I've put this off for far too long. Neglected this fandom. I AM working on the sequel to Only pay off, I have a rough outline and I'm sorry it's taken so long, but it will happen.
This story inspired by the song "Firethief" by Karine Polwart, I recommend listening to it, it's on youtube, it's on itunes.
In the vein of my roots (2009 song fics anyone? ) the lyrics will be interspersed as interludes in the story, in italics. I have 0 shame in this. Because dammit, this song Y'all, I dare you to find me one that fits Cass and her situation better. Go forth.
Firethief
Who stole the heart of my bonnie Laddie
All alone and aloney O
And left me another lad in his body
Down where I cannot go
Down where I cannot follow?
Cass felt numb, empty and hollow, as someone in uniform—a firefighter, a paramedic, a cop, she wasn't sure because all she could see were flames—put a hand on her arm and spoke in a low voice. Nothing they could do. Ran into the fire. Explosion. Trying to save. He had the heart of a hero. A hero. A hero.
Hiro. Oh, god, Hiro, where was he? He had to be here, he had to be somewhere, she couldn't lose them both. Not all the family she had left, not again.
Her voice was raw from the drifting smoke and the tightness of tears she could not shed yet, not until she knew, not until they were sure.
Hiro was alive. He was hurt, blood from a concussion matting his hair and staining the bandages pink, his arms wrapped in gauze from elbow to fingertip where he'd shielded himself from the explosion, been peppered with sparks. Minor, the doctors told her, hushed voiced. Minor, she'd repeated dully to his friends, Tadashi's friends, waiting out in the hall for news.
It was the only good news there was.
two people had died, though nearly a hundred had been hospitalized for smoke inhalation, burns, scrapes, cuts, bruises, hysteria. Hiro had not been the worst of those casualties, not physically.
But when his eyes blinked open and he found voice enough to ask where his brother was, see the hat with a singed brim, creased and folded in her shaky hands, Cass had seen. This was hardly her Hiro, so small and fragile like a glued together piece of blown glass, unmoving. No, he said, They're wrong. He's not gone.
That was all he said.
She wanted to believe it.
Three days later, under the rubble, amid fallen beams and scattered bits of debris, charred metal and splintered glass, they found his body.
Who stole the light from my laddie's eyes
All alone and aloney O
And left me another lad in disguise
Down where I cannot go
Down where I cannot follow?
It rained the day of the funeral. Of course, Cass thought, of course it rained. The sun broke through the clouds, in a few places, over Oakdaiba, but not over Sunset View Cemetery.
She should have replaced her umbrella last year, it was worn so thin that the rain dripped right through, but she didn't notice, didn't care, just held it in one hand, and held Hiro's shoulder with the other, hoping to bring him back to her.
Tadashi wasn't the only one dead, it seemed. Hiro's eyes were dull, blank, unseeing and uncaring. She knew the look. She'd seen it in her sister's face, on her uncle's face, on her own in the mirror ten years ago. On her own in the mirror this morning before she'd forced herself to try to think about more than the hole in her heart, about her heart in the ground with so much of her family.
Just the two of them, now. Hiro was all she had left, but even he was slipping away. Drifting and lost. Drowning in grief the way her uncle had, the way she'd wanted too but couldn't for his sake. Drowning and not coming up for air.
It was a somber affair. Tadashi wouldn't have wanted it like that, she thought, guiltily. He'd have hated the dull way one of his professors spoke, praising his work and ethic and forgetting about the boy who bandaged knees and punched bullies in the jaw and filled cream doughnuts with mayonnaise on April fool's day—but only the ones for family, never paying customers. He knew, always how far was too far.
Too far had been going into that fire, Cass thought. But he'd done it anyway.
Hiro refused to say anything, she'd asked if he wanted to, trying to keep her voice gentle and not show the jagged brokenness that was her raw throat. But Hiro had shaken his head, so Tadashi's friends spoke instead, their own voices shattering.
She'd hoped Hiro would stay with her, as friends and classmates gathered in the little apartment above the lucky cat, to speak softly and leave casseroles and ay again how sorry they were. She knew how much he wanted to be alone, how much she had wanted to be alone with all the pressing crowd had told her at Uncle Abbot's wake that he was in a better place, and always with her, and that it had been his time, inane, unhelpful, heartbreaking.
But she knew, also, how much that isolation hurt. So she drifted away from the well-meaning but wrong adults, and the clusters of students who seemed too afraid of saying the wrong thing to say anything, and found the knot of friends. GoGo was wearing a dress, and Aunt Cass quirked a half smile that didn't last.
Tadashi would have laughed, to see her in a dress, to see Fred in a suit and tie. Hiro would have laughed, too, if he'd noticed. Cass wasn't sure he had. Like the world around them, her nephew seemed trapped in mists.
She felt that way, too, letting the cup of tea in her hand grow cold as the mourners departed, and Hiro kept his door closed, and she turned on the false, flickering candles at the family alter.
She wished there was something else to blame. She wished there was something to fight against, something to blame besides Tadashi's stupid, reckless, selflessness, besides a structure weakened by fire and an an explosion that couldn't have been predicted. There was no cause to throw herself into, here, no cry for awareness or justice, just surviving.
It had to be enough. She could not blame Deirdre, the TA who'd broken down in her arms blaming herself.
The fire was the thief, and for all it was called an element of rage, or passion, or destruction, Cass knew the truth. Fire was flame, no intention, no malicious thought. It had taken her parents. It had taken the boy she called a son.
It had, in a way, taken Hiro. And this fire, like the other fires, hadn't just taken half her family. It had taken part of her, as well.
Who stole the words from my Laddie's tongue
All alone and aloney O
And left me a rickle of skin and bone
Down where I cannot go
Down where I cannot follow?
Food tasted like cardboard and dust, but Cass ate. She ate and baked and reopened the café and prayed for some normalcy. Pain was pain and did not fade away, not in days or in scant weeks. There were bills to pay and bodies to feed.
Hiro still spoke so rarely, stayed shut up in his room with a drained fishtank and shuttered windows. He answered questions, never saying anything more than needed to get her to back off. She gave him the space, but worried her pendant, lacquer sealed malachite, her mother's, her sister's, her's, between her fingers, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
Hiro wasn't eating, either, no more than a spoonful of rice or soup if she coaxed, a small cookie here or there, half of a half of a fruit cup. His face was pale, his arms thinner than she'd remembered, and still he stayed in shadow, never doing more than collapsing into bed at night and closing any blinds she opened.
She tried, she called his friends—Tadashi's friends—and they tried, too. But Hiro was slipping away like sand through a loosely held fist. She wanted to cling to him, drag him back to himself. But she'd never been good with grief. It was so hard even to hold herself together, to paste on a smile that said "adjusting" and "coping" and "dealing with the loss" as if she didn't want to sink to the floor and sob herself breathless at random moments when the weight of it all was too much.
But Hiro needed her to be strong, if he could not be. Or if not strong—because there was nothing weak about tears in the face of half a family gone—then stable.
He had to have something to hold on too, something to rely on, when everything else crumbled.
If she knew anything, she knew that.
And what was there to do, in the end, but keep going? So she brought Hiro plates of food, and she cried in private moments. She cleaned and she ate and she slept, restless, and watched the flickering streetlamp outside the kitchen window.
She would be there for Hiro, when Hiro was ready to see again, to face the world. But she envied him that, a little, to be able to hide, silent, lost in memory, or thought, or whatever it was.
She should not, Cass knew, he was building not just a shell but a wall, and keeping himself buried down deep was not like pink lily bulbs in soil. She'd seen grief like this with Uncle Abbot. What if he never emerged?
She took up another plate and tried again
Who stole today
And who stole tomorrow
And left me with nothing, with nothing
But doul and sorrow
But doul and sorrow?
Cass wiped a tear from her eye, passing it off as a bit of flour. He'd done it, he'd finally gotten up. Dressed. Put shoes on even, and gone outside. The fresh air would do him good, Mrs. Matsuda had been saying, and Cass agreed. It was fall, after all, the warmest time of the year in the Bay area, and the fog was holding off, beyond the Sunset Bridge, a good day to be out.
The birds were returning, chickadees and juncos and golden crowned sparrows fighting pigeons and gulls for scraps.
But finally, after so long, Hiro had gotten up, a light back in his eyes, an urgency replacing lethargy and dulled emotions. Finally, she thought, finally he's back. He's home.
He'd lied to her, she learned, about registering for classes. She found the letter in the trash, again, Professor Callaghan's signature bold at the bottom of the page. She'd called the school, to see about bringing a lunch over since Hiro had not grabbed even a cookie or scone.
But so what? He was outside. He'd had a smile on his face. That was all that mattered. They had, somehow, survived this. They would be all right. She had her child back.
Except no, she didn't, not really. Though there was that light, it was not for her. He seemed busy, caught up with something, driven. It was to be expected, really, she'd seen him like this before. It would be fine. Everything would be fine. They would be ok, now.
She rubbed her necklace charm again, doubt creeping up inside her, and worry.
And then one night he didn't come home. Cass checked every botfight ally she could find, ready to drag him home and ground Hiro for life, but found no trace of him.
Oh, God, she'd lost him for real, she should have seen the signs, but what signs had there been? Where was he?
Cass sobbed flat out after hanging up the phone, when he called at past midnight to say he was with friends and staying over.
His friends would protect him, even from himself. Thank God.
He wasn't quite so distant after that night, but the gleam that returned to his eye, the eagerness, seemed to be for something beyond his reach, beyond her.
And the sorrow-grief-rage still struck. She heard him downstairs one night and thought to go down to comfort him, because he was shouting—garbled, muffled, that his brother was gone. As if hearing it for the first time again, as if realizing it honestly, and guttural, and finally letting out all the pain that had been bottled up in a silenced voice and dimmed eyes.
She let him be.
When she turned on the news for the café later in the morning, she realized she shouldn't have.
For so many weeks she had tried to make peace with the pain and the loss and comforted herself with knowing there was nothing and no one—not even Tadashi's own kindhearted-foolhardy-courage.
Cass had been wrong. The fire was more than flame. The fire was not to blame.
But someone was.
I Know the name of the Firethief
All alone and aloney O
But you can't grow a tree from a fallen leaf
Down where I cannot go
Down where I cannot follow
Cass felt rage and fury and all those dark and terrible and wonderful emotions wash over her, justification: yes, there was someone to hate for this. It had not been fate, or God, or any such thing. It had been him. Callaghan. In some revenge scheme, seeking to destroy.
He had lost a child, and had found a source he could blame.
In a way, she understood that. But his words resounded—that Krei had taken everything from him.
As if he had not nearly taken everything from her. And did so again for the world to see.
She was no fool, she knew who those masked fighters must be.
She faced him across a table, his first visitor. To his credit, the man seemed to show some semblance of guilt.
I never meant for anyone but Krei to die, he said.
It took all her gathered serenity to not spit out that Krei had never meant anyone to die, either. But at least Krei's errors had been, by some miracle, corrected. Callaghan's had not. There had been no second chance for Tadashi. There had been no one to shield him, no one to save him, and that blame rested with one person.
Callaghan, who shuffled in his cuffs and would not meet her eyes. Cass looked at him long and hard.
She knew what she should do, what the Right Thing would be, the Honorable Thing from Sunday school lessons and TV specials. Forgive. Move on.
As if she could forgive a man who had left her child die, who had nearly slaughtered her other children, by blood and choice, three times over. No. Life was not so simple as saying those words and a shackle dropping free.
She had one question, though, that had burned at her mind.
So she asked it of the Firethief, the one who had not only taken Tadashi from her but Hiro too, Hiro who was still laid up in bed with bruised ribs, Hiro who was only now starting to heal emotionally.
Was it worth it?
She had to know. Was her family's pain worth all of this, was the death of a child worth a revenge plot that had devoured itself, did he honestly feel guilt or was he going to pull that horrible phase about ends justifying means?
I have Abby back, he said it to her face.
He did. He was right. His daughter returned, Cass thought, was worth another mother's pain. Would have been worth five mother's pain, or more.
So that was that. That was all. He did not try to justify himself, but she saw it in his face, wrinkled and slack. He thought it worth it. So there was her answer, yes.
Cass stood. She did not pity this man now. She had, once, knowing the stab of loss, the grief. But he had known it first, and not cared about causing it, so long as he won in the end.
He had not won, and Cass took pride in that, took comfort in that. He would pay for what he had done.
It would not bring back Tadashi. Nothing could.
Cass left without another word, nothing more to be said.
She had not expected apologies, nor would she had accepted them. Her fingers tangled in the chain on her necklace.
Closure. Healing. These were words she would embrace, because there was nothing else to be done.
She knew who was to blame, but it would not change the past. She had Hiro back again, and his friends, and maybe, in time, there would be real, solid, honest joy in his laugh again, maybe the scones would taste like cinnamon again and not dust.
A tree does not grow in a week, a Lily does not sprout in a single night.
The autumn sun warmed her, slightly, enough.
Cass lifted her head high, but could not help but think that though Callaghan had not won, no one had.
Down where I cannot go
Well, that was…different. Haven't done introspection in a while, or anything quiet this style in a long time. Soooo yeah, leave a comment? Hope you liked it?
also, Only Pay off sequel IS. COMING. I. PROMISE.
eventually.