"It isn't the past the haunts us. It's what could have been."

. . .

Hot. Bright. Tangled fingers. Running. A gasping tickle of breath between two lips. Heat flooding the body. Ecstasy. Pulsating waves of lust. John. Beside him. Eyes glistening with something unspeakable, something electric and melancholy and warm. Tumbling forward. Entwining in delicate desperation. Lips brushing together. Bursts of wild hued colour. Hands roaming, hearts beating in tandem, eyes closed against cold reality. Needing more. Shedding shirts and jumpers and trousers. Clinging to one other like two leaves in a hurricane. Unfathomable grey eyes meeting with blue. Kissing fiercely, hotly, desperately. Knowing the darkness is coming. Coming for them directly. There is no escape. They mold together with divine perfection as the cosmos crashes down, as cities shatter and blood trickles from the necks of the innocent and everything that ever was collapses with an anguished roar and the light goes out forever.

They stand. Awash in darkness, feeling for the hand of the other. Arms outstretched. Praying with every fibre of being that their fingers will brush something besides emptiness.

The detective reaches for his doctor, heart stuttering frantically. John will be there. John has always been there. Yet there is no sign of him this time; no stirring of human life.

There's nothing left in the universe but a hollow breath of wind, singing and moaning in empty space.

Hope is extinct.