Burning Cosmos {A Torchwood Story Three} [COMPLETED]

29. Fragments

Owen's POV

Glass tinkles as it smashes. Old wood threatens with its jagged spikes. Floorboards creak from their new weight, carrying everything that just landed on them.

Apart from that, silence. The comms cut out at some point whilst we were in the explosion, Jack and Tosh and Ianto and I. Evy's still in the SUV, or more likely trying to worm her way through the fallen building wreckage to get to us. I wonder who she'll find first.

Above me is a huge window. Well, what used to be a window: now it's just a looming threat to cut me into irrepairable fleshy pieces. The wood paneling, snapped into twigs, hold barely slivers of glass that exploded around me. It hovers dangerously, only a minor mistake away from dropping and reenacting the death of Marie Antoinette.

I'm trapped, ironically into the position that Jesus was when he was crucified. My arms are buried in rubble, eyes trained above me to the window because every time I move, it drops closer. I can't stop my eyes from opening wide, my lips from trembling. What if this really is it?

My life doesn't flash before my eyes, so to speak - that's already happened, the first time I died. That ended how it always will, with the image of Evelina reflected in my eyes. No, my life doesn't so much as flash rather than gently replay my favourite moments to the tune of some classical earworm I get when Tosh is in a cleaning phase and brings her playlists to work.

My mother, waiting until I'm in bed to complain about me to her friends. My father, lying dead in the bedroom of his divorcée flat from an aortic aneurysm. Amira Hussein, the friend who got me through the hellscape of college and acceptance of my life. Diane, who made me feel and realise so much about myself. Poor Katie, whom I loved so much I was willing to marry, to make her better, to sacrifice myself for her.

With Katie, I was in love to the point where I was scared of it. The thought alone scares me now: loving her so much that I wanted only to protect her; terrified of losing her, though in the end I did.

Looking up through the dust at the looming glass above, thoughts strike me. That feeling, the feeling of desperate aching protective love... it's all Evelina. Only I died first.

Oh, Evy. I can see her even when I open my eyes, her face permanently etched into my brain.

Oh, no, oh wait, no, she's just here to save me.

"Owen, how the fuck?" she whispers in panic as she climbs over debris, her voice getting screechier when she looks up to see the swinging window.
"Careful!" I hiss, not wanting her to be trapped if it falls. Her eyes are wide as they look up, the whites glowing around her cosmic irises. When the window slides again as she leans over me, her instinct is to hold a hand above her, like she could stop the glass like Superman.

"Okay, all right, I'm gonna get you out," she murmurs as she scans the wreckage containing my body. Removing various bricks and gently tossing them as far as possible, she gets both my hands free. Seeing that my legs are already free, I watch her eyes glow brighter when the thought comes to her.

Unfortunately, it's at the same time the window drops a little further.
Evy gasps, looking upwards, her legs in their squatted position next to me trembling. I can't stop staring at the guillotine. Chills wrack my body as it slowly edges closer, closer, closer-

"Look at me! Trust me, okay."

A quick dart to her troubled expression then the dislodging window pane. Evy grips my hands, standing over my legs now.

"Slowly!" I barely breathe.

"Hold my hands!"

I finally grip her hands back and she pulls me forward into a sitting position, then crouching, then standing and running, at the same time a sheet of glass falls from the sky and into the same place my head would've been.