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Jimmy almost collapsed from his shifted weight. He’d been standing on one foot that held its mighty support from a tree he’d looked as if he was sleeping upright on. Perhaps someone from behind could see just from his sickly stance alone; how tired he was, how forlorn the other trees around him swayed on the mountaintop or how in the shining moonlight, there in it’s wake, one could see a kissed flower in a clenched, red palm. Not white where blood could run from sorrow or wilful anger. Hell, that’s why he’s here. And not there. So nobody could see just how much his limbs were shaking.
An immeasurable distance between him and the event, a small clan of people that increased in numbers slowly, hustled and bustled with flailing joints and jumpy movements with a somewhat joyous complexity in small, blurred colours that its warmth shook Jimmy further - eating away at his nerves like a last supper. That jubilation that shone at him even miles away had then bled into his eyes for the next minute, it was unbearable, he could have let out a previously choked back sob at its likeness to him to which the others were unfortunately gathering for. The extinguish of that admirable light, a whisper so that the flame may hush and it’d be time for bed. Jimmy sighed, putting the back of his hand to his forehead like checking for a fever.
A silly death that’s what it was, and silly choices, bad choices. Yet he was making one right now, maybe in remembrance of Tango.
He knew he was a coward in and out, he was a coward for running away and pretending it had been for safety red life precautions to run up all the way out here, isolated. A coward for allowing himself to at least watch his funeral from afar so that he may get a semblance of what? A goodbye? An apology for being a coward, for foolishly believing that the curse was only for him? A coward for everything that lay in Jimmy’s path, a goddamned coward for the the washed over eyes, the rosy nose and quivering lip at that distinct moment in time. It was truly a pathetic display.
Jimmy laid the flower, a cornflower, down at his feet, crouching with what felt like every pain and stab he’d ever endured in praying for Tango, kneeling for Tango, pleading that he does not succumb to a fate written especially for Jimmy. Because what kind of cruel act would that be? Maybe he could’ve helped it more, besides on hoping intangibly, like his curse, that things could settle for Tango and him. And that hoping on a better power, a higher power, like his curse, could erase the very thing that it undoubtedly created.
And then, Jimmy knelt down as he saw what looked to be the mouth of the earth swallow its surface whole upon where Tango’s grave was resting on - swallowing up three alive people and marking their gravesite as an indent upon the sacred ground.
Jimmy smiled, laughing slightly at the humour of it all. It was like a little revenge, a little taste of what a final but first death could bring - like chaos igniting for the first time, one that never looked back but a chaos you could not intersect with because you were too busy being dead to immerse yourself within it all. It was something that brought Jimmy’s knees up to his chin, wrapping his arms around himself as the cold entrapped the peak of where he sat to the point it tinged Jimmy’s cheeks a red purple.
He’d had no doubt that Tango would be cold right now too. A fire churned out. A firefly that dwells well within the night. It sprung to Jimmy like a mouse ensnared with the promise of cheese that perhaps, he could die so that’d Tango wouldn’t have to be cold anymore.
Oh, the courage that burnt in him then. The notion evenly carving out deep swirls in his low stomach and making his voice leap from within his throat to the encouragements roaring and spiralling from within his head.
But then a gust of another explosion that had Jimmy well standing up in belated shock were the second round of sparkles, smoke and exclamations - bellowing out to fill the night sky - so much so that Jimmy could hear from so high up. Could hear life talking back to him.
Another two dead. Ren and Impulse. Jimmy squinted his eyes at that etched onto his communicator, thinking he hadn’t been the first one to rotate the idea of a reunion with Tango around and around their head as his best mates. Although it had been an amiable moment to explain his reasonings as to why he had fled his once beloved’s funeral - he figured the others he also fought valiantly to protect were just as in danger as anyone else muddled in the growing hole of Tango’s burial. So he thought about going down (whilst stopping to thank Void above that a final death did not leave with them, the corpses of fellow players - if Jimmy saw Tango’s mangled person all scorched, gnarled, perhaps dirtied and licked at by the core of the earth, on his doorstep to the great pyramid, he wouldn’t know what to do) but decided ultimately that there was nothing like a night quite like this one.
Tango’s own special hour. One that strangely prolonged nightfall it seemed. The moon remained pasted even after some haunting minutes, stretching away into the inky dark - slick, iridescent, breaching the grey clouds - eventually, all that Jimmy could see and think about was that Tango was beautiful.
A buzz was the only sound that reverberated against the soiled grass for a second, with a watered patch that dried after a good hour or two with trails of mussed up dirt, grass clippings and human fingerprints pressed into it like sharp blows or arrow wounds to cover its damages. It looked as if the buzz wasn’t letting up either, it read ‘jiggles stay back!’ on the abandoned communicator - the howling or wailing that then preceded from this noisy neighbour moulded with the sound of a man gasping with laboured breath as he disappeared with gold locks into the perpetual night, ever a doleful heart that could dress a mourning black if it could, where nobody reported any sight of Jimmy until the next harrowing day.