All Of To Lose

Prompt: # 02 for 30 Kisses
Last Chapter, yes.

She staggers forward, only a few more feet through a battlefield still raging until she can rest. The letter in her hand, a series of placements that she copied to paper from the slowly breaking computer, it was important. Important to her, her brother, to the entire resistance.

Hell, perhaps this might stop the war.

A howl of a dying Hollow echoes from behind her, and she grits her teeth. Chad had left her back there. A kiss on the cheek, a half-hearted smile and then he was pitching headlong into the rat’s nest of those damn monsters, swinging his arm with as much strength as he could muster.

She had run after that. The beasts were probably picking his bones clean right now, though she hoped not, and could not make herself go back to check. He had said to her before he left “Get to the Outpost”, and damnit that was what she was going to do.

Stomping runs towards her, and she runs faster, the jumping vision of a half-protected building with broken letters that should spell out “Kurosaki Clinic”, and did once long ago. A grunt breaks her vision, in colours of black white and red, and she skids to a stop before the grinning Hollow.

“Well, if it isn’t little red riding hood.”

She grabs her baseball cap off her head and throws it at it. “Have it, I don’t want it.”

Claws catch the article of clothing in midair, and shreds it just as quickly. “Oh, but I would much rather have you.”

It charges, and she dodges. The letter is still gripped in her hand, wrapped in a bit of plastic to protect it and slowly melting from the heat of the too-close sun. The ground cracks under her as she stumbles and falls backwards, and she screams as she hits the asphalt.

Toxic breath puffs over her legs, and it chuckles. “I bet you’ll be juicy, since you are so well fed.”

She laughs at it, once for distraction and again in triumph.

The shattered head of the Hollow crumbles onto the pavement before her, and her brother grins at her as well as he can.

“Do you have it?”

She holds up the bit of plastic and paper, and nods. “Sure do.”

FIN.