Hellfire ✞ a.f.i.

30: weeping and gnashing of teeth

Cause I literally feel like you could die ever should I
Leave you for good so never would I
It'd be all bad, never understood why they call it goodbye
But I think I'm a pretty damn good guy
And you're a good person too
I can save you, I can make you change

Need Me ; Eminem and P!nk

✞

          Eden is somehow feeling everything and nothing, all at once. There's ringing in her ears, smoke in her lungs, one of her eyes is throbbing in pain, rain is splintering across her skin, and she has lost her voice from screaming. She fights to keep herself upright as she tumbles through the air, straining to keep her eyes on Ashton, who too is falling, having taken the brunt of the lighting strike directly to his spine, just below his wings. The tips of his feathers are charred, fluttering off his great ebony wings like insignificant pieces of ash in the wind.

          Feathers fall heavy...

          He is hurling towards the earth with his back facing her, and as she screams his name over and over begging him to regain consciousness, and fight to keep hers, through her blurred vision and the rain and the tears, she can make out a blistered explosion of quickly scarring tissue all over his back. His wings are curling around his arms due to the force of the wind and gravity working against them. It's no use.

          With more effort and searing pain than should be required, she closes her eyes. She hopes this won't hurt; just one moment, then nothing. Though, before Ashton walked into her fortune shop, she never believed in demons, heaven nor hell. Maybe she deserves whatever happens next... She brings her hand over her heart, out of habit, reaching for the ghost of a necklace that she will not find.

          When the eye of the moon closes in a deep sleep...

          Ashton's orange flames snap open. His stomach twists as he realizes he is freefalling. There's a literal flash across his memory which allows him to recall what happened in the brief moments before he fell unconscious.

          Luke had finally landed a shot on him. "Well, I'll be damned," he murmurs, almost silently, almost a thought.

          As if from miles away, Eden's desperate and pleading voice reaches him through the ungodly ringing in his ears. She is calling his name. This all feels like hours, maybe days. It is, in reality, mere seconds. The rain floods and splatters across Ashton's face as he jerks his body one hundred and eighty degrees, the pain is excruciating, rainwater filling the open wounds (some flesh still on fire), but his eyes are met with his love, and the disastrous reality that the earth is so close to kissing them both goodnight.

          Ashton acts instinctually, as if there was no decision to be made at all. Instinctual, one might say. Despite the intense soreness within his wingspan, he tucks those massive wings flat against his back in order to dive through the air with greater speed and catch up to his garden. C'mon. Not like this. She can't fuvking die like this.