Author's Note: Unofficial response to Cendri's Yuletide request. Took artistic liberties with Marla's outfit as I obviously don't remember exactly what she was wearing at the end of the extremely darkly lit movie.

Disclaimer: I don't own Fight Club, nor do I talk about it.

Fireworks for Fingers

The sudden bloom of smoke and fire and destruction and holy hell my ex is a psychopath turned the plate of glass from a pigeon shit-stained window to a perfect, dirty mirror. Marla's reflection was tall and dark, her hair a mess of knots where greasy hands had grabbed. Her coat was falling down her shoulders, which slanted with the uneven line of her legs; her heel had caught the stair rails as she was dragged up, and snapped right off. The bounce of it against the iron bars as it fell was almost musical, she remembered – a tinny melody between her slurred choruses of "fuck you, you motherfuckers!"

Now there was only the distant boom of cement shattering like glass… and her breath, long and drawn and sluggish. She felt as if she were inhaling all the chaos outside – the poison of ten packs of Marlboros, of one of Tyler's often resigned, always mind-blowing kisses.

The reflection beside hers was not looming or imposing or corded in muscle like the men that had wrestled her up here. His limbs were gangly and unimpressive; his clothes hung off him listlessly, as though depressed to be on such a weak body. If Marla stared really hard, until she hurt from the squinting and the cuff on the back of the head, she could almost see the blood glistening like a darker, diamond shadow on his face.

The skyline looked unnervingly level when the last building fell. The dust began to settle, the silence split by sirens wailing like little brats. The night sky cleared and the reflections faded. Reality was suddenly so very loud and so very dark and so very overwhelming that Marla did something she had never done without medicinal help. She fainted.

The last thing she saw was her skinny fingers in his bloody ones, laced in immaculate symmetry like a ribcage, and a gun falling to the floor.