DRABBLE: Breathe

[stormsandsins]

Author's note: Another drabble123 piece, totally non-smutty this time but again a little longer than anticipated. The muse just ran. Though why is it so easy to write angst when it always tears me up inside? *sigh*
Realities blur all too easily for some.

BREATHE

Music starts playing like the end of a sad movie
It's the kinda ending you don't really wanna see
'Cause it's tragedy and it'll only bring you down
Now I don't know what to be without you around

- Taylor Swift, Breathe

Leighton’s breath falters out once as he lift shaky, helpless - goddamn it he can’t do a bloody thing - fingers to her cheek, brushing away a matted strand of hair behind her ear.

“Stay with me, please stay with me,” he hears himself speak out of a throat that hurts, that constricts the sobs that want to wrack his body. As it is, he’s wracked with shivers of Please God no, this can’t be happening. Please make it stop.

Tears roll down her eyes as pain clouds them. The last of her strength clutches his hand in her clammy one. Or it may be his hand that is clammy. He squeezes back, as though doing so can bring her back in force.

“Fight, baby. Fight for me.”

He knows she can’t, but as he watches her struggle he dares to hope. Dares to cling to her as though he alone can produce a miracle.

Then her eyes dull, and her last breath is the shallowest, gurgled, fought for. “Love… you…” she whispers at last.

His heart wants to die along. And, for a moment, he is frozen and his heart does stop in his chest. Maybe… maybe time has only stopped. Maybe…

“Cut!”

The next breath is not a relief, it is pain. Ed’s heart pounds in his earts as Leighton’s eyes flutter open, the lashes wet, glistening with both shed and unshed tears, and stuck together. Red rims her eyes as she sniffles back her tears and stares wordlessly back at him.

Words are too much.

(Not enough)

“Are you okay?” he asks quietly in the bustle of cameras and lights around them.

She nods, looking a tiny bloody thing on the glass-strewn pavement. Death haunts her eyes along with something sorrowful that reaches him tentatively… has reached him a million or so times before on another set in another city.

Her breath fans on his arm and it’s just as bittersweet as ever. Only worse now that they have donned new, foreign and yet familiar skins.