Eugenie watched Barry get gunned down and swatted like a fly on top of her. The sounds around her dissolved into some kind of soup due to the proximity of the other bullets which barely missed her and were shaking the ground below her feet. This extraordinary fortune would become a tale for the years to come, how all the shots had missed Eugenie, although she wouldn’t ever be able to remember the episode herself.

She was busy trying to remember how to speak a human language at the moment to be released from his bolting bubble, in order to warn him that he had accidentally dropped her and himself into enemy territory but then, the sentence had just been: “Barry wait” followed by “Barry no” –useless. Who are you, in times of high action, that was a legitimate question to ask, and quite arduous to answer before any real high action presented itself. Eugenie discovered that she was a mix of both useless and possessed.

In the tiny fraction of a second, Barry had gone from standing there with a stupid grin on his face to flicked, like a small piece of yarn is flicked from an impeccable and ironed wool sleeve, a huge purple flower opening on the right side of his chest, and Eugenie’s mouth gaped open, she tried to say, “NO” but she only managed to wheeze and sniffle. There were too many bullets hitting the ground on which she sat and, soon enough, stood, and she thought she was going to faint. Following that, she lost all recollection of her actions.

During a moment when she questioned her entire life decisions, she had the brief replayed vision of that sneer from Ivan saying ‘bullet blanket’ and winking to Barry, she got up on her feet and felt the chills run down her spine. Now he had just saved her life, from a deadly fall into the precipice. She must save his. You already saved his li—she switched off that silly voice, she was done arguing. She tuned off to the ear-splitting beatings of her heart. She stepped forward crouching and being guided by the light above, slaloming behind the channel of the mrai moumou ship on top of her, and then she paused and knelt at the opening of the grand stairs. There, she expected to be met by a thought but she identified only a push.

Providence having maintained her on the safe side of the menace, she found it terrifyingly easy to just follow the path of destruction of the hovering ship, as it didn’t seem to care about turning around and didn’t look like it was even merely interested in her. The droids matched Barry’s energy because of his race signature, and they’d locked in on him, even if they were half blinded by the dusty glass roof on top of which they were floating. The apocalyptic sound mix of detonations and bites into hard marble, collapsing of pieces of the ceiling against the cold metal of the structures and vending machines below, crumpling of the concrete corners into piles of dust, everything was drowned together in a dull blow and screech as if she was under water.

She went down the stairs very carefully and very precisely, with short steps, stopping at key moments synchronizing with the explosions on top of her and avoiding heavy objects falling from the sky. No, Barry, no, she begged him not to die, she begged him to discontinue lying there covered in blood and waiting to be executed, she begged him in the name of the cleverness and perseverance he had nourished well enough to show up at her balcony before and have faith in some nursing skills she wouldn’t have ever thought were sufficient to bring him back to life. She begged him in the name of the ingenuity and devotion she had had in order to rescue and shelter him, the double life she had led, the epiphanies she had let bloom into her existence.

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But Barry appeared trapped into some internal quicksand, his torso already soaked with blood, the expression on his face scandalized and incredulous and alarmed. She watched him push himself up unsuccessfully, slide a desperate hand towards the lid of a knocked over trash bin. She eyed the thing with intrigue, agreed with the choice of it. She saw one more row of gunfire barely miss his skull. All of a sudden, under the crude white autumn light pouring from the ceiling and filtered as soft glitter by the dusty glass frames, he already looked very under the weather.

She watched Barry get shot two more times, once in the arm and another time in the back, a cruel hit which dug a twin hole near the gaping one he had already suffered at the summit of the stairway. At this point he rolled into a bean position before melting against the marble tiles of the sticky floor and Eugenie couldn’t be sure that he was going to survive the next twenty-five seconds. It seemed that the whole grandiose middle hall of the train station was slowly but surely folding on them and time was running out. Presently, that she had eyes on Barry, it wasn’t a push anymore. It was a pull. She wouldn’t ever be able to remember any of this strange phenomenon that was inhabiting her.

Delivering at the perfect moment and as if she had trained for this specific manoeuvre all her life, she surfed on the last stair steps with feet soles up, extending one leg, an operation which opened ample space on her side when she dropped down her hand to brush against the trash bin lid. It might as well have been made of feathers, as the traction and picked up speed and released tension from Eugenie White, an individual usually devoid of any nimbleness and athleticism, allowed her to continue gliding and to reverse herself, eventually, to land on top of Barry with the protective lid half elevated against their flank. Three hungry bullets lodged into its metal immediately.

“Hang on Barry!” she yelled, using her free hand to flip him on his back like a beef patty on the grill, tossing him up under the futile protection of her body, but then, raising her shield higher with the other hand, she covered them both. They locked eyes in this unexpected position under a new curtain of steel, “HANG ON BARRY” she shouted and brought her face one inch from his.

“OH SHIT” the astonishment opened Barry’s eyes as large as dinner plates. Eugenie admired the tiny speck of life at the bottom of them as held on through another assault. Later on, she would look in the bathroom mirror at all the bruises on her back after being rained on by bullets from the sky, and not recall a single one of them. She didn’t feel anything. He squinted at her in dubiety, “holy shit” he said again, his voice hoarse and coming from the bottom of some very faraway place. Barry’s eyelids fluttered like the wings of a bat. His skin was the color of death.

“Bolt” she implored him.

He threw her back a tired look, shook his head, closed his eyes in bitterness, “I c can’t” he answered.

“Please”

“That’s… not gonna happen” She felt one of his hands grip her elbow, squeeze it intensely. “Run” The word produced a small bubble of blood at the corner of his mouth and liquefied her. He opened his eyes again, swallowed hard and said, “F fly little b bird”

“HANG ON BARRY” Now that there were two targets for the droids, the shots were pouring and rather accurately, their noise similar to some drum rolls announcing something fantastic.

“The Sky people have sent us a message—”

“Not now”

He frowned, “I think… I’m gonna die this time”

“Shut up, they’re coming”

“Who” his voice was so low, buried deep. His stare was piercing hers as much as he seemed to look through her.

“What are you talking about, your Team of course, they’re coming”

“Yeah” she caught his smile and shivered. He lifted his chin and just smiled lightly, his breath whistling like out of a poked balloon. The presence of the blood beneath her was tremendous. It soaked Barry’s sweater completely and was still coming bright red and flashy and glistening under the sun.

“Hang on, just hang on”

“I don’t… think I’m gonna make it this time” he sighed

Eugenie punched the floor next to his head, “Barry shut up, SHUT THE FUCK UP”