23
"A Teen Titans OneShot"
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"Don't worry, I'll be there soon."
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Those were the last words she had ever heard her husband, the father of her unborn son, speak. It was over the telephone, like all the other times before. He was a California native, a soldier, and was in the middle of the U.S.'s conflict in Iran.
The year was 2012. December 21st, 2012. The world was in an uproar, the whole Mayan Prophesy paranoia was in full-force. But with the world all worrying about the end… there were much more important things going on in Mary Holman's world. She was in the hospital, in labor. Her father was on his way in traffic.
Several blocks away, the sounds of car horns were filling her father's ears. He was beeping his horn like a madman, right on someone's bumper, as the red light seemed to take forever.
Nightfall in San Francisco, California, the one city where the paranoia was largely non-existent. The population of San Francisco had come to the same conclusion. The world wouldn't end. It was too soon.
But in this world, irony is one of the greatest forces of all. The red light taking too long wasn't just her father's impatience. The traffic signals weren't changing at all. The Christmas lights around town didn't stop blinking and changing colors on their own.
The vibration in her father's convertible wasn't just the engine.
Suddenly, the Earth skipped a beat. The traffic lights went. People on the sidewalks… they went screaming. People inside… went running, or staring. Her father… went honking his horn at a 24-year-old mother of two in a dark maroon minivan.
As the earth released its tension, buildings fell, people went, and bridges collapsed.
The hospital where Mrs. Holman was remained intact… at least, her floor did. The 3rd floor had become the 1st floor. Her room had become ground zero.
Just 24 hours ago, she was talking to her female friend, talking about how she hoped the hospital's conditions weren't 'too bad'. Her female friend, who went… driving on the Bay Bridge.
Dust filled her lungs, sparks flew in the distance from severed wires, and all she could do was pull through. All she could do… was pull through.
December 22nd, 2012. Out of the turmoil, the chaos, the riots, the mania and the paranoia, only one city had met the end. That city, was San Francisco.
The only remaining icon was the Golden Gate Bridge… severely damaged… the iconic red paint… charred black by the heat of the ensuing blaze.
Fire crews rushed in from all over the state, and even neighboring Nevada, some leaving raging wildfires in the south… all to save the city of San Francisco. As the amassed waterpower of the western U.S. fire departments finally reduced the blazing inferno underneath the smoke-screened atmosphere, nothing of downtown and residential San Francisco remained. F.E.M.A. set up tents filled with goods; some government supplied… more donated from all over the country, and the world.
In the midst of political division over the past 2012 election, the country united over the Great Blaze of 2012.
Fortunately, some people survived. People were found in emptied refrigerators, near suffocation, with burns from the scorching heat, and among other survivable places.
Rescues continued and continued, more and more… the government and search parties didn't set a date to stop searching for survivors. There was no 'end date'.
On December the 23rd, a 23-year-old fireman named Scott H. Harvey found a 23-hour-old baby boy… stuffed in a freezer, wrapped in bed sheets, in a blazed hospital room, and 23 minutes from death.
He passed 23 emergency vehicles before being loaded in a fire truck with the number '23' on it, before being driven 2.3 miles to a F.E.M.A. tent, treated, and saved.
He was the 23rd and final survivor to survive the blaze.
23 years later, on his 23rd birthday, he decided to go back to the city that was rebuilt over the ruins of San Francisco.
He drove 23 miles from his house to get there. As he was crossing the old Golden Gate bridge, now repainted black. He looked up in his 2023 Ford Mustang as he was driving down the bridge, and spotted a fireball traveling 23 miles per hour, crashing in the city and causing a huge explosion flying 23 meters high. He rushed around traffic to get to the scene, and arrived. 23 seconds after, he spotted a figure coming out of the smoke.
As the scene unfolded and a battle broke out, he took 23 steps back to his 2023 Ford Mustang. He jumped in, and stared as the figure that had come out of the crater was less than 2.3 feet away from his car.
Before he could start the ignition, the figure put their foot underneath his car, and kicked it up into the air. His car was then kicked into the air, flying into a 2-3 story building and instantaneously exploding.
If the earthquake hadn't happened 23 years ago, he wouldn't have been on that street to be kicked, and instead, the figure would have attacked their fighter head-on and instantaneously killed them with brute force.
If it never happened, he would have never died, and the fight there would have happened and would have been won by the figure in the crater.
Everyone that heard his story would indefinitely believe his death was unnecessary.
But in actuality, if his car wasn't there and the person fighting the figure in the crater had died, the entire course of history would have changed.
Why? Because…
The figure in the crater was an alien girl running from an alien race of people wanting to ship her into slavery. The fighter was a sidekick who left his partner after an argument, looking to start fresh and solo.
If the 23-year-old survivor hadn't been there to die, the Teen Titans never would have existed.
His 23rd birthday wish was to make the world a better place.
And with his death… his wish came true.
Author's Notes:
By the way... the story description is also 23 words long... and actually, now that I think about it, so is this sentence!