Darkness tries to swallow me, and with each excruciating step they take, I fight it less and less.
I pass out again…
The next time I wake, we’re moving, every bump in the road sending fresh waves of agony through my broken body.
“… call Lorenzo,” Remus is saying, his voice fading in and out like a bad radio signal. “This was planned. Has to be…”
Darkness swallows me. When light returns, we’re still moving.
“… losing too much blood…”
I slip under again. This time, I dream. Not of the explosion but of an older fire—the one that took my parents.
Flames climbing wallpaper, licking across the ceiling. My mom’s screams as the flames claimed her life. My father’s hands, pushing me toward the window. The fall. The impact. Watching our home become a funeral pyre.
The next time I peel my eyelid back, we’ve stopped. Doors slam and voices shout. Hands reach for me, lifting me onto something flat and hard.
White coats blur around me. Someone cuts away what remains of my clothes. Cold air hits exposed flesh, and I hiss through clenched teeth.
“Severe burns…”
I catch fragments of their assessment, clinical terms for my dismantling. A woman with steel-gray hair leans over me, her gaze calm but urgent.
“Mr. Russo, can you hear me? We’re going to put you under now. You’re going straight into surgery.”
I want to tell her I’ve been under plenty tonight already, but my tongue is lead in my mouth. Someone attaches monitors to my chest; the steady beep of my heart is oddly reassuring.
Still beating. Still fighting.
The gray-haired doctor returns with a syringe, the liquid inside catching the light like liquid diamond. “Count backward from ten,” she instructs.
Ten.The ceiling swims.
Nine.My body feels suddenly weightless.
Eight.I think of fire, of rebirth, of vengeance.
Sev…
Darkness claims me completely.
Time becomes a strange, elastic thing in the weeks after the explosion.
I surface through layers of sedation like a diver fighting against crushing depths, only to be pulled under again by the next surgery, the next dose of morphine.
Pain is my only constant companion—sometimes dulled to a distant throb, sometimes sharp enough to tear screams from my throat that I refuse to let escape. My left eye is gone. That much I understand from the hushed conversations around my bed when they think I can’t hear them.
“Unsalvageable,” they say, as if parts of me are inventory to be written off.
During brief moments of clarity, I catch fragments of the world continuing without me.
Rafe’s voice, unusually subdued, “This was personal.”
Remus, his controlled fury evident even through the haze of drugs. “The footage shows one man. One. Fucking. Man.”
Doctors with their clinical assessments. “The grafts are taking well on his torso, but facial reconstruction will require…”
I drift on an ocean of pain medication, sometimes sinking, sometimes floating to the surface just long enough to remember that I’m not dead. Someone wanted me that way, though. The thought circles like a shark in the dark waters of my mind.
