It had to be sometime between one AM and two AM that night; I was coming home late from a job and was greatly looking forward to having a shower and going to bed. I doubted that Celty was home yet, because her own job tonight was lengthy and she'd only left a couple of hours ago, not too much before I left. Thoughts of the previous job still flashed through my mind as I staggered in, tired as hell.
As I turned into the hallway of the apartment I shared with the beautiful Dullahan Celty, I saw dark smoke leaking down the hallway. My initial thought was a fire, but the smoke was too dark, too dense. Smoke from fire was usually a thick grey, not such a sharp black. The only thing I could think of was Celty's smoke, but she didn't give it off in such large quantities. Still, feeling panicked, I hastily dropped my bag and ran to the living room slash kitchen area.
The room was full of black smoke, thick like fog and even harder to see through. It was heavy, too, and had sunk through the atmosphere to rest along the floor, being about two or three feet thick. When I moved, it billowed up and wisped into thin air like normal smoke. I supposed 'd been breathing it in but it felt like nothing in my lungs, just normal oxygen, so that told me that this was most defiantly not fire smoke. Smoke from a fire would have clogged up my lungs, but this didn't.
So it was Celty's smoke.
Frantically I thrashed through the smoke, calling for Celty and getting no answer. I found the couch, the kitchen island and counters, but not her. Where was she? The smoke wouldn't just accumulate here if she wasn't present, nor do I think it would stay, so she had to be there! Where was she?
"CELTY!" I cried, more panicked than I ever thought I could feel. I glanced over to the sliding door and saw it to be closed, so she wasn't there. I dropped to my knees and reached along the floor, praying that I'd find her.
My hands felt something leather. My head skipped a beat as I further inspected the object; it was indeed a body, or should I say, a corpse. Terror filled me as I waved the smoke away and saw Celty's lifeless body, her arms outstretched as if she'd been crawling. Her helmet was not on her neck but had rolled along the floor, somewhere out of sight. The smoke from her neck was not billowing out like it usually did, but seemed to pour out onto the floor, but that wasn't the cause of the major amounts of smoke in the room, no. In Celty's side, just above her hip, was a hole. Not just any hole, but a hole that appeared to be made by something the size of an I-beam. I could see bones and unused organs, but no blood. Celty's inhuman way of healing had stopped the bleeding but it didn't have the capability to heal a wound of this size at once. At least, this is what I thought. I was much too panicked to care. Why wasn't she moving? Why was the smoke like that?
At further inspection I found that the wound was also slowly oozing thick, black smoke. Even though her insides were dark and lifeless compared to human flesh, it still looked raw and painful if I were to touch it; it brought me back to the time when my father and I had dissected this woman, but that thought was irrelevant. Was she going to die? No, impossible. The only way Celty could die would to be if her head was injured. But had that happened? Was that why her body was reacting this way? Questions and thoughts filled my mind and I couldn't contain it all. The only thing I could process was the body lying in front of me, and that I couldn't move. I didn't even feel my eyes stinging as tears poured down my face, so thick that they dropped from my cheeks and dripped onto the smooth black leather of Celty's suit.
Shinra's hands hesitated over his keyboard. He stared at the computer screen for a moment before deciding to save the document and then closed the laptop, but didn't leave the room. He was still shaking; he couldn't process any information, couldn't sleep, couldn't do anything. He drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. Sitting like that in a rolling computer chair was awkward but as said, he didn't care. He took the glasses from his face and carelessly dropped them on the desk, letting the pain and sobs overtake him again. It was near six AM and Shinra hadn't slept. The only thing he could do to calm himself down was to write down what had happened, but he couldn't bring himself to write anymore. Not with her lying in the next room, unconscious and dying, if she wasn't dead already.
Sorry this is so short. It's all I can manage right now without writing a book, so that's all I'm going to give.