Sacrifice
Staring up with wide eyes, up at Manfred, up at the fireball in midair, he knows this moment will haunt his dreams forever. Or at least, for whatever kind of forever he has left. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Charlie's back. Turned. Which means he won't see. Charlie's running back towards the door, towards the fight, and at least out there he'll have other people to watch his back.
Somehow, even though all he wants is for someone to turn around and see and come to his aid, the other music student is simultaneously glad of the knowledge that it won't happen like that. He knows that, if Charlie could see-and Charlie's the only one in here now-he would run back to help. That's not what was intended.
After all, the only reason he's lying here now, waiting for the fireball to strike, is so that Charlie can fight a little longer.
The fireball contacts. The boy throws his hands up to protect his face, a futile action, and a split-second too late. He thinks he can hear Manfred chuckle as he begins to scream.
All he can remember is Bloor's. All he can remember is lying in the ruins, prone on broken beams, splintered wood, shattered glass-all that remaines of the Academy.
Screams pierce his fogged mind, screams as the battle of the endowed rages around him, leveling Bloor's and sending its unendowed students scattering. He doesn't even know what brought it on. But he can remember, all too clearly, the magic streaking through the air. Manfred's fireballs, Tancred's fierce winds and hail, Dagbert's rushing currents. A bright bird, raking faces-Emma. A half-giant-Otus Yewbeam, summoned by Charlie in a desperate attempt to turn the tide. Flying rocks and rubble-the china doll twins, Idith and Inez, and their horrible expressionless faces. Three bright, yowling leopards …
A desperate urge to run, if only his loyalty had not held him back.
Fidelio Gunn's sudden scream as his own dream wakes him brings everyone into his hospital room.
Cries, wordless and nearly hysterical, bring the Gunn parents into their son's room. He hasn't been out of the hospital long, and they know he shouldn't be put under too much stress. They find him just as his cries subside; nearly in tears, he kneels on the floor with his back to the bed, trying in vain to pick up the violin and bow he has dropped yet again. His hands, heavily marked by burn scars, struggle to close on the instrument, but the badly damaged muscles and tendons refuse to move properly. His fingers barely twitch at all.
He looks up with over-bright eyes to see his parents in the room, staring forlornly down at him. He shakes his head and stands, leaving the violin where he has dropped it, and falls back on the bed. His hand wavers in the air before his tear-glazed eyes, and he stares at the scarred skin, burn damage no one can repair.
"Sorry," he says quietly. "I was trying to practice."
Mrs. Gunn reaches down and picks up the violin and bow, replacing them in the case at Fidelio's bedside. She shakes her head, then reaches out to embrace her son.
He rolls away, unwilling to risk enjoying the comfort he knows will break him. "No, it's okay, Mum," he says, swallowing forcefully and clearing the huge lump in his throat. "I'm okay."
She looks oddly at him, and he hates the forlorn look in her eyes. The erstwhile virtuoso forces his mind out of the rut it has fallen into, and concentrates on everything he's ever loved, everything that has ever made him happy. Bolstered as much as he can be by these memories, he smiles.
And as Mrs. Gunn nods and makes to leave, she suddenly becomes aware of something that pulls her heartstrings so hard she fears they'll break-today is the day her Fidelio turns thirteen. she glances back, just to reassure herself that he is still smiling, but to no avail. The expression has already melted away.
Really, it's in his best interests, they say to each other. So they never tell him what has happened. But he finds out anyway.
He sits downstairs, wearing sound-proof headphones so he can hear the TV over the ever-present clamor in his house. He doesn't really know what he's watching, but it helps take his mind off things.
It does, at least, until the news comes on.
He sees the rubble again. Old footage, he thinks. The shattered building-or what's left of it-and at first, he doesn't recognize the bodies.
But then, with the clarity that comes of too much shock, he sees them for who they are. They're cold, lifeless, unmoving. The newscaster says the death toll was surprisingly low-but all the deaths were students (unless you count the "Talents Master," Fidelio thinks numbly).
He can't figure why they're showing the bodies on TV again, because he can't concentrate on the newscaster anymore; but he can't take his eyes away. A blood-caked mass of dyed-blue hair, the rest of her body buried beneath the rubble. A tiny, crumpled figure, barely on screen, with pure white hair and eyes that, behind their closed lids, Fidelio knows are red. Black-haired Manfred, and the china doll twins. A human Emma Tolly, with a death-grip (anything but that, Fidelio thinks) on Dagbert Endless. Psychic Gabriel, hands clenched forever into fists, and with a tight armband encircling his wrist. Dorcas's work, or Charlie's aunt's, Fidelio guesses dully.
And he thinks, with a surge of misplaced hope, that one body isn't there. …
And then they move outside, into the garden itself, and Fidelio sees the sprawled form of the friend he gave up everything for. Charlie has the thickest hair Fidelio has ever seen, though now it's blood-caked and matted to his head. The erstwhile violinist has to wonder why the first thing that comes to mind is the state of his dead friend's hair.
"It's best that you didn't go," wheedles Mrs. Gunn, not singing for once. Fidelio sits across the table from her, eating slowly-too slowly. Mrs. Gunn is worried.
Even now, Fidelio tries not to explode. "Mum," he says tremulously. "You didn't tell me."
"I'm sorry …" and she is contrite in this. "But Fidelio-"
"You didn't tell me! What would you do if this happened to you?" His voice rises hysterically and cracks. He slams scarred hands on the table, but the pain doesn't register. No pain registers in the damaged fingers anymore. Nothing registers in the damaged fingers anymore.
Mrs. Gunn opens her mouth, but Fidelio cuts her off. "It was the least you could let me do, Mum, go to his memorial! The least!"
He's acting so uncharacteristic that Mrs. Gunn is temporarily stunned. And somewhere in her mind, she knows she should have told him the date of Charlie Bone's memorial … But she remembers how he had silently cried when he had gone to Olivia's, and she doesn't want to watch him break down so again.
He buries his head in his arms on the table, breathing shaky and ragged. "I did everything I could," he says through hitching breaths, just to hear the words spoken. "And he still-and you couldn't even-"
Fidelio knocks his chair to the floor in his overwhelming need for privacy. He flees up the stairs, his voice quickly fading in Gunn House's musical din, leaving Mrs. Gunn alone in the kitchen. Now she thinks maybe she should have let him go … She's sure she'll never forget the heartbroken, tearstained face of her son as he flees up the stairs.
Fidelio lies on his back late at night, wishing he could go to sleep but unable to manage it. He stares at the ceiling, mind whirring against his own will; if he could turn it off, he would.
Because what it's doing right now is breaking through the denial he's built up around him, slowly chipping away at the walls that keep him from starting to cry. He reaches over in an attempt to distract himself, and presses the button on his remote to turn on his stereo. On it comes, adding to the nightly sounds in Gunn House-more than a few stereos, and the sound of his mother singing in her sleep. Charlie told me I sung in my sleep, he thinks suddenly as his mind works to break through the walls he's built up. That's probably where it comes from.
It's the little things that always make you lose it, little things that are nevertheless just strong enough to become the death of walls. For Fidelio, it is the trumpet solo that begins softly to play from his stereo. For a moment, he doesn't register the sound. He lets the music sweep over him, a soothing, lulling sound. But when it breaks through to him what instrument is being played, the music is suddenly the thing he is concentrating the most on.
It may work in company, but when he has no one to impress, holding to pleasant memories doesn't wipe the sorrow away. The last traces of his denial cling stubbornly, but the walls are swept down by the memories the music invokes.
In Gunn House, even at night, no one can hope to hear such a quiet sound as the one made by sobs muffled in a pillow. That's okay, though, because no one needs to see Fidelio cry.
In the morning, Fidelio can barely keep acting normal. A weight hangs on his shoulders, a weight brought on by the night before. By the destruction of the denial that has kept him insolated from the full brunt of shock.
Now, he contends with what he's been unable to feel since the battle-and it isn't anything to do with his scarred fingers.
He looks at the cheerfully burning stove, as Mrs. Gunn makes breakfast, and remembers the fireball in Manfred's hands.
He sees a starling flying free outside, and remembers stiff human hands around the neck of a drowner.
He hears trumpets all day long as the musically-inclined family practices the day away. When he can't stand the sound anymore, he flees Gunn House for the streets outside, wandering aimlessly-just trying to get away.
He passes, by chance, the Pets' Cafe. The reopened Pets' Cafe. He walks on without a second glance, trying to make himself not remember anything.
He is cold and red-faced by the time he returns to the din of his house. His parents are at the door, waiting for him. He, with a horrible effort, gives them a tiny smile, grabs a music score off the table at random, and retreats to his room again. When he finds that music scores are the only things that he can bear right now, he locks himself in his room with as many as he can stockpile, and reads the rest of the day away.
"Can he handle it?" a sober Mr. Gunn asks his wife uncertainly as they sit close together on the living room sofa, the better to hear each other over Gunn House's tumult.
She shakes her head. "I don't know," she says forlornly. "But what else can we do? Maybe education will help … take his mind off things."
"At a school for the gifted?"
"Are you saying he isn't gifted anymore? He can learn again. He can do something else. He can handle it."
But when the blue bus pulls up in front of the newly rebuilt Bloor's Academy, restored fully after its demolition, Fidelio Gunn loses it. As soon as its new gray walls come into sight, he screams. "No! I won't go in there!"
Everyone on the bus turns to stare at him, and he sees not a one familiar face among them. Memories he's been trying to herd away press back in, and he roams the bus with his eyes, searching vainly for some sign of his friends. Gabriel, or Charlie, or Billy-they were all on this bus with him … But not anymore, of course. He can barely breathe as he is prodded and herded off the bus by the crush of students behind him; he stares around the courtyard, at the newly-built gray walls, at those stifling, imprisoning double front doors, and is violently ill right where he stands.
"Motion sick?" The voice is slightly snide, and too familiar. Fidelio looks up into the face of Dr. Bloor, and feels his stomach heave again. He falls to his knees, resting his hands on the cobbles of the courtyard, back heaving as he retches helplessly. All too clearly, he can remember Manfred's fireball, the images on the television-
He refuses to go into the garden at break time. When he is given detention and forced into the garden anyway, he is sick again.
Everyone stares at him all day-the weird boy in the blue cape who seems to have real problems with food staying in his stomach. Fidelio barely notices. All day, and indeed all that week, he can barely pay attention to his lessons. Every other waking moment, his thoughts wander back to a time when everyone he knew wasn't six feet below ground, back to a time when he was a musical prodigy … Back to a time when he didn't have to dictate the answers to the questions on his homework because his fingers can no longer curl around a pencil.
Many times at night, boys wake up to hear him shifting restlessly in his sheets, padding to the lavatory for a drink, or quietly crying. He does this much too often, in his own opinion. No one else can figure out why he is this way.
Some of the boys take to bullying him, the boy who cries at night and has the scary, scarred hands. Fidelio never really says anything; if anyone ever defends him, it won't be Fidelio himself. Some boys try to stand up for him near the beginning of the year, but he simply sits back and watches, apathetic, uncaring. They give up when he doesn't learn to defend himself.
As winter break approaches, Fidelio stares out the window at the third frost of the year, making everything outside glimmer. When he isn't dwelling on memories, this is when he becomes philosophical. Like perhaps if he can explain things, they won't hurt as much.
Today, sitting in his English class and staring out the window, he hears the teacher mention the word 'sacrifice.' He latches onto this like a drowning swimmer, except the word is a leaden weight, dragging him down even further. Sacrifice, sacrifice, he chants quietly to himself, eyes fixed on a soaring bird outside.
He has never been a drama student, but he finds himself planning out a monologue inside his own head-maybe because thinking the words, organizing them, helps clear his mind. And he has to wonder, in the midst of this monologue-this tale of friends he's lost and will never get back-why he, a sacrifice, a casualty of war, is the only one left standing in the end.
End notes: Second revision
- Good Lord above, how did I manage to miss so many tense switches and improper uses of the word "Mom" in my first revision? Well, however that happened, I've fixed them; the whole thing is now in present tense, and Fidelio does not call his mother "Mom" half the time and "Mum" the other half.
- Have hopefully fixed the lack of breaks between different sections of the story. This was stupid FFN's fault, not mine. They apparently don't want dashed lines in documents anymore, and only God knows why.
- Very small changes in the story itself, but mostly just to make it flow better or explain things (like why Fidelio yells that he won't go back to Bloor's ... Then promptly leaps off the bus of his own valition).
- Apologies for demonizing Dr. Bloor. This was written before the last book was released.