Clear Lake Academy holds the worst of the worst delinquents from around the country. Each and every student there holds a notorious background that led them there and almost everyone avoids them.
After setting the tenth building on fire, which just...
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Flashback - Italic Present - normal
A/N this is super long so make sure you takes breaks. I'll have a message for you guys in an authors note following this. Enjoy :) <3
Everyone inevitably loses someone special in their lifetime .
There's no stopping death or grief. Sometimes it's friends and sometimes it's family, but even friends can turn into family. And then there's how that person left; was it a peaceful descent; the last few minutes filled with love? or was it a painful one, a path filled with terror and agony?
The friends you make in your life either stick around or don't — there's no in between, and the friends that do stick around become family.
The truth is, people spend their entire lives searching for someone who will stay. Someone who won't run when things become difficult. Someone who sees the ugliest parts of you and remains anyway.
Most never find it.
But they did.
What existed between those five teenagers was never just friendship. It had long since become something deeper, something unbreakable. They were a family built not through blood, but through survival. Through late nights, shared secrets, bruised hearts, laughter at the worst possible moments, and hands reaching out in the dark when one of them started slipping.
They were children who had learned too early that the world could be unforgiving. Children who discovered that sometimes the people meant to protect you simply... don't.
So they protected each other instead.
They became each other's safety net. Each other's reason to keep standing when life knocked them to their knees. They carried one another through grief, rage, heartbreak, fear—all of it.
And when terror finally came for them in its ugliest form, when death stood in front of them with a gun in its hand, none of them ran. They stayed. They fought. Even when it hurt. Even when they were terrified.
Even when protecting one another meant putting themselves directly in danger.
That's what made these people family.
And it is what will always make them family.
$$$
"Where are they?! Where are they?!"
The young man burst through the hospital doors so hard they rebounded against the walls behind him. Breathless. Dishevelled. Desperate. It hadn't even been months since he'd last stood in this same building under terrible circumstances, and somehow he was here again.
People turned immediately at the sound of his voice. Some looked irritated at the disruption, others startled—but a few recognised the panic written across his face and their expressions softened into something sympathetic.
