Note(s): [1] I wrote something that isn't Love Live! and that's a huge improvement.
[2] I hate Vayne/Jess for being so cute and fluffy and sad and depressing and heart-wrenching and and and so full of despair.


"Teach me about death," she says, voice shaky and nearly a murmur, uneven, barely-there, desperate. Jess doesn't even squirm in the slightest. She's paler than she had ever been, smaller than she had ever looked, and smiles the brightest sunshine she'd ever flashed.

Vayne doesn't have the heart to look. He diverts his eyes, thinks of the compounds needed to synthesize an X-Heal, because the sight of Jess, cradled in his arms, Death-kissed, so hopelessly dying broken him in more ways than he ever imagined.

"Vayne,"

"Death," he chokes out, and impressed at himself for not combusting into tears, "death, it's scary. It's lonely. It's cold,"

Jess reaches out a hand to his face. It hesitates for a second before a finger traces along the surface of his nose, drags itself to his right cheek, all the way to his cheekbone. Normally, such gesture would burn his cheeks a million shades of humiliated red, but then again the girl he (likes? Adores? Loves?) is –

"Now that you are," Jess coughs out, all sickly-sounding and rough and every bit as painful and it sounds, and smears splotches of blood on his uniform, and his grip on her tightens, "—you are so up close, I think, you're pretty good-looking."

"Th, thank you,"

"You'll grow into a fine young man,"

Suddenly, he realizes how he's abruptly too close, and how he supports her increasingly getting limper body upwards, so close, their foreheads touch. He can't breathe. She's basically, indirectly suffocating him. He laughs inwardly on how such harmless thing such as a dying young woman could kill him in less than an hour.

"Don't say that,"

"If only—"

"Don't," Vayne cuts, struggling with hitched, unsteady breath through his stuffy nose, and he can hear his friends shouting things at the two of them, and the mutterings from Isolde, taking the form of icicles ready to hone through his heart, and the world moving on without him, "don't leave me, please, don't, I – I,"

He hears Jess going silent. He knows that she's contemplating on a reply. He knows, because at this very moment they are one and the same and even their heartbeats and pulses – hers subtler than his, now – are thumping in tandem.

It's ironic how Death unites the two while at the same time separating them further apart.

"I won't, Vayne." She says, so obviously, feather-light and throw-away. He watches her closing her eyes, her hand falling to her side. She smells like graveyards, he notes.

He closes his eyes and lets himself sinking into the darkness. He doesn't shiver.