he brought it up.

Ichabod paced through the house, not knowing what to do. The floor was cold beneath his feet but he didn't care enough to find socks. Those had her on them too.

How dare she do this to him? How dare she leave him? She saw his face as she stood on that dais, made eye contact. She had to have felt in the very core of her when he whispered don't, and yet she did it anyway. To save her sister.

He didn't want to feel resentful of Miss Jenny, but how could he avoid it? It was her stupidity that had gotten them into that mess. Her brash, reckless behavior, going directly against whatever Abbie had said that had gotten them into this terror. But Miss Jenny was in the hospital and it was so hard to maintain anger at a person who was still in a coma, and Abbie was gone. It was far easier to be angry with a ghost.

Did she care so little for the bond they shared? Of everything they'd been through together? She could've thrown the bomb into the tree, maybe ran herself. But she had to be so sure, had to make doubly certain. Abbie could've found a way. Isn't that what she had said to him so, so long ago? There is always another way. So why didn't she find that way?

His anger boiled in him now, his hands shook not from numbness or pain or anxiety but from rage. How could she leave him to this? This house filled with her, this life filled with her that couldn't exist in their entirety without her. She knew what she was damning him to when she ran inside that tree, and she did it regardless. He needed to throw something, to hit something. Ichabod grasped the chair with her jacket hanging on it and threw it. Drywall dust rained upon him.

"You leave me alone in your house, Abbie?" he yelled, looking to the sky, to the door, as if she would answer. "Fine, then I'll make it look like you were never here."

He flipped the couch, knocked over the tower of DVDs, screaming all the while, shouting his frustration, his desolation, his anger to the world. He punched the wall to see the crater streaked with blood from his knuckles. Ichabod saw their mugs sitting so serenely in the drying rack, the two of them together, like himself and Abbie could never be. Not again. He took her big, oversized, idiotic mug and hurled it on the floor, feeling more outside his own body, his own self, than within it.

The crashing of that one little mug rang through the house, echoing along the ruined walls. He stared down at the floor, the pieces no longer making sense since they weren't interconnected. Ichabod crumpled, his legs no longer able to support him.

"What have I done? Oh, my God. What have I done?" He gathered the shards together, tried to make them whole again. They wouldn't fit, they wouldn't go together like a goddamned puzzle was supposed to. Her mug, her mug. All of this hers. What had he done? Did he really want nothing to do with her?

Tears streamed down his cheeks into his beard. His shoulders were wracked with sobs, hunched over the broken remains of ceramic, wearing pants Abbie bought for him, on Abbie's floor, in Abbie's house, without Abbie in it.

"Abbie, Abbie, Abbie," he said, words coming out broken and stretched between the syllables. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. "I'm sorry. I can't do this without you. Can't take care of anything without you."

He wished for the numbness again in that moment. Wished to feel nothing at all, because even that would be better than feeling the aching loneliness of his very heart being absent from his chest, of him living alone, without her. Numbness, he decided, cradling the broken shards of her mug, was everything compared to that.

A/N

Hope you all enjoyed.

I apologize again for my reckless absence. In 2015 I studied abroad from January to June and had little time to write what with all the adventuring and self-discovery I was doing. Then when I got home I had to work 50+ hours a week to /pay/ for Study Abroad, and to see my friends, family, and boyfriend (bless that man's soul for putting up with me). Then fall semester was really hard. I barely had time to sleep and eat, let alone anything for funsies.

It is my earnest desire that this chapter sated at least a little of y'alls appetite, and thank you for sticking with me. Each and every one of you mean the world to me.

-Bliss