Work Text:
“What do you think, Shadi? Can I manage to make eggs and toast without causing any disasters?” Kamaria shuts the refrigerator door and turns to look at the American Akita, who’s sitting at attention with her head tilted to one side. “Right, I know. You just want your own food.”
Opening a cabinet and pulling out a can of dog food, she sighs and shakes her head at herself. Bruno has rubbed off on her when it comes to the pets, talking to them like they can understand. If her father could see her now, carrying on a conversation with a dog …he’d probably declare her incompetent and shoot her on the spot.
But he’s not here. Never will be again. And just to spite him, as she sets the bowl of food on the floor she declares, “There you go. At least we know I can handle that kind of food prep.”
She turns her attention back to her own dinner, getting out the eggs and the bread and other necessary supplies - stopping to think before remembering she needs to grease the skillet. She’s made that mistake once, and doesn’t care to repeat it.
Bruno has been trying his best to teach her how to not be so completely hopeless in the kitchen. She feels stupid every time she sets foot in the room. She didn’t even know the most basic things when they first started, like how to use an oven or stove. Not that it’s her fault, as a child her mom had to work and wasn’t around to do much cooking, and for the next fourteen years at the gang’s headquarters she wasn’t allowed to step foot in the kitchen and subsisted off of whatever shelf-stable items she could steal and hide underneath her bed.
But she doesn’t like not knowing things. Knowledge is power. Knowledge can keep you alive.
Right now Bruno isn’t here, he’d taken his German Shepherd, Dante, and reluctantly left this morning for a short business trip. So feeding herself is entirely up to her for the first time since they got married, and she promised him she wouldn’t resort to the cans of cold beans and granola bars she used to live on. She’s done eggs before, though. They weren’t pretty, but they were edible. And toast isn’t hard, now that she knows not to trust the pictures on the dial of how black she wants it to end up.
Or at least, toast shouldn’t be hard. Except that in the midst of focusing hard on getting the eggs right, she glances over at the toaster oven and something inside is on fire .
She’ll blame her reaction later on the fact that it’s unexpected. After all, it isn’t even that big of a fire, not much more than a candle flame, and she can handle those as long as she doesn’t stare at them. But toast isn’t supposed to catch on fire.
Her heart immediately leaps into overdrive and she abandons the pan of eggs, diving toward the toaster. She has to fix it before it gets worse. She can’t let it grow, fire is so unpredictable, can’t let it take anything…
Instinctively, she throws open the oven door, but it’s the wrong move. The influx of oxygen makes the small flame flare to life, engulfing the bread inside and shooting out to lick at her hand.
Kamaria launches herself backwards, her spine slamming into the counter across the small kitchen. Suddenly she’s breathing too much and not enough all at the same time.
No no no no no no
She grips her burned hand tightly, but her shoulder hurts even worse.
The ceiling crumbles over her head, chunks of glowing orange showering down around her
It’s not real. It’s not real, she needs to get a grip on herself, but the flames are still there, right in front of her, and she can smell the burning.
Smoke clogs her lungs, she can’t breathe
Her chest aches. She doubles over forward, clenching her eyes shut, but the flames only multiply in the darkness.
It’s everywhere, covering every wall, leaping out at her as she stumbles through the hall and down the stairs
The smoke alarm starts screaming somewhere overhead. Kamaria lets out a strangled cry and crumples to the floor, shoving herself backwards against the cabinets and burying her head in her arms.
She can’t find her mom
Strangers are in her house, snatching her up and running outside, but they’re not her mom, she needs her mom
The whole world is on fire, there’s fighting everywhere, she’s screaming and crying but across the street her neighbors are dying, bleeding on the pavement
A man with a gun throws a woman onto the ground and straddles her
It won’t stop. It just won’t stop. Shadi is trying her best, licking and nudging, but the memories just keep coming.
Kane’s laughing face leaning in close to hers, his hand wrapped around her throat
Taunts in her ear of how worthless she is
The fire is everywhere
Fingers carve burning paths through her skin, touching, always touching
A loud bark in her ear jolts her back to the present. Kamaria’s eyes go wide and she gasps in a hoarse breath, taking everything in. The alarm is still blaring, threatening to drag her back under, but she can’t see fire anymore, just a stream of smoke and a burned smell permeating the air.
Shadi starts licking her arm, doing whatever she can to make sure her owner stays alert now that she’s gotten her back. Which is good, because the images are still pressing at the edges of her mind. She can still feel his hands on her, still feels like she’s choking.
“Shad-…” She tries to force the command out past the phantom fingers digging into her throat, panting in between each word. “Shadi…search.”
Immediately the dog is off like a rocket, checking every corner of every room in the house for intruders. Kamaria squeezes her eyes shut, then opens them again, trying to figure out the best way to keep herself from slipping until Shadi gets back to help.
She knows there’s no one here. Just like she knows that the night the gang burned her neighborhood was ages ago, and that Kane is long gone, and that the fire and her captivity at his hands were completely separate events divided by seventeen years.
But she’s learned by now that the trauma - she still hates calling it that - doesn’t care about those details. That doesn’t mean the nonsense that she feels doesn’t make her angry, because it does. She wants to be over this by now. She wants her brain to stop making her think things that can’t possibly be true, to stop mixing up and linking events for no reason.
She also wants to stop thinking about how Roderick would use all of this against her if she was still back there, how maybe he and her father were right not to let her near the kitchen, how the former Shadow of Death shouldn’t be crying on the kitchen floor because she burned her finger.
Shadi returns and sits next to her, ears perked as she waits for her next instruction. All clear. The house is safe. There’s no Kane, no Roderick, no other gang members lurking.
Her next breath comes a bit easier. “Lap.”
The dog immediately settles across her legs, still looking up at her eagerly. She isn’t trained to offer grounding pressure automatically in these situations, because Kamaria doesn’t respond well to being touched during or right after a flashback. But right now she thinks she’s ready for it. The hand that didn’t get burned begins stroking the soft fur, from head to tail, over and over in a soothing rhythm.
It isn’t even that bad of a burn. She glances briefly at it, and the skin is slightly pink but nothing like her other burns. It won’t leave a scar. Her shoulder still hurts worse than anything, and that’s just phantom pain that will hopefully ease soon.
For a long time she just sits there, focusing on her breathing and the feeling of Shadi’s fur beneath her fingers. The smoke alarm cuts off right after the dog’s return, and she relaxes into the silence. There’s no fire, and no Kane. She’s safe. Bruno isn’t here, but he’s safe, too, and he’ll be back tomorrow.
Drawing in a deep breath, she pushes to her feet, Shadi jumping up and standing at attention. “I’m alright, girl,” Kamaria murmurs. Her head spins a little, and her legs feel shaky and half numb, but the worst of everything has passed. She purposely ignores the toaster oven for now. She’ll deal with it later. Her eggs are fried to a blackened crisp that smells horrendous, and she doesn’t want to deal with that right now, either, so she just flips the burner off and tosses the whole skillet, eggs and all, into the sink. She’s not sure the skillet will ever be the same again, anyway.
Still leaning against the cabinet for extra support, she turns to look at Shadi, who has relaxed just a little but is still watching her. “So…it’s a hard no on the eggs and toast.” She glances at the upper cabinet next to her. “Think Bruno will be too mad if I have a granola bar for dinner?”
She knows he won’t. The man couldn’t truly be mad at her if his life depended on it, and once he finds out what happened he’ll fully understand. She should probably call him now, actually, he’ll want to know and it will help erase the last of the jittery feeling in her chest.
So she takes her granola bar and goes into the living room, curling into a corner of the couch with Shadi tucking herself in right beside her. She turns on the tv to a classical music station for some background noise so that she doesn’t start hearing noises that aren’t there, and taps Bruno’s name in the recent calls on her phone.
A soft smile spreads across her face as soon as she hears his voice in her ear, the last of the tension easing from her shoulders. “Hey, hon. I’m…I’m good. I just, uh…thought I’d let you know that I’m never making toast again…”