Bloom stared at the pieces of glass in front of her. Most had shattered inward with the brick, but a few small shards were scattered on the pavement too. She bit the inside of her lip and looked over at Vanessa who was wringing her hands.

"It's Bonner and Brown," her mother said. "It has to be. Part of our deal would have been that they provided me with extra security so now they're trying to intimidate me. I'm going to call the police."

"I'm sure I can fix this!" Bloom gestured at the smashed store front. It might take quite a lot of focus but she wouldn't let two sleazy businessmen destroy her mother's shop.

"And I believe that you can, but I need the evidence intact so that I can file a report. I doubt they'll be able to do anything but I want everything documented. Hey, hey," Vanessa cupped her daughter's face. "As soon as that's finished with I have no doubt that you'll be able to make it good as new."

Bloom took Kiko to the park while Vanessa handled the officer that came out to them. She walked aimlessly until she came across the spot that she had first seen Stella. It didn't look like anything special, just a cluster of trees and bushes. The fact that she had been so close to never discovering her powers made her shudder; she liked her new life and there wasn't any amount of money she could be offered that would make her go back to her old one. As scared as she had been during the whole attack by the ogre and his ghouls, and then the incident with the troll as well. She had to wonder if she'd ever have accessed her magic without the imminent threat to her life.

That whole event had led to her meeting Brandon too. Even in a squad of attractive, muscular guys he had stood out to her. She thought it was probably his hair. It was unusual for boys her age to have long hair on this planet, but it seemed that Red Fountain had a different dress code than Earth high schools, so she was free to enjoy how he looked when he pushed his blonde hair behind his ear whenever he was concentrating. Sometimes he even put it up when he was riding his hover bike and that did things to Bloom.

She was regretting more and more that she hadn't said anything to him before they left for the holidays. The longer she thought about it the more she was sure that not only did she really like him but she wanted to be with him too. Clearly, she was over Andy.

As soon as she got back to Magix she was going to apologise to him. And then she was going to try and recreate the pre-kiss moment that Musa had interrupted and this time she was going to go through with it.

Bloom sat on the ground with her back to a tree trunk and threw a ball for Kiko. Her face and chest was flushed from the thought of what she wanted to do with Brandon.
She'd never done more than kiss Andy, and most of that had been quick pecks because whenever he'd tried to make it into something more she'd been grossed out by all of his saliva that was suddenly in her mouth. That wasn't something she was worried about with Brandon. And she was also imaging some other things she wouldn't mind doing to him in private.

There was a yip as Kiko dropped the ball at her feet and looked pointedly at it in expectation. Bloom shook herself and hoped no one was looking close enough to see how scarlet she'd gone from her own thoughts. She had spent far too much time with Stella for her own good. She threw the ball as hard as she could and watched her dog chase after it.

There was a curdled mix of emotions in her stomach. She was excited to go back to school, she was relieved to be home with her parents, but there was guilt too. Her mother was going through something terrible and here she was wishing that she was far away. Then there was the fear. The fear was always hidden away in her somewhere.

Things didn't get any easier as the days passed by either. She was able to fix the front window for Vanessa but the next day a couple on a motorcycle destroyed the outside display with a baton as they tore down the street, and then later on in the week, they found the shop door pried open and the inside trashed.

That made Vanessa cry. The police were called yet again to survey the damage and Mike swapped shifts so that he could take the day off and console his wife. No money had been taken out of the register, but the destruction was methodical and brutal and passed what Bloom could reasonably fix.

"I'll move money out of the rainy day fund for a new alarm system," Mike said. "We won't let this happen again."

Bloom mended a few of the potted plants but she didn't have it in her to repair the broken plastic and other inorganic materials, it made her head pound and she found it harder to focus for some time after she tried. They got everything photographed before Bloom helped clear up the broken glass and put out some plastic tables so they could still put some flowers out. While the front of the shop had been decimated, whoever had done it hadn't been able to break into the back room so there was thankfully still enough stock that they could stay open that day.

At the end of the day Bloom made dinner and contemplated how much of a failure she was while Vanessa cried into Mike's shoulder on the sofa. What good was being a fairy, having magic, honing her magic, if she couldn't use it to help and protect her loved ones? That the whole point of the fairy code printed on the wall at Alfea after all.
Once again, she found herself upstairs on her phone so that she could give her parents some space to talk and for Mike to comfort Vanessa in private. She knew that they were trying to sort out an upgraded alarm system to be put in soon, an expense she remembered her mother had been resistant to when she'd first opened up the shop.

Thankfully, Tecna had sent through a whole photo album of Stella at the Miss Magix pageant (presumably taken by Sky) and Bloom was amazed by how extravagant the princess looked. In a lot of the photos Stella was wrapped in a fluffy bathrobe, smothered in a charcoal face mask, and reclined in a massage chair while aestheticians worked on her. And that was before she was in any of her costumes. Bloom didn't think she'd seen her friend more at home.

She asked Tecna to pass on a message of encouragement before she began filling her in on what had happened that day with the shop. She had barely made it through the first few sentences before she was in tears. Bloom knew that she was upset by everything, but she hadn't realised how broken it made her feel. Tecna shushed her gently, sounding like she felt out of her depth.

"I'm so sorry this has happened, Bloom," she said. "But it's better than the alternative of her being locked into a contract with them, right? And, remember, they're adults, they've been at this longer than we have, they know what they're doing."

"She put her heart into that shop and now all the flowers are on shitty plastic tables and chairs," Bloom wept. She remembered helping her mum pick out some of the furniture, and then Mike when he had taken a day off to put the new shelves up. They had shared a picnic on the floor of the shop that day and Vanessa had been stressed but so happy and so excited.

"You know what your mum needs from you right now?" Tecna asked, pulling her back to reality. "She needs you to be strong for her, and it sounds like that's what you've been doing. Would you like to do some meditation to help calm down?"

"Yeah…" Bloom could tell she was distressing Tecna who, even on her best day, was not an emotional person and was not used to having to comfort anyone. "Thanks for just listening to me."

She focused on breathing in time with Tecna's calm and gentle voice, letting the fire in her heart stretch out to reach the tips of her fingers. Her tears slowed and then dried up, her slow breathing lowered her heart rate and she felt the panic ebb out of her with every exhale.

"I hope I've helped," Tecna said after a long period of time where neither of them spoke.

"You really have… I'm going to go to bed now because I'm not sure I'm fully awake right now."

Bloom barely had the energy to brush her teeth before she had to collapse onto her bed. It was always like this after she had a meltdown even without the meditation. Constantly being on edge used up so much energy that it felt like she was borrowing tomorrow's spirit every day. She was paying off that debt tonight.

Despite how much she missed school, and the people there, she always felt safe wrapped up in her childhood bed with her fluffy duvet.

Her sleep was deep, dreamless and healing for as long as it lasted. Bloom wasn't sure of the time, but it was late at night when she heard her mother shouting. It was hard to follow exactly what she was saying since Vanessa was downstairs and Bloom was barely awake, but she was present enough to know that it wasn't at Mike, and the gaps made her think that the yelling was probably down the phone. She could hear the rage in her mother's voice and was sure that the phrase 'don't you dare threaten me' came up more than once.

Bloom briefly considered going downstairs to see if she could console Vanessa, but she could hear Mike talking in a quieter voice so she allowed herself to go back to sleep again, confident that her dad could handle it.

It wasn't as peaceful as before the interruption though, vague and blurred images contorted behind her eyelids. It felt like she was drifting in and out of sleep rather than sinking into unconsciousness and staying there until the morning. The only thing that she could focus on properly was the image of a rose - like the one out of Beauty and the Beast - wet with condensation that was slowly evaporating away as heat from somewhere hit the flower. The petals curled and blackened, and the stem started to smoke. There was fire around the rose, burning fiercer and hotter, so much so that Bloom no longer felt its warm invitation. It was out of control and it was consuming the flower before her eyes.

The shop.

The fire was at the shop and Bloom sat bolt upright in bed.

She had no proof other than the certainty in her gut that her mother's flower shop was burning to ash as they all slept. All of the zen and relaxation that she had achieved with Tecna was gone, replaced by raw focus. There wasn't space in her head for fear or doubt, she had to act and she had to act now.
Bloom got up and went to her parents room, turning the light on and waking up a bewildered Vanessa. Mike groaned and pressed his face into the pillow.

"Darling?" Her mum muttered. "What are you doing? What's wrong?"

"The shop is on fire."

"What?"

"The shop. It's burning. I had a dream and I know that it's happening."

Vanessa studied her daughter's face. Bloom was more stubborn, more resolute than she had ever seen before. The shy and uncertain girl was gone and Vanessa found herself believing everything that Bloom said.

"Mike," she prodded her husband. "Get up, I want to visit the shop, now."

Bloom wasn't sure that her father was all that awake, but they all put their coats on and bundled into the car so that he could drive them into town. She sat stiffly in the backseat next to Mike's gear the whole way there, knowing what they would find when they pulled up outside.

The black smoke could be seen from two streets over. By the time they were able to hurry out of the car there were flames shining through the front windows and Vanessa's shriek could only just be heard over the noise of the fire alarm blaring. Mike was trying to hug her while making a call to the fire station to get one of the engines down here as fast as possible.

Bloom stared at the building, seeing the flames both in front of her and in her mind's eye. There was something off about it, and it wasn't just that it hadn't been started naturally, there was something else. Another kind of fire… there was someone inside.

"Dad, I think someone is trapped."

"What?" He looked confused. "Bloom! You can't go in, it's not safe."

She should know better, Mike had drilled into her many of the rules for if she ever discovered a fire when she was a kid, but here she was ignoring all of them. Bloom crouched to get through one of the broken windows and found herself almost engulfed in fire. The flames were so bright that she struggled to see anything beyond them, the fire itself might not hurt her but that didn't mean she was safe from all of their byproducts. A hand touched her shoulder and she turned to see her father in his gear next to her.

"Where are they?" Mike asked through his goggles and face shield. Bloom took his thick-gloved hand and led him further in. It was clear that the fire had started in the middle of the shop, the wooden floor there was the most blackened, and she was sure that the trapped person was beyond that.

On impulse she pushed the layer of protection out from the surface of her skin to form a barrier around herself and her dad as they approached the huddling man. He was barely conscious as Mike lifted him up, but Bloom could see his aura hovering behind his head and the reflection of him was one of panic and fear.

She held onto her father's hand again as they exited the shop the way they came in and was struck by an overwhelming feeling of deja vu. She'd been here before. No, they'd been here before, her and Mike. The fire, the barrier, him holding onto her, it was so familiar that it left no room in her mind for anything else.

Bloom stood silently in the street, in her pyjamas and slippers, as the emergency services arrived. The paramedics administered first aid to the man she'd helped pull out, Mike's colleagues unravelled their hose and started to blast the flames with litres upon litres of water, and the police officers started taking statements. She realised when they came to her that they should have come up with a story about how they knew to come out and why they knew that the man was still in there, however she was able to listen to the officers' auras to keep what she said in line with what both her mum and dad had told them.

They spent several hours being grilled and sorting out paperwork with both the police and the claim they were going to make from Vanessa's insurance company. One of Mike's firefighter buddies brought them some hot coffee and a box of doughnuts for breakfast and Vanessa's best friend Sandra fetched them clothes from their house. Bloom changed awkwardly in the back of the police van, trying not to be too critical of the random selection of clothes that Sandra had brought for her.

After the police had finished their street-side interrogations they were allowed to leave. Mike packed his kit into the boot, frustrated that the investigation meant he wasn't able to go back to the station with the rest of the firefighters, and drove them back to the house.

"We should get some sleep," Mike said. "Then we'll have a talk as a family about what this means."

"Dad," Bloom cut in. "I wanted to ask you something first."

"What is it?"

"Why did you lie about my adoption?" Vanessa and Mike exchanged a guilty look. Her father put his head in his hands and she couldn't tell if it was out of shame or sleep deprivation.

"What did the fire tell you?" He asked.

"I remembered you finding me in the fire, I remember you picking me up and carrying me out. I can't have been a baby then, I must have been…"

"Almost four," Mike finished for her. He still wasn't looking at her.

"Bloom, darling," Vanessa said. "When we first had the opportunity to adopt you we had a discussion about the challenges that a non-biological child would present and we didn't want you to feel like you were abandoned. After so many years of trying to get pregnant you were so wanted."

"That's not what she's asking about though." They both looked at Mike, Vanessa looking surprised. "Is it, Bloom?"

"I was casting a barrier to protect myself. Like the one I used today."

"Yes."

"You knew I had magic."

"I didn't know what I saw, I'm trained that if I find anyone inside a burning building I need to get them out as quickly as possible. I saw you and I did my job. It was only much later, after we were able to take you home, that I even considered that what you were doing wasn't natural." He shook his head. "I'm sorry, I - we - only wanted you to feel safe and happy, and it was only after Stella turned up that I even considered that it would impact your life."

Bloom was too tired and emotionally strung out to stop herself from crying. She'd always thought that her parents had been honest about her past, she had a scrapbook somewhere that had been shown and read to her when she was small that explained that she had been adopted and how, but now she knew that most of that wasn't true. Vanessa wrapped her arms around her, and Bloom cried into her mum's shoulder.