I originally wrote this story for a competition, but didn't win, so thought I'd share it here :) Hope you all enjoy! <3

Mike wakes up when it's the end of the world.

The High Priestesses constantly preach of madness and chaos; of the ground splitting open and demons spilling forth from its burning core. Mike expects the ground to tremble like a startled gigantic beast, expects the terrified screams of his loved ones drowning out the sound of the rest of the world as it explodes with panic and sings a song of mayhem.

But it starts with silence.

Deafening.

Mike doesn't notice it at first. His room feels airtight, and his breathing is loud and erratic, like he's breathing into a mask. He can feel his pulse pound in his ears, and the centre of his ribcage hurts with phantom pain as his heart threatens to beat right out of his chest. His lights are on, but the room is dim, as though a thin, translucent sheet of black covers his eyes.

The world seems strangely still; like he's on a television show, and the viewer has pressed pause. The air itself is static, and when he lifts his head up, it's like moving through tar.

He'd fallen asleep on his computers – again. The soft blue glow from the three projection screens come on as his cheek rubs against the finger pad. The software he's been creating awaits his return, bright and glaring. At the bottom right of the centre screen, his chat with Jeremiah is offline. He'd probably fallen asleep while on call, again.

That's when he notices.

How loud his breathing is, and how he can't hear anything else; not the soothing hum of his computers, or the sound of his mum and dad in a constant argument, nor the sound of his older sister on her communicator, as she is twenty-four seven.

Panic blossoms at the back of his mind, threatening to take over, but he resists the pull, sliding out from his seat and edging towards his room door. Stepping out of his room is like stepping out of smog. The lights brighten, but the atmosphere doesn't change, remaining quiet and unmoving.

He wants to call out, but he chokes on air, voice stuck in his throat.

Mom?

Dad?

Mary?

His lips shape the words, his throat vibrates with sound, but nothing comes forth from his mouth. Something unfurls from the ceiling on the landing of the stairs. It's a wad of blue cloth, stretching out to form a tracksuit without a body in it, yet hands and a head poke out from the extremes, the colour a sickening red.

Demon.

He sucks in a sharp breath. Time speeds up; suddenly on fast forward.

He's running down the stairs. The noise of the world returns, crashing into him like a tidal wave, nearly overwhelming him into stopping. But he doesn't stop – can't stop – because deep down he knows.

Several tracks of blue hang from the kitchen ceiling. His parents and sister are standing by the wall, staring with bizarre, blank looks on their faces as the demons, one by one, begin to drop to the floor.

It happens so quickly Mike can't find it in himself to scream.

He blinks, and his family's on the floor, red pooling around their fallen bodies in a rapid spread. The demons turn to him, their motions slowed down – by his fear? His panic? His rage? Mike's not sure – and he notices their faceless heads, forms floating.

He runs towards them, hands out, screaming.

*

Mike's hands haven't stopped shaking, even as they cling to the communicator like it's the only proof left of his reality. His mouth tastes like vomit, and he can't seem to get rid of the copper tang clinging to his nostrils. He's curled up on the floor of the hover pod, Jeremiah's address programmed into it. Mike doesn't remember the last time he's left his room, not to mention his house. It feels strange; just like the last few moments feel like a very realistic bad dream. Mike's still waiting to wake up.

Like the High Priestesses have predicted, the Third Circle, the outer ring, is the first to be hit by the demons. The scene outside his abode could've been an extract from his weirdest nightmares; people running and screaming, some collapsed on the floor in a foetal position, others walking like zombies while the air and the skies above turned tainted with red.

He remembers tear streaked faces, those wrought with panic and fear, but doesn't recall sound – nothing but a high ringing in his ears as he'd shakily made his escape.

Mike clenches his eyes shut as he remembers the sight of sickening red skin shrivelling up and cracking underneath the touch of his fingers, before exploding into ash, tracksuit and all.

The High Priestesses haven't only preached about chaos – they've prophesied the birthing of angels, humanity's last hope, and the only possible salvation from the demons unleashed.

"Hello?"

He startles at the cautious voice, forgotten about the communicator still clutched in his shaking grasp. "Jer?"

"Mike?" Jeremiah sounds soft, shy.

Mike clears his throat. They've only ever spoken via video on their computers. Something about not seeing his face, and hearing his voice so close feels strangely intimate.

Mike doesn't know what to say. How to start. Jeremiah lives on the edge of the Second Circle, almost half a day from Mike. It'll probably take that long for the demons to spread there, hopefully. It hits Mike suddenly that he has no one else, and the last person he has, he's never even met.

"Hello?" Jeremiah asks again, a trace of concern in his voice. "I can hear you breathing, Mike," he says with fond exasperation.

"I..." Mike begins. His voice comes out wobbly. He swallows, tries again. "There's..."

Red. Everywhere. People screaming. Red-skinned demons dressed in blue. The sky is crying tears of blood.

He's hyperventilating.

"Mike? What's going on?" Jeremiah's voice is loud with alarm, "are you okay? Is your family okay?"

"I'm coming," he manages to rasp out, before clicking the end button, curling over himself as he rides out the panic attack.

*

Mike doesn't move when the hover pod jerks to a stop.

"You have reached your destination." The robotic voice is full of grating cheer.

The pod belongs to his dad. The archaeologist is as passionate as one can get, and he always has stray artefacts hanging around in the vehicle – especially when said artefact has duplicates for him to take home – drowned in protective gel surrounded by an unbreakable glass sphere. It's in one of the spheres lying around that Mike finds the cigarettes.

He clutches the ancient item along with his communicator in both hands, and exits the pod after programming it to park.

Jeremiah lives in a nice neighbourhood. Then again, it is the Second Circle, even if it's merely the outskirts of it. Despite the lack of grittiness the Third Circle holds, there's a familiar eerie stillness hovering in the air. Walking to Jerry's door feels like it takes an age, and Mike ignores when the noise around him disappears, and all he can hear is his breathing. He knows it's a prelude to the horrors he's left back home, and some part of him feels that ignoring the signs would somehow prevent events from repeating themselves.

The door opens before Mike can knock, and the sound rushes back into his ears in a flood.

Jeremiah is shorter than Mike expects, and the thick curls of his afro look more brown than black in the daylight. He looks much younger than his nineteen years, just as Mike is sure he himself looks ten years older than his twenty-one. Mike has several dustings of silver in his dark hair, the cons of being a tech savvy genius hired to work for major corporations since the age of thirteen.

"Hi," Jeremiah breathes, and Mike realizes, oh, this is the first time they're meeting face to face.

His eyes are greedy as they take in the sight of his best friend in the flesh.

"Hi," Mike replies, heart racing for reasons other than fear, denial, and panic.

"Did you hear the news?" Jeremiah asks. "Almost everyone has gone to the Centre Circle. But I had to wait for you."

Mike thinks under different circumstances, he may have blushed, but he can't find it in himself to care.

Jeremiah hesitates, and his expression turns soft, filled with compassion. "Your family?" It's asked in the barest form of a whisper.

Mike's hand clenches around the cigarettes. Bile threatens to rise in his throat, and images now forever seared behind his eyelids flash through his mind's eye like a poorly shot film. His entire body hurts, and he doesn't know why.

"Mike." Jeremiah reaches out, fingers curling around his bicep. The contact feels electric, narrowing Mike's world down to where their skins almost kiss, the touch prevented by one layer of cloth.

There's an ever present lump in his throat. Mike swallows. "Your mum?" he asks, diverting the focus.

"She left a few hours ago, the second she heard the news."

Mike's eyebrows wrinkle. "Without you?"

Jeremiah shrugs. "I'm telling you, that woman hates my guts," Jeremiah says with a laugh, and Mike can't help the way his lips curl up too as he thinks, nah, you're just really damn stubborn, but doesn't say the words out loud. "Besides, I can take care of myself. And like I said, I wasn't leaving without you."

Mike snorts, but the sound is wet. "If I recall, someone thought the High Priestesses were a bunch of ordinary women who were simply high on hallucigens."

Even with his dark skin, Mike can tell Jeremiah is blushing. "I was wrong about them, okay? Happy?"

Mike smiles. "Can I come in?"

*

It starts, once again, with the deafening silence. Jeremiah is moving around the dwelling, packing up last minute items to take with them on their journey to the Centre. It creeps up on Mike, and he doesn't notice until the first wad of blue appears on the ceiling, before unfolding to reveal its faceless head and distorted hands.

Jeremiah turns to stare at it. He wears the same blank stare as Mike's parents before –

Mike doesn't let them fall. He strides to the first one, reaches out, and touches it.

It explodes in brilliant white, ashes bursting across the kitchen and painting the floors. More wads appear and uncurl, and Mike walks to touch them all, not giving them the chance to take someone else from him.

It takes less than a minute, but it feels like forever.

His breathing is loud, but he can hear everything else.

"Mike?" Jeremiah's whisper is tentative, and full of awe.

On instinct, Mike glances at himself on the reflective surface of the fridge.

He sucks in a sharp breath. His brown eyes look like molten gold. Hovering behind him, high above his shoulders, are the faintest, translucent curves of great white wings. He stumbles away from the reflection, heart pounding.

"We should go," he says.

*

Mike finally lights the cigarette. Like the many historical documentaries his father had practically forced him to watch, he places the stick in-between his lips, and pulls, breathing the smoke into his lungs.

He coughs, and the cigarette is slapped out of his hands. The packet is ripped away from the floor beside him in the next instant.

"Where did you get these?" Jeremiah sounds impressed and disapproving at the same time.

Mike shrugs. "My dad."

"Ah, yes, right," Jeremiah nods, and then eyes Mike with speculation. "And you're smoking them because?"

Mike shrugs again, but he sounds bitter and childish when he says, "We're going to die anyway. I might as well speed up the process."

Jeremiah's expression turns sad, and Mike prefers the disappointment. He turns his gaze away, hating how that look makes him feel.

"I'm sorry," Jeremiah says.

Mike clenches his eyes shut. He hasn't cried. He doesn't plan to. "Please don't," he whispers.

He hears Jeremiah moving on the leather covered seats, and then feels a body press next to his, arms going tight around his shoulders.

"Please don't," he repeats, voice trembling.

"I'm sorry," Jeremiah repeats, hugging him closer.

Mike closes his eyes, and lets the tears fall.

*

The sun is kissing the land in the distance ahead, bathing the world in bright orange. It's a little too close to the red taint from the demons' aftermath back home, so Mike avoids looking at it.

The High Priestesses may have prophesied the demons' coming, and the angels' birthing, but they never said if humanity would survive.

"We're about to reach the toll gate leading to the Centre Circle. Please have your Identification Cards and gate passes ready," the computerised voice hums.

"You know, I'm glad we met," Jeremiah says, making Mike turn to look at him. They're both on the floor in the middle of the pod, encircled by the white seating going all around the white walls of the vehicle. It feels like down here could be their own little world.

Mike manages a smile. "I'm glad we met too."

Jeremiah shakes his head. "I mean, I'm glad we met. Face to face. Before the world ends. I've always wanted to come see you, but I'm poor and a coward, and you're always busy."

"I'm not always –" Mike begins to argue, but the look Jeremiah gives him shuts him up. After a pause, he repeats, "I'm glad we met too."

Jeremiah shifts closer. "You are going to help save the world, right?" he asks, lowering his voice to an intimate whisper, "I mean, technically, you are humanity's last hope."

Mike laughs, and then feels guilty for it, ducking his head.

"Hey," Jeremiah whispers, hands cupping Mike's face. Their eyes meet, and Mike feels his stomach swoop. Jeremiah smiles, and it's like seeing the sun. "Not everyone you love is gone." There's a twinkle in his eye when he says it.

Mike can feel his cheeks heating even as his heart breaks at the words, but he doesn't hide. "Who says I love you?"

"You've loved me since you first began talking to me, admit it," Jeremiah's grin is cocky.

Mike laughs, and feels the blush spread to his throat and ears. He looks away, unable to bear the intensity in Jeremiah's brown eyes, before sucking it up and looking at him once more. Instead of speaking, he uses the oldest language of love in the books, leaning in to kiss him. He moves slowly, giving Jeremiah the choice to pull away if he wishes to. He doesn't.

Their lips meet, and behind them, the ground breaks open.

*

Wow lol hope you all enjoyed that! Don't forget to vote if you liked it, and drop me a comment below sharing your thoughts!

Thank you so much for reading! <3