Chapter Text
Rayane’s mind was not processing anything.
5 seconds, an hour, maybe a lifetime ago, he’d been crossing the busy courtyard of the lycée, his hands on Jack’s shoulders, enjoying the familiarity of the return to school after the summer break. As much as it pained him to admit, it was nice, now that he had found his feet – and his heart – in Sète, not to have to wear the old, arrogant, argumentative persona every day and to every lesson. Maybe it was even nice to be back talking about French poetry and English verb forms. Maybe.
They weren’t even late for class; they were early, enjoying the freedom of their new timetables that gave them dedicated study periods between lessons. They were heading to the library to make sure they got their favourite table; the one where they could tangle their legs together and sit hand in hand, but just about also manage to get some work done.
They’d rounded the corner into the corridor, meeting Lizzie coming the other way, flustered. Jack was supposed to have returned her notes for a test that afternoon. Rayane squeezed his shoulders rhythmically as Jack searched his bag. No luck; they must be in the pile of papers he’d left inside his history textbook that morning, across the other side of the school. Lizzie had sworn, grumbling something like “Sérieusement, Jack? You’re such an idiot. Remind me to never help you again” as she carried on, charging past them, still managing to give Rayane a look that said ‘Somehow, you’re also to blame’.
“You love me really.” Jack had shouted at her back over his shoulder, flashing a smile at Rayane that made him bite his tongue and wish the summer back so that he could have this boy all to himself again.
They’d moved off. Perhaps one step, perhaps two. Rayane just had time for the words ‘can you smell something strange?’ to form in his mind but not on his tongue.
And then nothing.
Darkness.
But also everything.
Pain. Blinding light. Deafening, roaring, overwhelming noise. Half a sense of Jack’s body spreading itself across him. Dust, the air thick with sudden particles that coated and choked everything.
Rayane’s eyes had opened into darkness. He closed them again. Opened them. Felt the pull and wrinkle of the muscles on the side of his face telling him that his eyelids were moving. But there was no light, nothing to see. His last memory was of standing but now…now he was on the ground, backpack arching out his spine painfully where it was trapped beneath him. One arm throbbed, radiating dull pain from wrist to shoulder, with a sharper, biting sting around his elbow. His ears literally rang, a horrible droning whine filtering through, managing to send ripples of pain through his head even as it surged botched and fuzzed, leaving no distinct sound. On instinct, Rayane drew the hand of his uninjured arm up to his forehead, half a mind that he would find it hot and feverish, product of a headache he could understand. Instead, it was cold, clammy. He drew his hand back through his hair gingerly until he hissed. Sudden dampness, warm and sticky, was matted into his hair above what was definitely a deep gash. Even the glancing touch threw up bile into his throat and made his head swim. Unreal lights burst in his vision.
He brought the same hand down to the floor at his side. Fragments of…something…were everywhere. They stuck to his hand, caking it. He reached behind himself, cautiously, over his head. A wall. Something solid. It reared up behind his tender right shoulder.
He groaned as he rolled to the side, trying to follow the wall with his hand. Something heavy, unyielding, weighed down across his legs, stopping them from moving. One of the sounds in his head was beginning to crystalise now, even as pain rippled through his mind again as he shifted positions. The whirring was regular, rising and falling, rising and falling, high pitched, alarming.
Fire alarm.
Rayane fixed on the sound as he tried to push himself to sitting, his head, his muscles, his fixed legs all protesting. He worked the backpack out from underneath him, coughing as the effort dislodged dirt and debris around him.
Why would there be a fire alarm?
Now that he was sitting, he could reach more to his other side. The darkness extended past his fingertips, but there, just at the outermost reaches of his arm, was another solid surface, not smooth but rough with what felt like wires and screws and uneven finishes. It extended behind him to meet the first wall. The space was small.
He slid the bag to the side, resting his chin on his chest as his mind rolled incoherently, passing dangerously close to unconsciousness again. A steady, logical mind might have worked through the evidence piece by piece, but all he knew was that the sound was scaring him. He stayed still and breathed as hard as possible. He wanted Jack.
Jack.
Jack.
The name, the feeling, cut like adrenaline through Rayane’s bloodstream. Jack had been there, right before all of this. They’d been at school. And then…something…an explosion? Rayane’s blood was running cold. His eyes were pawing at the darkness, willing it to show him anything of where he was.
“Jack!” He shouted desperately into the shadows, each sound coming with a wracking cough. “Jack!”
The was no reply. Nothing. Rayane wished desperately he could drag himself to his feet, to claw his way through the darkness to find Jack, shift the weight on him and just...
Rayane’s brain shuddered to a stop.
“No…”
He leant forwards, terrified, towards the source of the unmoving weight on his legs.
Rayane felt shoulders, felt a shock of soft curls, dredged in coarse dust.
“Jack…”
His throat was strangled with dirt and the sound died in his mouth, even before it could reach his muffled ears.
Like some awful movie, Rayane’s fingers threaded instinctually to where he knew he’d find the side of Jack’s neck, where he’d hid and burrowed his own face a hundred times before, that always felt so strong, so safe, smelled so delicious, flexed so disarmingly under his kisses.
It was there; a pulse. Not fierce, not pounding, as he had known it in nights on the beach, or accelerating through a lazy morning when they’d found themselves alone in an empty apartment. But it was there. Rayane’s head hit his chest again and he released a hundred breaths that he hadn’t known he’d held. Hot, salty tears ran silently across his cheeks.
Jack’s head was resting just to the side of his thigh, his chest spread over the majority of Rayane’s legs, slowly leeching numbness into them. Now he knew he could dare to imagine it, Rayane could feel imperceptible shallow breaths bracing against his knees. He had no idea what to do. His hand stayed pressed to Jack’s neck, as though the slow beating was the only thing keeping him from falling entirely apart.
“Jack…”
He coughed and tried again, but there was no answer, no change in the muscles under his palm.
Rayane knew enough to know he shouldn’t move them, not without knowing how hurt Jack might be. The thought ran excruciatingly through his own head, flaring at the point he knew was gashed and bloody. His back was aching now with the effort of sitting up without the use of his legs, but he couldn’t lean on his injured arm. Awkwardly, he edged as best he could to prop himself against the wall, the coldness of it meeting his shoulder blade through his thin shirt.
The angle was uncomfortable, but again it made him aware of something else. Painfully, slowly, he manoeuvred his right hand into his pocket. His phone.
The screen was shattered, tiny crystals of glass breaking away as he pulled it out, but by some miracle the display still came half to life, and with a second miracle, so did the torch. Within a moment though, Rayane wished it hadn’t.
Above them, not high enough to stand under, stretched a twisted metal girder and sheeting, sloping to the ground at their side. Where gaps stood out, Rayane could see huge pieces of rubble, laced in with broken pipes and wires, weighing down on the metal. Elsewhere, broken foam tiles still hung lamely together. The roof had collapsed. Somehow, they’d been thrown backwards into the bottom of an alcove that had stopped it hitting the ground altogether. All of it admitted no glint of light, no way out.
With a shuddering breath he turned the phone around.
Incongruously, Jack looked almost peaceful. His arms were settled out to either side gracefully, his hips sliding down from Rayane’s calves with his legs stretched neatly behind him, as though he’d made himself comfortable and just drifted to sleep. Mercifully, Rayane could see his feet were clear of the flood of rubble. A larger piece of masonry was laying just to the side of them, fractionally away from the side of Jack’s chest, like it was a boulder on the beach that they’d chosen for a wind break. His face was turned into Rayane’s leg, temple resting on the crook of his elbow, tipping his features just enough for Rayane to see one and a half of his closed eyelids and the corner of his just-parted lips. Across the whole of him, from all Rayane could see, the only sign of something horrible, something wrong, came from two thin rivulets of blood, one coming from Jack’s upturned ear, one from under his high curls, threading its way through dust down the side of his nose. Even such a small amount made Rayane’s stomach curdle.
“Jack…” he said again, prayer-like now with tears filling his eyes, sweeping his fingers so gently through his curls to try and remove the mark of the blood from his forehead.
Suddenly, there was a deep, groaning noise overhead. Rayane flattened himself painfully over as much of Jack as he could, his phone slithering out of his hand, but only a shower of dust filtered down onto them. Rayane stayed hunched over, breathing as quietly as possible, his ears straining through the still echoing buzzing for any more noise, terrified that any movement would bring the whole structure down on them. From where it had come to a stop, his phone torch cast horrendous shadows up on the ceiling above them.
He realised then that he couldn’t hear the fire alarm any longer. Instead, right at the edges of his hearing, he thought he could hear sirens. And then, from right under his heart, came the smallest noise.
“Rayane..?”