A/N: So it's like 2 am and my downstairs neighbor decides to do the self-clean on his/her oven, resulting in the entire stairwell filling with nasty burned-food smelling smoke and me kinda wondering if I'm going to die in a fire if I go to bed now. The next thing I know, I've written this. You gotta love apartment buildings. Woot for angst and some darker imagery. Nothing to read to the kiddies, but nothing too graphic either unless you have an overactive imagination(like me).
Poor Duo. *huggles*
I own nothing.
Oh PS: I know I know. The prevalent assumption(it might even be canon, I really need to reread the backstories) is that the church went up in an airstrike type of bombing. Well good for the prevalent assumption. This is a different take. Artistic license. If you're gonna whine at me about something, make it how badly my writing sucks, not my random possibly inaccurate plot-points.
Love and lust and bitter violence. Rising, falling and twisting in between. I taste and touch and feel it in my soul. And I fight and choke and swallow bile as I hold it close, and it hates me, which is just as it should be.
Fire. Oh sweet god, it's choking me and I can't breathe. I can't get any air that isn't tainted by the cloying, almost visible taste of smoke. My brain tries to poke me, pointing out something about a field of flowers that I had been walking in a minute ago, looking for ladybugs, because it had been important.
Like that means anything to me now.
Fourteen nameless children died in that fire. Washed away in a brilliant, cleansing blaze of agony none of them deserved. But that isn't the whole truth and I know it. I would have known it up close and personal if I had just run the red light. It had been after midnight after all. Who was gonna care?
Better safe than sorry. God what an idiot I have always, always been.
They call it the Maxwell church massacre because a few innocent civilians were killed out of hand by militant forces. Then they blew up the church to hide the bodies. At least that was the prevailing theory of the time.
It would seem someone had been unaware that there were fourteen orphan children asleep in a room in the basement. A room with window wells that were too narrow for even the skinniest child to use to escape. A room made of molded concrete blocks and one door that led to a staircase that led up into the chapel, which was where they'd set the bombs and started the fire.
Smoke rises, old wood burns and concrete muffles sound. By the time anyone knew anything about it the fire had already eaten through the floorboards of the church itself… or rather, had eaten through the ceiling of the dorm. The first the children knew about it was the sudden heat, the sound of tormented wood giving way and the screaming, screaming, screaming of the kids on the top bunks.
The ones whose clothes and sheets and hair was on fire as exploding floorboards flew everywhere.
There was no putting them out, though some of the older kids tried. There was no way to get out, though they dislocated one girl's shoulder trying to shove her up one of the window wells. She got stuck and couldn't get back out and so, unlike so many of her compatriots, she breathed clean air and didn't succumb to anything but the pure heat of the fire that worked its way from the soles of her feet upwards.
Three of the very oldest tried to make a run for it with the very youngest babies held to their chests. They made it halfway up the stairs, all on fire but the babies were safe… until they found that there were no more stairs.
No one knows any of that about the Maxwell Church massacre, because that kind of PR, the government just did not need. But it's all there, in the coroner's reports and the fire chief's report and the crude sketch of where the bodies had been found. How they had been found, twisted and turned and this way and that and today, asleep and safe and alive I'm one of them.
It's somehow always worse when I know I'm dreaming, knowing what's coming and not being able to change it.
I taste smoke and cooking flesh along with my glorious morning breath.
I feel too-hot sheets tangled around my stomach as I wake to fire, fire in my eyes and face. My hair , my eyebrows, my eyelashes, my shirt, my sheets, the hair on my arms, and OH MY GOD the wooden slats across my shin are totally engulfed and that's the only thing I see before I can't see anything and I scream, though I cannot cry, and nothing stops the pain. Nothing… noth—
I choke on thought and absent air as a new wave of the smell of burning becomes me and I spin off in a new direction. I arch up off the bed as my throat muscles seize but no, I'm crouched in the corner, nightshirt stuffed in my mouth because it doesn't hurt so much to breathe this way.
But it still hurts. Stay low, stay low. Smoke rises. Smoke rises… until it doesn't have any more up to rise to. Then smoke sinks and takes all the air with it. All the air. Even the little, tiny bit a little, tiny boy would need to stay alive.
I can't breathe. I can't breathe.
And I'm glad.
Maybe this time my brain will win out. Maybe this time mind over matter. Maybe this time I will die in my dream and die in my bed and be where I'm supposed to be. Balanced out. The way it should have been.
I can't breathe!
And goddammit! Duo's eyes slammed open as he jerked straight upright in bed, his diaphragm heaving. In and out, in and out. Air. Blessed air.
Tainted air.
His eyes flew wide as his brain registered that he really was smelling smoke, really was tasting the precursor of his old enemy, and he tumbled out of bed, almost faceplanting into wood as the knotted maze of sheets refused to part from his middle. Stumbling, cursing and sweating from a dozen sources Duo clawed free, tumbled, bolted to the top of the stairs… and heard laughter.
"Amazing, Winner, for a tactical genius you'd think you'd grasp the concept of what the Clean cycle on the oven does without having to try it."
It was one of the other pilots. Duo knew that from the sheer familiarity of the voice, the only people he recognized by voice were the other Pilots… or one of his dead. Though he couldn't have said which one it was. Not Quatre, from the content.
It didn't matter. Shaking from reaction and still gasping for air he didn't need so hard that it made his chest hurt, Duo sank, slowly, onto the top step. His grip was white knuckled around the banister and he did not hate Quatre. Smoke and burning was the natural by-product of cleaning the oven. It wasn't Quatre's fault. He very much did not hate Quatre.
He did not hate the blonde for doing something so typical to his inquisitive, and highly sheltered, nature.
He did hate that it had happened while he'd been trying to nap.
He did hate that even the whiff of the wrong kind of smoke could do this to him.
He did hate that, once upon a time, he had decided that it would be a good idea to hack into the L2 records to see what had really happened inside the church during the bombing.
He hated that he knew the name of every single child, but that, even in his darkest remembrances he could not bring himself to think about who would have tried to do what in those final moment. Who would have died how. Sweet lord.
He absolutely hated that he had been the cause of it all, even if he had had no other choice.
He hated how much that sounded like an excuse.
He hated… ah god, too much. But with all his soul Duo hated that he hadn't managed to get himself killed right along with his family. Just like he hadn't managed to succumb to that damn plague with Solo and the boys. Just like—
"You're blocking the stairs, Maxwell."
"What?" He blinked slightly as he looked up at Wufei who stood almost on top of him, sword in hand, looking annoyed. "Oh right." Like a good little boy Duo flashed a smile at the other pilot and scrambled to get his feet out of Wufei's way. "My bad."
Because that's all he was. A good little boy. It was just a pity he hadn't quite managed to die yet.
God.