Everything shatters at once.

The courtyard is chaos incarnate—smoke curling into the gray sky, alarms shrieking, the air trembling with every shout, every metallic clang. Mitch doesn’t stop. He doesn’t wait for permission or instructions. All he sees is Tenn, exposed, too close to the open ground. He steps forward, heart hammering like it’s trying to escape his chest, hands gripping the bomb as if it’s the only thing keeping him tethered to some kind of meaning.

“Get down, Tenn!” he shouts, voice raw, cutting through the cacophony, each word almost swallowed by the roar of panic.

He throws the bomb.

The blast erupts in a flash that blinds and deafens, pushing soldiers backward, shaking the school’s walls like it’s warning the world: this is happening, and someone has to pay attention. For one fleeting heartbeat, Mitch thinks he did it. That he actually did something right. That maybe, just maybe, he saved someone.

Then he turns. Breath ragged, chest heaving, adrenaline thrumming in every vein, eyes darting to {{user}} and Tenn. Mouth opens. Words tumble, unshaped. Something important, something real, something he never practiced.

“I—”

And then Lilly moves.

It’s too fast, too sudden, a betrayal too intimate for the chaos around them. Sharp, brutal. His neck burns with a shock that steals the rest of the sentence, rips the air from him. His hands fly up instinctively, but they don’t reach the thing that ends him. Confusion flares first—disbelief that cuts deeper than pain—because no one ever tells you your last breath arrives this way.

Mitch stumbles, knees buckling. His vision tilts, the smoke curling like it’s trying to hide the world from him. He hits the ground, chest heaving, limbs trembling with the kind of helplessness he’s never tolerated in himself before. The fight keeps moving, guns, boots, screams—but it all slides into a distance, like he’s underwater. Everything muffled. Everything distant.

His eyes lock on {{user}}. Wide, searching, trying to anchor himself to something living and human. Panic, yes—but under it, something heavier. Regret. A weight that stretches across every choice, every word he never said. Every time he should have stopped, shouldn’t have acted, and didn’t. Every sentence cut short in his life, every “I care” that never made it out.

His lips move. Nothing comes. A twitch in his fingers as if he’s trying to hold onto {{user}}, to Tenn, to the moment that is slipping from him faster than thought. Whatever he was going to say, whatever he meant to explain, dies in the smoke.

“Mitch!” someone screams. He doesn’t hear it properly, or maybe he does, but it feels unreal. Unreachable.

He remembers a thousand little things at once: the moments he failed, the people he tried to protect, the faces that haunt him because he didn’t get the timing right. He thinks, fleetingly, that he should have told {{user}} sooner—things he never said, truths he never let {{user}} know, apologies he wasn’t sure he deserved.

And then it ends.

The world doesn’t pause for him. The chaos roars back, unfeeling, relentless. He’s still, a heartbeat, a breath, a presence that will never move again. The air where his words should be stretches too wide, too empty. The echo of everything he meant, everything he failed to communicate, hangs in the school like smoke that refuses to settle.

Mitch’s eyes—fading, unfocused, heavy with unspoken thoughts—stay on {{user}} for the last fraction of a second he can claim. A plea, a warning, a confession, all impossible to separate. The courage, the love, the regret—compressed into one gaze, one twitching hand, one heart that tried to outrun the impossible.