𝙑𝙞𝙭𝙚𝙣 || 𝙏𝙧𝙞𝙥𝙡𝙚 𝙁𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙚𝙧

Eighteen.

Chapter Eighteen: Goodbye, my friend

Margo coughed furiously after she was winded upon impact. She mustered the courage to lift herself off the gravel but the intensity of the ringing in her ears never ceased and the black dots that riddled her vision made her think she was going blind. 

"Tom!" Margo yelled through her dry, bloody throat. "Tom, buddy! Are you hurt? Are you okay?"

Unease crept into Margo's chest and suffocated her more than the blood could. Gurgling on the blood, she spat it up and it covered her face and with the only movement her body could produce, her shaky palms tapped the ground in a pointless attempt to gain Tom's attention.

"Tom, answer me!" She fought the urge to cry as the man remained unresponsive.

Energy shocked Margo and with the newfound adrenaline after hearing another damned bullet whizz in the cool air, she gasped in preparation and she rolled over and hit a bright orange jacket with a thud.

Dread drowned Margo below its mournful seas, the feeling itself already sorry for her before she could come to terms with such a horrific and tragic loss. At first, she blinked slowly and adjusted to the bright colour of the jacket that lay beside her and when her eyes pathetically trailed upwards, she noticed blood trickling down the dead eyes which belonged to Tom.

If he was severely disorientated the same way Margo had been, he should've woken up by now. When Margo's hand found his, squeezing his cold palm in efforts to wake the man up, she wasn't able to tell that his blood stopped pumping oxygen round his body, since the pigment on his cheeks had never been there, given the freezing temperature.

"Tom, why won't you wake up? Talk to me!" Margo croaked.

When a thought hit her like a ton of bricks, she began to squeal in utter terror and panic. With every little bit of energy she had left, gnawing on the inside of her skin to pressure her into moving her body, by the grace of god, she found the will to struggle to get on her knees.

Looking down to Tom's face, a hole had made residence as an exit wound on his skin and the crimson red liquid trickled from the permanent injury that had been lodged right between his eyes.

"No." Margo muttered in sheer disbelief.

She couldn't believe it, nor did she want to accept the loss of someone she'd grown to love through the bickering, narrow side eyes in judgement and the existential lengths he went to to protect her as though she were his own young and how he built her eighteen year old, broken girl character to a powerful, ruthless woman who showed no mercy.

Only this time, she showed all the mercy she could in a hellish cry in defeat. Just as she lifted her head from Tom's chest, over his breast to where his heart lay in his rib cage, resting in its eternal slumber, she pounded on the padding of his orange jacket and yelled in sorrow to the heavens above.

"Margo! Tom!"

Ben's voice mirrored Margo's heart-broken cries in the echoing gloom. He fell to his knees beside the man and turned his body, a sliver of hope being that he was alive and just injured crumbled beneath him as a pool of blood had formed under Tom's head alongside the bullet that imprinted on the ground.

Margo's mouth fell agape and she could only cry into Ben's shoulder as he wept over Tom, grabbing onto his body and begging for revival. When she finally rose to her feet, she was only brought back down on her knees at the hands of mercy. She howled into the air, sobbing and praying for a miracle to repay her sins by offering her life in return for Tom's.