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'He's dead, isn't he?' Jack asks. The young man nods, once, but doesn't say anything.
'Fuck.' It's the only thing Jack can think of to say. He grips the edge of the table for support.
'Really dead?'
'Really dead.'
Hands steer him into a chair; a jar of something alcoholic is pressed into his hands. He drinks it, because it is expected, and because he thinks it might help. It doesn't. Anger courses through him with the meed, and then a sense of futility.
'It was a glorious death,' the young man says. 'A noble death.' And that's supposed to be some comfort.
'He fell in battle? At his age?' Jack is incredulous.
'Yes. I was at his side.'
Cold fury sweeps over Jack.
'Trying to relive the glory-days?' he says bitterly. 'Had to take on one last fight?'
'A final blaze of victory.' The young man's eyes flash. 'It is as he would have wanted.'
Jack slams the jar down against the table.
'Over-courageousness is the same thing as folly,' he says. The young man shakes his head.
It should make no difference to him, Jack realises, whether the man has cut his life short or no. Death would have taken him in the end either way. The day was always going to come when he would return to this hall and see it crumbled into dust, kings and heroes dead, harpers silent. Such is the way of time.

*

There is no grave. Just a cliff top on a jutting headland where the grass has given way to scorched earth. He was taken by fire twice over, Jack thinks. It is appropriate, somehow. It must have been beautiful here, before the funeral pyre left the land charred and blackened. The blaze would have been visible for miles around. Jack pictures the smoke, curling skywards and and swept out to sea. A kind of home-coming, he thinks, if you want to get sentimental about it. He remembers a clumsy, cheerful young man, a hard drinker and a terrible boaster with very little of greatness about him, lurking on the edges of the great feasts, cousin to the King but nothing yet in his own right, out of place and uncomfortable. They had left the meed-hall together and sat on a cliff-top not unlike this one, overlooking the sea, and Jack had listened solemnly to a youth's foolish hopes of glory, all in the hopes of getting inside his pants. Later, they had called him a hero, and Jack had laughed aloud until he had looked upon his face again. Then he had known it for the truth.

*

'They ran,' the young man says. 'They ran and left him to die.'
'But you didn't,' Jack says.
'No.' There's a tensing of the young man's muscles.
'A brave thing to do,' Jack says. The man's eyes narrow.
'You need not humour me,' he says. 'You think it was foolhardy.'
'Yes.'
The man shakes his head.
'Do not mistake me,' he says. 'It was neither bravery nor foolishness. I thought only to stand beside because... because I would rather have died beside him.'
'I know,' Jack says.
'And the dragon was slain, and I lived to tell the tale,' the man says, but there is a note of desperation about his voice. 'And it will all come to naught. I am no fool; I know that. It was the dying stroke of our nation. We cannot stand. The gift-throne overturned and the threads of peace unwoven. That is the only future I can foresee for us. Our glory is past; he took it to the pyre with him. And history will forget us.'
'Not that,' says Jack. 'Never that.'

*

He avoids the area for centuries after that, until all traces of the great-golden hall have been utterly lost to time.
He cannot bear the thought of seeing Wiglaf's prophesy fulfilled.

Fandom: Beowulf.
Disclaimer: Beowulf and Wiglaf belong to that greatest of all literary greats, Anon. I remain as ever muchly indebted to the Beowulf poet.
Jack still belongs to lots of people who are not me.

'Ofermod' is an anglo-saxon word meaning either 'greatest courage' or 'too much courage' ie foolhardiness, depending on how you look at it.