A/N: Watching Little Busters to wind down after exams and instantly falling in love with it. :D Which means I have to write for it too, because it's just irresistible.
This fic is written for the 100 prompts, 100 MCs Challenge on the AMF, #005 – reformatory, taking the more vague definition. Per challenge rules, the fic will be at least 10k long, so I hope you'll all enjoy and stay till the home stretch. :)
Waking Back Up
Prologue
They'd all been smiling when it happened: his cherubic face aglow, his parents laughing with their own eyes, eyes he shared, alight. The driver's window was down; his father's hair was ruffled with the wind even despite his hat, and his mother's long ponytail dancing about and falling straight, not a lock out of place. He'd been plastered to the windows, clambering over his mother's lap and the front passenger seat and gazing with the fascination only a young child possessed. She was helping him, hands supporting him so he didn't tumble into the seats, or hit his head on the window. They were all laughing. The sky was laughing too: little white stars scattered about the sky and shining like the remnants of fireworks that never went away. The headlights were leaving a stream of light on the road ahead and he thought he could see fireflies following them as well, and that it would go on like that until daybreak came, or home…
But it didn't. Their road of light was destroyed by stronger lights from the side: the other window, the one next to his mother, that he'd had his back to. And he'd blinked, confused. The light reflecting off his own glass made the stars vanish from the sky. But then his mother's weight was on top of him, and the light vanished as well, the serenity replaced by grating metal and whimpered screams in the darkness.
He opened his eyes later to broken glass and the starry sky looking brighter than he'd ever seen before and a silence that screamed louder than fingernails on a blackboard in his ears. It took him a little bit to hear the slow drops of something heavy; he saw fresh dark stains on his mother's pullover before that. That dark stain, slowly spreading… His eyes travelled down the arm protecting him and saw the shimmering drops at a fingertip, saw another limp hand with a band on one finger and two of them stained dark, both of them dripping: the source of that dripping sound, heavier than rain, lighter than anything solid…
'Mum? Dad?' The words fell from his lips: slowly, innocently, as though his mind still hadn't taken it all in, hadn't recognised those dark stains as blood, the bright stars as a window now shattered beyond sight, the even brighter light he'd seen before it all turned dark another pair of headlights: another vehicle coming towards…and that grating tearing sound their van crumbling from the force of the collision. But it didn't take long: they were foreign, but unmistakeable. Even if he couldn't smell the blood he knew without a doubt it was there. Even if he couldn't see the wounds, he knew their source. Even if he couldn't see beyond two limp hands, a shoulder saturated with dark and a broken window with the night sky beyond, he knew…that his world had just died.
He was a child and innocent, but he wasn't naive enough to mistake the angel of death for something else. And maybe he could have been saved earlier if he could, instead, have mistaken something else for that angel, but it was the angel of death, and even if he could have denied it, in that moment, the truth would have crushed him another time. The timing didn't matter. Not then. It had mattered when they were on the crossroads, when that other vehicle had been on the crossroads, when they'd collided, their van halfway past and the other unable to brake in time – that was when it mattered. It didn't matter where he saw death clear now or enjoyed a few minutes of hope behind an illusion only for the light of truth to tear it away and show him what he'd been blinded to. That didn't matter. None of that mattered.
What mattered was that his world had just died, and he needed to hang on to it, run away from the days of darkness and too bright stars and nauseating days that were sure to follow, that were clinging to him now… If only he could avoid all of that, go back to that time he'd been staring out the window and laughing, where his parents had been laughing with him, where their road had been straight and heading to a happy daybreak and home.