Spades and Angels

It Won't be Forever Mi Amor

Lolita

Over A Year and a Half Later

It's hard re-adjusting to normal after what happened that night. However, I'm luckier than most given what happened and how quickly we were all found that night. The night I almost died. That I almost lost my family and friends...almost lost him.

Oddly, the news of the carnival site fire didn't hit the news for over two weeks after we were rescued, and that also has not been mentioned. Not that we cared since an unspoken part of the Angels motto was that we didn't want extra attention. Luckily we did get to the hospital but when asked what happened we had to come up with a lie. So we said we'd been walking in the forest, a woods hike, and we thought we'd heard kids laughing there. The lie went over smoothly since it was no surprise there. It's true that because of its condemned status, kids did play in that abandoned area so that's the story they went with.

What was broadcasted in newspapers was that we were heroes. We were heroes attempting to save kids who turned out not to be there. When the story ran the fire was blamed on a faulty wire and since the ground itself was so scorched they didn't know what started it. After all, by the time officials returned to the carnival site, there was nothing left for them to investigate to come up with another answer. All that was left was just some wires that were still sparking.

However, once it was cleared and people moved on from the story the council moved on with the restoration project they'd been planning. Once they'd cleared and treated the land they built the redo of the carnival that they'd been promising and planning for months before our nightmare of an experience there. Now over a year on, the carnival currently stands as if nothing ever happened. They even named it the same as before, calling it the 'Devil's Paradise and Angel's Hell' carnival. The newly remodelled carnival was rebuilt directly on the ashes and bones of the old.

None of us will go near it though. The memories of what happened were too traumatic. Neither can we stand to hear carnival music - some of us are worse than others with that - but we all suffer from the one song we hate - 'Run rabbit run'. Understandably, you see, none of us could stand to hear that song. The intense trauma flashbacks hit even the strongest of us. The worst attacks coming every time the 'bang' part of the song comes on we all flinch. All of us looking over our shoulders, where we're cursed to remember it. Always remembering, remembering it all.

I'm not ashamed to say that I don't want to remember it. I don't. I don't want to remember it but I do. I do remember every moment of the time I was trapped there. Right from the moment I woke up, having been pulled out of the car wreck next to my beloved, to when someone woke me up in the hospital. The one dark period during that time was when I collapsed from the gunshot to the chest which made me bleed out enough that I collapsed. Not knowing how close I'd come at the time to never waking up again.

Though even with the time that's passed since that fateful night it's by no means been an easy almost two years. For any of us. Around six to eight months after we all made it out we lost Hali. It was labelled a racing accident since she had been doing one of her usual races when her car somehow suspiciously went off a cliff resulting in her death. Something that no matter our attempt to look into what really happened - and our lack of answers - shook us all. Both because of the lack of answers as well as how most of us were involved in that part of the underground scene.

Though we knew it would hit Ash and Riv the hardest and it did. We try to be there for them but it's difficult since we knew they'd both need their space but not wanting to make a....not wanting to leave them.

It was a good idea too, given how it seemed to hit Riv the most. Even before Hali died we noticed changes in her behaviour but they got worse when we lost Hali. She'd vanish without a word in the middle of the night. We'd find daggers missing from sets. It was never a whole set mind but still, we worried and had suspicions. All of us worried that since she was a fifteen-year-old girl with missing weapons. We were all worried. A feeling made even stronger when some of us started noticing she'd be meticulous when cleaning the ones she trained with. Almost as if she's trying to remove evidence, though for what we didn't know for some time.