Chapter 1: 1.
I still remember the sound of the violent rain slamming against the windshield. I remember the water that fell on my skin through the back window that never went up. I remember the sounds that the car made when my father used the brakes.The rain fell in a blinding spiral, combined with the wind, the car was in a game of tug and pull. The same window the rain came through, the wind would whip past and throw my hair to reach every inch of my face. I remember thanking God that the streets were empty, praying we would get home before the storm got worse. But the wipers were already in full swing, and the water kept pouring from the roof.
"Fuck. I can't see anything." My dad mumbled. I saw sweat drop from his rugged, dark brown hair onto his lap. It was clear that the weather was making him nervous. I saw it in his face, and he wore it shamefully.
"Yeah me either. Just keep going slow honey." My mom said.
Every couple of seconds, my father would look at me through his rear-view mirror. His eyebrows knit and his labored breathing made it hard for me to stay calm, in spite of my mother's attempts. She would turn half her body around and smile at me. A sweet smile it was. But I could tell it wasn't genuine. The corners of her mouth would twitch, and her nostrils flared inconspicuously.Through her facade, I could tell that she was just as frightened, maybe more so, than my father was.
The car jerked violently to the side. My body moved with the car. When it jolted back to the right spot, my shoulder was thrown against the door. I winced in pain, trying to be as quiet as possible in the already hostile situation, but my mom saw.
"Slow down,Michael!" My mom shouted, gripping the armrests of the seat. She called my dad by his first name. There was not one time before that had I heard them say each other's first names unless it was for something absolutely dire. It was unsettling. His legal name sounded almost foreign to my ears.
"Mary, I'm already going 30 miles an hour in a 60 mile lane. If I go any slower we'll never get out of this rain." He gripped the wheel as tight as he physically could. He tried focusing on the road, but it was futile.
The swerves gradually became more frequent, and more forceful. After a few more jolts, I could no longer feel my left shoulder. Tensions rose, and the breathing of everyone in the car noticeably became heavier. At one point I remember squeezing my eyes shut, rocking back and forth with my knees against my chest. The apparent sound of the rain slamming against the roof of the car made me anxious. A chill ran down my spine. I was shaking. I kept telling myself that we were going to be fine.
"This will be the worst of it," I whispered to myself.
A strike of lightning came down, and smacked the earth on the right side of the road a few kilometers ahead. Sounds of cracking roared from every direction. There was no escape. A thunderous slam sounded from in front of us. It was a tree. Pieces of it flew in every direction. In a matter of seconds it went from standing leisurely to being laid, sprawled out across the highway ahead of us. One end of the tree erupted into a fire, fighting for its life against the unforgiving rain. The wind, the rain, the fire, they all mixed into a cloud of chaos.
Instead of stopping, my dad unexpectedly turned the wheel, stomping on the accelerator. I couldn't have been more confused. It took me a few seconds to realize he was attempting to drive around it.
He drove wildly. All control of the car was gone. Branches went on for miles. We came so close to rounding the tree. So close… but a blazing light appeared. Little by little, the light got brighter. There was no escape. A honk sounded. Still, there was no place to go. I couldn't breathe. Looking left or right… there was just nowhere to go. I remember the smell of burning wood. I remember the sound of screeching tires on the pavement. The look of pure terror on both of my parents' faces was etched into my mind.
Before it all went dark, I remember the back of the car elevating, flying far too high to measure.
When I woke up, at first, I couldn't see. My eyes wouldn't focus into the picture. Regardless, I remember feeling calm for about a second and a half. Fully at peace. And for that second I completely forgot where I was, and what was happening.
An ear splitting sound dragged me back toward the land of the living. Pain rang throughout my body. My chest felt heavy. My breaths came out as gasps. My arms and legs felt weak. From the neck down I felt like I was trapped, sinking into the earth. My consciousness was slipping.
When I forced my eyes open there was glass everywhere. It was red. Everywhere was just…red. The motionless scene brought about an eerie sensation. Dust mites froze perfectly in the air as I lifted my head in an attempt to look around, but an intense pain pierced my brain. In frustration, and a little bit of fear, I laid my head down. I was scared that there was something wrong, but my arms were too weak to reach up and check if there was. The anticipation of the impact of my head hitting the floor caused a premature groan. When my head did make an impact, the reality of where I was shocked me. The car had flipped over, and I was laid on the roof. I shifted my head, and saw that the seat belt I wore in the back was torn, one half still clicked into the lock. I looked down at my body, and started tearing up, panic setting in. I hadn't felt it there before, but I had a piece of glass wedged into my side. It was unbearable. It ripped the exhaustion from my body, and my hands involuntarily shot to where the glass shard stuck out of me. My lungs seized in pain. Every breath stung.
I looked to my father for help, but he sat still in his seat with his seat belt on. His head was stuck between the roof, and the steering wheel. His blood ran up, and sat on the roof of the car. His face was caved in. And, somehow, the joystick was lodged in between his ribs. I could barely recognize him. It was all so surreal, and I knew that at that moment i should have been crying, but I didn't want to believe this was actually happening. Yet within the depths of my consciousness, there was no doubt in my mind. He was dead.
With a calmness derived from shock, and denial, I looked over to the passenger side. My mom wasn't there. In her stead, was a large gape in the windshield. Thousands of glass shards sat spread out across the scene. I forced the thought that she must've left to get help, into my head, but in curiosity I lifted my head slightly, following the glass with my eyes. I saw her. Her mangled body planted on the road. A large, rugged shard of glass sticking out of one of her legs. I wanted to get to her. I needed to get to her. Slowly, I mustered up the last bits of strength that hadn't already been stolen from me, and crawled over the field of glass to the whole in the car's windshield. I winced with each movement, but forced myself to move forward. A trail of blood followed me, spilling from the wounds that I chose to ignore. My body was numb. I couldn't feel my hands, or my knees, against the pavement at that moment in time. I didn't even feel the headache anymore. My only goal was to move. To be near my mother. Maybe I felt as though I needed to let her know she wasn't alone.
When I got to her I sat with my feet under me, and stared. Carefully, I lifted, then rested her head on my folded knees. All the while, she wheezed. I could hear the pain through every cough, and the blood that came with it made me feel worse. I stroked her forehead trying to hold back my tears.
"You'll be okay, Mom. You'll be okay," I repeated tirelessly.
"You be good now, you hear?" She told me in a gruff statement.
I chuckled humorlessly, "Don't say that," my voice broke and my face twitched. I forced a smile, but the tears still dropped, hiding in her hair. "You're gonna be fine."
It was a lie. We both knew it. But for a single second I… I had to believe that I wasn't losing both my mom and my dad in a matter of mere seconds.
"Hey. Listen…" She managed through labored breaths, "I love you, Arya… I always will."
"Yeah, I know. You can tell me again later. Just stop talking… you're gonna be fine." The more I spoke, the more of a sob my words came out as.
She never responded. She just smiled at me apologetically. She soon became cold, letting out her last, tired breath. I knew, from the countless doctor shows we had watched together, that she was dead, but still, I sat there. Rocking back and forth. Weeping silently in the rain.
Later when the paramedics came, they told me that my dad died instantly, and almost painlessly. They informed me that my mom had died from "blunt force impact of the windshield and the road, which caused her to bleed out internally, but if she hadn't died from that it would have been the multiple other injuries my mother sustained. Almost all of her ribs seemed to be broken, she bled from a fractured skull, and the glass in her leg severed several arteries." Her last moments replayed in my head as they drove me away in the ambulance. While the medic spoke I could pay attention to nothing he said. I stared blankly at the ground. The place where I held her. The circle of already drying blood. The place where my mom died.
The next few days, weeks even, were the same. They all ran together. I would lay in the unfamiliar hospital bed, staring into the distance, watching the sun rise and fall. I barely ate anything. Some of the time, it felt as if I was the one who died that day, or at least a piece of me did. Almost as if I was the one who passed in the arms of my mother, and this was the hell I was living. According to the shrink, that I was forced to go to, that feeling was called "survivor's guilt". When you feel guilty for surviving while other people in the same traumatic event didn't. It made sense. I constantly found myself thinking about why I was the one who survived, instead of my mom and dad, who both left me here.
During most of the month following the accident, I didn't talk much either. My face never held the slightest of emotions. By the time the funeral came around, it didn't change. I guess I just stopped caring. Stopped caring about what people thought, I was sick and tired of the eyes that filled with pity every time they saw me. I even stopped caring about whether I lived or died. So as somewhat of a twisted joke, to see how far I could take things, I wore a red dress to the funeral. It was revealing. A low, off the shoulder, tight fitted, laced red dress. The people still only saw a pitiful little, recently orphaned, girl. And while others were crying on each other's shoulders, I watched with dry eyes. The whole time, thinking how weird they looked crying like that. Seeing both parents lying peacefully in their coffins brought no tears to my eyes. Witnessing them being lowered into their own separate plots of land, also, had no tear jerking effect on me. I hadn't cried since the day of, and when I saw everyone else doing it-it brought me confusion, almost as if I couldn't understand the feeling of sadness any longer. Or the feeling of feelings anymore.
The reception afterwards was worse than the burying itself. Every corner I turned was another unknown family member trying to "offer their condolences". At least during the burying, with the fact that my parents were still on display, people kept from talking to me.
The only benefit to have possibly come out of it was the meeting of my next guardian. My dad's brother, Sebastian. Apparently he had been around a lot when I was younger, but I had barely found his face familiar. He, and my dad, had a scary resemblance though. They were the same height, about six foot. A strong build, a bit on the skinnier side, but surprisingly muscular. Their faces were almost identical as well. A sharp nose, and wide eyes that made him look goofy when he smiled. Plus a well shaped beard. If it wasn't made painfully clear that I didn't have a father anymore, I definitely would have mistaken him as my dad. They could have been twins for all I knew. And although looking at him was hard at the beginning, I'll always appreciate him for what he did during the reception.
The swarm of humans bombarding me, asking how I was doing, started to become overwhelming. There hadn't been less than four people stuck to me like Siamese partners, since the very beginning of the gathering. Aggravation was evident on my features.
The person in front of me spat the same speech everyone else did, "They were such good people…" blah blah blah, "It's a tragedy…" blah blah blah, "I'm so sorry for your loss…" blah blah. The practiced insincere lines of the people was met with an equally faux smile.
While I was suffering another round of the being felt bad for, Sebastian must've seen my yearn for escape, and became my savior. He appeared so suddenly, putting his arm over my shoulder, and, like it was nothing, told the person speaking to go away.
"Look at her," He said, "She clearly wants nothing more than for you to shut up. Please go away. Sorry, I'm not sorry." The person's face, the one that had stood in front of me for so long, turned from absolute pity to an utter bafflement. I, too, was caught off guard, but it was more humorous than anything else. I turned my face to hide the slight smile it brought on.
Although it felt like years since the last time I smiled, it felt good. It was like… a piece falling off of the stone that was crushing my heart. Breathing felt the tiniest bit easier. When I turned back to face him, he had this sheepish smile that made it look like his eyes were closed. He removed his arm from my shoulder and stood there scratching the back of his head in a fit of embarrassment, which kept an atomic sized smile on my face.
"Sorry about how that sounded. I swear I'm not as rude as that on a regular basis." He giggled in a low tone, sticking his hand out as a greeting. "I'm Sebastian, your dad's brother."
"Arya." I nod back, looking at his hand, then offering a small, awkward smile.
"As you can tell, from me being your dad's brother, I am your uncle."
I huffed a short show of understanding through my nose, and nodded.
"I'm gonna be your legal guardian from now on. In other words… you're moving in with me." He smiled innocently while rocking back on his heels with his hands in his jean pockets.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone