Chapter Text
“MUMMYYYY! MUM! ITS HOT!” Beca screams, but it’s hard to breathe and she’s not sure her voice is getting through the wet blanket thrown over her but her Mummy told her not to take it off or else and-
She wakes up in a bright white room. There is a strange buzzing sound but nothing else, and she can feel something on her face.
“Mum?” She calls, but the sound comes out muffled and she angles her eyes down to see a plastic mask over her face. “Mum!!” She increases her volume, and suddenly there’s two people beside her but neither of them are her Mum.
“It’s okay, Beca, your Mummy isn’t here right now but your Daddy is on his way and you’re safe, okay?” one of the people talks, and Beca squints to try and recognise her. They other person, a man, turns around and leaves so she focuses on the woman who talked. She has bright red hair but she doesn’t look like any of her Mum’s friends or family.
“How do you know my name? Who are you? Where is this?” Her Mum always told her to only ask one question at once but her Mum isn’t here anyway.
“I’m Elizabeth, but you can call me Liz. We are at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, I’m a doctor and I’m helping you get better. You’ve heard of the Children’s Hospital, yeah?”
“It’s the one with the... big playground? And you call the tele- the- Good Friday telephone?” Beca asks, scrunching up Her face to try and remember the words.
“Yes, that’s right, the Good Friday Appeal telethon raises money for this Hospital every year so we can help even more kids feel better! And there’s lots of fun things here but maybe you can see them later.”
“Why am I here? Mummy said I would be okay under the blanket. It was very hot, did I get burnt? Or smoke... I don’t know the word...” Beca trails off.
“Inhalation, you mean? You’re very smart Beca! How old are you again? You must be at least 10!” the woman tells her and Beca shakes her head as best she can, feeling something around her head.
“I’m seven. What happened?”
“The blanket did help you, you didn’t get burned, but there was a lot of smoke so you needed to have some extra oxygen to get rid of it, and it was very hot so we needed to help you cool down. We have to keep you here until tomorrow morning to make sure but you will be okay.”
“Okay, Thank you doctor Liz. Can I see my Mummy soon? I don’t like my Daddy, he left mummy and me and he forgot my birthday,” She tells the doctor, frowning slightly.
“Your Mummy is busy, sorry Beca, but if you’d like I can take off your mask now and I could show you where the playground is, you could see some other kids?”
“Does the playground have music? I like music,” she answers, smiling slightly more as the doctor moves and starts loosening the things near her head.
“There is some music, and there’s some instruments so you can make your own music too!” Liz tells her excitedly and Beca can’t wait to get out of the bed so she can go and see.
“Hello,” a girl who looks like a year 4 comes over to where Beca is playing with a xylophone. She’s only a year two, so she lets go of the hitting stick and frowns.
“Do you want to use it?”
“No, you use it, I just like what you were playing so I wanted to say hello. I’m Dr Liz’s daughter, my name is Chloe,” the girl explains and Beca looks up to see that her hair is as red as her Mum’s.
“I’m Beca. Are you sick too or are you visiting your Mum? I visit my Mum sometimes at the high school because she’s a year 9 teacher.”
“I’m not sick, I’m visiting Mum because she has to be here all day because of the fires so no one could look after me at home. But I get to play on the playground when I visit so I don’t mind. You want to play together? I can play the triangle if you do the xylophone,” Chloe suggests, and Beca thinks it sounds like a good idea.
“We were in the fires. It’s why I’m sick. Mummy and I were driving away but it caught up with us so we had to hide under blankets on the floor.”
“I’m glad you’re not too sick then, that sounds very scary,” Chloe tells her, but they start talking about different things then and Chloe somehow makes the triangle fit in with her xylophone playing.
“Beca?” She turns around to see a man who looks kind of like her teacher but younger calling her name. She doesn’t know who he is, though, so she doesn’t answer. “Doctor Liz asked me to come get you, you need to go back to your room,” he adds, and she turns her head. She isn’t meant to follow strangers, but he did say Dr Liz asked him to, and she isn’t a stranger any more. She thinks it should be okay.
“Thank you for playing with me,” She tells Chloe, awkwardly patting her back when she leans over and hugs her before she follows the man back out of the playground.
“Hello Beca,” a voice she definitely knows greets her and she glares up at him in response.
“I don’t want you here Dad. I want Mum.”
“Your Mum... can’t be here any more, Beca. It’s just me now. The fire hurt her really bad,” he replies, and she isn’t sure she understands.
“What? Where is she? Is she at the adults hospital? When will they make her better?”
“She’s not at the hospital Beca. They couldn’t make her better, she died. She’s gone now.”
Beca sits in silence for ten seconds, trying the thought on for size. She knows what dead is, her rabbit died last summer because it got too old.
“NO!” She yells, “Who do I live with now? I can’t look after myself yet, she told me!”
“Well, Beca, you’ll live with me. In the city, too.”
“What? I don’t want to live with you! I don’t want to live in a city! The schools are too big and there’s too many people,” She cries, moving over to the other side of the room away from him, “all my stuff is at Mum’s house and she had the key how am I gonna get it?!”
“Your Mum’s house burnt down in the fire, Beca. All your things are gone too, we’ll have to buy you new things,” he explains, but his voice sounds like it did when he used to get mad at her Mum.
“But Mum knows what clothes I like! I need Mum to buy things.”
“Well, I’m not totally useless, Beca. We’ll work it out.”
“No WE won’t, I’m not going with you! I don’t like you, go away!” She screams as angry as she can and it must work because he makes a face then turns around and leaves her alone in the room.
“Go away Dad!” She grumbles from her seat on the bed, legs dangling over the edge, when she hears the door open a long time later.
“Its me, Chloe, from the playroom,” she says quietly.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“That’s okay. Can I sit with you?” She asks, and Beca simply nods. They sit in silence for so long Beca can’t remember when they started.
“My Mum died,” Beca tells her, her own voice turning quiet as she looks down at the gross hospital bedcovers she’s sitting on. “And my house and all my stuff is gone.”
“Oh, Beca,” Chloe doesn’t say anything much in response but she leans over and hugs Beca and for once she doesn’t really mind it.
Dr Liz comes back in later, after Beca has pushed the gross hospital food around a plate for a while. She isn’t asleep but her eyes are closed so she doesn’t move.
“Chlo?” Liz calls softly, and Beca feels Chloe sit up from where they had been lying down beside each other. She guesses Chloe must have to go home and it makes her tummy feel sore.
“I don’t want to leave her alone Mum. She lost everything and her Dad sucks.”
“I know, Chlo. I know, but you know the rules. I’m going home for a few hours so you need to go too. You have school tomorrow, you need to sleep.”
Chloe moves her hand along Beca’s arm as if to wake her up, so she slowly opens her eyes and pretends she didn’t hear what they said.
“What?” She asks.
“I have to leave, I wanted to hug you first,” Chloe tells her before doing just that. She can see Chloe is crying when she ends the hug and slides off the bed but Beca can’t work out why and she doesn’t want to be rude so she doesn’t ask.
“Dr Liz? Are you going too?” She turns to the adult in the room.
“Yes, but I’ll be back in the morning to check on you, okay Beca? Dr Jacob who got you from the playroom before will be here if you need anything all night.”
She tosses and turns all night, hearing and seeing the fire approaching them every time she tries to close her eyes. But Dr Liz tells her she’s fine, and suddenly her Dad is there again and everyone tells her she has to go with him. She screams anyway as he drags her out, but no one helps her.
By age fifteen, Beca is back in the country, or at least, a suburb of Melbourne that is far enough away to be its own town instead. She doesn’t know whether to be happy about it or not - she still hated the city when they moved five years ago although as she’s got older she’s changed her mind on that. The real kicker is that they moved in with her Dad’s new wife. She’s fine, she guesses, she just doesn’t say much and Beca feels like an outsider in her own home.
“Rebecca! You need to get to the bus!” Sheila calls, as she’s leaving her bedroom to do just that on her third day of Year 9.
“That’s not my name, Shelly,” she snarks as she walks through the living area past her, turning out and throwing her headphones in her ears before she can respond.
The one luxury of being in a borderline-suburb city, she’ll accept, is that she can take a legit public bus to school and not have to deal with a vehicle full of the shitty kids she has to spend the rest of her day with. It’s appropriately quiet and everyone keeps to themselves, so she doesn’t need to remove her headphones at any point between leaving home and when homeroom starts. She knows she gets weird looks sitting by herself by her homeroom building until then, but whatever. She has like 1.5 school friends and they are reliably late. Also, not great friends.
She drags her feet going to the first class of the morning - science. It’s not that she isn’t any good at it, she just thinks the science labs smell gross and the teachers all act like the existence of students is an inconvenience to them and like, it’s their job for fucks sake why can’t they stop complaining about doing it?
She starts to feel uneasy approaching the classroom, trying not regulate her breathing and not sure why. She slips into the classroom and into a seat up the back with thirty seconds to spare before class starts, her head spinning as she throws her hands over her nose and mouth to try and stop the smell seeping into her awareness. It’s not even just the science lab usually gross musty ness, it’s-
“Okay! Attention up here!” their teacher calls, pulling out a small model of a house on a tray lined with other items she can’t quite see, “to start this year we’re looking at how fire behaves in different contexts! Today we’ll start easy and focus on protecting yourself or someone else in the midst of a fire. Does anyone know what some ways suggested are?” He asks, and people start replying but she feels her ears ringing drowning out what they’re saying and-
“Beca! Grab the blanket from your bed! Quickly!” Her mother shouts, and she wants to ask why they need a blanket when it’s hot but she can see the fire over the hill through the back window and her Mum is crying so she rushes into her room and grabs it, sprinting out and into the car as they go.
Her Mum slams her foot on the accelerator and Beca usually thought going faster would be exciting but this time it’s just scary. It seems to be getting hotter and she risks looking back, expecting the fire to still be back on the hill but it’s right there and-
“FUCK, Beca, empty your water bottle on your blanket, make sure it’s all wet and get down on the floor underneath it, please Beca, don’t move under any circumstances,” her Mum is screaming and crying still as she serves off the road into the empty paddock beside it, and Beca follows her instructions as she upends her water bottle-
“Beca Mitchell!” she snaps back to the classroom, feeling herself flush as she realises everyone is looking at her, “it’s the first day, if you can’t pay attention to this you are not going to pass this class,” her teacher grumbles and she tries to give some kind of confirmation she is paying attention, but she thinks it just comes across as a grimace.
She picks up her pen to attempt to take notes, immediately feeling it flick out of her trembling hand back onto her desk. She grips the cool metal edge of the table, instead, glancing up to see her teacher holding a lighter.
“Now, I’m going to start a fire on the far side of the hill, and we’ll see how all our tests go,” he says, and it’s only then that Beca notices there is multiple parts to his diorama, now, a fake grassy hill leading into a house surrounded by forest, opening up into empty paddocks with a car sitting in the paddocks and- the ignition point is somewhere behind the hill and immediately the fire races up to the top of it. It’s the wrong angle, watching it from the side, but she’s immediately transported back again only this time she’s just standing staring out their back window as it moves down the hill and her mum is screaming but she isn’t moving and she-
Beca pushes back from her table and stands up, her chair clattering back onto the floor behind her as she stumbles out the door, sinking to the ground against the brick of the side of the next building over. She doesn’t know how long she’ll get before the teacher comes out and yells at her, but she tries to use what she has, back against the wall and taking long, slow breaths. She never saw a counsellor after it happened, her old school had them but her new one in the city didn’t and her Dad refused to pay for a private one, thought it’d make her soft. But the online chat one - it was good, when she was 9 and her Dad was too stupid to know how to lock his computer at night. They kind of sucked, actually, but at least they taught her the breathing thing.
“Beca Mitchell! What makes you think you have the right to get up and walk out of my classroom?!” Her teacher’s voice snaps her out of her attempts to calm down much too soon, and she winces, rapidly trying to kick her brain into gear to lie her way out of it.
“I-“ She pauses, her brain not supplying anything useful.
“Just as I thought, pure laziness-“
“PTSD,” she snaps. Fuck it. “Got caught in the 2008 fires. Exactly that scene, raced too quickly down the hill behind us and we had to leave quickly. It caught up with our car so Mum went out into the empty paddock, I got under a wet wool blanket and woke up mostly fine in the Royal Children’s a few hours later. Mum died.”
Her teacher is silent, for a full two minutes, and she keeps her gaze down as she picks at the seam of her shoes.
“You can spend this period in the nurses office if you’d prefer not to come back in,” he breaks his silence, tone less angry although not as apologetic as she’d like. She nods slightly and waits for him to walk back into the classroom before she stands up and wanders in the opposite direction of the nurses office to grab her headphones from her locker and hide out until next period.