Thea Hargreeves had already experienced loss in her short life, but her family was something she was determined to keep together and close to her heart. No matter what.
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"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to." "I don't much care where–" "Then it doesn't matter which way you go."
✧✦✧
"Are you okay?"
Thea heard the words distantly, as though spoken behind a wall of glass. Herself, she felt trapped; captivated in an endless, subdued horror by the mutilated faces of Jayme and Alphonso which flashed behind her eyes with every blink.
Because those were their names, weren't they?
Thea was sick to realise that the only reason she knew the names of those she'd inadvertently let die was due to hearing them upon the lips of their anguished sister.
A family had been splintered today. Two dead; corpses splayed upon the hotel floor; a homage to the devastation brought upon by the hotel's newest patrons. They were a disaster...bringing destruction wherever they went.
No one was safe from the wreckage but themselves.
And how long would that last?
The Hargreeves family were a collective time bomb, waiting to tear and shred; to involuntarily absorb everything within their wake into an orbital despair.
Involuntarily, she repeated to herself for the nth time. I don't want to cause devastation. I don't want to see more people die because of us. Because of me.
"Hey, Thea?"
"Yeah?" she heard herself respond, muffled from beyond the glass.
"Are you okay?"
At that the glass shattered, and Thea was thrown back into the world with a start.
They were sitting at the hotel bar – herself and Diego – while the blonde mechanically ran her hands through the soft strands of Mr Pennycrumb's golden fur, whose head lay upon her lap, his body splayed onto the seat beside her.
"...What?"
Diego looked concerned, tracing the lines of her face with an apprehensive curiosity. "I said, are you okay? You've been pretty spaced out for the last thirty minutes...I was starting to get worried."
I think I'm going mad, was whatshe wanted to say, but instead she settled on–
"I'm fine."
Diego was not convinced.
"That was some pretty quick thinking back there," he said lightly, edging into the conversation he really wanted to have with a delicacy not usually utilised. "You saved us getting toasted."
"Not everybody," she said glumly, glancing at the empty carpet where the bodies once lay. Not even the blood remained; absorbed into the crimson carpet and erasing any semblance of their existence.
