Work Text:
I’m still not sleeping well. I’m not sure if I ever will. I made it through my recovery with very little use of depressants and pain killers, and I feel like I should get through this as well. I wish I could say it’s because I can still see Michael’s face when he made the decision to die with his family, or because I had stood there in a prison and decided to die with him rather than go on without him again. I could blame it on myself, on the decisions I made that led us there, that led to all of them dying, but it’s not even that. It’s so much worse.
I know what it felt like for them in those last moments. I know how it feels when the concussive blast hits you square in the chest, hard enough your heart skips a beat. I remember the heat on my skin, how every breath in was inhaling fire, feeling it burning through your lungs. I know how your vision goes black around the edges, and you think that’s it, it’s over and you won’t feel anything else… and then the metal hits your skin and you can feel it. You can feel every piece as it punctures skin, tearing through tendon and muscle and even cutting through bone.
Maybe it’s construed memories, thoughts you make into reality because you know what happened to you. I know what happened to me. I know what happened to each of them when the building exploded, before the fire consumed everything.
I didn’t have nightmares about that moment in the weeks I lay in a hospital bed recovering, but I have them now. I close my eyes and just in that moment before sleep happens, I remember. I remember the pain, and the terror, and that knowledge just as it all becomes too much and you know that you’re going to die, that this is it, there’s no coming back. Except I did come back, and they didn’t. And that’s because of me, my family, our legacy.