A/N: I do not own the Cal Leandros series, or any of the characters!
I had a bad day. I needed to relieve some stress. It's my habit to pick a character or two and kill them in horrible, awful ways while listening to loud rock music to blow off steam. Cal and Niko were the unfortunate victims this time. (So when I say to myself 'I gotta kill somebody' all my muses take off at a dead run to hide!)
Niko could say he'd never expected it to end like this.
Oh, he'd entertained some grim ending for them both, but this had not been one of them.
Then again, he thought distractedly, who would expect to die like this?
Who on earth expected to die by slow inches, flesh ragged, lungs burning, blood dripping and every nerve pulsing blinding agony with every heartbeat?
Who expected to die betrayed and flayed and being perfectly, absolutely unable to hate the betrayer?
The knife that caressed his raw lungs was hot fire in his side. Niko couldn't actually see anything anymore, but he saw the slide of the knife against darkness like vivid lightning. His voice was raw and broke over the scream as steel gouged into bone. Oh he'd tried so hard not to make a sound, so hard, but somewhere along the way to dying he'd lost dignity and pride and all control. Niko wasn't sure where or when. Things were hazy, his world redefined by pain and a steady pulsing knowledge of death too close. Too close.
Laughter abraded his hearing like barbed jet-black claws, the monsters that were dead resurrected again in unholy life in a body not theirs. In a mind and soul that had never been meant for this, and the tears on Niko's face were not for himself or the blinding burning agony unfurled down every limb.
The tears were for the one who'd tried so hard and fought until the last.
Until grey eyes were no longer grey.
The knife gashed through his thigh, sliced hanging intestines and Niko screamed again, arching against the tree so hard he nearly knocked himself out against the rough bark. The handcuffs bit bloody into his wrists, and he could have stood on tiptoe but he'd lost that too, and he hung from bloody wrists like a kill for the gutting.
Something like a laugh burned in his throat - oh he was already gutted, mostly, and he still knew it, couldn't ignore it, couldn't see but only feel oh to not feel. He didn't want to feel - not his body and not his heart and not the throbbing grief.
Niko's broken shattered raw voice wrapped itself around the beloved name of the one he'd lost at last.
"Cal!"
This time the knife went through his heart, so hard and deep the blade went through him entirely and stuck fast in the tree behind him.
He couldn't even scream for the pain, white-hot-blind-dissolving, he was dissolving into the agony oh...!
Grey eyes were no more, dead and blind and red and hungry.