Untitled drabbles, a sort of cleaning-out of my collection. I hope you find some use in them.
He doesn't believe there's a providence involved, special or otherwise, with this--but he can feel himself slipping, and if it must happen, this is an appropriate close to things. Cal is safe, Cal is near, raging at him and everyone around them even as he grips his hand, and the battle is done for now; Cal is the only fight left in the clearing. Goodfellow looks on, his mouth as a line carved in granite, and Promise—
Promise is still trying to staunch the flow of blood, cradling his head in her lap and snapping orders that will do no good. They are too far away from help, and the world is blanching white and cold. He gives Cal's hand a weak squeeze, tries to grind out an "I love you" meant for both of them, but it doesn't quite take in precisely those words—but he is forgetting the meaning of sounds and can finally think only in terms of the warm leather against his cheek and the calloused vise of a grasp on his fingers.
It is the best he might have hoped for.
-
Many years later, far from a city she could no longer bear to visit, she watched the last dregs of the sunset drain away from the twilit sky from a wide window a dozen stories above the street. Another metropolitan, smaller, one in which the occasional star could be picked out, but far enough from the vast, muddy wilds of her earliest memories that she could separate herself along with her current residence.
Niko's shadow stayed on her long after they parted, somehow lurking in the way she spoke, fought, glided past the unwitting. His gaze had never truly left her form.