So far, this was turning out to be a complete waste of time. No matter which diagnostic he tried to run, the Doctor simply could not seem to find anything wrong with the translation circuit - which couldn't be right, because literally nothing Demyx said was being translated into the correct language. Quite honestly, he wasn't a hundred percent sure anything Demyx said was translating at all. Had he ever actually tried to use it with someone using a spoken language when their actual first language was not spoken? The translation circuit worked based off of the speaker's first language, and if it so happened that Demyx's first language was signed...well, it was a possibility, at any rate. He'd have to ask Demyx about it when he came back. Where was he, anyway? Then again, the fact that Demyx switched from signing to speaking under duress, instead of the other way around, indicated that speaking felt most natural to him, and by extension that he'd learned to speak before he'd learned to sign...and that didn't answer the question of where he was. When had he said he'd be back? Had he said when he'd be back? How long had he been gone, anyway? Hours, at least...it was a bit hard to tell, given how just being around a Meanwhile tended to fog up the timeline a bit, but this was starting to get a bit concerning. Sure, they both thought this was the planet and roughly the time period Demyx was from originally, but even that was fraught with all kinds of danger, and what if there had been an attack, or an invasion, or some schemers trying to undermine the local authorities towards their own ends - what if there turned out to be a secret enclave of Cybermen just waiting for the right moment - what if - what kind of mundane disasters might have happened? What if he'd been hit by a car or shot by a mugger - or what if the rift had just opened up and -
He never finished the thought; at that exact moment, the TARDIS door opened and closed, and Demyx walked in and flopped into a seat, his gaze fixed on the floor. "Where have you been?" the Doctor demanded, more sharply than he'd intended. "Why do - all of you - first thing you do on a new planet, you go wandering off on your own? Then you get into trouble, and I've got to go rescue you, and - why do you do that? All of -"
"Doctor. Shut. Your. Damned. Mouth." He did; the cursing didn't throw him anymore (from Demyx, at least), but he'd never heard Demyx say anything quite so forcefully. That, and now that Demyx was finally looking up from the floor, he looked like he wanted to hurt somebody. "First of all, I am a grown man, venturing out into familiar territory, and I don't appreciate being talked to like a teenager who's broken curfew." He slouched even further into his seat, and the Doctor wisely refrained from pointing out that he certainly looked like a sulking teenager right now. "Second, I just found out that a guy I knew way back when I was a kid is dying, and I am...just not in the mood for any bullshit right now."
"...Oh," was all the Doctor could say, because really, what could one say to something like that? "I'm...I'm sorry to hear that. Really, I am."
"Bullshit," Demyx grunted, returning his scowl to the floor. "Like you care. What's it matter to you if some mayfly you've never met only lives eight hours instead of 24?"
Now where on Earth had that come from? "Excuse me!" the Doctor said, trying to fathom just what could be going on in Demyx's head that he'd said something so utterly uncalled for. Grief? Obviously. Anger at an unfair world? Almost certainly. A desire to lash out at whoever was nearby in retaliation, whether or not they deserved it? Well, he certainly understood that; he just knew better than to act on it. "It does matter; it matters immensely!" He went over to grab Demyx by the shoulders, to emphasize his point, but as soon as he started reaching for him, Demyx blocked his reach, slipped around and past him, and was halfway across the control room, in a combat-ready stance, before the Doctor had quite processed the "slipped around him" part. He eased out of the combat stance quickly, looking vaguely ashamed of himself, but the fact that he'd entered it at all was troubling.
"I'm sorry," the Doctor repeated, keeping a safe distance from Demyx this time. "I didn't mean to scare you. But still, what you said was completely out of line."
Demyx had transferred his gaze back to the floor by then, but he did glance up for a brief moment of eye contact. "I...I'm sorry," he said, before his eyes dropped again. "It's just...so easy to get bitter out there. Like it's you and yours against the world. It's...so easy to assume that no one gives a shit whether you or anyone else lives or dies." His eyes flickered back up, for one brief but meaningful instant. "Mostly they don't."
"I'm sorry," the Doctor said once more, wishing he could find some more creative way to express his feelings. "I take it you...came from the wrong part of town?"
"The wrong part of town, yeah, and wound up in the wrong part of the wrong part of town," Demyx grunted.
"Hmm." Sometimes the Doctor really regretted coming from an upper-class background; he could be as sympathetic as he wanted, but as Demyx had pointed out before they left New Boston, that didn't mean he actually understood what that kind of upbringing could do to a person. "...Tell me about your friend," he finally said, because it seemed preferable to another "I'm sorry".
Demyx grunted, and rearranged himself in his seat, and the Doctor assumed he wasn't going to get an answer. "'Friend' is a strong word," he finally said. "I wouldn't necessarily say I had any friends back there. We were all competing against each other for the same...limited resources, and while we might band together to...deal with an outside threat, that didn't mean we all got along in general. Plus, I had a second source of income and no one to support but myself, which some of the other guys didn't like. They thought I was trying to be...better than them, I guess, because I didn't one hundred percent have to be there. Not Chicho, though. Chicho was just about the nicest, most easygoing guy I ever met. I mean it. I mean, I'm pretty easygoing as long as I'm warm and well-fed and not being threatened. Chicho stayed that way even cold and hungry. Even when people made him a target because of it. That's not easy to do. At the time, I thought he was an idiot, but in retrospect, I gotta admire that." He scratched the back of his neck and shifted position again, looking uncomfortable with more than just the seating arrangement. "He doesn't deserve what he's getting. I mean, no one deserves that, but especially not him."
He fell silent, curling in on himself as if his grief was a physical wound he was nursing. Much as the Doctor wanted to help, he really couldn't see a better way to make himself useful than to go back to repairing the translation circuit and let Demyx be alone for a while.
Demyx woke up the next morning still feeling all wrong inside, twisted up and aching and angry at the worlds, and lowkey wishing Xemnas was right about their inability to feel because sometimes emotions were just more damn trouble than they were worth. Lacking anything concrete to do before approximately 11:30, when he would need to start readying himself for his 1:00 lunch date, he did his level best to go back to sleep, but the result of that was not pleasant - a dream about the Organization finally getting their hearts back and becoming Somebodies again, except no one, not even Axel and Roxas's Others, wanted him around all of a sudden, on the grounds that he was a no-account loser. Waking up again with that dream still in his head did nothing to improve his mood, and neither did going back out to the control room and finding the Doctor still so hard at work at whatever he'd been trying to repair the day before that he didn't even look up and say hi.
Well, at least Eighty-Six and Chicho are still willing to talk to me. Last I knew, anyway.
Feeling like there was a hundred-pound weight on his soul, he sat down in the control room and watched the Doctor work. It not only didn't help, being so consistently ignored actually made him feel worse about himself. He'd literally saved this guy's life less than two weeks ago, and now he couldn't get as much as a backwards glance out of him. What was even the point? Why bother trying to do the right thing and be a good person when it consistently earned him nothing? Look at Chicho; he'd tried to do the right thing by supporting his sister and now he was dying slowly and painfully. Why not be like Saix and just live by whatever orders got handed down from above - or like Marluxia and go full-out for Number One?
Stop doing this to yourself. You know what this is - it's depression sneaking back up on you. It's taken up too much of your life already; don't let it win now.
Oh, yeah. "Stop". Like it was just that easy. Like it had ever been that easy. "Snap out of it." "Stop being so down all the time." "Cheer up already." Like that had ever worked.
Yes, but this self-destructive thinking is only making you worse. You may not be able to snap yourself out of depression, but you can snap yourself out of this line of thought. And you need to. Otherwise you know where this is going to lead.
"Doc...what's it like spending your life wandering around space and time? Mostly nobody but you and the TARDIS?"
"Huh?" All right, maybe the Doctor genuinely hadn't known he was in there. "I, um, I...it's all right, you know? Never gets boring, at any rate. I call all the shots, do as I please...at least, as long as I can make it to my intended destination. Have fun, save worlds, make friends along the way...and run a lot. Running is a really big part of it."
"Don't you ever get lonely?" Idiot, that is 200 percent not your business and you should never have asked that.
The Doctor looked at him for a split second with a downright stunned expression, before his face relaxed into its normal casual grin. "Lonely? Me? Nah," he said, shaking his head slightly. "I mean, everywhere I go, there's always someone around."
"Okay," Demyx said, pretending he hadn't seen that split second of shock - the split second that told him everything he needed to know. "I'm kind of like that too. As the intel chief of the Organization, it's part of my job to maintain a network of contacts in the various worlds we frequent, the end result being that it's literally my job to make friends everywhere I go. Including here, and I have a lunch date with some of them, so I'll be getting ready and heading out again, if you don't mind. I should be back before 5 at the latest." With that, he went back to his room to clean up, paradoxically buoyed by the knowledge that someone else in the universe felt soul-shatteringly lonely right now too.
What Demyx remembered of the Gran Mercado from his childhood was its vibrancy, its joyous clamour, the feeling that all the world was gathered there to sell you whatever it was your heart desired. Today, in his present state of mind, it felt like an entirely different place - obnoxious, riotous, full of too many clashing colors and too many contrasting scents and too damn many people trying to hawk counterfeit iPhone accessories and pirated Disney DVDs and somehow too damn loud even when he turned his hearing aids down. His new first impression was so overwhelming he almost turned around and ran back into the taxi he'd taken to get there.
All right. This can happen when your mind is a mess. Quick step back; close your eyes; breathe. Wait until you get it together, then go back inside. Even after taking his own advice, Demyx felt reluctant to head into all that chaos. Taking yet another deep breath and reminding himself that he'd done much, much worse on missions, he finally took a step inside and almost immediately regretted it. But then, he'd also done a lot of things on missions that he'd immediately regretted, and most of them had turned out far worse than just having to wade his way through a cacaphonous crowd to get to the dark sanctuary in the center.
Lolita's was a longtime hidden gem of the city that social media had only recently started to bring to light. Nearly forty years ago, a hard-eyed, acid-faced woman, who answered to "Lolita" if addressed respectfully enough, had arrived in the city, with a dozen children and the recipes for the best Guatemalan food anyone outside Guatemala had ever tasted. Moving a bunch of secondhand cooking equipment into an empty stall in the Mercado, she started serving the crowds with her characteristic scowl, and press-ganged her children into employment as the business grew - her daughters in the kitchen, her sons as waiters. Men were strictly banned from Lolita's kitchen no matter what their credentials; a male celebrity chef who'd tried to profile her restaurant on his TV show two years ago had had to get an all-female camera crew and a female colleague to co-host in order to win even indirect access. After the original Lolita's death, her eldest daughter (also called Lolita) had taken over, and continued to run the place exactly the same way her mother had; rumor had it that she'd gone from having no particular resemblance to her mother to looking almost exactly like her overnight. Since the new Lolita had no daughters, only sons, some were already speculating as to who would take over from her when the time came. Her eldest niece, a college student studying landscape design, was already being called "Lolita" even though her given name was Elena. At no point in its history had Lolita's ever taken reservations, and the wait for a table could sometimes stretch on into hours at busy times, but Demyx was gratified to see Eighty-Six already sitting at a table in the back, with a frail, skeletal man it took him more than a few seconds to recognize.
Holy shit...he wasn't kidding when he said Chicho was dying. He looks pretty dead already. Easing his way carefully through the crowd to the back table, Demyx still had no more idea what to say when he reached it than he had before, and could only stand there trying to collect his thoughts. Fortunately for him, Chicho broke the silence first. "Rockstar? You...you feeling all right, man?" he asked in a cracking voice. "You look kinda pale."
Demyx stared at him for a second, then, against his own will and better judgment, he started to laugh. It started off as a little giggle, and quickly grew so out-of-control that he found himself leaning on the table for support, gasping for breath. "I - I'm sorry," he choked. "I can't help - it wasn't even that - that funny, I just -"
"Oh, just siddown, man," Eighty-Six said, gesturing at an empty chair. "We been here fifteen minutes smelling everyone else's food, and we wanna order already. Still remember the menu? 'Cause trust me, it has not changed since you left town."
"Remembering the menu doesn't help," Demyx groused, jokingly. "I skipped breakfast. Right now, I wanna order every vegetarian item they have."
"Only the vegetarian stuff?"
"I'll take fish too."
"They do vegetarian versions of all the tamales now," Chicho offered.
"I thought you said the menu hadn't changed!"
"No, he said the menu hadn't changed. It has...modernized. Just a little."
"Part of me is devastated to hear that. The rest of me is just hungry."
"Well, pick something so we can order already!"
A waiter came by at just that moment, and Demyx had to quick-scan the menu and pick something before Chicho and Eighty-Six got even more impatient. Neither the service nor the quality of the food had changed since he'd been there last; in seemingly no time at all they were being presented with plates of tamales and steaming bowls of pepian and tapado. Demyx didn't get nearly enough seafood at home, and he really was starving, so for a few minutes the tapado was all he could think about. He almost choked on a shrimp when Chicho said "So, Rockstar, where the hell you been this whole time?"
"New Orleans," Demyx said, once he managed to swallow. "I was busking on Christmas Eve, some guy gave me a fat wad of cash, I got on a Greyhound and went the fuck south. Did not miss the winters. At all."
"Man, you got lucky," Chicho said, shaking his head a little. "I admit, I always felt kinda sorry for you, not havin' any family, but I guess that made it easy to just pack up and leave when you had a chance."
Felt sorry for him? Really? The impression Demyx had always had was that the other boys had envied him to the point of hatred for not having anyone else to support, or else simply disdained him for being an orphan. It had never occurred to him that anyone might have simply felt sorry for him for being so alone - that anyone might have just not looked down on him.
How much else have I been remembering in the worst possible light? How much of my life was really as horrible as I always told myself it was? How much wasn't?
"- kinda fulfilled all our fantasies when you went after that senator," he came to himself to realize Eighty-Six was saying. "We've all had those horror-story johns whose lives we'd love to walk back into and ruin, but you actually did it. How'd you get away with it?"
"Eh, just...laid low until they managed to prove suicide," Demyx said, ducking his head a little with embarrassment. "It was pure luck I happened to walk by that rally and recognize him. Once I saw who it was, I couldn't resist."
"Do you really think he did for Pony?" Eighty-Six asked. "'Cause I remember you said somethin' about him..."
"No idea," Demyx said with a shrug. "I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if he did, just 'cause Pony had somethin' on him and he thought he could get away with it, but I dunno for sure. Probably never will. Probably no one ever will."
"He didn't," Chicho said. "It was his dad. Pony's dad, I mean."
Demyx and Eighty-Six froze instantly, Eighty-Six with a fork halfway to his mouth, Demyx with a fork actually in his mouth. "So, uh...are you saying..." Eighty-Six said hesitantly, while Demyx finally remembered to chew and swallow what he had in his mouth. "That you know - like, definitely know - who killed Pony?"
"Like I said, it was his dad," Chicho said firmly. "I saw him dumping the body in the river. He had Miggy helping him, too."
"Oof." Demyx shuddered involuntarily. "Imagine having to help dump your own brother's body."
"You knew?" Eighty-Six demanded. "You knew this whole fuckin' time? And you didn't tell nobody?"
"Who was I gonna tell?" Chicho protested. "I was just a kid back then too! You know what Pony's old man is like; I tried to tell someone, I was gonna be in the river next!"
"He's got a point," Demyx said. "Pony's old man was a dangerous bastard. Probably still is, if he's alive. A guy who'd kill his own son isn't gonna hesitate to kill some random kid."
"Still, you ain't a kid anymore," Eighty-Six insisted. "There's no statute of limitations on murder. You just...never told anybody? Until now, anyway?"
"What's the point, man? Is it gonna make Pony any less dead?" Chicho took a long drink of his beer, somehow never breaking eye contact with Eighty-Six. "Besides, he's got Miggy working the Club for him now. Miggy was with him that night. If I went to the cops, they'd wanna bring him in as a witness, and hey, the old man already killed one son. Why wouldn't he kill Miggy to shut him up?"
While the other two argued, Demyx tilted his chair slightly back, thinking hard. There was no way to prove that it had specifically been Chicho who witnessed the body disposal, was there? It could just as easily have been Edmy. He knew where to find Miggy now. He had enough funds to get him well out of his father's reach. And what could Pony's father do to him, anyway? In two days, he'd be so far out of town no force on Earth could find him. He didn't even technically exist...
Lunch had ended rather awkwardly, between Chicho and Eighty-Six, at least. Demyx had done his best to keep some kind of conversation going once they seemed done arguing about Pony, but his metaphorical heart hadn't really been in it. Once the checks had all been paid, he'd just said as graceful a goodbye as he could manage under the circumstances and got out of the too-loud, too-colorful, too-intense-for-his-wonky-brain Mercado as fast as possible.
All right, he'd told the Doctor he'd be back by 5:00, and it was 2:30 now. That gave him another two and a half hours to play with, hopefully in a less intense environment. Where was he going to go from here? Well, maybe take another shot at finding the restaurant his grandmother used to work at. Even if it turned out to be a waste of time, he'd still spend some time wandering a familiar and nicer part of town than he was going to be in tomorrow. He couldn't remember if it was in the same block as Blind Helen's, or even the same street, but he was pretty sure it was in the same general area. Now, what did it look like, anyway? He had some vague memory of a green-canopied hole in the wall, with a single dingy window full of flashy neon signs...what the hell had it been called, though? Something like "Bombay House" or something else too blindingly generic to leave any impact on his memory. Well, there was Blind Helen's, anyway, so where was it in relation to here...?
Whatever direction it was, his brain didn't want to tell right from left just then, and Blind Helen's was dark and quiet. A dark, quiet pawnshop seemed like a better environment to let his brain reboot itself in than the bright, noisy street, or back to the TARDIS for more awkwardness with the Doctor. The place still smelled like dust and old electronics, just like he remembered, and Helen still hadn't switched from incandescent to fluorescent lights, so not only was the place way darker than strictly necessary, there was absolutely none of that nerve-wracking hum that seemed to be the only thing his hearing aids could pick up sometimes...
"Rockstar? That ain't you, is it? ...How long's it been, boy? Six, seven years?"
...Of course, the downside of going back to places he used to be familiar with was the risk of being recognized. And of course Helen - who could supposedly tell the purity of a gold object from its weight alone without needing an acid test - would somehow recognize him years later based purely on the sound of his footsteps. "...Something like that," he said, after a moment spent debating whether or not he should pretend to be a stranger. "First time back in town in about that long."
Between the dim light and the fact that she was still busy tallying receipts without looking up at him, Demyx had to focus all his attention on reading her lips. "I got worried about you, after a while, you know," she said, or seemed to be saying, anyway. "Usually when boys like you disappear, they don't come back. Like that other boy - what was his name? The one who disappeared and then they found him in the river later?"
"...You mean Pony?" Gods, it was like Pony was haunting him on purpose today - unless she meant one of the other four boys who'd disappeared and turned up in the river later. "Yeah, I, uh, met up with a couple of the other boys over lunch, and we got to talking about him at some point. But no. I just got enough money for a bus ticket south."
Helen actually looked up at him, at that, or at least in his direction. "You went south for six years and you came back? What the hell is wrong with you? If I could get myself a bus ticket south, I would stay south."
"I never said I was staying here. I just said I was back in town in general."
"Uh huh. Well, it's probably a hundred degrees in the shade down south right now, so I'll be thinking of that when you go home."
There wasn't much to say in response to that, and Demyx hadn't been in much mood for conversation to begin with, so he turned around and did his best to get lost in the rest of the shop. There was a lot more shop to get lost in than it looked like from outside, but he'd never really taken a good look around; he'd only ever come in to sell before, and everything available to buy was not strictly necessary for life and generally too expensive for him anyway. There were whole cabinets full of jewelry, shelves of secondhand TVs and computers, even a section dedicated entirely to musical instruments...
And half-hidden behind a row of more prominently displayed violas, violins, and guitars, he found the first love of his life.
How, in the name of all that was holy or even possible, had his grandmother's sitar found its way to Blind Helen's? Why it hadn't sold once it got there was less of a mystery; sitars weren't exactly a popular instrument compared to, well, literally anything else in the place. But how had it gotten there in the first place? Who found it and opted to sell it for whatever they got instead of...well, in an area like this, lost objects that looked remotely valuable were way more likely to end up in a pawn shop than returned to their rightful owner, and Blind Helen's was the biggest one close by. But...still. It was here. Now. Like it had been waiting all this time for him to walk in and find it.
He didn't even think about what he was doing; it was as if his brain had shut off and left his body to run on automatic. His hands were shaking so much he had to pick it up with both hands, and he almost couldn't get it into the case. Taking a deep breath, because he knew that if he seemed particularly excited about it Helen would double the price, he closed up the case, slung it over his shoulder (and was suddenly six years younger for an instant), and headed back up to the counter. "H-how much do you want for this?" he said, unable to keep a quiver out of his voice as he set the case on the counter and opened it for Helen's examination.
Not only did Helen not seem to catch his emotional state, she actually let out a little snort of disgust as she ran her fingers over the sitar. "I almost forgot I even had this damn thing," she said, shaking her head slightly. "It's been sitting back there gathering dust for...must be six years now? I was asking a hundred, but I'll give it to you for sixty-five just to get it out of here already. Take the case for free."
"Deal," Demyx said, trying not to sound too eager as he fished his wallet out of his pocket. His hands were shaking so much he dropped the wallet once and the card twice, but Helen didn't seem to notice.
Once he was back out in the street, with the familiar weight of the sitar case on his back, all he could do was stand there and take deep breaths. That was real. It had happened. His grandmother's sitar - the very first instrument he'd ever handled, let alone played, back when he was still trying to learn English from watching Sesame Street - was back in his possession, years after he'd resigned himself to never seeing it again. It wasn't like he technically needed it, since he was able to summon one out of thin air whenever he wanted, but having it was like...oh, he didn't even know. Maybe a person with a heart could have put a name to whatever he was feeling right now, but it was beyond his grasp. All he knew was, he never wanted to put it down again.
Where was he going from here? He'd come down this way to try to find the restaurant where his grandmother used to work, but right now his whole brain seemed to be buzzing like a hornet's nest. Focusing on anything was going to be impossible. There was a bench near the end of the block; he could at least sit down for however long it took for his brain to stop buzzing and start working properly, and then he could try to make it do something constructive. Or he could just sit here with his brain scrambling itself like a pan full of eggs until it was time to go back to the TARDIS, either way. He was staring at the sign outside the door of the restaurant the bench was in front of, but it was making absolutely no sense to him; was it a no-smoking sign, a no-dogs-allowed sign, a -
...Was that smoke?
It certainly was smoke, and his buzzing, staticky brain seemed to sharpen instantly as he realized that it was not tobacco, cannabis, or cooking-accident smoke. It was some kind of woodsmoke with a chemical undertone, more like a burning house than anything. He looked around sharply - yes, there was smoke coming out the second-story windows of a nearby building. People in the street were starting to notice; some were running away, some were on their phones presumably calling 911, some were banging on nearby doors telling people to get out. What building was it that was burning? Shit, it was Helen's...
Why couldn't he hear any fire alarms going off? Most fire alarms he'd ever encountered were loud enough to hear even with his hearing aids off, but he couldn't hear so much as a whistle. And if she couldn't smell the smoke, Helen wouldn't know what was going on...he ran for the door as the fire truck sirens started blaring, but as soon as he opened it, he was met with a blast of heat that almost knocked him down. Gritting his teeth, he tried again to force his way in, but there was a cracking, tearing noise from overhead, and burning beams started crashing down from the ceiling in front of him. Where was Helen? Was she still in there? Had she made it out a different door? Damn it, there was no way he was getting through now; the only thing he could do was go back out the front before the whole ceiling came down on him. He stumbled backwards, practically into a firefighter's arms, and found himself shunted off to the side while they forced their way in past him.
The next time he was aware of what was going on, he was sitting against the wall of the restaurant at the end of the block, with the sitar case pressing painfully into his back. He could still smell smoke and hear fire trucks and sense boatloads of water being pumped out nearby, so he couldn't have lost more than a few minutes, and the fact that he was still aware of what had been happening just before meant that he hadn't had a seizure. Someone seemed to be dabbing at his face with a cloth or something, and he had to blink several times before he could make out a woman in an EMT uniform. She was talking, but he had no idea what she was saying. "...What's going on?" he asked, still blinking furiously in an attempt to actually see her face. "I think I blacked out for a minute..."
"Shock can do that to you," the EMT said, apparently not missing a beat herself. "What's the last thing you do remember?"
"When...when I saw the building was on fire over Blind Helen's, and I couldn't hear the fire alarm, I tried to go back in to get Helen out." Demyx took a deep, shaky breath, slowly becoming aware of how much his face was stinging. "I, uh...didn't get far. It was so fucking hot already. The ceiling started coming down. I didn't even see her in there. I just...backed the hell out, and...that's kinda it."
The EMT nodded, as if that was exactly what she'd expected to hear - well, for all he knew, he'd been babbling about it for the past ten minutes straight. "Well, you really shouldn't have gone back in in the first place, but getting back out was the best thing you could have done," she said, dabbing at his forehead near his hairline, which just made that particular area sting worse. "You're just a little singed. We can still take you to the hospital if you want, just to be safe, but I think you'll be all right."
"No. No, I...I'd rather not." Demyx closed his eyes for a moment - by the Gods, even that stung. His whole face had to be one big first-degree burn. "...What happened to Helen? Did she make it out?"
"I don't know," the EMT said, but all Demyx had to do was glance to the side and see the firefighters zipping up a body bag to find out.