Coat
He was not entirely sure when he had stood up.
One moment he had been the boy against the wall, chest barely moving, blood drooling in a thin crimson thread from the corner of his mouth, eyes open and unfocused on nothing at all. The next he was beside himself, standing, looking down at the same boy from a small distance away, and neither transition announced itself with any particular sensation. There was no falling, no rising, no sense of having crossed from one state into another. There was simply, now, two of him, where a moment ago there had only been one.
The apparition wore the same coat. Musty, oversized, khaki gone grey with age and grime, the same jeans worn soft and pale at the knees, the same boots with the same broken stitching along the left sole. It stood the way he always stood, upright, still, arms loose at its sides, and its face — his face — carried the same flat, unreadable calm it always carried, the scar sitting the same way above the same eye, nothing about the apparition softened or sharpened by whatever strange half-existence it now occupied.
It looked down at the dying boy the way he had always looked at everything. Without alarm. Without grief. A simple, unhurried taking-in of facts.
The boy against the wall was in a bad way. The apparition could see that plainly, the same way it could see the four rivers of filth still moving past a few feet away, or the dark pressing close on every side, or any other fact belonging to this particular tunnel on this particular night. Blood at the mouth, more than a nosebleed should ever produce. Skin gone the colour of old paper, stretched thin over cheekbones that had never had much softness to lose in the first place. Eyes half open, dazed, fixed on nothing, the pupils slow to respond to a darkness that offered them nothing to respond to anyway.
The body was dying. The apparition understood this the way it understood most things — plainly, without the need for anyone to explain it twice.
It did not run to fetch help. There was no help within reach to fetch, and even if there had been, something in the apparition doubted it would have moved any faster toward it than the body it stood beside was currently managing to move toward anything at all. It did not weep, or scream, or press its hands uselessly against a wound that had no visible opening to press against. It simply lowered itself down beside the dying boy, settling onto the same cold stone, close enough that their shoulders would have touched if either of them had still been entirely solid, and it looked out at the same dark water the dying boy's unfocused eyes were also, looking at, though neither of them saw much of anything in it worth remarking on.
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No memories came. That was the strangest part, if the apparition had been capable of finding anything strange. A person was supposed to see things, at a moment like this — some final procession of everything that had ever happened to them, offered up one last time before the lights went out for good. He had heard that somewhere, once, from someone, in some scrap of conversation long since forgotten. Nothing of the sort arrived. No gutter, no bread, no gate, no red lanterns, no crooked branch in a poor corner of a graveyard nobody maintained. Just the dark, and the water, and the two of them sitting in it, one dying and one merely watching, and neither of them especially moved by the difference.
Perhaps it was the life he had lived that had emptied him out this thoroughly before the dying even properly began. Perhaps it was simply the shape he had always been, built from the start without whatever part of a person was supposed to panic at an ending like this one. The apparition did not know which explanation was true, and did not spend long turning the question over, because the not-knowing didn't trouble it any more than anything else ever had.
There was something almost peaceful in it. Most people, the apparition imagined, feared this moment because of everything it threatened to take from them — the people, the plans, the unfinished shape of a life still reaching toward something. He had so little of any of that to lose that the losing of it barely registered as loss at all. No one was waiting on him to come home. No plan stood half-built and now abandoned. The gate would simply be handed to another guard tomorrow night, the same way it had been handed to him once, unremarked, uncelebrated, and the city would not so much as pause to notice the difference.
There was, in that, something almost like mercy. Not because the dying didn't matter. Only because so little else had ever been allowed to matter either, and a life built that empty made for an ending with very little left to grieve.
The dying boy's breathing thinned further, each inhale arriving further apart from the last, and the apparition sat with him through it the same way it had sat through every other hard thing that had ever happened to either of them — present, unmoved, simply beside him rather than anywhere else, because that, in the end, was the only thing it had ever really known how to offer.
The dark water kept moving past the two of them indifferently, carrying on toward wherever the city sent the things it no longer wished to look at, and for a long, still moment, neither the boy nor the thing that watched him dying made any sound at all.