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“Kyoko! Let’s go!”
She can’t leave her. Kyoko reloads her gun with another belt of bullets and fires into the advancing ADVENT troops. Tears streak her face as she slings her fun back and grabs Chrome by the shoulders and continues dragging her back towards the evacuation point. “Come on, Chrome-chan,” she whispers. “We’re almost there. Just hang on a bit longer.”
Behind her, Tsuna watches stricken, his face stained with the blue light of the flares surrounding him. The Commander’s orders to finish evacuating echo in his ear, but he can’t bring himself to grab the line waiting to pull him up into the Skyranger.
Chrome coughs weakly. Fresh blood paints her lips. “It’s no use,” she croaks, reaching up to pat Kyoko’s hand. She offers a bloodstained yet peaceful smile to her love. “Just go. I’ll be alright.”
“No. No you won’t.” Kyoko falls to the ground beside her with a sob. “You won’t be alright, and I can’t…” Gasping, she presses a salty kiss to bloody, already cooling lips. She pulls away, folding Chrome’s hand in hers and holding it to her chest, and whispers, “I can’t live without you.”
Another brilliant red ADVENT flare drops beside them. It sizzles on the ground where it lands, and Kyoko doesn’t have to look at it for long to know.
They just keep coming, and they’re going to just keep coming, and Kyoko’s long been out of tricks.
“Kyoko!” Desperation and grief undercut Tsuna’s call.
“Kyoko,” Chrome begs. Her voice weak and breaking, she cups Kyoko’s cheek and leaves a smear of blood behind.
“I can’t. I won’t.” Kyoko’s eyes are hard and unyielding beneath their tears. An ADVENT shuttle swoops in, and Kyoko presses a final kiss to Chrome’s forehead. “I love you, Chrome Dokuro, and I won’t leave you!”
Tsuna stands helpless as the ADVENT reinforcements repel down from the shuttle. As Kyoko stands over Chrome and fires into them with the screaming rage of grief. As some, but not enough, of them fall.
“Tsuna,” the Commander whispers in his ear. “You can’t save them. Not this time.”
Tsuna hates that they’re right. That there’s nothing he can do. He grasps the evac rope and lets Firebrand hoist him up as Kyoko falls.
On the ground, Kyoko threads her fingers through Chrome’s, clutching at her cold, cold, hand and smiling through her tears. Her mouth tastes like iron, and her own breaths come shallow and ragged now. ADVENT troops crunch through the undergrowth and over the bodies of their fallen. “All surviving XCOM operatives are secure. Returning to base,” crackles over the comm in her ear.
She watches the Skyranger fly away, and then closes her eyes for the last time