The Fire

Lorcan watches as the world catches on fire and wakes to them telling him it was all a dream.

x

"I saw you," he tells her. "You died."

"Shut up," Lysander hisses, a true snake all in green. A tree snake all in dream. "You're such a freak."

But Dominique leans forward. Her eyes are silver coins and they flash and flicker in the sunlight. "How?"

"Don't humour him."

The scorn in his brother's voice has Lorcan screwing his eyes shut. He tries so hard to block it out, but it still cuts and tears and hurts.

Dominique's voice is icy. "I'm not. I want to know."

Lorcan's heart swells thankful. He hasn't had much to be thankful for since his brother stopped being his brother and everything stopped being certain at all.

"It was the smoke," he explains. "It got to you before the fire could have." He doesn't mention how glad that made him. She looked so sad and still but he still wouldn't have wanted to see her beautiful face charred and burnt. He knows this is probably a bad thing but it's still true.

Dominique shakes her head. It isn't a little movement. Everything she does is so full of life. And maybe that's why he felt (feels) so sad. Her hair fans out around her, a golden mane. She's the lion, in more ways than one. "That would never have happened," she says like this or anything is certain. There's nothing of the softness of sympathy. "I wouldn't have gone out like that. I'd have brought the fire down with me."

Lorcan smiles. His mouth muscles miraculously still knowing how. "So it wasn't real?"

She returns his smile. "And it won't ever be."

x

Lorcan's bed is pressed against the far wall of the dorm. He didn't move it there.

The dry, wispy smell of smoke is fragile and thin with distance. It enters his nose and his mouth and makes him cough, but he's been training his brain so that's all that happens.

Then a sound, magically amplified and ringing ringing ringing is in his ears, in his skin, in his bones, and now he's choking. He can see it, he can taste it.

You can't trust your senses.

He can see his brother and he can hear his words. "It isn't real, Lorcan. It's not really there."

"But I can see it."

Lysander closes his eyes. His voice is strained. "Your senses are lying to you."

"What's wrong with me?"

He's no longer even being cruel. Not anymore. He merely shakes his head. "I don't know." And, like it means anything, "I'm sorry."

Lorcan buries his head under the blankets. It's even hotter under here, but he makes the tears have to fight their way out from under his eyelids.

"Lies lies lies can't trust anything lies not real not real." He has to speak his internal monologue out loud, but that still doesn't sound real either.

x

The ghost is all pale delicacy, but she's louder even than than that siren that still reverbs in his mind and she shakes him and he feels it.

"How are you here?" he asks, but then he remembers he only dreamt that she died and he can smile.

She's not smiling now. She's not even really a ghost, because although her skin, her hair, her eyes, they're all pale and silver and gold, she's smudged black and torn and tearstained. "I told you I'd fight it." She sounds like his hysteria embodied, and she pulls both at his arms and his heartstrings.

He's only a rag doll, though, and he sags and flops and her efforts at pulling him up are nothing as he scrambles backwards, the bedsheets twisting around his ankles. He sees that they're alone but won't see anything else. "Fight what?" he asks, and wonders if he'll get enough sleep to stay awake through class tomorrow.

"The fire, Lorcan!"

And then the flames are everywhere, as red as the heat and the balloons and some of the flowers.

"But this is a dream." And not for the first time, he is uncertain.

"It isn't! I told you this is how it'd be, and it is."

He hesitates, he doesn't even know how to be sure, but he wants to believe her so badly.

Then Dominique kisses him. It tastes like surprise and smoke and her ferocity and it's realer than anything he's ever known, although that isn't saying much.

"What was that for?" he asks between gasping breaths that rip and tear and burn and hurt. He could breath better through her.

She actually laughs but it makes her cry too. It strikes him for a moment that his fear, his pain, is spreading.

"I don't know," she says. "I'm trying to wake you up or something. Isn't that how it works in stories?"

Then, in the midst of this absurdity, can see how it really is.

She knows it too. "But this isn't a dream or a story- It's real. Lorcan, get up get up get up."

He grabs one of her offered hands and with the other, she makes it rain.

x

A crow craws, rubble crunches under feet.

"Did I make it happen?" Lorcan's voice is small, like it itself is scared of doing any damage, touching anything more than intended.

"No."

Dominique and Lysander speak as one, and it makes Lorcan warm with happiness that they're both here and they're both okay.

He nods, accepting that response because it's what he wants.

Only then he looks around him, and sees only white.

x

The nurse has green eyes too, like his brother did. Lorcan asks her if she's a snake, but she too pretends he doesn't exist. Well, he can only assume she's pretending. He pulls the covers back over his head.

One of the cards has a lion on it, and he won't look at it, because when he does it makes it hard to breath, like he's choking on smoke.

x