Once, there was an island.... // MPHFPC one shots, imagines, and misc !

Fireworks { Jacob Portman}

sorry for all the mitski inspired chapters recently its just been one of those months lol//

Fourth of July, 2001

Boom!

Jacob pressed his face closer to the window, fogging up the glass with his breath. He was searching for the fireworks, even though they were miles away and he wouldn't have been able to see them unless he was standing on someones shoulders in the middle of the street. His hands left smudges on the glass.

" We should go see the fireworks, Grandpa." He decided, turning to his grandfather. Abe Portman sat across the room, in the old chair he had owned for decades. 

" Yakob, you said you didn't want to."

" Yeah, but that was before. You don't have to go if you don't want to." 

" You know your parents would never let you see them alone." He flipped to a different page in his book, and Jacob pouted.

" Just for a couple minutes?" 

" Oh, maybe. But it has to be our secret, alright, Tygrysku?"

" Okay!"

He clung to his grandfathers arm as they walked up the street, jumping over cracks in the sidewalk and pointing out every bug he saw. There were a lot of bugs in Florida, especially in the summer. At the top of the hill, Jacob could see the fireworks blooming over the treeline. Great splashes of gold and red and green in a deep blue sky, lighting up the night in celebration. It was amazing.

Then he looked up at his grandfather, and saw the sad lines etched in his face, and wished he hadn't asked to see them at all.

Fourth of July, 2012

Boom!

Jacob tightened his grip on the steering wheel, his eyes glued to the horizon. His knuckles were going white, but every time a firework went off, his heart dropped and his mind started racing. He wanted to block it all out. So he turned the radio up and wished it would stop.

Splotches of gold went off in the corner of his eye, and he braced himself for the noise again. He should pull over, wait out the night.

Yeah, he should do that. Better a breakdown on the side of the road instead of on it. 

He pulled over and covered his ears as more went off in the distance.

It was stupid, how easily he slipped back into the previous summer. Sometimes, it only took a word. An annoying voice chastised him for being weak, despite the root of all his current issues stemming from him refusing to be so. If he told Miss. Peregrine, she would look at him like his parents used to. Like he was sick. Like something was wrong with him. 

He was still waiting for this... simmering pain to solidify. He was waiting for the noise to not bother him again, for the metallic scent of blood to leave him alone so he could actually speak to the people he lived with without wishing he could just drop dead. As he pulled his knees to his chest, he kept wishing that it would stop.

He wished it was quiet.

He wanted the silence that came with the early spring of last year to come back. He missed it- that dull numbness that followed him like a plague— it would have been preferable in comparison to this nagging everything these days.

One morning, he hoped this sadness would fossilize as it once did. 

Jacob looked up in the car seat, catching his eyes in the mirror. They looked grey in the pale light, and he grimaced. He recognized that lingering look, that marriage to silence that resided deep in his pupils. He had seen the same look on his grandfather over and over and over again. It was the look of forgetting how to cry.

It was the look of men who hunted hollowghast and ran from their past.

Men like the Portman family, men like Jacob and Abraham before him. 

Jacob sighed and turned the radio up again. He'd listen to the memories, since there wasn't much else to do until the fireworks died down.

In that quiet, a river that would never find home ran dry.