Chapter Text
“I was ten when it happened.”
“You were just a child.”
“I didn’t feel like one.”
Her world started with a bomb. Well, two bombs to be fair.
It was her greatest shame that the details of that day were blurry to her. Before they had volunteered, they both had regular memories of the event. After though…?
Their memories had changed. Her brother could remember their entire past, especially that day, with startling accuracy, after he had gained his powers. Her powers, on the other hand, had made the memory indistinct and muddled. All of her memories before her powers were hard to remember now, but that day, that day especially was blurry. In contrast, while her brother’s emotions for the past slowly disappeared into nothingness, her emotions, with that day in particular, grew exponentially.
The evening had started off badly. Her father had come home after he had lost his job. She could no longer see his face, but she remembered his hunched back and his limp. It was a work accident. A piece of wooden frame had fallen in his leg. She shook her head. No, it was a steel bar. Or was it- She always stopped herself there. The harder she tried to remember the details, the less she remembered. The feelings she reminded herself, listen to the feelings.
She had felt sympathy for her father. His leg must hurt. She had also felt worry. Worry at how they were going to eat in the future. Her faceless mother had called them into dinner. They had sat down to a meal of… of rice and sauce. She struggled with the memory. Yes, rice and a brown sauce. And water, dirty water, brackish and somehow tasting old, old as the city’s pipes must have been. They surely had never been replaced after being installed the first time.
They sat and ate in silence, an oppressive silence followed by a bang. Her eyes locked with her father. Her faceless father, except for his eyes now. Her father’s sharp blue eyes that had been dulled with pain and a lack of fortune all his life, lit up in this moment with surprise and fear.
That’s when they disappeared. In her memory, the hole opened up slowly, comically, as if actually swallowing her parents. In reality, her brother told her they had just fallen with a scream in less than a second. But it took whole minutes in her head. Her brother had grabbed her and pushed her under the bed. The building had started to crumble down around them. That was when the second bomb hit.
Three feet from her face.
Two days. That was how long it took for the searchers to rescue them. Two day, five hours, and thirty seven minutes, her twin had said. She didn’t remember all the shifts of the bricks, all the attempts to save them, all the calm assurances from her brother. All she remembered from then on was the pain and the hunger and the fear. And the one word written on shell. The one word that became the subject of all her hate.
Stark.