a/n: an old, old piece i recovered deep from the depths of my tumblr.
Acid in his spine, tearing him apart from the inside. Gunfire and smoke. Vertigo. He's flat on his shell. Leonardo grasps for his sword, loosening dirt and warm blood into his palm. (Is it his? It feels too warm against his skin.) Cloudy eyes squint behind dark shades, searching for something that isn't there. The answer to what he seeks is already darkening his mind.
He is dying.
His next breath, a ragged gasp that rocks his core, comes as a surprise, and he wonders if the sound like scraping glass inside of him is the last he'll ever hear. Perhaps it's fitting–he abandoned his family, and now he'll die alone, to the sounds of war and his own death played inside him with all the crackling and stuttering of an aged record player. If this is all he has, then so be it. His final moments are spent not longing for the light, but embracing the darkness that has colored his entire existence in its different shades.
He will remember it. For the seconds of life he has left, he will commit to memory not gunfire and broken bodies, but the peaceful nothingness, (the sense of loneliness,) that has haunted him for the years spent knowing that even sight would not save him from the darkness permeating this world.
He has heard and seen everything. Knowing this, he lets go.
(But the last thing he hears before the blackest shade comes is not the hollowness of his mind. It is a distant, mangled cry of Leo. He cannot match a face, or a tone, or a meaning, but there is a strange, brilliant flash of multicolored light before his eyes, echoing around the edges of his vision like an aurora of sound, just before the black silence sweeps in.)
