A/N: IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS FANFICTION WAS PREVIOUSLY POSTED ON MY FORMER ACCOUNT, .crown. I AM THE AUTHOR, I SIMPLY MOVED ACCOUNTS. IF YOU WOULD LIKE A NOTE FROM THE OTHER ACCOUNT TO PROVE IT I WILL BE HAPPY TO SEND YOU ONE, BUT DO NOT BLAST ME WITH ACCUSATORY SPAM. THANK YOU.
I'm only reposting this one because I'm very proud of it--I think it's one of the best I've done, in both fanfiction and original works. I thought it would be a good wa to start things off.
Snatched Out from Underneath
The flames blazed.
The flames danced.
The flames ate: ate like the brutal, ravenous, insatiable gluttons they were. They licked at the walls with hungry orange tongues that cracked and hissed and spat.
Sparks flew free of the body, skimming the air—circling the blaze, cheering the flames higher, higher.
The children were silent.
Dressed in night clothes—bleary and awestruck—they watched the fire with something akin to delight.
Delight felt horribly similar to fear.
They huddled together in a sodden clump, their wide eyes reflecting back fire as it ate away at their home—the home for those without a home. They were nomads, now. Even from the one place an orphan belonged, they had been turned away. Thus, home meant little. Home was a fable.
Home was ablaze.
From its ashes, rose one voice.
One voice: high and panicked and angry. It chased away the silence that threatened to pop in their ears.
A little, light-haired boy was attached to that voice. The voice drug him along with it, rising and falling like the tumultuous blaze, urging his arms out to tug at the arms and shirts of the people in charge, to lash at them, to pound his bony knuckles into their thick, useless thighs. The tears and the screams left mismatched patches on his pale little cheeks.
"Where's Miki?" His voice demanded, again and again and again. It rang in his ears. His blood sang with it. Miki. Miki. Miki. She was all that mattered. She was lost inside the blaze.
"You have to go get her!" That was the undisputed fact. These were the adults. These were the role models. These were the advisors, the leaders, the wise. They had to go get her. They had to save her because they were the grown-ups. They were supposed to fix everything.
They were supposed to fix things; in the way only grown-ups can.
The building had started collapsing on itself, now.
The landing went first: diving to the ground in a rush of flame and splinters. There was a shrill sound from inside peaked and rolled to a stop.
Akihiko gave up on pummeling legs as his own gave out beneath him and his palms and knees met the earth with a jolting welcome. The ground was cool. It mocked the smoldering air around them—air that popped and weaved.
The air danced.
The fire danced.
Akihiko just wanted the world to stop moving.
Stop spinning.
Stop dancing.
It twirled on.
Dizzy, lost, his hands groped out. They met shoes. Small shoes. Pants. He traveled up the leg a ways, using it to lever him up off his hands. Clinging to the cuff of this bystander's shirt, he heaved up his head to stare.
To stare at the terrified look in the eyes of the terrified boy as stood and he stared.
Someone had bolted Shinjiro's feet to the ground. The soft topsoil was granite beneath his shoes. He didn't feel Akihiko. He didn't see Akihiko. He didn't see the trembling little collection of orphans off to his right or the bumbling set of sputtering grown-ups to his left. He did not see the fire that raged in the whites of his eyes. He did not see the tears that hid his vision from these things.
He saw Miki.
He saw her trapped.
He saw her scorched.
He saw her screaming.
On fire.
Saw her with the life ironed from her lungs by blackened beams of rafters as they ploughed her down.
The rafters worked her lungs like a bellows, and urged the flames to grow.
His budding imagination did not favor him. It was an imagination his mother had often told him she liked.
Miki was probably black now.
Miki no longer looked like Miki.
He'd lost his mother much the same.
Akihiko was using Shinjiro as a lever to haul himself to his feet. He stumbled on the pine-littered grass. It all looked so flammable—ready to catch flame as soon as the orange beast lost interest in the old house. They were still standing on it, because no one could collect enough pieces of scattered, scampering thought to think to move.
In his head, he was running; dashing towards his sister with all he had. But his legs weren't obeying. They teetered haphazardly over earth and made uncoordinated movements in the house's general direction.
The heat of the fire roared in his face; closer now than ever before. It snarled at him; raked at his eyes with smoky, sooty claws and dry, insubstantial hands. The collapsed landing was almost within reach. He could see himself tearing through it—past the chunks of wood that had stopped their burning and been left to smolder, past the triangle shape that was left of the doorway, past the arms of fire as they begged and reached out to embrace him. He saw himself stumble up crumbling stairs to find Miki, huddled in a corner. She would sob and laugh. She would open up her thin arms and throw them around his neck. He would carry her out, down the stairs as they caved into themselves, past the friendly orange enemies that lined and scaled the walls, past the corpse of the landing and out into the open once more.
He didn't make it to the landing.
Strong, wiry hands held him back.
No, they threw him back. They hurled him back. They held him down despite his screaming and sobbing and wobble-limbed flailing. Their tears landed on his face and made trails in the ash.
He was covered in ash.
The ground was covered in ash.
The air was coated in ash.
He choked and fought back vomit.
Some of that ash wasn't ash.
Some of that ash was his sister.
Shinjiro fell against him the moment his struggling stopped. The dark-haired little boy was wailing; sobbing into his sooty chest. Sobbing against Akihiko. Getting Miki all over his face.
Akihiko could hardly understand him. His words were muddled by tears and flames and the fabric of Akihiko's pajamas. "Don't go in there, too, Aki," the boy was praying.
His family was gone.
He was not a social child.
He had made two, incomparable friends.
One of them was now scattered across the onlookers.
One of them was now nothing but ashes.
She got in his eyes.
Akihiko fell into a jumbled puzzle of pieces.
"I didn't get her, Shinji," he bawled. It was an apology. It was a bitter truth. "I could have grabbed her but I didn't. I thought—" He gagged on a sob and had to stop to ride out the aftermath of it. His voice now gruff and spent and soft, he finished, "I thought she'd be okay."
There were no words of comfort to say. There was no magic remedy to undo what was done.
There were tears to be shed.
There were horrors going on.
There were four sets of people out on the front lawn.
There was a pell-mell congregation of confusion and fear.
There was a silent, shifting body of disbelief and loss.
There was a loud, sobbing tangle jutting out in front made of two little boys who would never be the same.
And there was a lost little girl whose ashen lips kissed them all goodbye.