It was the middle of the day, but when I found him, I found him asleep. He lay facing the window rather than the wall; as though longing for something that lay behind the closed wooden shutters; the shutters that he must have closed himself.

I was shocked by how ill he looked. He was as large as he had been the last time I had seen him, but his skin hung limply from his bones like an old tapestry left out to dry, and his face was lined in a way that it had never been before: lined from sorrow rather than from smiling. And I looked around me at this house, and I looked around me at this place, and even though I knew that he had been ill for years, I also knew, in that moment, that the British had done a better job of killing him than any disease ever could.

He opened his eyes. They were grey as nothingness. And I no longer cared that I despised what he had become: what he had made himself the moment he placed a crown on his head. He was my friend, and he was dead; his body lingering; his soul having departed a long time ago.

And yet, he looked at me. He smiled at me, weakly. And I could tell that he knew who I was.

He raised his hand to touch my shoulder. His fingers were light as breath, ghosting softly down the linen of my shirt as softly as they had touched the heat of my skin, once.

His hand reached mine. He tried to squeeze it. He failed. Instead, he wound his fingers slowly through mine, and brought my hand sluggishly upwards to his throat. He rested it there. He tried to squeeze it. He failed.

It was then that I realised what he wanted.

'No,' I hissed, snatching my hand back, 'no. I won't do it.'

His face became a mirage of pain and despair and anguish as he looked at me; his eyes wild and pleading.

'Please,' he softly begged; trying to get my hand back again; 'please.'

'You're my friend.'

'Please.'

In his eyes I saw the faces of every innocent I had ever killed; every person who had ever begged for their lives; every person who had ever begged me for anything.

'Damn you, Bonaparte,' I hissed; furious at the tears beginning to well up in my eyes at how completely I understood; how bloody completely I understood him; 'you cannot ask this of me.'

'My…friend, please,' Bonaparte murmured; his voice like an old man's; his eyes beginning to cloud with a misery that I had never seen in him before as they fixed fervently on mine; 'remember…please…'

He squeezed his eyes shut and smiled with the tranquility of a person coming home after twenty years, and as I watched his smile grow, and his hand reach out for something that only he could see, I realised that he was looking into the past. His. Mine. Ours.

'The Tuileries…' he murmured, 'remember?'

'Yes,' I whispered. My voice cracked.

'I told you… my name,' he breathed, his eyes still closed, 'my new name…my French name…'

'Yes.'

'First person…I told. The first.'

I remembered the day that we had met; all his glory ahead of him. I remembered today; all his glory behind; behind and forgotten and breaking; him breaking. I felt the heat of Longwood House around me. I saw the dark pass across his face. I saw his closed eyes and the vision behind them; a temporary respite from this, from hell. And I realised that I had come for this. I had come to set him free.

When he felt my hands at his neck, he smiled, with the contentment of one at the edge of a dream.

And as I kissed his brow, I heard him whisper.

'Thank you.'