Ashes (Flame Ash Burned Backstory)

Chapter 8: Gasoline

1st November 2001

It had just gone on her second year surviving out on her own. She had turned six years old one day ago, but didn't celebrate her birthday at all. Flame had spent the day sitting, alone as always, beneath the tree she had slept under the night before, looking at the picture of her family.

She had tried to remember their voices: the sweet things they had said, the tone of their voices when angry or sad or happy, their laughs. Their laughs were the hardest to remember, as well as their smiles.

Flame had spoken to her family in the photograph as if they were alive and sitting beside her.

As if they were listening, and could speak right back to her.

She wanted to believe, even for a short while, that she wasn't alone. But that was no use, and when she had stopped speaking to her family in the photo, her loneliness was all the more apparent.

Once everything had warmed up again in the spring and there was an abundance of plants and animals to eat, Flame spent the majority of her time hunting and gathering as much food as she could hold in her bag.

Since her meeting with Escape, Flame had been low on food. Whatever she had owned only just lasted to the end of January, and she had gone about three weeks without any food whatsoever. During that time, she had begun to grow weaker and weaker from hunger, so when she ran across something edible at some point in February, she completely devoured it.

If she had been selfish, she would have regretted giving that bag of berries to Escape.

But she wasn't. She knew she would have never been able to forgive herself if she had let him go on without food. He needed it more than she did. And there had been more people in that courtyard who probably needed food as much as he did, so Flame would have given them food if she had enough to spare for all of them.

That morning, Flame had finally just exited the forest she had been in for the past two years, and had been sat upon a rock by the ocean, on a vast stretch of beach void of human life except for her own.

The sound of waves rolling onto the sand was a pleasant change from the sounds of the forest that Flame had grown used to: the creaking of branches from the weight of birds resting upon them, the eerie hoot of an owl somewhere close by but hidden by the darkness, the scuttling and crunching of an animal's feet through dried and fallen leaves. It was the first time in such a long time that the sunlight wasn't blocked by branches and leaves.

Flame's small body was covered in recent and old scars: scratches she had inflicted upon herself in fits of extreme anger (directed at herself) or in moments where she felt completely empty and emotionally drained, desperately wanting to feel something else to distract her from the pain going on in her mind.

She turned her mental pain into physical pain, and though it felt as if it helped in that moment, she regretted it afterwards. But she had no alternative. She found it hard to express positive emotions - almost impossible, in fact.

With all she had been through, how could she possibly be happy?

Flame was stuck in a continuous loop of hurting herself in order to focus on something else for a moment before the pain came back just as bad as before and her body growing more and more covered with red scratches and bleeding cuts that turned into permanent scars.