A/N: Thanks to my reviewers: eolhcsullivan, IH8Abbreviations, Destatikai, Lord Mayo, and Mandy I Am. :)

Yes, this prompt has orphans again. I originally wrote it with just Vaan and Penelo, but then I realized for the subject I was writing about, it really wouldn't make sense not to include the other orphans. Besides, they're just too stinking adorable to get away from for long. ;)

I'm now halfway through my prompt table. HUZZAH! (No, seriously, though, this is where I wonder what I'm going to write for 25 more prompts. -head desk-)

Prompt #18 - Scream

"Vaan! Vaan!" Penelo shouted, searching through the crowd of people, some talking, some crying, some wailing in pain or grief. Her heart was pounding in her ears as she shined her light around, frustrated by the dark night and wishing for the sun.

Bodies of the dead or injured were strewn along the road, the sight threatening to overwhelm Penelo with black memories of another time, a different night. "Vaan!" Her voice was raw and caught in a sob. Where was he? He couldn't be dead. He couldn't be dead. Oh please, oh, please, oh, please…don't let him be dead…

Why? Why had some of the Rabanastrans decided to stage a protest? Didn't they have any memory of what had happened the last time they had done this? Didn't they remember the deaths that it had wrought? It had only been a year; they couldn't be that stupid, could they?

Apparently they could be--how could they have forgotten? It was so easy for a "peaceful" protest to turn to hate and violence and death, especially when the Archadian soldiers were involved.

As tears poured down Penelo's cheeks, she looked frantically around and wondered how many more orphans had been created this night. How many parents had died by accident, because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time? Just like her parents, victims of that first horrible riot, slaughtered indiscriminately because they were stuck in the crowd.

At least the reasoning behind the first protest had made sense; King Raminas had been killed and the Archadians had swept into Rabanastre and taken it for their own. It had been the hardest time of Penelo's life; she had just lost her brothers, and Reks had just been brought back to the city, mostly dead and completely comatose after suffering the wounds that had eventually killed them. He had lived for a while in that horrible state, but while death was busy draining the life from him, it had swept in and taken her parents, too.

"VAAN! Vaan, answer me!" she screamed desperately. She caught sight of a boy her age lying bloodied and lifeless, and her knees went weak. She stumbled and just barely caught herself from succumbing to gravity.

"Vaan…" she whispered, choked and tortured. Where are you? She didn't want to look too closely at the bodies, terrified that Vaan might be among the fallen, but at the same time, she had to look, had to see if he was among them. Had to see if there were any children there, any of her charges, and if the soldiers had killed kids, nothing would be able to suppress her rage.

A moment later, almost as if he had heard the whisper instead of all her yelling, she heard Vaan's unmistakable voice calling her name. "Penelo!"

She whirled around, aiming her light toward the voice, and then she saw him, crouched against a wall, mostly hidden from sight, his arms shielding two huddled figures--Johm and Myro, she realized. She ran toward him, smacking into him just as he stood up and folded his arms around her. "Are you okay?" he asked.

"I'm fine--you?"

"I'm okay, I--"

"I couldn't find you; I was looking everywhere--"

"I got caught in the crowd of rioters; I had to find shelter; I was--

"So scared," Penelo breathed.

"The kids?"

"I don't know, some of them came running to me in Lowtown and told me there was a riot going on and I told them to stay there, I don't know who's missing--" Penelo finally peeled herself away from Vaan to get a better look at the two kids. Myro's eyes were huge and blank, and Penelo wondered if she was even really aware of where she was. Johm was crying and trying unsuccessfully to hide his tears.

She took a step toward them, but was stopped when Vaan grabbed her arm.

"Penelo, you're bleeding!"

She looked down at herself to find a dark stain on her middle, and she felt a little dazed. She didn't feel any pain, had no memory of being injured…but her body was running on adrenaline and it could have blocked the pain. She reached down and touched the bloody area, but there was no cut, no damage to her clothes there.

Her eyes traveled to Vaan and she was suddenly dizzy. "I'm not bleeding. You are." He had a long gash in the top of his pants, and was bleeding from a cut in his lower abdomen.

"What?" Vaan looked down at himself, and shook his head dazedly. "I must have--I had to go right through a crowd of rioters, that must have been when I--but I don't hurt."

"Not yet." Shock, adrenaline--she knew from experience that people could go for a while without feeling their injuries. "We have to get out of here, Vaan. I can't look at it to see how bad it is out here. Come on. We have to get back to Lowtown." Penelo held her hands out to Myro and Johm, trying to hold onto calm, trying to be assured. Johm stepped toward her, scrubbing his face, but Myro remained unmoving and staring at nothing. It didn't surprise her. Myro had always been the most quiet and sensitive of the children. She quickly stepped forward and picked her up, settling her in her arms. "Come on, Johm."

Johm pressed against her side, and they headed for the nearest stairwell to Lowtown, and Penelo gave one last brief look around at the chaos outside before she pushed open the door, fear welling up in her like bile. So many dead…Vaan hurt…

She tried to ignore the renewed pounding of her heart in her ears. Panicking was not going to help anyone, not Vaan, or her, or the kids, at all.

It seemed to take forever to get to their room in Lowtown, but she had to get there; it was where her supply of curatives was hidden. About halfway there, Vaan muttered, "Okay, I feel it now. Ouch."

It seemed all the children had crammed into her and Vaan's room--or most of them; she glanced quickly around and knew some were still missing. The ones that were present were frightened and clamored for her attention as soon as she reached them, and they hammered her with questions as she lay Myro in the corner on a blanket, and then made Vaan lay down, too.

"What happened to Vaan?"

"Kytes and Filo ain't here--"

"--we couldn't find them in Lowtown--"

"--we looked all over!"

"What's wrong with Myro?"

"Were there lots of dead people?"

"Are the soldiers gonna come into Lowtown?"

"Are we all gonna die?"

Penelo held up her hands for silence. "We're not all going to die," she said very firmly. "Vaan's hurt, but I'm going to take care of it. Myro's just a little scared right now." She hoped that's all it was; she had known people who had been so traumatized that they had shut down and she hoped that didn't happen to Myro.

Penelo moved a couple of kids aside so she could wiggle one of the rocks out of the wall, behind which her items were stored so they wouldn't get stolen. She grabbed a potion and handed it to Vaan. "Drink that," she ordered, her fingers swiftly unfastening his pants so she could roll the edge of them down over his gash.

"You know, if you want to get me naked you could just ask," Vaan said, in a voice just loud enough for her to hear, and if he hadn't been hurt, she would have smacked him.

"You can't be too badly injured if you can still talk like that," she muttered. "Drink the potion already!"

She heard the sound of Vaan swallowing while she examined his wound. It didn't look very deep; it was still bleeding quite a lot, but certainly not enough that he could to die from it. The potion was helping, too, making the cut even less deep and closing up the edges of the wound.

Penelo didn't have any clean cloths of any sort, so after washing the cut out with water--at which Vaan yelped and grumbled some more--she grabbed her only spare shirt, folded it, and pressed it over the healing gash, then rolled Vaan's pants back over it and fastened them back up to hold the shirt snugly in place. "You'll be fine. It's just a scratch."

The reality of what had just happened was swiftly sweeping over her, and she took several deep shuddering breaths. It wasn't over yet. She wondered if the soldiers had come back to take the bodies away yet, wondered how many people were up there screaming and crying because they had found the bodies of loved ones. She wondered how many people still didn't know what had happened, and would only find out when the person they were waiting for never came home.

Would the soldiers come down to Lowtown? Would they take revenge on the citizens for the violence of the riot (never mind that the soldiers had done most of the killing; she knew she had seen the bodies of several soldiers there, too, and she knew how unrelenting Archadians could be). Would they sweep through the undercity to prove a point?

She clenched her hands into fists, and turned her attention to Myro. Fidget and Layabout were sitting with her, each clutching one of Myro's hands. Vaan sat up, wincing slightly. "I've gotta go look for Kytes and Filo."

"Vaan, I'll go--you're hurt."

"Not bad, and you mostly healed it."

"I'm still--"

"I'll handle this."

They exchanged heated glances, arguing with their eyes, and Penelo knew neither one of them wanted the other to be back out scouring the city streets, but she also knew neither of them would sit idly by while Kytes and Filo were missing. "We'll both go," she said firmly, and was just turning around to tell the other kids to watch over Myro until they got back when the door opened. Several kids jumped, and at least one screamed, and Penelo whirled toward the door, half-expecting to see some avenging soldier standing there--but it was Kytes and Filo, tripping and stumbling over the door to squeeze into the already cramped space.

Vaan, within arm's reach, grabbed each one by a shoulder. "Are you okay? Are you hurt?"

Both looked up at him with those dark, pained eyes, and Penelo knew that they, too, had seen the destruction above. Destruction that all of these children had looked upon in one form or another during their short lives, which they shouldn't ever have had to see in the first place. Filo was the first to slowly shake her head, then stumbled past Vaan and walked straight into Penelo, burying her face in her shoulder. Penelo held her tightly as Filo whispered, "There's a lot of dead people up there."

Penelo's throat closed up, rendering her unable to speak the words running through her mind. I'm so glad you weren't one of them.

She felt helpless, agonized, furious; she was a raging muddle of emotions and she couldn't let them loose, not in front of the kids, not when they needed her to be calm. She had to keep them calm.

There was hardly room the breathe in the small room, but no one was willing to move out of it, so the kids all sat against walls and leaned against each other, except for Myro, who was still stretched out on the floor. What she needed right now, Penelo guessed, was rest, but even that wasn't assurance that she would recover emotionally from what she had witnessed.

Then again, could any of them really recover from what they had witnessed in their lives? Deaths piled on deaths; pain and hunger and loneliness…it was enough to scar anyone for life.

When they were sure that the soldiers were, for now, staying out of Lowtown, the tension in the room drained slightly. One by one, the orphans all finally drifted off to sleep, slumping against the walls or each other, until only Vaan and Penelo were still awake, crammed together into one tiny corner. Unspeaking, they sat in the hot, stifled room with the multitude of sleeping children. What was there to say? They had been through this before. They had raged and screamed and yelled and cried and nothing had changed. It had all happened again anyway. It might happen again.

No, no, I can't think that way, I can't, or I'll go completely crazy. I have to believe we'll get through this, too, and that one day this will be over. I have to keep us together. We can do it if we hang on. We can, all of us.

Still, when Vaan gripped her hand tightly, she knew she was not alone in her fury and agony. And when Myro woke from a nightmare, the first--but certainly not last--child to do so that night, the scream that tore from her throat echoed the silent scream in Penelo's own mind.