Writing Skills - A Collection

Not another one.
That's what he thought as he looked at the pale face beside him. Not even the many wrinkles and age spots could hide the beauty this human once must have possessed, especially not to him. Gently he placed his hand on their forehead, stroking away a loose strand of hair. The silver streaks that ran through their hair shimmered in the dimmed light of the room.
"Shane?" The quiet, almost broken voice made his heart ache, but he forced a smile on his lips.
"I'm here Austen."
Austen slowly opened their eyes and he saw that they were glazed over with grey. He wasn't sure if they could even see him, so he made sure that they knew he was there by taking their hand into his. Immediately they grabbed onto his fingers and started to smile.
"How are you feeling?" he asked, even though he knew the answer already. Before he got here he had spoken to the doctors that were responsible for Austen, so he knew what awaited him. Still, seeing his partner like this before him was different.
"You already know, don't you?"
Now he was relieved that they couldn't see him, because his eyes filled up with tears. He couldn't do it, not again, not after everything they both experienced together. But he pulled himself together, swallowed down his tears and tried his best to make his voice sound confident. He had a lot of practise in the past. "I just know what the doctors told me, but I want to hear how you feel."
They chuckled weakly. "Tired, incredibly tired. But I guess you know how that is."
He huffed. "Yeah, I guess I do."
For a moment none of them said anything, then Austen spoke up again, "Don't be sad Shane. You'll find someone else, like you always did."
"Stop Austen, please. This really isn't the time for your jokes," he interrupted his partner, now choking up. Austen seemed to hear the sadness and frustration in his voice, because they didn't say anything for a while. They both sat in silence, just holding each other's hands, before Shane had to go.

He went to the funeral in disguise. None of Austen's family ever met him, not even at family dinners. Shane liked to keep them away, and so far all of his partners had agreed to this. Of course, after they knew who or what he was.
It was a sunny day when Austen was buried and a gentle breeze ruffled the leaves of the trees surrounding the graveyard. Shane stood under one of them and watched the ceremony from afar, no tears falling from his eyes. His heart had gotten cold since Austen's death, and it was an unfamiliar coldness for him, one he had never experienced before. This was strange, as he had seen many people pass away during the course of his everlasting life, but somehow he always managed to stay positive. But not this time. For the last few decades he had noticed how exhausted he was, everything he did seemed to be so pointless. He was constantly bored, nothing was important to him anymore. Still he tried to be confident and over time he found little things that made his life look a little bit brighter, at least for a while. Austen was one of these things.
But now they were dead, like everyone else he ever cared about.
Without making any sound he left the funeral, unseen and without anyone even remembering he was ever there in the first place.

For the next weeks he wandered around the town he and Austen used to live in for the past decades, but soon he became restless. He remembered this feeling from the very first time one of his partners died, which was a couple centuries ago, but he didn't really recall anything else. Shane had been alive for so many decades that he even forgot when he was born, or who his parents were. As far as he knew he was just a normal guy who happened to live longer than everyone else he ever met, and at first that was a wonderful thing. He was able to explore the world and experience the slow growth of dozens of civilisations around him, always curious about the things these people invented to make life more interesting. But over time his fascination died down, like a child's balloon losing air until the kid finally decides to throw it away. Gradually the thing he once believed to be a fantastic miracle became a terrible curse, and he had no idea how to end it.
During his long live, there were a few instances where a normal person would have died on the spot, like an arrow piercing through his heart, a gunshot to the head or a fatal car crash on a busy road. Yet he never died. Instead he continued to live, slowly gathering horrible memories about near-death experiences and absolutely clueless about why this was happening to him.
If there was only something that could cure me, that could end this nightmare, he thought many times to himself, but no matter what he tried, nothing worked.