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Akira could get used to this: going on a walk with parents after school, spending time together at the cinemas, eating ice-cream on their way home, laughing at her father’s dumb jokes. Being normal, being happy. It doesn’t matter if her mother wasn’t carrying things with her left arm because of the burn marks twisting their way up her arm. It doesn’t matter that her father makes weird, sad faces at Akira whenever he thinks she isn’t looking. It doesn’t matter, because she is normal.
They are walking a different way home, the long way, because Akira wants this moment of normality to last just a little bit longer. She knows that she won’t receive it again until a week later, when school finished for the week and there were no children around to point at her and whisper and not come close to her for fear of getting a burn.
It’s ok, she always thought to herself during school, it’s ok because the weekend is soon, and then you’ll get to be normal. You’ll be normal.
Her parents walk together, arm in arm, while Akira runs ahead of them, laughing joyfully at the way her wings flicker and leave small embers floating behind her. She turns around to smile at them when the screams ring out in the air from behind her. Her parents quickly detach themselves from each other, and begin to run towards her, arms out to grab her. Her father scoops her up, and together they run away from the screams and dust where buildings had collapsed.
There were others running with them, pressing up on either side of them, a wave of humans cascading their way down the street to get away from the danger. A sickening crack from ahead causes the crowd to split, some running harder to get out from under the collapsing building, some running to the other side of the street. Some, unable to push through the crowd, choking in the sea of people and dust, can’t get out in time, and are swallowed up by the concrete and dust and screams.
Akira’s dad was pulled along with the crowd of those who ran to the other side of the street. He runs with them, holding Akira’s head down into his chest, his heartbeat loud against her ear, louder than the screams. They run with the crowd for a few more seconds before he skids to a halt and turns wildly around.
“Akane!” His voice is ragged with desperation as he screams the name down the street, turning around sharply and bumping into people. He clutches Akira closer to his chest as he yells, calling out to her mother, pushing through the crowd of screaming and crying people. He runs for some time until his breath catches in his throat and his movements slow down. His grip on Akira falters, and she manages to turn weakly around to see what he was looking at. There, lying under a large piece of rubble, was her mother’s hair on the ground, clumped together with blood and dust.
“Mother?” Akira quietly asks, moving towards the rubble slowly. “Mum?”
The screams are all that answer her.
Her father sobs behind her, falling to his knees and clutching at his hair. His fire comes out and wraps around his arms, drying up the tears as they fall from his eyes. Her mother doesn’t answer. She doesn’t make a noise.
The crowd has run away now, and the screams are quieting down. There is only sobs and silence, and a pounding in Akira’s head that threatens to split it in two. A person is thrown out from one of the buildings close by, smashing into the building across the street, causing more rubble to break off and rain down. They stiffly pick themselves out of the crater they made with their body, and drop down into the street. They don’t look like any hero Akira’s seen.
Someone steps out of the building the person was thrown out of, and they shine in the sunlight, smiling proudly; a hero has arrived. They arrived, but too late, as Akira’s father still sobs and her mother still lies beneath this rubble, not saying anything. Too late. Too late.
There is no fancy speech from either party before they clash; there’s only enough time to take in a breath, and then they are fighting. The buildings around them crack more under outbursts of power, and the one behind her father begins to fall.
“Dad!” Akira calls out as the concrete drops further and further down, casting a shadow over her father and herself. She doesn’t have time to blink before she’s pushed out of the way down the street, and then the building crashes to the ground. It swallowed up her father. The hero stands on the other side of the rubble, glaring at the man next to Akira. The man who had been thrown out of the building, the man who was mostly likely a villain, the man who saved her. His hand rests lightly against her head, pushing her further away from the rubble as he runs back into the fight. The phantom of his hand rests there as Akira runs, tears streaming down her face, back down the street to the place where the most people would be.
At some point, someone had taken her to the police station, where a woman spoke softly to her despite the noise from the rest of the station. After stammering out her uncle’s phone number, she sits there, clothes coated in the dust of crumbled buildings, ears ringing with screams, eyes swimming with her mother’s hair, and a hand upon her head. When her uncle gets there, it is with hard, unseeing eyes that he looks over her with, gentle hands that hold her in all the wrong places, and a body that runs colder than her father’s. He hugs her close to his chest, and it feels wrong, so unlike her own father’s chest and hugs, something that she had less than an hour ago which she would never have again.
This is not normality. She cries into her chest, sobbing for all the moments and memories she has lost, for the brown hair clumped with blood, for the fire along her father’s arms which did no good against the concrete raining from above.
When she goes back to school, no one points at her or whispers about her. Silence follows her through the classrooms and hallways. They still keep their distance, unsure how to comfort, inexperienced with grief, unable to comprehend the pain felt by losing something you’ve had for your whole life. Her uncle tries to comfort and help her, but he hugs her stiffly and speaks too quietly towards her and stares off into the distance when she is speaking.
There is a time, when she is older, that he adds screaming at her to the list of things he does. Screaming about clothes, screaming about grades, screaming about her parents. The normality he had portrayed at the beginning begins to rip at the edges, revealing pain and anguish and an inability to function without his brother and sister-in-law. Those days, where he screams and she screams back until her throat is raw, those days are the days where something in her room crumbles to ash. Where she concentrates on making one thing burn without setting her entire room alight.
The phantom hand on her head rests there, calming and comforting her more than any words or actions by classmates, teachers, or her uncle ever could. She watches the news, hearing of the villain attacks, of heroes valiantly fighting and saving people, and hates it. They didn’t save her parents, nor all the others under the rubble. That villain had saved her, and now he was in jail whilst the hero that causes her father’s death paraded out in the streets in front of the public.
She buys fireproof clothes, so that she doesn’t have to concentrate on making her fire harmless. She practices her fire in her room, burning old objects and clothes that she doesn’t use. She stitches a red phoenix onto one of her black fireproof jackets. She listens intently to the news, watching the world spiral into chaos, watching heroes and villains alike causing destruction. She researches previous civilisations, tracking their path to destruction and noticing a pattern.
The world is doomed to failure, like all other civilisations before them, because people only care for themselves.
A few weeks after she turns 17, she and her uncle scream and yell at each other, arguing for hours with each other. She tries to make him understand that the world is chaotic, that it will destroy itself, that heroes cannot save the world if they cannot save even two humans. He screams and punches the walls, crowding her into a corner, yelling in her face about how she is wrong, always wrong, a pitiful child that couldn’t even save her parents, what should she know about saving people?
That is their last fight.
She bundles up her fireproof clothes into a bag, along with all of her money and her uncle’s credit card. She locks all the windows in the house before sending a quick flick of her wrist to the curtains and leaving through the front door, locking it behind her. The curtains burn brightly, engulfing the house in smoke and flames. She watches it from an alleyway, the fire flicker in the window, the ambulance and fire truck arriving to help, her uncle helped out of the house, coughing wildly. And somewhere in her chest, something that had grown cold throughout the years thaws and sets itself ablaze.
This is normality.
She runs, feeling lighter than she ever had in years, the phantom hand on her head spurring her to go faster. The fire in her chest blazes as she decides that she would help the world in its chaotic spiral to repay the time given to her by that villain, her hero. The world would fade to grey as she burnt it to ashes.
A fire burns within you,
Bright and unfettered.
Can you see it?
Can you feel it flicker through your body?
I can see it, burning
Within you,
Lighting up your skin
As if you are the sun itself.