Because of You

Burning World

Forest fire, some disconnect in me thought, and for a fragment of a heartbeat, there was that confusion, torn between the smoke and the acrid smell of burnt rubber that only now began to sting my nose.

But then the second passed.

The confusion receded.

And all I felt was dread.

It settled in my soles and weighed me down, but I forced myself out of my car and across the street. I hedged closer, heartbeat a clamor at my temples. Then I was peering over the small decline to a shallow basin below.

Small reflections caught in my eyes where sunlight glinted off shattered glass, until the pieces shown like fallen stars in the dirt.

I followed the scene as if in slow motion, tracing those glass constellations until I wasn't staring at the smoke anymore, but at the two, crushed forms it was coming from, like cans that had been stepped on.

And suddenly, within a moment's span of looking and understanding . . .

I couldn't breathe.

Twisted metal.

Blinding lights.

All the oxygen had been pulled from the very world, leaving me alone.

I tried to squeeze my eyes shut as if to blot out what I was seeing, but I couldn't move. The image of the two cars, one overturned, the other steaming grey, seared into me, burning me.

The world spun around in vertiginous greens and blues, vignetted by smoke.

"Bellamy!" I couldn't catch my breath. I wasn't even sure if I'd said his name or just screamed it in my mind.

I didn't remember stumbling forward. Or running down the incline. The smoke made my eyes tear as my hands fluttered helplessly across the overturned car I didn't recognize, its color a deep blue.

But I knew the other one, upright but hissing. Maureen's car.

Bellamy's name was on my lips, but I couldn't get the air I needed to scream it, coming instead in a clipped, scraping breath. It was that day all over. Only this wasn't a memory. It wasn't a nightmare. It was real.

And it was happening again.

No, no, no, I silently pleaded. Once, twice, a thousand. Please. Not him.

Not him.

Some distant part of me was already trying to assess the damage. Even as my legs shook and my heart threatened to break through my chest, even as tears pooled in my eyes, suddenly blurring the smoke and the glass together in threads of metallic grey, I knew. Because for all of my failings, for all the times I couldn't fix anyone, I still had some foolish, inveterate instinct to try.

I inched forward, glass crunching beneath my shoes. I couldn't seem to be able to keep my eyes from Maureen's car, unable to think of it as anyone else's. It was turned enough away from me that I couldn't catch any movement from inside. The huge dent marring the metal carved out a new wave of panic in me as horrible images flashed through my mind, building awful possibilities that wouldn't just devastate. They would demolish. And then what would be left?

I hoped nothing.

A choked sound escaped me. "Bellamy!" I didn't know if it was a cry or a sob.

"Clarke?"

The sound punctured the stillness like thunder.

I didn't even look before dropping to my knees in a puddle of glass, looking through Jae's overturned car. And there, framed in the broken window on the opposite side was a familiar face, his brown eyes wider than I'd ever seen them.