Blaine Sativa grows up in a family of hysteria. Her mother, a bitter woman who raised her in the remote woods of Colorado, dies shortly after Blaine's older brother Clarke is institutionalized. That fateful day after losing her family, Blaine lives...
Blaine was fourteen when it happened. The event. It remained nameless, the monster under the bed, that nobody quite believed in but everybody was afraid of all the same.
It was a usual Friday, home alone from school, and Blaine eventually forgot to worry. Her parents were working. Tina would be out with her friends all weekend and Clark... well she didn't know where Clark was.
The responsible kid who used to cook her Mac and Cheese in the evenings grew up into unpredictable eighteen year old. Now his escapades rival even Tina's wildness. Nights where he stumbled in, whiskey on his breath and the stink of smoke in his clothes, became more frequent until he stopped coming home or stopped saying where he was going.
Usually Clark keeps his bedroom door shut and locked. But, home early from school, she'd noticed it open a crack. If she were a good little girl she'd have stayed downstairs. Instead she's a Sativa -- not a single one of them are very good at following the rules.
Blaine never would have ventured into her brother's room if he didn't stay cooped up for weeks. What keeps him there? The door falls back, creaking at the hinges, and Blaine shivers.
It's dark. Too dark to see her hand in front of her little lone where to walk. Feeling blindly along the wall she finds a light switch and her breath suspends.
The floor is a mess of empty vodka bottles and piles of ash flicked onto the carpet. His bed is bare, all the blankets used to cover up the windows. Most alarming are the words scrawled in marker. Covering so much space on the walls he's started to write over them in some places.
"What are you doing here?"
Even Blaine's gasp is stifled by a catch in her throat. She whirls around, facing Clark who stands in the doorway with his hands clenched into fists. He's ragged, his hair unwashed for days, and his clothes are too big hanging limply off his bony shoulders.
"I-I..."
Blaine's pathetic stammering cuts off when Clark grabs her by the arm, dragging her back out of the room. The door slams shut behind her and she flinches backward. She's unable to discern what to do before the lock clicks into place. Of course she got caught.
It will always feel like it was her fault. The event. Because, in the few minutes it takes her to make a sandwich and walk back upstairs, smoke billows thick grey from beneath Clark's bedroom door. Even as she beat her fists against the wood he wouldn't come out. Fire burst against the door, a blinding bright light, sending Blaine tumbling flat on her back.
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In Blaine's present, the blinding light remains -- shone intentionally at her pupil this time. Blaine feels she's still in the memory but, when she blinks, she sees an unfamiliar man standing in front of her instead of Clark. He's older, balding, and wears a stark lab coat.
"What do you remember?"
Confused, Blaine glances around. The room she's in is sterile, stark white, and scentless. She's sitting on a bed as hard as a rock covered by a layer of tissue paper that crackles at the slightest movement.
