Crash and Burn

Ch1: Drive

Summary:
Post series Carmen wakes up in a van with Coach Brunt in the middle of nowhere. When everything goes wrong they have to put aside their grief and work together.

It goes explosively worse than expected...

FANART: https://www.tumblr.com/mmaricarmen23/765852621513834496/crash-and-burn
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A heavy feeling wells through a fallen body.

A fog with weight, a soul crushing weight, one that owned every cell of her existence, but dispersed no further than her skin. Only she felt it, and only she knew of it.

It was burdening, crushing— it was every regret or mistake she ever made bound in her mind like an anvil pulling her down, begging she stay in bed and forgot of the world. Rot away her bones and crawl beneath the sheets to die. And Carmen felt it all over her. It felt disgusting, it felt lonely. Carmen groans. It was her body churning for an adrenaline rush that never came— the chaos that kept her alive. It was her soul creaking for something more. A burned child asking for the heat because it's all she ever knew.

Lately her impulse to run was becoming lesser, not because she had retired, but because her mind was only just beginning to realise there was nothing to run from. Because she lived with her biological mother now, a fact her soul was not properly bound with even after a trying 6 months. Half a year of pushing her body out of bed not because she wanted to, but because she had to. Because seeing worry on her mother's face hurt her more than a gut punch. They'd lost each other once, and both were terrified to do it again. Carmen felt horrible for yearning for more; but that didn't stop her soul from craving a reason to die again, so she had an excuse to live for. Something to survive.

Rather than wasting hours in the spare bed of her mother's orphanage, decorating a room that'd had people in it before her. Laying awake at night in a mattress that... didn't normally feel so cramped and estranged. Carmen prided herself on details, but she suddenly had no control over the memories of her room. If it didn't feel like this— rubbery and firm, then she doesn't know what it does feel like. Surely it was never this constricting... it didn't usually hold her arms and legs in place.

Dreams deprive themselves from Carmen's head as she slowly begins to clarify the nature of her abrupt arousal. She felt jostled, and like she'd fallen asleep in the late afternoon without once first lying her head on a pillow.

Carmen drags her head upright sluggishly, feeling delirium wash its way through her throbbing head. Her throat was dry, and her limbs are constricted— no, tied down in a way that made her feel detained, or perhaps like property. She goes to massage her forehead only for her other wrist to follow closely, bound within the other as if her skin had matted itself in her sleep. She blinks groggily at the sight of something else wrapped around the both of them, trying and failing to remember when she'd first closed her eyes. An uncertainty oozes through the thief, one she hasn't felt since-

"Good morning." A jolly voice, Carmen's eyes snap fully open, lifting her neck as best as she can with her helpless body tangled together. She finds a window, and registers the ground beneath her moving— harshly, like a car driving on rocks and-

She's in a car driving on rocks... the sky outside tells her it was late— but her internal clock says it should be lunchtime, not the brink of sunset. Carmen's heart rate picks up, she struggles to see much more than hints of deserted landscapes with her arms refusing to— Carmen wrestles with herself, finally casting a downward glance at... ropes. Actual ropes.

Carmen's breaths quicken. Where am I? Her ankles are knotted too, and though she can see double of nearly everything around her, Carmen can't find that voice. It's one she knew. Maybe this was one of Shadowsan's impractical jokes (he was terrible with those), or maybe Zack and Ivy were giving her the full tour of work as ACME agents— or maybe her mother kidnapped her to take to therapy as she so often joked about.