incinerates replied to your post “5-Sentence Prompts”
Two men in masks, one on the edge of the building beside the sniper who is lining up the shot, her finger barely caressing the trigger and ready for the order, but he won’t give it, not when the other man below still makes him feel like he’s out of breath, as though no matter how far he runs or how many walls he walks through he will still be there, waiting for him.
A girl lost in time refuses to drop her smile, and she’s always ready with a dapper little quip and a hug for her friends, because it’s easier to pretend that everything is okay rather than make the people around her worry because every night she thinks about the lifetimes she’s blinked through, afraid that eventually the tenuous tech will fail and she’ll parse out of existence again.
The cowboy isn’t the fool everyone thinks he is, but the only person he deems worthy of his true face is an archer who can never quite seem to forgive a past version of himself, and as much as their love is a tightly threaded tether that keeps them both afloat, sometimes the suffering they see in one another is a mirror of what lurks in the center of their hearts, and their greatest fear is going under.
A mother doesn’t need two eyes to see who her daughter is becoming, the choices she is making, but she can fear for her all the same, because despite every sure shot she’s fired, she knows that luck has kept her from falling apart in the same way that she has seen so many friends shatter over the years, and she can pray and hope that the same doesn’t happen to her own flesh and blood.
They all know the ship is going down, and the fact that they would all give their life vests to one another means that no one is going to be saved.