Title: Twenty-One Is the Loneliest Number
Author: Shay (TheWickedQuill, untold_story)
Show: Dark Angel
Genre: Angst
Type: 100-word drabble, prompt challenge response
Rating: G
Note: Written for the Raising Hell February ‘title’ prompt challenge of the same name.
Disclaimer: Dark Angel still isn’t mine. *sigh*
Summary: The title says it all.

Twenty-One Is the Loneliest Number

It was my twenty-first birthday.

There were:
Twenty-one balloons, twenty-one candles and twenty-one kegs of beer.
Twenty-one seconds where I trembled with anticipation.
Twenty-one flutters of my pulse when you opened that little blue box.
Twenty-one sparkling gems, glittering like stars in a band of platinum.

Twenty-one rounds perforated the walls, tearing into flesh and shattering bone.
Twenty-one terrified men and women were caught in a web of destruction.

Twenty one, the sum of some; of one love, two individuals, three words, four intruders, five minutes and six seconds of terror.

Twenty-one were the breaths you took before you died.