Chapter Text
The last thing Howard remembers is being torn apart.
He jerks awake, sitting up and nearly whacking his head on his window frame. Childhood bedroom window frame. You know, the window frame he hasn’t slept under for actual fucking months.
“What the fuck,” he mutters, rubbing at his eyes and squinting. Yeah, he’s in his bedroom all right. Comics and video games and models decorate the shelves. Couple of posters. His alarm clock is blaring at him to wake up, which is weird, because he hasn’t used an alarm clock, not one like this, at least in--
In months.
He reaches over and smacks it a few times before it shuts up, and then Howard gets out of bed, and that’s when he realizes two things: he’s wearing clean pajamas, and also, while he’s skinny, he’s not ‘starving-child-in-Africa’ skinny. He’s just regular ‘early-teen-boy’ skinny. He can feel his bones but he can’t play the xylophone on his ribcage.
“Don’t tell me it was a dream,” he says. Only to himself, because obviously there’s no one else in here. But maybe this is the dream. Maybe he didn’t actually die. Maybe he just… maybe they found him in time, and then Lana healed him up, but right now he’s just floating, floating, floating.
If it’s a dream, maybe he’ll be able to see his mom again.
Howard makes his way to his bedroom door and opens it. Yeah, this is for sure his house from before everything went ass-up. He leans out and yells: “Mom!”
A little bit of rustling, and then an answer from the kitchen: “What, Howard?”
“Oh, shit,” Howard mutters, and he’s down those stairs faster than the Breeze. He barrels into the kitchen and glances at the calendar on his way—calendar reads first day of school.
Howard does some mental math on how long he’s got until it all goes to shit again, if that’s what’s happening. But he can multitask; he also gives his mom the biggest hug in the world. She stumbles, a little, surprised.
“I made you breakfast,” she said. “For the first day of school. Are you going to walk with Charles?”
“Uh—probably,” Howard says, though he thinks that if he sees Orc with skin he might just nope straight the fuck out. “I guess.”
He sits down, and he can’t stop staring at his mom. She either doesn’t notice or just accepts that her son is a weirdo, because she works on making him up a plate. The thing is—of course, Howard missed his mom. He’s pretty sure that all of them missed their parents, if they had parents worth missing. Orc, probably not. But Howard’s got all right parents.
He just never let himself think about it, you know, in what he figures was either a dream or real life, if this is the dream, or if he went back in time—maybe he’s a freak, too, maybe his power is going back in time when he dies. If that’s the case, he’s really gotta make sure he’s out of the town when the poof happens. Maybe he should warn some people.
But he’s a little wary of that, because while him being gone probably wouldn’t affect anything (at least… wouldn’t affect anything negatively; if anything, a FAYZ with no Howard is a nicer FAYZ), there are a lot of these guys who, without them, the rest of the kids in the FAYZ would be fucked. Edilio, for example. Best fucking guy in the universe, Edilio.
Maybe if he was more noble, he’d be thinking of how to convince everyone to leave instead of just planning his own escape, but while he’s a smooth-talker, he’s not exactly that charismatic. Not charismatic enough to convince not only everyone in Perdido Beach but also everyone in Coates (because he’s not going to leave Dekka in this hellhole) to take a day off from school. Oh, right, and also let’s grab all the babies and everything. Maybe if he was the kind of guy who could fake like, an incoming nuclear bomb, or something… or if he could call in bomb threats to the… whole fucking town? Shit, where did people like Lana even come from?
It’s too much, so he just eats the eggs that his mom puts in front of him.