Work Text:
New Year’s Day, 2026. The clock has just struck midnight. Somewhere rowdy teens are screaming in an amusement park, celebrating the new year. Somewhere a woman writes down her New Year’s goal. Somewhere, a young man looks at the fireworks.
Somewhere, a young man named Derek Hutchins dies looking at fireworks.
Blood-red and lake-blue and honey-yellow and slime-green; fireworks of every hue, doubled, tripled through the film of unshed tears on his dying eyes. Nevershed. He’ll die before they ever streak down his face in glinting tracks - this he Knows.
Fireworks - brief yet spectacular. Maybe it’s only their briefness that makes them spectacular. Maybe, if they lasted longer, no one would appreciate them. Life - brief yet spectacular. No one would appreciate life if it lasted forever. Brief, and glorious, and beautiful. Feelings and pain and lovely wonderful living, wrapped up in a bundle of life.
At least I’ll go out… like a firework, Derek thinks, with some effort. The gears of his mind are slowing now, not rust but the sticky yellow blood of a dying god clogging the cogs. Too much weight, too much everything. Like a firework.
He had his ascent, and then he exploded in a shower of success and victory. He smiles a little. Who else could claim the feat of having defeated a god? And then he’ll go out - in a few seconds - in twinkling sparks of victory, fading out.
Red, he decides. His firework will be red.
A blood-red firework climbs into the night sky, through the dirty glass of his window. Somehow, the grime makes the red light spread across the glass, only making it more breathtaking. It explodes in a shower, and then it fades out.
The moment the last spark disappears, Derek Hutchins is dead.