Eli screamed, a sudden burst of pain exploding across his chest. He scrambled backwards, feet kicking wildly against the gravel to break Atlas’ hold on his shirt. He turned intangible on instinct, the blistering pain in his chest prevailing even through the awful process. But Atlas released him, fell back onto the ground with a sickening thump, and when he returned to being only seconds later, the flames on his shirt were gone. Shiny red skin gleamed through new holes in the fabric. He grimaced, but this pain was still manageable.
But Atlas... Atlas was dying. The flames erupted from his skin in erratic, fitful bursts, searing his skin, leaving only the dark outline of a sick, sick boy amidst the smoke and blaze. He wasn't even screaming anymore. He was just... burning.
"Lord, please no," Eli whispered, gagging on the horror that swelled and crashed over him as he dialed. The heat from the fire evaporated tears right off his cheeks.
"911, what's your emergency?"
He choked on the words, fully aware of how crazy he sounded. "My friend is on fire."
"We're sending an ambulance over now."
The operator told him to stay on the phone with them and tell them what happened. Eli shut his eyes tight, his breath hitching in his throat as he tried to recite the nightmarish events. He knew this call exposed Atlas as Pyro, but what choice did he have? Better have Atlas alive than anything, and he didn't know if he'd even get that.
The more he talked, the more it seemed as if his emotions were draining out of him, leaving a dry, empty husk of who he had been behind. Prayers fluttered behind his eyelids; unformed, desperate pleas.
When he opened his eyes again, the flames had gone out. His friend was a blackened, bleeding mess, a crumpled silhouette in the darkness, and the sick feeling in Eli's stomach grew the longer he sat there. Watching. Waiting. Helpless to do anything.
He threw up.
When he sat up, emptier than ever, the lights of an ambulance cut into his brain, blinding him. The ringing in his ears mimicked the emergency vehicle's wailing cry. It rattled across the broken pavement to pull up beside the two young men.
Three paramedics hopped out, clad in crisp navy blue uniforms. Eli pointed towards his friend, even though it was obvious who was in trouble. The paramedics ran over, assessing the situation in smooth voices as they gathered supplies. They hovered and buzzed like flies, eyes wide in recognition at the symbols marking Pyro's suit, even as they strapped an air mask to his face and arranged a stretcher beside his too-still body.
Eli couldn't watch anymore.
He got to his feet and turned away, only making it a few paces before the emptiness yawned up inside him again. He sat down again, with his back to the scene. The blood rushing in his ears failed to muffle the conversation he so desperately wanted to ignore as he stared into nothing.
"Damn..."
"... this Pyro?"
"... not sure... make it... second and third degree burns, maybe more..."
Shuffling, grunting, sharp commands as they hoisted him into the ambulance.
The ambulance doors slammed, the siren flipped back on. A policewoman got out of a car that Eli hadn't known was there. The officer strode towards him as the ambulance screamed its way back down the darkened neighborhood street, and Eli was numb.
His friend was gone, maybe forever, and he couldn't feel... anything.
Did that make him an awful person?
"Sir?"
The policewoman placed a hand on Eli's shoulder, and he flinched violently. He glanced up at her, momentarily breaking free from his stupor. She withdrew her hand, the wrinkles around her eyes deepening in sympathy, then settled down to sit beside him on the ground. Her steady breathing made Eli realize that he'd been holding his breath.
He gasped, his chest aching, and for a moment, he returned to reality.
It was unbearable.
"What's your name, kid?" Her voice was kind and strong, but he wished she wasn't there. He wanted to be empty in peace. It hurt too much to be anything else.
He swallowed with difficulty, his throat dry and painful from inhaling the smoke and the god awful smell of burning flesh and clothing.
"Eli."
The officer had to be in her mid-fifties, rounder, with a tight blonde bun shot through with white streaks. She held a pad of paper and a pen, and jotted this down.
"...Full name?"
Instead of responding, he twisted and stared behind him at the spot where Atlas had just lain, the ground glistening with blood and pieces of burnt fabric. She turned to look with him, and his lips parted in a feeble attempt to cry. Nothing came.
He clutched his backpack to his chest and faced forward again.
"Eli JuLong Wagner," he whispered.
She wrote this down, glanced at him, sighed. Then she turned around and muttered something to someone else, and pulled a shock blanket up over his shoulders. Eli realized that he was shaking, and couldn't stop. He clenched his jaw to stop the chatter.
"I'm Officer Anderson. Do you think you can tell us what happened here?"
Eli didn't respond. Was Atlas dead? He should have called as soon as he'd arrived. Maybe then... Oh god. Maybe then--
"Mr. Wagner?"
She placed a strong hand on his shoulders. The pressure helped to soften the screaming in his ears, to focus the buzzing energy racing through his bones.
"You're burned," she said, her grip softening, as if she'd just noticed. "Do you want us to take you to the hospital? We have another ambulance ready."
Old fear jabbed through the mind fog. Memories of sterile, blank walls, blankets that stank of bleach, tubes sprouting from his twiggy arms. Unable to breathe. Blood in his mouth.
"No," he spat, then struggled to correct himself. "No. I'll be alright. This isn't..." He glanced down blearily at his chest, which glowed crimson in the flashing emergency lights. He couldn't even feel it. "This isn't bad."
"...Let's get it looked over, at least." He gave a sharp inhale, and she added hastily, "At the ambulance, Mr. Wagner."
"Oh."
At this, he allowed Officer Anderson to gently pull him to his feet and guide him to the ambulance that had pulled up behind him. He shuffled his feet, clutching the shock blanket about him. The burns in his chest ached at the movement, and the pain helped to cut through the fog in his head. He sat on the edge of the waiting ambulance and took a shaky inhale as another paramedic began to inspect his chest.
He checked out again as they tended to the burns-- cutting off his ruined shirt, cleaning the wounds, bandaging them. His mother's voice echoed in his skull, "Dissociation isn't healthy, honey," but it had become a bad habit over the years. He had gotten very good at it.
"What is your connection to Pyro?"
He didn't know how long Officer Anderson had been sitting beside him, or how long it had been since the paramedic had finished bandaging him. He suspected that he'd ignored a few of her questions already, or maybe he had been answering them without even knowing. He blinked, as if waking up.
She repeated herself, and even though her tone wasn't accusatory, Eli could sense the underlying suspicion in the question.
"What is your connection to Pyro?"
"His name is Atlas Beckett," he said, eerily calm, his voice coming from outside of him. "He's my roommate at Edgewood. We've been friends for over a year."
"And he called you for help."
"Yes."
She wrote this down. "Were you aware that he was Pyro before this incident?"
He answered without hesitation, staring straight ahead. "No."
She raised an eyebrow, clicked her pen. "No idea? No hints? You were roommates, after all."
Eli looked her in the eyes, expressionless. She reminded him a little of his grandmother. She had thin smile lines along her mouth and under her eyes.
"No."
She accepted this with equal lack of expression. "Alright, Mr. Wagner."
There was a pause as she wrote down her notes, and when Eli looked up, he noticed that the moon was shrouded in clouds. He had stopped shaking, now, and the shock blanket weighed heavy on his shoulders. His backpack had been placed next to him on the metal step, and he grabbed it, wincing at the stiffness in his arm and chest muscles.
He wanted to go home. He wanted to sleep.
"May I ask you a favor, officer?"
His own words surprised him, and his voice was so low that it was nearly inaudible.
Officer Anderson glanced up from her paperwork, the dim light from the ambulance glowing in the wisps of blonde hair escaping from her bun, casting shadows over her dark uniform. She nodded.
"Please tell me he'll live."
Her gaze slid away from his, and she shifted uncomfortably. "I can't, kid. I'm sorry. At this point... we really can't say."
Eli tried to feel something at this. Some hint of the horror, the agony, the grief from before. But there was nothing, and that was almost worse.
"I'm going to take you home, now, Mr. Wagner," Officer Anderson said in a soft voice. "You don't look in a state to drive. Can I have your address? We'll take care of your car for you, too."
Eli told her, and she gave him a weary smile.
"One last question, kiddo. Can I ask what you were doing out at this time of night? Why were you so close by, that you could be at Pyro... I mean, Atlas' side in a few minutes?"
Eli blinked slowly. "Studying," he said, the lie slipping out as easily as it always did. "And then coffee. Anatomy test tomorrow." His words slurred. He was definitely going to miss that test.
The officer nodded, jotted this down in her notebook, then closed it quietly.
"Okay. Let's go. We'll contact you if we have any more questions, and please call if you remember any more information."
The ride back was a quiet one, one that Eli could hardly remember only five minutes after it ended. He had given the keys to his car to another officer, a young, beanpole of a man with flaming red hair, and Officer Anderson gave him instructions first to where the car was situated, and then Eli's dorm. Then she led him to her police car, and then they were home.
Almost all the lights were off at Rosiello Hall. A tragedy happened to one of their own men, and his dormmates had slept through it. Eli did not want to see any of them. He didn't want to break the news, answer their questions, or relive the memories for their benefit.
He wanted to sleep for days.
"Do you want me to walk you inside?" Officer Anderson. "Or can I get someone for you?"
"No," Eli muttered, cracking the door open. "That's okay."
"Okay. We'll stay in touch, Mr. Wagner." She handed him a card. "If you need anything, call my department. I'll tell the hospital to keep you in the loop. There may be some... confidentiality issues, though."
"Okay," he said numbly, and shut the door. She waited until he got inside, and she was already gone when he realized that he probably should have thanked her.
He found himself swaying in the doorway to his room about five minutes later, with no memory of swiping his card, climbing the stairs, or walking down his floor's hallway. He had placed his hand on the knob when a wave of dizziness overtook him. He leaned his forehead into the cool wood of his room for a moment, listened to his shuddering breaths and the pound of blood in his ears.
Then he went inside.
It was dark, of course. Sebastian, his second roommate-- the one that wasn't dying, he thought, then shuddered-- kept a strict schedule and an early bedtime, unlike Eli. But when Eli shut the door behind him, careful to soften the sound as much as he could, Sebastian's voice echoed in the empty room.
"...Atlas? Or Eli?"
Pain stabbed through Eli's chest, and he couldn't tell if it was actual emotion, or just the burns acting up.
"It's Eli," he whispered, the words coming out in a sigh, exhaustion threatening to drag him to the floor before he could make it to his bed. He couldn't tell Seb what happened. Could he?
"Turn on a light, man. You sound... Are you okay?"
There was a shuffling sound as Seb rolled over, sleepiness clogging his voice.
Eli clicked on the light on his desk without a word, the dim glow throwing long shadows along the walls. Seb blinked blearily from the top bunk, dark black, movie-star hair mussed, a sleep scar stretching over his cheek from pressing it to his pillow.
"Eli? Your chest..."
Eli glanced down at the bandages the crisscrossed his chest, the stiff white bright against his tan skin.
"Oh. Yeah."
Something broke inside of him. Maybe it was that he was safe, now, with a friend and his bed and his secrets, but for whatever reason, the dam burst, and all the emotions came bubbling to the surface.
He swayed on his feet, darkness climbing into his vision.
"Eli? Eli!"
Eli stumbled to his bunk, falling halfway onto it. Tears threatened, burning his eyes. His head was filled with lightning, his jagged breaths were thunder in his ears. God. God.
There was a loud thump as Seb jumped down from his bunk and shakily regained his balance.
"Dude. What's wrong? You're shaking."
Eli felt a hand press between his shoulder blades, and then the tears wouldn't stop. He gripped his sheets with his fists and curled in on himself, ignoring the searing pain of the burns pressing into the wooden bedframe.
"Atlas," he managed between clenched teeth. A sob racked his whole body before he could say again, "It's Atlas."
He slumped to the floor, heaving. After what felt like days, the tears began to subside. His whole body ached.
He turned to lean his back against the frame, grateful to see that Seb was still there, perched on the bed in his wrinkled sleep shirt and boxers. Eli's cheeks were sticky with tears.
Sebastian picked at his nails nervously, black eyebrows knit together in concern.
"What happened?"
"I..." Eli swallowed, blinked away fresh tears. Atlas's empty bed sat in the corner across from him, the sheets creased and drenched in shadow.
"I think I just watched him die."
Subscribe to Hero for Hire for weekly updates!
Points: 90000
Reviews: 1085
Donate