Harkness lay quietly on the ground, covered in blood. Jason knelt beside him, tears and snot smeared across his face as he sobbed so hard he could barely breathe.
"George... George, wake up... Didn't you say you'd teach me advanced boomerang techniques... You said you'd teach me once I could hit a moving target... I can hit a bottle cap now, you know..."
But Harkness didn't respond to his cries. He didn't move at all.
"I'll remember you. I'll remember everything you taught me and carry it on."
Crying, Jason reached out to close Harkness's staring eyes.
They wouldn't close on the first try.
He froze, assumed his hands were shaking, wiped his tears away, and tried again.
They still wouldn't close.
"What's going on..."
Sniffling, Jason pressed his thumbs against Harkness's eyelids and pushed them down. "Just close them... Sob..."
Harkness lay motionless, his eyes wide as saucers, staring straight at him.
A thunderclap went off in Jason's head. This meant something evil had possessed the body.
Harkness had become an Open-Eyed Corpse!!
He remembered that in those old stories, you had to weigh the dead person's eyes down with silver coins. But he didn't have any, so he could only use both hands to try to close Harkness's eyelids.
His thumb slid over an eyelid. The eye closed for a second, then stubbornly opened again, glaring fiercely at him.
"Can't you fucking rest in peace?!" Confusion and terror mingled with Jason's sobs. "George, is there something you can't let go of... But you already knocked that monster away..."
"Hah... Cough, cough... I'm not fucking dead yet!!"
Harkness suddenly exhaled and shoved Jason's hands away. His whole body hurt, and his left ribs burned, but what he couldn't stand most was this idiot constantly fiddling with his eyelids.
Jason