It had been an accident.
Laura had known she wasn't supposed to be playing with the lighters, but her brother had so many of them, had left them out, and she just wanted to find the one with the funny coloured flame.
He had brought it back from Greece, and only showed it to her once before calling her a 'baby' and putting it away with the others.
It had been late, her parents gone to bed angry but not bitter, her brother in his room not yet asleep but on the edge of it, and Laura had gotten up to look at lighter in the dark.
She couldn't get the first few to light, and she'd put them down, disappointed. What if none of them would light? She wondered, but did not say out loud. It was a school night and she was sure to be in heaps of trouble if she was found awake.
The next couple also failed to produce a flame, and she decided to try one last one before going to bed.
If she had stopped then and there, her story would have a different ending, one with a puppy on her birthday and a proud older brother when she fought back against her bullies and her first boyfriend in high school. If she'd just stopped, or even not tried at all, she would have been happy.
But this one lights, the flame large and bright and it scares her.
Laura drops it.
An accident, it's labeled.
The lighters where improperly stored, there were too many of them, there were no smoke alarms, and they'd all been asleep. Well, almost all of them.
Laura lies for the first time, and says she woke up when the smoke had entered her room.
(She'd run there, scared, after the fire first started, sure that her father or brother or even her mother would spring out of bed to stop it.)
Laura lies for the second time, and says she tried to wake up her parents, tried to get to her brother, before running out the back door for help.
(She was so scared, and she ran right away, right past their rooms, when no one came out to investigate the smell.)
They say her survival is a miracle, especially when the fire took her family, and the family next door.
Laura only feels guilt…but not enough to tell someone what really happened to her, to her family.
She ends up bouncing around from hospital to hospital, first for minor smoke inhalation, then for her nightmares, the screaming that would scare nurses half to death and would have her sent to talk with a man or woman about what happened that night.
Finally she is sent to some hospital in some city that she doesn't bother learning the name for. She's going to be shuttled off somewhere else for sleep tests and medications to get her and everyone else on her floor through the night.
It's there she meets Mary.
Laura was walking around, like she shouldn't have been, when she stumbled into Mary's room, looking for…well… anything but her room, her bed.
The first thing she notices are the flowers that are everywhere, the second is the woman calling out to her. She panics a little, tries to leave the room, but then the woman starts to climb out of her bed, and almost falls.
Then Laura is there, helping the woman back into bed, then Laura's sitting on the bed, and before long she's being woken up by a nurse the next morning for falling asleep on it.
She doesn't have any nightmares.
Soon it's her and Mary, Laura always visiting, always there with the sickly woman. Well, almost always there. Whenever her husband James is there, Laura conveniently has a meeting with a perspective family to adopt her.
She doesn't want Mr and Mrs Nobody to take her to some place with a picket fence and flammable walls though. She wants to stay with Mary, and sabotages herself.
But then Mary is well enough to go home, or that is what they say to Laura when she arrives one morning to talk to her. Mary's things are gone, the bed is stripped, and Laura is barely able to see her getting into a car outside.
Laura hates the hospital now, and dutifully grabs what little she has, steals a letter that she saw Mary give to a nurse one day when she though Laura wasn't looking, and she runs.
The town is cold and foggy, and she is sure someone will be sent after her. But, after a day, nothing. A week, nothing. She's been forgotten, or so she thinks. Once she goes into a store because she has nothing else to eat, she sees that there's no one there. A house she enters is completely empty.
She's alone.
But, after another week, she meets this guy, Eddie. He's horrible, smells like rotting food, and Laura runs off soon after meeting him. Some weird lady, looking for her mother. Laura simply shrugs and edges away when she sees something glinting.
And James, Mary's husband.
She dogs him, angry that he took Mary away from her, from the hospital, and taunts him by waving the letter from Mary in front of his face. She doesn't really hate him though, so when he tells her what he did, in the weird, smokey smelling hotel, Laura can't believe him.
But she can, in a way. Because she did the same thing when she ran away, when she dropped that lighter and didn't tell her parents.
In the end, he takes her to the edge of town, where he left his car. He gives her his wallet, everything inside of it. He points her towards a town called Brahams, and tells her to call someone named 'Frank."
Then he gets in his car, and slowly takes it down the winding path to the lake.
She can hear the splash, the gurgle of the lake as she walks, tears spilling over and running down her face as she thinks of the parents she killed and the killer who could have been her father.
She wouldn't have blamed him, not if she'd had the chance to tell him what she'd done.
A/N: Annnnnd Laura. Not...really a serial killer but did accidentally kill some folks.
(For various reasons, I decided not to touch on Eddie, Maria, and Angela)
I hope you enjoyed this thing! haha~