𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕼𝖚𝖊𝖊𝖓'𝖘 𝕷𝖎𝖔𝖓: 𝕮𝖔𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖙

Her Consequences

Adrenaline was flooding through Y/N's veins. She could feel it vibrating through her body, from her spine to her fingertips she felt electric. Her heart was beating in her head hard enough to make it pound. Her ragged breathing was all she could hear above the blood rushing through her ears, pouring through her skull like tidal waves. She felt like she was burning and freezing all at once. Her hands and feet felt like they weighed nothing, but her body was made of thick cement. Y/N felt that she might fall, but if she fell, she would fly. Her mind was racing and silent all at once. She swore her stomach was going to spew from her mouth while somehow plunging into her feet.

She should be happy. She was doing a good job, was she not? She hit her mark. Her bullet had burst that packet of finely ground flour, which was her job. The lantern's fire had caught the flour, making it burst into even bigger flames. It had sent sparks and embers flying through the shattering window of the Purple House dorm. That had been the plan she and Ciel had devised. And she had done her part. And she had done it well. The fire was now licking away at the stone building, swallowing up what it could. Carpets, curtains, furniture, and the like were all being turned into piles of ash. That had been what they wanted.

This was how they were going to do what the Queen requested of them. They needed to meet, or at least see, Derrick Arden. And this was how they were going to achieve that. They were using an extreme method, and Y/N had known that from the beginning, but it was necessary. Wasn't it? Derrick hadn't been in class. He wasn't walking around the grounds with his fellow classmates. He wasn't with the P4 or any of their Fags and friends. And he certainly hadn't gone home. So smoking him out of the one place he had to be hiding wasn't a bad thing, was it? If you really thought about it, wasn't it reasonable? They were at their wits end, fed up with Weston's excuses about why they couldn't see Derrick. So this was an understandable course of action, right?

Y/N wasn't going to hurt anyone. She had broken the window, but she hadn't climbed inside. She wasn't stalking by the foot of a boy's bed, checking to see if he was Derrick before moving onto the next one. She wasn't walking down the halls of the House with a knife in her hand or a loaded pistol. She had thrown in a make-shift bomb to smoke out one boy. Was this worse than going through every room and preparing to stab or shoot anyone who happened to stir upon her arrival?

Y/N felt like she was going to throw up. Acid and bile were rising in her throat. It felt like ice was creeping up through her vines as smoke billowed out of the broken window. She was petrified as she watched the growing fire swallow up more and more of the room. Paintings on the wall and their frames began to grow black and ashy. The walls were being charred away. And the fire was spreading, reaching and clawing its way into the surrounding rooms in what felt like a hundred years in the blink of an eye. And all Y/N could do was stare.

She felt frost-bitten. Her hands hurt, they were so cold. And her nose, lungs, throat, eyes and ears burned. Her nose and lungs burned from the thick, hot, smoke pouring out of the window of the dorm. Her throat and eyes burned as ash stabbed into her, and as her tears began to well up as her breathing became labored. And her ears. They did more than burn. They were smoldering, sweltering, searing with the pain of screams. Silent screams tore through her eardrums as they flooded into her head. They were not the screams of the schoolboys. They were not the screams of her classmates.

They were the screams of the children. The children who could no longer speak. The children with scars on their heads. The children with dirty clothes and dead eyes. The children Y/N had left behind. The children who burned for her sins. The children who burned for the world's sins. And they begged for her to save them. They pleaded for her to take them into her arms and to pull them out of their cages. They cried for her to carry them away from the house. All in complete silence with emotionless eyes and mouths that couldn't speak.