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Willow looked up at the roof of the manor just in time to watch them fall. The fire licking at the walls below them illuminated the sudden drop, the way they twisted in midair with the force of the jump. Her world tunneled to a single point. She didn't see the soldiers reaching for her, didn't hear Jacques snap, "Hurry up!" or feel Klein's arm where she grabbed him hard enough to bruise. For an instant, she beheld the end of the world in perfect clarity.
When Weiss's wings flared open, the sick crunch was deafening.
Willow had done everything in her power, short of holding Weiss down and carving her wings off herself, to keep her grounded. She'd blamed those damned wings for destroying her family. She'd desperately hoped that, once they were gone, she could regain what she'd lost. Her husband would love his children again. Her marriage would heal. Her home would be filled with warmth and laughter, rather than cold silences and colder beds.
Weiss had labored tirelessly at Beacon to undo all that work, anyone with a CCT connection could see that. She'd taken those vestigial things and made them into a message no one could ignore. As she'd grown into herself, they'd become stronger, healthier. She'd fought tooth and nail for every inch of healing and function her wings were still capable of, and her progress had been astounding.
It hadn't been enough.
Willow stood frozen, unable to do anything but watch the horrific scene play out. Malformed joints and weakened bones snapped as the wind ripped into them. The patchwork feathers that had grown in since Weiss left home, thick enough that they almost seemed healthy, were torn loose. They caught the firelight like shards of ice scattered in her wake.
Whitley's terrified wail was joined by his sister's scream of pain. Willow saw the grimace on her face, the sweat shining on her brow, the bunching and straining of flight muscles that were so much stronger than they had been, but still far too weak.
She watched, powerless, as her children fell, and the flames rose to engulf them. They caught like oiled paper, contorting and curling in on themselves in a vain attempt to retreat from their own blackening edges.
Their screams didn't fade. Instead, they shifted, growing louder, angrier, joining with the crackling roar of the fire in an incriminating chorus aimed directly at her. Suddenly, the flames were all around her, leaping toward her as though her culpability were burn dust floating on the wind. She tried to turn, to run away from the fire and the guilt and the screams, but her limbs refused to move. The ground beneath her churned, and a writhing mass of black roots burst forth, twisting up and around her legs. The tendrils climbed skyward, completely engulfing her below the waist, binding her arms tight against her sides. Where the flames licked the roots, bark frayed like rope, an unraveling cord of burning threads. Milky white sap bubbled from the wood. Where it touched her, it ate through skin and flesh, leaving searing agony and white ash in its wake.
A new voice joined with Weiss and Whitley, still screaming their pain and her guilt. Willow looked around wildly. On her right, through a gap in the flames, she saw another mass of burning roots binding another figure in place. Winter's eyes bored into her with a furious hatred Willow hadn't seen in nearly a decade, since the day Winter, barely more than a child herself, had stood between her little sister and the surgeon's blade and refused to stand down. There was no room for pain in Winter's scream, even as tears cut through the ash settling on her cheeks and flames blackened her hair and seared her skin. Only rage, indictment, condemnation.
Another break interrupted the wall of fire to her left, and Willow saw Whitley struggling against the pull of yet more grasping tendrils. He had been so badly burned already that she would have mistaken him for a corpse, if not for his frantic attempts to get free of his bindings, and the scream that hadn't abated since he and Weiss leapt from the window.
He reached for her, nowhere near closing the distance between them. Willow made no effort to get a hand free and reach for him in return. Whitley's expression shifted from fear to desperate confusion, before settling on a reflection of Winter's fury. His outstretched hand fell, but his eyes never left his mother's face.
Willow tore her gaze away from her son and searched for Weiss, for a glimpse of another living pyre claiming the price for her mistakes. She could still hear her pain, her fear and frustration. She had to be nearby. But Willow saw only flames, rising into the sky for miles around. All of Atlas was ablaze. The city crumbled in time with the final, irreversible collapse of her entire world.
Finally, mercifully, the fire rose up to engulf her entirely, scorching her eyes so she didn't have to watch, didn't have to know what it meant when her children's cries choked off one by one, until-
Willow woke far more abruptly than she would have after an uneventful night's sleep, but it still took her longer than it should to swim to the surface of her consciousness and recognize her surroundings.
She was in her bed, in the penthouse. It was still dark outside, and only the red glow of the alarm clock on the nightstand illuminated the room enough for her to see by.
Nausea surged into her throat, and she barely managed to stumble out of bed and into the ensuite bathroom in time. She wasn't used to vomiting on a full stomach. It was more unpleasant than she remembered. Her appetite had finally started to return over the last few days, and now last night's spiced stew was making an extremely unwelcome reappearance.
It wasn't just her appetite that had been getting better. Most of her withdrawal symptoms had started to fade. Her head didn't ache, her hands were steady, and until tonight, she hadn't vomited in a week. It had been touch and go in the beginning, so many false starts and shameful relapses. But she'd kept trying. She had to be there for Whitley. And while her daughters had stopped relying on her long ago, she was determined to become the kind of mother they could allow themselves to need.
Angry flames rose unbidden behind her eyes, illuminating flashes of Winter's fury. Whitley's fear. Weiss's fall.
Willow fumbled blindly through the cabinet under the sink with one hand, still clutching the toilet bowl with the other, until she found her secret stash of vodka. The bottle was opened and halfway to her lips before she paused. Her expression rankled in disgust. With herself, with how quickly she ran from the consequences of her own failures, even when it meant abandoning her children. She was no better than him.
The thought tore a snarl from her throat, and she turned the bottle over, pouring its contents into the toilet. There was a savage joy in watching the liquor drain away, but it didn't feel like healing. It felt like deserving, like punishing herself, refusing to take the medicine that would numb the pain.
And then the bottle was empty. A wave of exhaustion washed over her, and she slumped against the bathroom wall.
She'd held out a naive hope that the nightmares were a withdrawal symptom, that it would only take a week or two of sobriety before they would leave her in peace. But if anything, as her other symptoms had receded, the dreams had only gotten worse. It had been days since she'd slept through the night, and each time the flames seemed to smolder longer in her mind. It wasn't getting any easier to bring herself back to the present upon waking, to remind herself of what had actually happened that night.
Weiss's wings had borne her and her brother to safety. Winter hadn't been anywhere near the blaze. Willow's family home had been reduced to cinders, but her family was safe. In spite of every damned thing she'd ever done as their mother, her children were safe.
In that moment, she hoped the nightmares would never stop. It was no worse than she deserved.