Work Text:
five more minutes of air
ryusae | bllk
for seph ♡
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“You’re insane.”
The words had always been said with a little smirk, Itoshi Sae glancing back over his shoulder at the Alpha that had fought through the worst of him just for the chance to kneel at his altar and shower him with all the praise he thought they’d have a lifetime to revel in.
“For you?” Shidou’s answering grin had always been brilliant — demonic to some, but angelic in the eye of the beholder — “always, baby.”
There had always been a pull between them.
Something magnetic — if life was a war zone and love was a battlefield, Shidou Ryuusei would happily come out on the other side with bared teeth and bloody knuckles, clawing his way through the fortress of isolation his omega had cloaked himself in as a means of safeguarding himself. Sure, their love story wasn’t exactly rags to riches, but the adoration had been there; the mutual respect, the devotion, the endless, eternal love that Shidou had promised Sae when he’d knelt on the ground and slipped the engagement ring on his finger.
“I’ll protect you — protect us — until my dying breath,” Shidou remembers the way he gazes up at Sae, his eyes softening imperceptibly in the wake of his promise; his vow.
And Shidou Ryuusei was a man of his goddamn word.
They’re arguing again over something that he knows is incredibly fucking stupid — Sae just wanted to rile him up; knew that in doing so, he’d get slammed into the nearest wall once they’d gotten home and forced to scream his honesty to the vaulted ceilings.
“Maybe we should break up.”
Shidou chuckles lowly to himself, glancing at Sae from his peripherals with an easy smile, “you don’t mean that, pretty baby.”
And he knows the indignant rebuttal is a moment away from parsing the tense air when the car is cresting over the top of a steep hill, gravity dragging it down even faster down the seldom used backroad that he’d taken all because his GPS had warned him that there might be traffic if he took the interstate the way he’d initially planned to —
His Alpha instincts are breaking the surface the second his eyes catch the way the semi-truck that comes barreling towards them at top speed is skidding over the median line.
The asphalt had been slick, black ice forming in thin sheets over the midnight roads.
It all happens in slow motion as his body moves without conscious thought.
Sae was turning towards him, that beautiful, kiss-swollen mouth dropping open to undoubtedly spill a vitriolic retort that would flay him open any other time — metaphorically, of course.
But Shidou is reaching for him, turning his omega forcibly as he grasps him firmly by the nape of his neck and shoves him down.
“Don’t look.”
The words are barely past his lips before the crunch of the initial impact steals his fucking breath away as Shidou is jerking the steering wheel of the sports car roughly, swerving so that the car went under the belly of the truck to avoid the worst case outcome of a full, frontal collision.
He hears more so than sees the way the roof of the car is ripped free, icy air filling his lungs as he gasps out in the same instance agony rakes its way down his back as Shidou throws himself over Sae, forcing him even lower.
Terror sits low in his lungs as he tries to take in a gasping inhale, closing his eyes when the undercarriage of the truck claws the broad width of his back to silken ribbons of carnage, the pink tips of his hair brushing the metal as screeching fills his ears and he’s forcing Sae even lower beneath him with firm, reverent hands.
Shidou had seen the reports — the cases where the tops of cars and their inhabitants had been shaven off and fucking decapitated in most instances when a collision between a semi-truck and a car were involved.
It’s why he’d immediately moved to force Sae down, throwing himself over his mate like a wet, fucking blanket so that his back was the last line of defense — of avowed protection — between Sae and the truck.
Anything for him — everything for him.
‘Be safe,’ He finds himself begging even when blood surges up his throat and he’s coughing out a mouthful of rusted ichor, ‘stay safe for me, baby.’
Everything is quiet — or maybe it’s deafeningly loud, he’s not sure which one it is before the momentum of the crash is forcing the car to tumble end over end.
There’s no time for Shidou to consider any other possibility as he cages his arms around Sae even when he can catch the glimpse of red seeping into Sae’s designer suit — his own blood, he realizes.
Beneath him, Sae is whimpering something soft and sweet; the sound is warped — misplaced and jarring and wrong.
That sound belongs to early morning lights filtering in through the sheer gossamer curtains, when they’re both too warm and pleasantly heavy with the languorous call of sleep, trying to motivate one another to get up and greet the shattered pink kiss of a new dawn.
It belongs on lips that are swollen and bitten and kissed breathless — when his own lips are tracing paths of veneration down that perfect fucking body to soothe the ache that still thrums in the cradle of Sae’s hips.
His mate’s whimpers are the reverberating praises that accompany firm fingers threading into his own hair, manicured nails scratching stinging lines of pleasure even as he’s accepting the duality of all that Shidou Ryuusei stood for with a rapturous, fucked out voice.
There's a saying about how your life flashes before your eyes in moments like these, some cosmic, intrinsic knowing that transcends everything else.
And Shidou Ryuusei knows, above all else, that the flickers of color that bleed behind the back of his lids is a life that would never be his.
It’s an out of body experience, the way that he sees his Sae, smiling — and not the close-mouthed smile he gave to the cameras — but one that threatens to be a full blown, gorgeous, cheesy smile that Shidou knows Sae fought so hard against as he stands before an officiant, dressed in white, gazing at someone who wasn’t him.
But right now, he can hear the synchronization of their hearts, beating as one, for seven agonizing seconds…
Their lips meet again for the first time, and Ryu can almost taste the sigh that follows, a shaking, achy breath that stutters free.
Ten…
Sae's hands on his chest, fingers seeking the pulse that flutters every time he's around, even when the blood and the bone and the bond isn't his anymore.
Fifteen…
Spending the morning in bed, tangled together, the silken slide of sheets still warm as they watch the shafts of sunlight crawl like waves of wheat across the landscape of their blankets and bodies.
Thirty seconds…
None of these are him; Ryu…
…but they are, too — somehow.
Some part of him that's going to live beyond this moment, beyond the scents of burning rubber and the rusted iron of his heartsblood.
Oh gods, he just wanted more time.
But even if it wasn’t with him, distantly, Shidou knows in the splintered gold of his bones, that they would have more time.
Everything hurts —
He knows he only has minutes left.
— and Shidou Ryuusei knew that if there was ever going to be anyone that walked away from the twisted wreckage of this car, it wouldn’t be him.
And maybe that was for the best.
The rhythm falters, the synchronization fails — the feelings unspool, tumbling into jagged syllables, into broken words.
‘Please, don't give up, not yet.’
“L-lov —” The word feels thick and heavy on his tongue and he’s choking back the tide of blood that drips from between his teeth, “—ove you…S-sae.”
Shidou is pressing his nose to the cinnabar crown that his mate wears, wishing so badly that he could see his eyes through the haze of tears just one last time.
“F-forever…m’kay?”
It had always been a bit of a joke between them — “I love you more,” Shidou had always said.
“You’ll never surpass me,” Sae’s lofty rebuttal had bounced down the walls of their hallway, “in life or love.”
But Shidou Ryuusei is taking a shuddering breath in, a choked sob thrashing in the cavernous space behind his ribs, where his heart slaps pathetically to the labored breaths of his mate.
“I l-love you the… m-most,” He manages, hot tears dripping down to mat the soft tendrils of dusk hewn magenta.
“T-this… is i-it, huh?” His last words are imminent, his heartbeat is slowing.
“The e-end…” He’s losing consciousness — his five minutes were up.
“...I w-win…”
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five more minutes of air — f i n