Fireheart | Raven Reyes [O.H.]

0 | prologue

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PROLOGUE
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THE FIRST THING THAT registers is that he's wet. Ares Ortega squeezes his eyes shut a little tighter, grimacing at the feeling of water on the side of his face, seeping through his clothes, and in his hair, for Christ's sake. A soft groan escapes his chapped lips. He doesn't remember falling asleep after using up his daily shower rations, but hey, maybe he'd just zoned out beforehand. It wouldn't be the first time. In a life as monotonous as his, it's easy to stop paying attention.

Something's buried in the pit of his stomach though; something sending warning signs through his lean body and screaming at him that something is terribly, undoubtedly wrong. That's when he realizes the stench. The tangy scent of copper forces its way into his nostrils until he can almost taste it on his strangely dry tongue, making him cringe yet again and peel open his eyelids.

The first thing he sees is the ceiling of the spaceship that's been his home for the past sixteen years and probably for the rest of his miserable life— the Ark. The fluorescent lights above seer into his unprepared eyes. Blinking, he winces and quickly averts his gaze to something else in the room, which he now realizes is unfamiliar. He's not in the living quarters he shares with his father.

And then he sees the red. God, it's everywhere. Pooled on the floor in a puddle so thick it's practically a swimming pool, smeared on the walls, trailing around the cramped space. There's no water in sight. Which means...

Ares looks down at his body, which lies sprawled out on the metal floor, a place he doesn't remember falling asleep. He just remembers pain: a sudden, hot, burst of it, and now...

Now he's covered in blood. His blue t-shirt is soaked through with it, and when he lifts a trembling hand to brush it along the side of his face, he pulls his fingertips back to see them coated in crimson. Bile rises to his throat. He smacks his hand down, only causing it to land in the thick puddle surrounding him and splash it upward. But he's not bleeding. In fact, the only pain he feels is a dull ache in the back of his head, which means...

Ares flickers his eyes around the tiny room — a storage closet? — to see that he's not alone. There's someone else here, but when his brain processes exactly what he's looking at, the desire to empty the contents of his stomach becomes almost too much to resist.  There's a body about a foot away from him. The skin is pale, meaning the blood is definitely coming from them, because they look like the life has been sucked out of them. The man was probably in his mid-forties. His brown eyes are wide and soulless, his clothing so torn and flesh so marred that it's impossible to tell just how many times he was stabbed.

Stabbed. Stabbed—

Choking on another violent lurch of his stomach that leaves bile burning his throat, Ares' vision turns so morbidly that he falls  down onto his forearms. More red splatters onto his face. He sucks a strangled breath into his lungs, but it's like it never makes it there, because soon he's gasping on the floor and his chest is on fire and it feels like he'll suffocate in this hell he's awoken in.

The knife is inches from where he lies. The killer is nowhere in sight, and Ares doesn't have the sense to realize how bad this looks.

He only has the ability to finally suck a desperate breath of air into his lungs before letting loose a scream so loud it could probably be heard in the Go-Sci ring, and he doesn't stop until someone opens the door.

_______

a/n:

ares my bby, so traumatized already at only sixteen. sorry bro

this was just a little insight as to what ares was arrested for and what it was like for him when he woke up, because finding yourself surrounded in someone else's blood is bound to scar someone for life. especially when nobody believes that you didn't do it :/

—kristyn

( word count: 0.7k )