A/N: For the Banner's fanfiction contest of which Lute was kind enough to inform me. The challenge was to include a certain word and phrase in a fanfic; my word was "breathe", and my phrase was "I waited there for you". Just in case you were wondering.

Disclaimer: The two newsies (they can be whoever you want) belong to Disney, and the city belongs to me.

Asphyxiation.

I had promised myself that I would do it tonight. I didn't want to do it, but I had never been one to break promises—even to myself. And leaving him was something that needed to be done.

I exhaled heavily and raised my face to the moonlight, the icy wind burning my skin and making it feel raw and rough. The city was a maze of black brick walls and pale dust and green eyes and curving arches, the buildings laid out before me in a sort of chaotic order as the dim light cast complex shadows across the deserted street, outlining everything in silver and lacing it with wine and lust and pine needles. There was an odd, muffled silence about everything, as thought I were looking at it through a sheet of glass. I coughed awkwardly.

Just breathe, I told myself uneasily, trying to steady my pulse. I looked up and down the deserted street and began to walk for a lack of anything else to do. I knew I wouldn't find him. He always found me.

And he did.

He was there, suddenly, his body gleaming and alive, his dark eyes shining with a sort of hushed excitement, almost one with the shadows enveloping the pair of us.

"I waited there for you," I said, slightly breathless again. "Where you told me to wait." He nodded once, the corner of his mouth turning up slightly, and I licked my lips. This was it. I was ready. I swallowed with difficulty, my throat as rough and dry as old parchment, and opened my mouth to speak—

I said nothing.

I couldn't breathe.

He smiled pitilessly, and extended a slender, silvery hand to me that looked almost surreal in the milky light. I took it in mine, and his smile broadened. "Come with me," he said softly.

And, as though hypnotized, I followed numbly behind him as he made his way through a labyrinth of streets spider-webbing into the darkness, past madmen and sleeping men and dead men, around thieves and whores and murderers, the usual nocturnal life. He was like a cold torch, bitter and icy and blinding, and yet strangely attractive in the darkness. There was something about his dark smile, the way the shadows traced across his cheekbones and over his chest, that I couldn't defend myself against.

He's deadly, I thought suddenly, eyebrows lifted in mild surprise. He's smothering me.

I thought suddenly, eyebrows lifted in mild surprise.

He led me into one of the apartments, and as I left the open streets I had the acute sensation of leaving all oxygen behind me. I was suffocating. He closed the door pressed his lips to mine, entwining our fingers together, his chest against mine with a kind of uncanny strength. We moved as one, and soon we were nothing more than smooth, rhythmic forms with moonlight striping our bodies in long, unbroken bars. Silent and beautiful and perfect, and he reminded me of a diamond.

I had never been one to break promises, even to myself.

I would have said it, I thought as he tightened his stifling hold on me. I would have said it if I had been able to breathe.

A/N: Please leave a review!

-Saturday