He redirects like an electric current slicing its way through the path of least resistance, scaling the fire escape behind Asadi, rapid breath made searing in his lungs, his eyes slits against the erupting columnar inferno as it shoots skyward.
It would be terribly fucking consistent for him to have encountered the first enemy that simply refuses to combust or overload and simply be done with it. He flinches against the inhuman sounds spiraling from the thing as it immolates with a blazing intensity unhelpfully amplified to the nth degree, the raw howls through torn vocal cords.
He turns and squints to look at the thing he does not want to look at, the image of Icarus fixed rigidly in his mind as the thing bears itself upward, propelled by a clap of flaming wings, trailing gray ash and black streaking smoke.
Something lodged in his chest wrenches as the silhouette of a hand stretching toward him carves itself into his retinas.
Something is leached from him. Something he cannot cling to. Something fluttering and feeble and vital and he seizes at it with wild ferocity and it strikes him that a second noise echoes in counterpoint to the first and it soon becomes clear that it is the agonized sound stretching from his own throat as he reaches and becomes weightless and ceases to be a fixed point, his body an object set on a predetermined downward course.
He lands heavily on one arm, cracking against concrete in an aborted roll that skids him over blackened sidewalk and the charred outline of powerful wingbeats. He can see the sky. He can smell the ash. He cannot breathe.
tw: bone breakage and physical trauma
It would be terribly fucking consistent for him to have encountered the first enemy that simply refuses to combust or overload and simply be done with it. He flinches against the inhuman sounds spiraling from the thing as it immolates with a blazing intensity unhelpfully amplified to the nth degree, the raw howls through torn vocal cords.
He turns and squints to look at the thing he does not want to look at, the image of Icarus fixed rigidly in his mind as the thing bears itself upward, propelled by a clap of flaming wings, trailing gray ash and black streaking smoke.
Something lodged in his chest wrenches as the silhouette of a hand stretching toward him carves itself into his retinas.
Something is leached from him. Something he cannot cling to. Something fluttering and feeble and vital and he seizes at it with wild ferocity and it strikes him that a second noise echoes in counterpoint to the first and it soon becomes clear that it is the agonized sound stretching from his own throat as he reaches and becomes weightless and ceases to be a fixed point, his body an object set on a predetermined downward course.
He lands heavily on one arm, cracking against concrete in an aborted roll that skids him over blackened sidewalk and the charred outline of powerful wingbeats. He can see the sky. He can smell the ash. He cannot breathe.