clutching a smoking gun :: love / seven

His own scream covers the sound of Fleur's cannon, axe blade slammed down into the neck and a final sea of red spilling forth over his legs and the ground below.

He screams when she falls for the final time, he screams when his hands release the axe and it stays lodged in Fleur's body as she crumbles to the ground, he screams against the deafening roar of a cannon's wave in the darkened sky above.

He screams until his lungs collapse into one another, until the diamonds and the brands on his chest douse themselves in kerosene and light a new fire that spreads fast across shallow veins all over his body. When his voice finally cracks and shatters and falls to the bloody soil beneath him he feels himself fall with it, knees buckling and blood loss finally wrapping sharpened claws around his form. He collapses down to one knee at first, last shreds of adrenaline fighting against the inevitable as he pulls the remaining pieces of the mask glued to him from his skin, feeling the pieces detach and crumble under the pressure of a thousand cracks in the plastic as Fleur's cannon begins to fade out into nothing. 

Finally his body folds into itself in the shattered remains of smoke and mirror, and he feels his back hit the cold chill of the grass beneath him as he rolls over and faces the endless night that hangs above him, feeling nothing but the endless pain that opens and closes on shallow and deep wounds staining his body. He gasps for breaths that feel too cold to be anything useful, turning broken lungs into ice and stone and then pressing down into them until they disintegrate into nothing.

He stares into the dark of the void above him for what feels like seconds, like minutes, like hours, like an eternity and a half and back again. He feels everything and nothing at once, feels every muscle in his body ache and groan in toxic protests as the wounds open and close their eyes just to watch his life fade.

Shatter and fall and watch the pieces hit the ground, he stares up into the sky above and waits for death to claim him too. 

Maybe he deserves it, maybe he doesn't. He does, he doesn't.

The same record plays in the back of his mind over and over again, battling against itself as to the deserved and the undeserving, the dead and the dying and the damned themselves. His second kill stares back at him as he waits, resigned to his own fate as the shadows and the ghosts meld and form with the blackened spots that still dance in his vision

Death stares at him for an eternity, until it doesn't.

He's not done here yet.

For better.

For worse.

Love Bellisario looks to the sky for an answer, pulling himself slowly up from resigned death and back to his feet, gasping in pain and malice as he crawls towards his bag, fingers fumbling clumsily until he pulls out the bandages and medical kit and placing one of Fleur's missing knives in between his teeth as he sets to work, patching up the shattered diamond veins of a torn through rag doll with pins and needles. His life bleeds through his hands in a sickening wave of red and black and he sees blue as the black spots begin to fade from his vision, slowly and ever so unsurely.

He's living because he wants to- no,

He's living because it's what he's been told to do-

He's living because there's too many ghosts waiting to have him if he finally falls.