Firebolt | Avengers

PEOPLE THAT BURN DON'T GET IT

The air was toxic. Yet, the middle-aged man with dark hair and shattered no-line bifocals kept inhaling in and out. It didn't matter anymore anyway. His legs were trapped under a pillar, and with nobody supposedly in sight to help him, he knew he was a goner.

Or so he thought.

In his mind, he was just plainly panicking. It's hard to accept your fate, especially when it's unexpected. People think they'll be tough when that day comes, that they'll be brave and accept it all. But that is just in their minds, while in the fateful reality they'd be praying, religious or not, that they will miraculously make it out alive.

The man was coughing like an old-aged smoker, bending over as far as he could to try and slide out of the ruins he was trapped in, but no luck. He had given up on shouting, he'd only be wasting air.

"Hello?"

The man turned his head to the direction of the sound, making out an outline of a woman through his blurred vision, ducking under piles of ruins to see if anyone else was in the room.

"Hey! Hey!"

Her head turned quickly, seeing the troubled man. She then immediately ran over and fell to her knees, doing a quick examination of him. Shattered focals, dirt-stained all over him and flowing blood coming from burnt skin, mostly from down his legs where he was trapped.

"Why didn't you yell out?" The woman had questioned. And as if it was just the weight of a piece of paper, she lifted some of the ruins off of him and threw it to the side.

The man wasn't able to see her face, it was covered with a sort of mask, but not a gas mask. Though she did have one with her. It was more of a mask an unidentifiable superhero would wear. Like Iron Man during his first year of heroism.

"Too much breath being let out. Easy to keep quiet when you think you're meeting your fate." He watched as she pulled the rest of the ruins off of his legs. He didn't even want to look at them, see if they were even there anymore. The man couldn't feel them.

"You hurt anywhere else?" The woman had asked, looking over his torso and head, though saw no visible injuries over than a couple of cuts on his arm from the falling of rocks.

"Not that I'm aware of, no."

She just nodded, saying that she was going to pick him up and lead him out of the burning building before putting the gas mask she had onto his face, allowing him to inhale fresh oxygen.

While going down the first floor, passing over damaged stair steps and dodging debris like it was a game of dodgeball, the man was clinging onto her with all his might. "So, what's exactly happened here? News didn't cover anything, not yet anyway."

"Coworker of mine seemingly just...went insane. One second he was fine, typing out his clients' names from each sale he's made this year to hand out to our manager, but the next-" the man hesitated, seemingly still in fright of the memory.

"But the next second, h-he just broke. Started yelling and screaming, trashing his and other coworkers' desks, even stabbed one person with a pocket knife that we all knew he kept for protection. I tried to near him, hopefully call him down but then he flung a computer at me. Disconnected it from the power box and threw it like it was the weight of a pencil."

"It hit my stomach, knocked the wind out of me and I nearly knocked out from just that. It was the force he threw it at, like something just angered him so much in a second that he grew the strength that of Captain America. He just had this manic look in his eyes, as if he wanted to kill everyone in sight."

The woman looked at him, skipping over a step without even looking. "What did he set on fire, if you know?"

"I don't, but it was likely one of the computers of my colleagues, Terrance. Highly flammable, he sent a couple of reports to HR about getting a new one after it set on fire after he had like 7 tabs open for only ten minutes. Surprised the thing worked after that. Levine, that was his name, the turned maniac, was a smoker meaning he likely had a lighter on him.