Nightmare

Fire

And he grips my arm in an iron stronghold.

Then I can feel him reaching inside my head for the memories I've kept locked away for years.

(+)

I'm drawn back to the horrible past I've had.

First the scars and my ankle. How I got them.

What happened that day.

I'm thirteen, just a few months before the Area 51 raid, one month before I turned fourteen.

They're distant, the words blurred and faint.

Suddenly, I'm in my younger body again. I see my adoptive father, drunk to live light, lumbering towards me with a bottle in hand.

He pushes me over and I scramble backwards. 

His words are garbled, incomprehensible due to my fear.

I keep scrambling back and he continues to come forward, smashing his bottle on the ground when his heavy drunkenness makes him fall over the cheap brown coffee table.

I see my chance, getting up and starting to run, but he recovers from the fall faster than I anticipate, and he grabs my left ankle.

Then he twists his hand, breaking my ankle with a horrible crack that echoes and imprints itself in my brain.

And there's a searing pain in my ankle; it's broken and I can feel all of it again. The fear, the agony.

I scream, but no noise comes out.

He grabs a shard of his broken bottle and tries to say something, a little more understandable this time.

"You think you can get away with lying to me?" He advances on me with the shard and holds me down by my throat.

Then he brings the shard down to my face, to rip my eye out.

It doesn't reach my eye, but there's a huge gash on my right forearm, blood thickly dripping down into my face. And there's more pain.

He tries again with the same eye, this time holding my hands in a steel grip above my head, and blood drips down my face.

I'd jerked my head to the side as he brought the knife down.

Then he looks around him in surprise and tries to talk, but no noise comes from him.

Something unlocks deep within me.

Then there are flames shooting from my fingertips and landing on the ground. Just burning.

But then they flare up and crawl to him, swallowing him whole as he screams.

I watch with some remorse but mostly relief, blood dripping down my face as the flames devour him whole, his ashes blowing away with some unseen, unfelt wind.