• not edited •
I wake up in the dark, ears deafened by an alarm and eyes blinded by thick smoke. Panic seizes my heart, and I'm tempted to stay in bed and hide in the sheets, as if they'll protect me from whatever is happening, like how they had protected me from the monsters. My blankets never did do a good job protecting me from the monsters, so I figured my best chance at survival right now is to get downstairs and see what the hell is going on.
The smoke isn't thick enough yet to fill up my bedroom, so I still have space to crawl without choking, but I grab a towel lying on the floor anyway and drench it with water from the water bottle on my bedside table. I cover my nose and mouth with the wet towel and step out the open door, into the hallway. Red and orange fire climbs up the walls and stairs, wrapping around the banister and threatening to eat away the structure of the house.
Heart thumping in alarm, I look up at the sprinklers, which are not doing their jobs, and then look back down at the stairwell in front of me. It was like a staircase down to hell. The fire has already ravaged the picture frames hung on the wall, and the Christmas decorations on the wooden banister are all decimated to ashes. Going down there is suicide. I'll have to find another way out of this wreck.
Just as I turn to run back to my room, I hear a scream over the piercing fire alarm. "Help me!"
My mother.
My heart rate accelerates and I glance over my shoulder, back down at the staircase, which is quickly disintegrating. "Help me!" my mother cries again, and I grit my teeth before turning back to the stairs and leaping down into the fiery pits of hell.
While running down the steps, I try throwing up a telekinetic force shield to block out the flames, but my telekinetic powers have only just developed a year ago, and are barely strong enough to shake a leaf. The flames lick at my skin, but I'm running fast enough that they don't climb on and burn my flesh.
I follow my mother's wails and burst into the family room on the first floor. I halt at the open doorway and my heart lurches when I see the state of the room and the person inside it. The low-slung couches have been reduced to scraps of metal and fabric, and the TV hung on the wall is sparking with electricity, threatening to blow the whole place up. The wallpaper is peeling and being eaten by the ivy-like flames, and the the huge, gold chandelier dripping with diamonds in the center of the ceiling looks like it's either going to melt and collapse, or break off with the ceiling - and collapse.
And then there's my mother. She's crumpled in a heap in the middle of the small room, right below the close-to-collapsing chandelier, which is much bigger than her thin and short frame. The fire on the floor has already started nibbling at her long, white, silk nightgown, and is slowly climbing up and devouring her feet. My mother isn't doing anything to stop it, too. Instead of trying to bat at the fire with her feeble hands, or even trying to move away, she's curled in a fetal position with her head clutched in her bejeweled hands.
"Help me!" she screams again, eyes squeezed shut and face twisted into a painful grimace.
Her call breaks me out of my stunned stupor and I rip the towel away from my face. "Mother," I respond. At the sound of my voice, her eyes snap open and dart back and forth frantically until they latch onto mine. The whites in her big blue eyes are colored red by the smoke, making her look even crazier than normal, and I flinch when a lick of flame wraps around her ankle and she screams.
Her pain-filled shriek pierces my eardrums and my heart, and I step forward, ignoring the fire between us, and reach out a hand. "Mother," I say again, this time louder and more commandingly, "grab my hand."
She only continues looking at me with those manic eyes, refusing to pry her hands away from her skull. Her screams continue.
"Grab my hand, now!" I yell at her, taking a few more steps forward. The flames nibble at my bare toes and I take an involuntary step back. It doesn't matter anyway because my mother doesn't uncurl herself to reach a hand back out to me.
"Help me!" she takes a break mid-scream to cry out, and I'm tearing up due to both the smoke and frustration.
Ignoring the fire, I step forward again, this time dropping the towel to reach out with both hands. "I'm trying!" I argue, "but you need to give me your hand!"
She starts shaking her head frantically, jerking it left and right like a broken doll. "Help me!" she cries again, except this time it sounds different. Too close. As if she's inside my head.
A searing pain shoots across my legs and I let out a bloodcurdling scream. I look down, confused when I don't see my legs burning to crisps, then look back at my mother and see her flame-engulfed legs. She's doing it again. She's inside my head, channeling her thoughts as well as her pain.
No, not again.
I throw up a mental shield - something I taught myself years ago when my mother would punish me by channeling pain into me through telepathy. As the years went by, the punishment became a source of pleasure. She does it whenever she feels upset. Whenever she is in pain, I am in agony. Whenever she is afraid, I am terrified. Whenever she is angry, I am furious.
But the mental shield isn't working this time.
Fear tears through my heart and I try to step back, away from the fire. Away from her. I'm not doing this again.
Seeing my retreat, my mother's eyes bulge and her brows draw into an angry "v", even as she continues to scream. Help me. She demands in my head, and I feel myself relinquishing the control over my body in favor for hers. Suddenly, I'm walking back towards her. And then I'm in through ring of fire, just a yard away from my mother.
I scream, knowing the pain I am feeling right now is not hers, but mine. I can even smell my burning flesh as the flames crawl up my back from behind me, and eat at my feet. My mother is completely mummified by flames, and only her pale face is left unmarred.
Her eyes look triumphant and my heart heats up with a new feeling. When the anger builds up, I know it's not hers, but my own. I attempt another mental shield, this time throwing it up with more force than necessary, but it does the trick. My mother is slammed out of my brain, and I feel the instant effect when my body loosens and I get control over my motor skills back.
Help me.
Her voice is a distant echo in my head, but it fuels my fury. Get out, get out, get out! I scream at her in my head.
"No!" I shout out loud, fists clenched and chest heaving.
I feel myself accidentally release a surge of power along with my anger, but I don't have time to regret it because a loud cracking noise makes us both jerk our heads upward. The ceiling cracks open like porcelain, splintering into tiny fissures at the base of the chandelier. Time slows as we watch the elaborate chandelier rip away from the ceiling and crash towards the floor - right where my mother is.
Instinctively, I suck in a sharp breath and throw out my hands. The chandelier is pushed out of the air by an invisible force and crashes into the TV instead.
The air seems to be completely still, and the silence is as deafening as the screams from before. My mother's head slowly turns back around and she pins me with suddenly blank eyes. She's not screaming anymore.
"Run, Cassius." she says in that calm, soothing voice she used to use before she went insane.
Panic and fear swells within me, but I manage to instinctively throw up a force shield just as the sparks of electricity from the TV and the burning chandelier explode. The glittering diamond and blazing fire fly at my mother, swallowing her entire body and head from behind. Her eyes are still on mine.
I choke on a smoke-filled sob and stumble back, but I trip on my feet and slam into the wall of the adjoining hallway. The fire reaches me in the next half-second, flooding the whole hallway, and I squeeze my eyes shut in anticipation.
• • •
Police reports say that the fire was caused by a broken oil lamp. Because of course my mother would own an oil lamp and still use it as a source of light when getting a late night drink.
The fire was fueled by the bottle of '89 Bordeaux in her hand, which, when she dropped it on the floor, lit the curtains on fire. From there, the fire traveled, and finally baked the plaster on the ceiling until it cracked, causing the heavy chandelier to fall. The chandelier somehow smashed into the TV, and like a fuse, the TV blew up, resulting in the explosion that killed the late Mrs. Evangeline Nova. The fire from the explosion then reached the alcohol in the basement, which triggered the second explosion that annihilated the entire west wing of the mansion, just moments after I was rescued by one of the local Superheroes.
My father was later informed of the incident while he was on a business trip in London, and came back to deal with the paperwork. Meanwhile, I still can't manage to control my powers, even to help my own mother. The only thing I learned from the incident is that dying creates a hell lot of paperwork for the living.
The funeral was two days after the incident, and to be honest, I don't remember a thing from the small, private ceremony. Everything feels surreal and fake. The days following the funeral are a blur, as if my mind is still trying to wrap itself around the idea of my mother actually being gone. We had issues, yes, and I... I guess I did refuse to help when I had the chance to - when she tried controlling my mind and made me step into the fire, but when it comes down to it, I don't think I'm ready for her to be gone. She's never cared for me the way a mother should have, and I had numbers of nannies to fill the spot, but she's always been physically there, while my father was and still is neither physically nor emotionally here for me. I feel a little lost, to be honest.
I've had a lot of time to think, especially since after the funeral I was returned to the hospital to treat my wounds. I knew, logically, that I couldn't have actually saved her, as she was already immersed in fire and it would have been impossible to save both myself and her. Everyone assures me that I have nothing to be guilty of. But I do. I'm guilty of not wanting to save her.
The truth makes me sick to my stomach, and I squirm in my hard hospital bed. The nurse taking my blood pauses and asks me if I'm alright, but I can barely hear her, because I'm suddenly back in the family room, standing in that doorway, surrounded by fire and smoke, and looking into those crazed blue eyes.
"Help me." she demands in my head, and I take involuntary steps forward until my entire body is searing in pain and my head is locked in her mental grip. I can't get out - not physically and not mentally. I'm completely trapped, and she knows it. Triumph shines in her eyes.
Seeing her expression in my mind's eye brings forth several emotions from within me that were also present at the time: fear and anger.
But I discover another one: hate. It boils deep within me, and I'm both and scared and relieved that I feel that now, laying in the hospital bed, temporarily (hopefully) partially paralyzed due to the severe burns on my back. I'm scared because it means my father is wrong, and that I'm not a good person after all, because what kind of a good person hates their own mother, no matter how unmotherly she was? Yet I am also relieved because I've finally put a name to that emotion, which I've been feeling for a long time now. I feel free, somehow. Enlightened.
The next few seconds of the scene replays over and over again, even after the nurse leaves, even after my father visits me to bring me flowers, even after those flower - daisies - are promptly disposed of after I grew a rash, even after three days and three painful nights:
"Help me." she demands in my head, coaxing herself back into my brain, trying to retake control over my muscles. But I stand strong.
"No!" I scream, accidentally releasing a shot of energy that cracks the ceiling. The ceiling splinters and the chandelier comes crashing down.
The scene always ends with the chandelier crushing my mother, instead of what really happened, which was me pushing it into the TV with my powers. Maybe it's a sign, saying that I ought to have let the chandelier crash and kill my mother on the spot. To clarify that her death wasn't an accident, and that I wanted it.
The idea is scary, but it plagues my mind. By the time I'm officially healed (although the scars snaking all over my back and my ankles will beg to differ) and discharged from the hospital, one week later, I'm still haunted with the notion that I killed my own mother, and that I wanted to.
A wiggling thought appears when I'm in the backseat of my father's Bentley, driving back home. Is it bad that I killed my own mother?
Before I can fully explore that question and attempt to answer it, another thought shoots back, as if automatically: Yes, of course. You are good, Cassius, and it is your duty to show that. The thought takes on the voice of my father in the end, and I quietly lift my head up to look into the rearview mirror.
My father's looking at me through the mirror, and when he catches me noticing his stare, he gives me a firm nod, as if confirming my thoughts. I break out into cold sweat and I'm momentarily frightened that he has heard my immoral thoughts, but I remember that his array of super powers don't include telepathy, so I relax. I look out the window and there, I make a promise to myself.
I will use my powers to serve the world and protect it, like my father is doing and has been doing for the better part of his life. It's better to be selfless and think of the bigger picture, rather than being selfish and focusing on myself. That's also something my father always says.
Maybe I'll take more of his advice from now on. Maybe that'll keep the scary questions at bay.
• • •
sorry for the incredibly late update and the incredibly short chapter and the incredibly crappy quality - i'm just gna try to write everyday and after everything is done this'll go through an intense rewriting.
tbh i just want to finish writing something before i wither away and die ;(