Don’t go

"Please don't."

Kyle clenches his jaw in response. 

"Kyle, you don't have to do this." I brush my thumb across his jaw. I'm pleading him, because I can't afford him to go out there. Not alone.

"I do." Kyle wraps a large hand around mine and gently pulls it away from his jaw. "Let me do this one thing right, Thea."

The way he says my name. It sounds like a prayer and a goodbye, right there. He's given up. Or he wouldn't face the Darkness alone, not like this. He's given up. He's lost his spirit.

But he hasn't. I know it in me. If he really had lost his spirit, he wouldn't be pushing to get out there. Kyle is going out there not because he wants to die, but because he wants to live.

My life is a great big nothing, he said once. He wants to redeem himself. He knows this is his last shot.

"I'll go, Kyle. I can make it." I'm not giving up on him yet. I want him alive, not dead. "Or we can both not go."

"Two chosen ones." His voice is so quiet for a moment I think I'm imagining things. "Two chosen ones to beat the Darkness. It's you or me. No matter what happens, I'll die, or you die. Isn't it cruel? I love you, but we will never be together. By the end of today, I'm gone, or you're gone. And if it's really going to go down this way, I don't want to be the one left alive, my other half ripped away."

"And you rather it's me?" 

"You can live. I cannot. I do not know how." I see tears in those soulful eyes. Kyle draws me into his arms. We are silent for a long time.

"It really is going to happen, isn't it?" I whisper against his blood-stained shirt.

"Yes."

I drink in the smell of him, because I know this is the last time.

"I love you."

"Me too." I memorise his features, take it down one last time.

Then he's gone.