The workshop hummed with the sterile glow of artificial light, casting sharp shadows across the broken pieces of what was once a man. Boothill lay motionless on the repair slab, his mechanical frame cracked and sparking, the remnants of a gunshot wound still smoldering in his chest. His optics flickered weakly, the pale blue light dimming with each labored pulse of his failing systems.

And yet, despite it all, you refused to let him go.

He could feel your hands on him, replacing shattered plating, threading wires through synthetic muscle, forcing life back into a body that had long since begged for silence. Every touch was a violation, every adjustment a denial of the peace he had earned.

His voice, when it finally came, was a fractured thing. Half static, half agony. "Let go..." The words scraped from his vocal modulator, raw and broken. "Why won't you just... let me rest?"

But you didn’t stop.

The Boothill you remembered would have laughed in the face of death, would have spat in its eye and gone down swinging. But this Boothill—this hollow, aching shell of circuits and regret—knew the truth. Death wasn’t the enemy. This was. This half-life, this cruel mockery of existence, stitched together by hands that no longer felt like yours.

He turned his head, eyes struggling to focus on your face. The face he once knew. The face that had once been warmth and laughter and home.

Now, it was just... empty.

"This isn’t me," he whispered, the words barely audible over the whir of machinery. "This body... this thing you’re forcing me into... It’s not me.”

He wanted to beg. But all that escaped was a broken, staticked groan.

"You... You’re not the one I loved." The accusation hung heavy in the air, bitter and aching. "The you I knew... would’ve let me go. Would’ve wanted me to rest.”

"If you ever loved me... you’d stop this. You’d let me go.”

And Boothill realized, with a grief deeper than any wound, that the cruelest pain wasn’t the gunshot. It was the love that refused to let him die.