Run Like the Devil • L.S. • Larry Supernatural AU

Chapter 3

He was a week in the group home, with his sisters, before his social worker was able to get in touch with his birth father; during that time, Lottie didn't speak to him, and he tried very hard to be okay with it, continually reminding himself it was what he deserved. He had done that, even though he hadn't been able to control himself, had been banging on the walls of his brain and screaming, unable to look away as something else, something burning him from the inside out—he couldn't escape from it, it was everywhere—poured gasoline with his hands and lit matches and locked the doors and did something that kept them shut, listening to his parents screaming and pounding on the wood, Lottie screaming from behind him to help her get the other girls out and why wouldn't he move. He didn't respond, just stood, stock-still, blocking the door and watching the smoke creep through into the hall, and when the screaming stopped, he was ripped through with white-hot agony, searing up his throat and out of him as black crowded his vision.

The police didn't ask him if he'd started the fire, and he wasn't sure what he would say if they had. As it was, he didn't say much of anything at all. His throat was sore, and he picked at loose threads on the scratchy hospital blanket and listened to the hiss of the oxygen rushing through the mask strapped to his face, which was a convenient excuse not to talk, just nodding and shaking his head and shrugging, all of which hurt as well.

The cops had eventually left—he didn't really register anything about their appearances or voices, but he had the sensation that they were being careful with him—and the social workers, one after another, began cycling in and out of his room, and none of them would let him go see his sisters, who, they assured him, were safe at a temporary foster home and whom he could see once he had recovered, and he didn't have the vocabulary or the voice to tell them that they weren't safe, but then again, he wasn't sure if they were safe around him either, so he waited.

It was fucking boring; there was nothing to do except flip between the same few TV channels. He watched some talk shows and didn't cause trouble for the nurses, even though every time one came in his heart clenched so tightly that he would have to clutch his chest to breathe through it and force himself to look into the nurse's face and remind himself that it couldn't, and never would be, his mom. That thought hurt, but not as much as the frenzied hope that the scrubbed figures kept igniting, and besides, he deserved to hurt. He had burned his parents alive, and he didn't know why, and no one else seemed to, either. No one else seemed to know that he'd done it, and he was occasionally tempted to rip off the oxygen mask and scream I did it please please please make me pay for it you can kill me if you want I deserve it, but he would always swallow it down, wince against the broken-glass feeling in his throat (a combination of smoke inhalation, the doctor had told him, and the way he had screamed endlessly in the ambulance, which he didn't remember).

After an indeterminate period of time—he'd been asleep for a little while, sweetie —he was allowed to be wheeled out by his personal social worker, as the tall woman named Jennifer had identified herself. She informed him that she would be taking him to the same foster home as his sisters while they tried to figure out what to do with them, and that he could tell her anything, and she was here to help him, and was his oxygen tank working, and he was supposed to use it as much as he could, and he would get used to the feeling of the cannula until he didn't even notice it was there, and was he hungry? He shrugged and didn't say anything, just let her keep talking as trees and fences and highway whipped by.

He doesn't remember the foster home well—not even decently, really. He remembers it was crowded, and chaotic, and he had spent a lot of time in bed, breathing in and out with his oxygen tank beside him, and that Jennifer had been there frequently, and that Lottie refused to see him, which was all he could really think about even when his other sisters were with him. The twins attached to him like barnacles whenever they had the opportunity, and Fizzy had thrown an honest-to-god tantrum when she wasn't allowed to sleep in Louis' bed with him and had to go back to the girls' room, but all he could really think about was that Lottie wasn't there. He remembers hollowness, and the acute, aching sensation of something being missing, which made sense, but was horrible of him to feel when he had caused all of this, so he didn't try to see her, either, just caught glimpses here and there, across the hallway or in the kitchen, and she would scurry away when she saw him.