MALORY
Another lecture droned on, the professor's voice melting into static. I didn't bother pretending to listen. My thumb flicked through an endless scroll of suitors—half of them left on read, the rest not even worth opening.It was the certainty that no one in this room — or in my inbox — could surprise me except for Fin. For someone with such an unimaginative name you'd dismiss him, but that wasn't the case.
Seated right in front of me, inches apart, was Fin. On paper, his name was bland enough to vanish in a crowd, but the man himself never did. Broad-shouldered, yes, but it was the way he carried it—like weight didn't dare cling to him. His hair was too neat for someone who should've been restless, his posture too rigid for someone who clearly wanted out. Most people noticed his face first: sharp jaw, steady eyes, the sort that made teachers call on him. I noticed the way his hand gripped his pen, tight enough that the plastic bent. Like he was holding something back. Like he hated being ordinary as much as I did.
Fin didn't ignore me. He didn't look through me. He just… treated me like everyone else. Asked me to pass the notes when he forgot his, muttered a "thanks" without lingering. No stumble, no pause, no worship in his tone. For someone like me, that was stranger than silence. People either adored me or envied me. Fin did neither. He just existed, steady and unshaken, as if I were no different than the cracked desk or the window's glare.
That was what kept my eyes on him. Not arrogance. Not contempt. Just the infuriating possibility that he might actually believe I was ordinary.
I already had his number. I'd wrung it out of him weeks ago under the excuse of swapping notes, then stretched the excuse into late-night questions, stray jokes, little hooks he should've bitten on. Any other guy would've seen that as a green light. Fin treated it like traffic. Polite replies, short, steady. Never chasing, never pressing. When I pulled back—ego demanding I make him come after me—he didn't move an inch. It was as if those conversations had never happened. As if I'd never happened.
And yet, even as I tried to pull my attention back to the dead rhythm of the lecture, it stayed on him. Not in the shallow way eyes linger on a face you'd like to kiss, but deeper, like the weight of a story you already know but can't remember the ending to. It wasn't arrogance. If anything, the thought unsettled me. As if Fin and I were lines drawn far apart on a page, doomed to converge whether I wanted them to or not. I couldn't have explained why. Maybe it was the way he carried himself, unshaken and untouchable. Maybe it was how the world seemed to shrink into background noise when he was near. Whatever it was, the feeling clung stubbornly to me: Fin was not a passing figure in this blur of days. He mattered. He was meant to.
"Don't forget to submit your essays this Friday?"
The professor's words dissolved into dismissal. Chairs scraped, bags zipped, and the room bled into chatter. I was already reaching for my phone when a sharp nudge in my ribs made me look up.
"Hey, Fin," one of my friends called — far too loud, far too casual. His head turned.
"Yeah?"
The traitor grinned and jabbed a thumb my way. "She was just saying we should all grab lunch before the next lecture."
I wasn't saying any such thing. But suddenly three pairs of eyes were locked on me, daring me to contradict. Fin blinked once, pen still in hand, then slipped it into his bag.
"Sure," he said. Just that. No hesitation, no warmth, no nerves.
We filed out together, my friends clumped behind us, whispering their half-hidden giggles and stutters. For once, they weren't pulling attention to themselves; they were shoving it onto me. I should've hated it. Instead, I felt the smile tugging at the corner of my mouth before I could stop it.
Fin matched his stride to mine, unbothered by the eyes on us. "So… essays due Friday," he said. "How far are you?"
"Halfway," I lied smoothly. "And you?"
"Finished."
Of course. He didn't even brag; he just dropped the fact like a brick in a pond. My friends kept their distance, pretending to check their phones, their whispers thinning as we cut through the campus paths. One by one, they fell away, until it was only me and him, our conversation sketching small bridges across the silence.
And then — the shift. It wasn't in the sky cracking or the ground trembling. Not yet. It was in the way the air pressed closer, thicker, as if the world itself had leaned in to listen. Fin didn't flinch, didn't notice. But I did. My chest tightened, not from nerves or ego, but from the strange certainty that this walk, this nothing-moment, was the last breath before the page tore in half.
A low roar rolled over the campus, dragging my eyes upward. Not a passing plane — heavier, hungrier. Military jets, cutting across the sky in tight formation, their metal bodies catching the light like blades.
Around us, heads tilted back, conversations broke mid-word. Nobody missed it. Nobody could. The engines drowned even the busiest chatter, rattling the glass windows of the lecture halls we'd just left.
Fin slowed, gaze lifting with the rest, his face unreadable. My friends huddled behind, their giggles extinguished, replaced with uneasy murmurs.
But me? I didn't hear the panic swelling in the crowd or the phones snapping photos. I heard only the drumming inside my chest, a rhythm that matched the thunder above. Because in that moment, as ridiculous as it should've been, the sight of those jets didn't feel like war or danger. It felt like confirmation. As if the universe had decided our walk, our words, this ordinary corridor of time — wasn't ordinary at all.
The air pressed tighter. The first ripple of fear finally registered in the faces around me. Then the second roar came — closer, hungrier — and the ground itself seemed to shiver.
The second roar wasn't jets this time. It was the sky itself. A tearing sound, raw and merciless, like fabric ripped across the horizon.
Then the light came. Not sunlight — too sharp, too fast. A streak, then another, carving through the blue with impossible speed. Meteors. Dozens, maybe more, fire-tipped and shrieking, aimed straight at us.
The military jets banked hard, engines screaming as they rose to meet the falling stars. For a heartbeat, the crowd around me exhaled relief, like someone up there had a plan. Missiles cut loose, slicing through the air — bright trails chasing brighter ones.
And then nothing. No explosions, no victories. The meteors didn't shatter. They didn't even blink. They tore past the missiles as if swatting away gnats, their fire growing larger, nearer, inevitable.
Screams broke like glass. My friends scattered, their earlier whispers replaced by shrieks. Fin didn't move at first — his jaw clenched. I should've run. Everyone else did. But I couldn't. Because in the sheer madness of that moment, with the world collapsing overhead, the thought that rooted me in place wasn't fear.
It was the certainty — absurd, undeniable — that the meteors weren't just falling at random. They were falling for us.
The first meteor hit like someone throwing a planet through the window.
The lecture hall erupted in a sound I couldn't even name — a monstrous, wet clap followed by glass and concrete shredding into a scream. Heat hit us like a wall; the world folded inward. Students were blown from their seats as if the room had turned inside out. For a second my brain tried to file it under ordinary things — a blown transformer, a terrible accident — and then the floor pitched and the roof collapsed over the desk in front of me, a bloom of flame and metal and a rain of ash.
Fin didn't hesitate. He reached across, grabbed my wrist like he'd been waiting for permission he didn't plan to ask for, and yanked. The motion snapped me out of whatever private orbit I'd been in. We stumbled up through a doorway that was already a jagged mouth; people were a tangle of limbs and screams and falling backpacks. The air was thick with the smell of burned paper and something chemical, a sweetness that made my eyes water.
We ran. The corridor was a tunnel of shadows and light — streaks of fire where the sun should've been, bodies thrown like rag dolls, screams cut short and replaced by the high whine of things tearing. My lungs were full of grit and noise. Fin's hand held mine like an anchor: not possessive, not tender — practical. His grip said Move. Don't stop.
We reached the steps and someone screamed that the school was collapsing, that the streets were gone, that the sky had been replaced by hungry light. We pushed down the stairwell two at a time, the world around us closer and closer to falling apart. My brain kept trying to catalog details for no useful reason — the scuff on Fin's shoe, the way his sleeve smoked at the cuff, the fact that my phone was still in my bag and useless as a stone — as if naming them would make them less real.
Then the second strike came. Not a distant thunder this time but an arrival, a blade of daylight plunging into the city with a sound like tectonic metal. The world expanded no further; instead everything compressed toward that single, bright point. The stairwell bucked. The walls shivered. I saw Fin's jaw set, the thin line of his mouth, and I knew — not thought, knew — there would be no more steps.
He tightened his hold. For a ridiculous, private sliver of time I felt the outline of everything that had mattered to me: the petty calculations, the unread messages, the neat rows of professors and lectures. It was all noise against the pressure of his hand.
"Hold on," he didn't say aloud — his fingers said it in a language that didn't need words.
The impact was not cinematic. It was a crushing, absolute requisition of sound and light: a pressure that bent the bones of the city, a heat that tasted metallic and bright. The stairwell where we were standing folded like paper. For an instant my skin remembered the campus sun, the blue of the sky, the absurd notion that this moment would be like any other. Then everything white-hot and the world narrowed to the weight of his hand in mine, to the small human certainty that I had been touching someone who mattered.
I felt the heat and then the absence of heat. Pain — a flood, then a hush around the edges. My vision frayed into colors I had no names for, and the sound shunted away until only a ringing remained. The last coherent thought was simple and stupid and tender: that I hadn't wanted to be ordinary, and here, in the end, I was held like something worth holding.
We died the same way we lived in that stretch between breath: together, our fingers tangled, the world collapsing into light and then not. The certainty that had lodged in me all afternoon — that Fin would matter — did not unclench. It stayed with me like a quiet bell, even as the fire took everything else.