(This was a collaboration with captain-aspices-me, also known as AquamarinePisces on Ao3. It's also posted there.)
A shiver went up his spine, the sort of shiver he felt when Call was in danger. Every time it came, he felt his heart swoop down into his feet. Nothing mattered anymore, not the Chaos-ridden, not the Order of Disorder fighting side by side with the monsters they'd helped create. Aaron turned and watched as Master Joseph bowed low at Call's feet. His onyx-topped staff glinted as he held the wood tight in a white knuckled grip. In Call's hands, chaos swirled, and Call's eyes were hard as stone. Would Call really do it? Aaron felt ready to vomit. No, Call, please.
"Master…" The man lifted his staff to perform his preservation spell, but it flew from his hands, clattering to the ground away from his reach. Shadows like grasping hands grappled for it and all light seemed to bend into itself where the staff was disappearing.
"I am not your Master. I killed him," Call said, his hands shaking as he struggled to control the flood of chaos spilling from his palms. "I'll greet death before you let me become its Enemy." As the final tendrils of darkness vanished from his hold, Call let out a choked gasp and his body dropped, the void continuing to leak like lifeblood from his prone body.
Master Joseph was stunned, his hands quivered as he reached out to the boy.
"No! Get away from him!" Aaron threw a wave of darkness at Joseph, slamming him into the forest of trees. "Leave him alone!" Aaron didn't make it far to Call before Joseph barked an order and the Chaos-Ridden rallied, clawing at Aaron to hold him back. Hands grasped at his shirt and twisted his arms behind his back.
"Stop, I command you as your Master!" Call's voice was weak. Aaron couldn't even see Call. He was trapped in the eye of his own hurricane of chaos.
They moaned in unison, and for the first time, Aaron understood them in their terrible language. "Not our Master."
"Aaron…" He heard Call grunt as he hit the dirt. "Aaron! I can't- I can't-" And Call was cut off as the chaos seemed to close in, compact and almost alive. It almost seemed to all be sucked into Call himself.
Aaron screamed and it felt like his vocal chords had snapped as he let go his own burst of chaos. He couldn't look away from his friend, half lidded eyes threatening to close shut for good. Call's mouth twitched as if trying to say something, but instead deep crimson came dripping out, dark, too dark to be normal blood. It was as if the void itself seeped out from Call.
"Call...Call!" He dropped to his knees, cradling Call in his arms, not caring for the blood that streaked his chin or the dust and sweat and grime from the endless battle or the chaos threatening to close around the two of them, sucking them into oblivion. "Call! Call, talk to me! Oh, my God, please don't do this."
He felt the battle, the world, and his heart stop as Call's gray eyes glazed over, colder and emptier than the void itself. And that's what Aaron felt, a great black hole of nothing and everything as his world fell apart.
"Call? Call! Call! No, no, no, no, no…" Aaron buried his hands in Call's tangled hair, desperate for a reaction, anything. "I need you! Call!"
Call didn't respond. Aaron knew he should have been doing something, anything else but he'd felt the tear and the emptiness and knew he was gone. Aaron knew he was supposed to be fighting back, be the hero, the chosen one, but Aaron was tired of being the hero. He just wanted Call.
Aaron hugged him to his chest. He cried into his friend's curly black hair. It smelled like blood. "I'm the one who was supposed to die!" Aaron had believed it all along and he'd braced himself but he never braced himself for this. "Together, not dying," he muttered. "Together or nothing!"
Call's head lolled back, his beautiful face gone blank- no more pouty looks or half-smiles. Call suddenly looked very, very young. Too young to be dead in Aaron's arms. Aaron choked. They were sixteen. Only sixteen! No child should have been trained to be a human shield, and barely human at that- pretty play toys to display power, a weapon of flesh and blood and bone.
"I need you, Call!" He repeated, the words falling upon deaf ears. "You…you showed me it was okay not to be perfect. All I ever wanted was someone to like me, to really like me. With you, it was just so effortless...I just..." Aaron took Call's face in his hand, gently shaking him. "I love you." Aaron couldn't help but feel stupid and powerless as he finally did the one thing he never had the courage to do in time.
He pressed his lips against Call's, cold and lifeless and slick with bittersweet blood. Aaron pulled away, gagging and wiping it off his tongue. What kind of morbid person kissed a dead body? Call couldn't answer to Aaron's kiss, he couldn't even give consent. He was just a corpse; he had no pulse, no breath in his lungs. It almost felt like he didn't even exist at all anymore.
And to some, Callum Hunt had never existed at all. Like the man who was responsible for this. To Joseph, Call had always been Constantine Madden, the monster he created from a flawed man. A desperate boy who wanted nothing more than for his brother back, resurrect the one who mattered everything to him, risk it all for one person.
Now he understood. Call was Aaron's Jericho and he was falling for him in more ways than one.
Aaron gently laid Call down on the grass, and he knew it would be the last gentle thing he would do in this world. No, he was tired of playing hero. Because the Magisterium was just the lesser of two evils, and Aaron was ready to be the same.
He summoned chaos and stepped towards Joseph.
In his hand, he held Miri, but he must have been holding it by the blade because his blood mixed with Call's, a final blood sacrifice to bind them.
Soon, Joseph's did the same.
"Kill me, Tamara." he said as the chaos crowded his eyesight. Every single one of his senses overloaded as the chaos took them over. Everything was tearing pain, a ringing in his ears nearly drowning out everything. "Before I'm not me."
Tamara shook her head. Aaron knew Tamara, he knew she would refuse. But he also knew Tamara loved him like she'd loved Ravan.
"Please. Or I'll do it myself." Soon there wouldn't be a body to kill, soon he wouldn't even have a conscience- all scattered thoughts and uncontrollable violence until nothing of Aaron was left but the memory of Call's blood under his nails. Until he was nothing but chaos. "If you ever loved the Magisterium, loved me, you need to kill me." Aaron didn't love the Magisterium, not anymore, but he knew they didn't deserve his inevitable wrath.
"Don't say that! Don't be stupid! Please...Think about yourself for once in your life!" Tamara cried. "Just stop being the hero, Aaron!"
He smiled sadly. "I stopped being the hero a long time ago. Maybe I never was."
And it was true because heroes didn't exist. He sure wasn't one. He was a murderer and the blood would always be on his hands. Nothing would change his guilt. He could only do one more good thing, one final deed to end it all.
Aaron held Miri with a misty, black hand- his body was almost completely broken down.
Aaron didn't feel anything in the last moment, because he'd finally gone numb.