This is super random, but I realized today that I joined FanFiction exactly 100 days ago! I'm so happy that I joined because I think it's been a really good way for me to practice writing and have fun creating something. Thank you for all the support on all of my stories!
Sorry I haven't written in a while. Staying at home all the time makes you feel lazy. The good news is that I've been planning out the next part of the plot and I'm pretty excited to write it. Hope you enjoy this chapter!
Flames. All around her. Licking at her skin and tearing at her limbs. When Cinder looked down, all she saw was ashes where there should've been a body. She was just a face and brain now. As she stared around at the waves of bright fury roaring around her like a monster she felt the rest of her head crumble away. And then she was gone. In her last glimpse of life before everything went black, she saw, beyond the flames, a crowd of people. Whole people, with all their limbs and skin and bones. And they were staring at her, eyes flashing and mouths cackling. Mocking her. Disgusted by her, a freak of nature.
Cinder started awake, panting, clutching at her arms, touching her face. Irrational as it was, she had somehow believed that the dream was real and she had been burned to death. Burned to cinders, she thought, smiling ironically. She often had that dream, of fire and smoke and people laughing at her, but never that vivid.
Shaking off any lingering remnants of the dream, she flopped back down onto her mattress. When she had been sleeping, she had been thrashing and kicking, so now Cinder's blankets and sheets were all twisted around. Kicking her legs around to free them of the constraining fabric, Cinder took steady breaths until her heart rate was normal. She closed her eyes and tried to go back to that blissful zone right between awake and asleep, where she could rest without fear of troubling dreams. The peace lasted only a few minutes before she was jolted awake at the sound of a scream.
Her body reacted faster than her brain and she raced out of her room and down the hall to her sister's room. When Cinder thought back to that moment, years later, she always wondered why she had run to Peony and not to Pearl or Adri or downstairs. Maybe it was because she truly cared about Peony in a way that she didn't care for the rest of her family, or maybe it was because she had felt a sort of premonition that something bad was happening to her sister. Either way, Cinder found herself at the doorway of Peony's bedroom, the world tilting slightly out of focus the way it does when you try to move quickly after just waking up.
Amid posters of Peony's favorite bands and movie stars and framed pictures of Pearl and Peony when they were little lay Cinder's sister, curled up in bed, moaning. Beads of sweat condensed on her face and Cinder could see every inch of her frail little body shivering. But what she cared about was the spots.
Itchy-looking, blister-like scabs covered Peony's body, marring her perfect, smooth skin. Adri let out a wail, looking toward the doorway helplessly. Cinder heard Pearl's footsteps pounding down the wall. Her older stepsister came to a halt beside her, dumbstruck.
Cinder's brain was churning, with shock, anxiety for Peony, but most of all, fear about what would come next. She thought about what Scarlet had told them at lunch. The chickenpox had recently made an appearance in several cities, infecting a few people and causing those carrier hosts to spread it everywhere unknowingly. But as far as she knew, it hadn't been identified in Commonwealth City yet...
Her heart lurched as she remembered their adventure last night to their old town. Without thinking, Cinder darted forward and grabbed Adri's arm, who was draped over Peony in misery. "Get away from her!" Cinder cried. Apparently, she was the only one who could put two and two together. There were lots of recent cases of chickenpox in other cities. This new strain was very dangerous and highly contagious. Peony had the chickenpox. They had to get away from her.
"Let me take care of my daughter!" Adri snapped, pushing Cinder roughly away. She wasn't even dressed, still wearing the silk kimono she had worn to sleep.
"You can't catch it!" Cinder said desperately. She didn't want to be responsible for bringing the chickenpox to Commonwealth City. Internally, she was smacking herself on the head. How had she been so stupid? Why on earth had she let Peony leave the house when she had a cold and her immune system was weak? "Pearl, help me!"
The other girl stared at her with big eyes. Cinder sighed in frustration. Pearl never had the bravery, the dignity, to act on her own. She only did something when she saw other people were doing it too. "Adri, please. Peony is contagious right now, and unless you want to be quarantined too, get away from her."
Adri, who's body had been rigid and tense while hovering over her daughter suddenly went slack with shock. "P-peony's not going to be quarantined..."
Sighing in exasperation, Cinder used Adri's vulnerability to grab her and pull her away from Peony. "The chickenpox needs to be contained before it spreads too much. Of course she's going to be quarantined." The words sounded braver than Cinder felt. She shuddered at the thought of her sweet, harmless little sister lying alone without her family or friends or even a comfortable bed. She couldn't go to the quarantines.
But... she had to. And it was Cinder's duty as a responsible sister to call the emergency services. She couldn't afford to go easy on her sister and make a mistake like the one she had made last night. Sometimes you have to follow your head, even when your heart is telling you something different.
Hours later, Cinder paced around the hospital waiting room. After the heavily masked and protected medical workers had taken Peony away, the remaining three had rushed over in their car. Now, Adri lay curled up in one of the cheap, overly sanitized chairs, hands over her face like she was trying to block out the agony of the world. Pearl was tucked into a chair next to her mother, knees pressed against her chest. She had tried to entertain herself by looking at her phone for a while but eventually gave up and was now just staring blankly into space.
Cinder had taken the approach of not trying to block out anything or shy away from the facts. Her sister was sick, and it was hard to accept, but she would have to eventually, so why not now? For the first few hours of their wait, she had interrogated a medical assistant and tried to learn as much as possible about the chickenpox and the new strain that had recently broken out in nearby cities. But after a while, the information grew too worrying for Cinder to handle as she imagined her beloved sister in one of the hastily constructed, already overflowing quarantines.
And now she was pacing. Because she had too much nervous energy to sit down and also wanted to be the first to see when the doctor came with news about Peony. Her phone, lying on the chair next to Pearl, beeped yet again with that annoying buzz. She ignored it, yet again. Cinder was sure that all her friends were worried about why she wasn't at school, but she didn't feel like talking to them right now, even though she knew they would be as compassionate and accepting as ever.
The doctor came out a few minutes later and confirmed that Peony did have the chickenpox and she was being quarantined right now. The woman used phrases like "to the best of our ability" and "highest level of comfort" but Cinder knew that if the chickenpox spread to more people, the hospital wouldn't care so much about the comfort of a single teenage girl. She also mentioned something about "tracing the origin of the pathogens." Cinder had assumed that Adri wasn't paying much attention from the look of her glazed eyes and lined face, but the second the doctor walked away Adri snapped into focus. Whipping out her phone, Adri pounded the screen with her fingers.
Cinder went back to pacing. The worst part about this whole thing was that she wouldn't be able to see Peony until she was fully back to normal. Since the chickenpox was so contagious, the hospital didn't want to risk anyone getting near her who didn't have to.
"Cinder." Adri's voice sliced through the air out of nowhere. It was so cold and sudden that Cinder flinched. She often heard undertones of disgust and disapproval in her stepmother's voice when she addressed her, but she had never sounded this sharp.
"Yes?" Cinder tried to make her voice light, to seem unruffled by Adri's glowering demeanor.
"What was my daughter doing in a junkyard in our old town yesterday night?" Adri emphasized the "my daughter" part as if to prove that Peony was her daughter and Cinder most definitely was not. "I just tracked her cell phone, and that's the location it recorded."
Cinder froze at the words. The inner voice that had been berating her all morning with accusations of Peony's illness being her fault grew louder, bolstered by the waves of silent anger rolling off Adri. "W-what do you mean?"
Her stepmother looked her right in the eye. "You know exactly what I mean."
The words seemed to hang in the air forever as they stared at each other. Cinder's range of view narrowed until the rest of the world - including Pearl's curious, suspicious eyes - was blocked out and all she could see was Adri's face tightening and her eyes narrowing to slits. What Adri had just said bounced around inside her head, and her body felt strangely hollow. Somehow, this time was different from all the other times Adri had yelled at her. It was because this was the first time Cinder had truly messed up. Normally when Adri got mad at her Cinder brushed it off, saying that Adri was being unfair and she really hadn't done anything wrong. But now... Pearl was shell-shocked and grief-stricken, Adri was more hateful and bitter than ever before, and Peony was lying in a hospital bed. It wasn't like she had never snuck out of the house or cheated on a test ever before. But this was something big. Lives were at stake.
All because of her mistakes.
Slowly, Cinder dropped her eyes. Her usually strong resolve was crumbling, burning to ashes as the flames of regret and sorrow raged at her. "I'm sorry," she whispered. She had thought her spirit could withstand anything. She never would have expected herself to defer to Adri.
Then again, she had never expected anything like this to happen.
"It's my fault," she managed to gasp out. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Pearl shaking with silent tears. Cinder blinked hard, but her eyes remained dry. She was too numb inside to really feel anything. "It's all my fault."
Navigating the hallways at Commonwealth High School when you were four foot ten was somewhat of a battle.
Elbows jostled all around Cress, everyone fighting to get to their respective classrooms while large, ungainly feet stomped all over her delicate ones. Her head barely reached the top of most people's shoulders, causing backpacks and bookbags to be constantly smacking her in the face. Cress generally darted out of her classroom as fast as she could the second the bell rang so that she wouldn't have to fight her way through the swarms.
But today, she lingered. She was looking for someone.
Cress went on the very tips of her toes and she still wasn't even close to being able to see over the crowd. It was a good thing that Scarlet had such vivid, bright hair. She was much easier to identify than most people. There was also no mistaking her friend's signature red sweatshirt.
"Scarlet!" she called, shoving her way into the pack of people the second she caught sight of Scarlet's bobbing mass of red curls. "Over here! Scar!" Once she reached her friend, she grabbed her by the elbow and the two backed away into a semi-private corner to talk.
"Have you seen Cinder?" Scarlet asked, brow creasing with worry.
"I was about to ask you that," Cress replied grimly. "I've been texting and calling her all morning but she still hasn't responded. "Maybe she's sick or something."
Scarlet frowned. "But I'm sure she would still talk to us. It doesn't make sense that she would completely ignore us."
Worry for her friend prompted Cress to do something she never would've dreamed of in all her years at Commonwealth High. She darted back into the hall, where the crowds were thinning as kids got to class. Only the ones who wanted to get in a few minutes of gossiping, socializing, or flirting remained.
"Kai!" Cress said, skidding around the corner to where the popular kids hung out. "I was going to ask you-" She came to a complete stop and broke off from speaking when she realizing that Levana and her friends were looking at her like she was a sea slug.
But she only had eyes for one person and was glad when Kai gave her a friendly smile. "Hi, Cress," he said politely. They weren't exactly friends, but Kai wasn't the kind of person to ever be unfriendly. "What did you want to ask me?"
"Have you seen Cinder?" Cress managed to get the rest of her sentence out as the other kids - all of whom were nearly a foot taller than her - stared at her. Judging her, she was sure, laughing at her clothes, hair, height... Cress ignored them as she stood there awkwardly, rocking back and forth on the spot, twisting her long blond hair between her nimble fingers the way she did whenever she was anxious.
Kai looked surprised. "Why do you ask?"
"Just because... er, Scarlet and I don't know where Cinder is, and we were a little worried," Cress began to stammer, realizing how idiotic she now sounded. If Cinder's best friends didn't know where she was, why would Kai know? Cress had thought that Cinder and Kai were pretty close, but now she realized that they were just business clients. Still, there was something in the way they looked at each other that made the part of Cress's brain that was overly romantic sigh.
Kai did look a little bit concerned for the mechanic. "She hasn't talked to me in a few days, so..." His lips tightened the tiniest bit as his girlfriend, Levana, leaned over to whisper something into a friend's ear.
Cress caught his drift. "Yeah, sorry to bother you. I guess - I guess I'll just wait for her to message me." She wasn't very confident in this plan, but it was all they could do now. As she turned to go, she saw Kai open his mouth as if to say something else - maybe to offer to help them look - but at the last second, he closed it and watched her go without a word.
The second the tiny blonde was out of sight, Levana let out a high-pitched burst of laughter and reached out to trail her long, manicured fingernails over Kai's arm. "Why would she think that you knew anything about that mechanic girl? I mean, you've barely even talked to her! She's really not the kind of person we associate with."
"Yeah..." Kai mumbled offhandedly, still staring down the hallway where Cress had retreated. He realized that Levana and the rest of their gang were staring at him. It was one of her tests, he realized. She knew that he found Cinder interesting. She wanted to see what he was going to do now.
Kai forced a laugh. "Definitely not," he said, even though he felt a pang of guilt. "Yeah, I barely know her."
This prompted the others into raucous laughter as some of them mimicked the way Cress had nervously rocked back and forth and laughed at Cinder's dorky boy clothes. Kai could hear snatches of conversation as they attacked every aspect of Cinder and her friends - "constantly covered in grease" "girls can't be mechanics" and "what a nerd, skipping two grades."
He heard it all. He ached to put them in their right place and tell them how they relied on their parents to pay for everything for them, while Cinder worked to make money to support her family. He wanted to tell them what a unique, smart, fiercely independent girl she was.
But all he did was listen.
Aw, poor Peony. She's always been one of my favorite characters and I wish she hadn't died so that Marissa Meyer could have developed her a little more. I was always curious about their family dynamics: she loved her mother, but she also loved Cinder, who her mother hated. When Adri beat Cinder down, did Peony stick up for her or did she not want to make her mother mad? When they fought, did who did Peony side more with? Did Cinder ever get mad at her for still liking her mother when she was so cruel to Cinder?
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