#k.asks

His mind flashed back to his nightmare: his father, his father, his father. Something had slammed against the counter. He didn't know what it was, and it didn't matter. It'd broken in a shower of glass and he'd cowered, his back hitting the shitty wood cabinets. His hands flew up to cover his face.

In the St. Agnes room, he sat up and dropped his face into his hands in the exact same way. He forced himself to take a shaky breath in. Breathe, Adam.

"Adam?"

Ronan.

He took another shaky breath in, tried to calm his breathing as much as possible. Before Ronan noticed.

"What is it?" Ronan's voice was soft, softer than Adam had ever heard it. He didn't know if it was a byproduct of being woken up or it being the middle of the night, or what, but at the sound of it something began to unwind in his chest.

He exhaled and flopped back down onto his pillow. "Nothing," he lied. He didn't want to talk about it.

"Parrish."

"Nothing, it's fine. Go back to sleep."

——

Adam woke with a start. 4:47 am, mere minutes before his alarm was scheduled to go off. Another early morning shift at Boyd's stretched out ahead of him, oily and sweaty perhaps, but a reason to leave the trailer nonetheless. A reason to leave before his parents woke up.

He stood and stretched, forgetting the fresh purplish blue that decorated the flesh of his back. He winced as the skin pulled taut and quickly grabbed his work shirt from the floor before the pain subsided and he had to feel it again. He carefully pulled on the shirt, grey embroidered with "Boyd's Auto" in red on the breast.

It was dirty, oil stains splattered across the bottom. He'd worn it last shift too, but it didn't matter. There was no time to do laundry and it wasn't like it mattered anyway.

Boyd didn't care. The cars didn't care. The only thing that mattered was getting out of this shitty town.

He gingerly reached down to grab his backpack, tilting his body sideways instead of bending over. It'd been packed meticulously the night before, before all hell broke loose. People could say what they wanted about Adam, but no one could say he wasn't prepared.

Blue Sargent lived in a house without silence. She'd never known the concept before today, and she wished she still didn't.

Persephone cradled her into her chest, whispered something she couldn't hear. She couldn't hear anything.

Her father, whom she'd known for less than three weeks, lay unmoving in front of them. He was dead. Nothing her mother or her cousins or her aunts could do about it, and certainly nothing she could do about it. The former was true because they'd tried, but even magic had its limits. The second was true because she was not a witch, unlike the rest of her family.

Blue was purely, utterly, regularly human.

She disentagled herself from Persephone's arms. "I'm going for a walk."

"Are you sure?" her beautiful, lovely aunt asked, concern evident in her expression. Blue wished she could wipe it away.

"I just need some air." That was an understatement. She gave Persephone a soft smile, as calm as she could manage, before turning away.

It was a crisp day, the kind that would've been nice if it hadn't been the day her father died. If it hadn't been another day where everything fell apart. She'd been having a lot of those lately.

Like the day a few months ago when she'd had stones thrown at her—small ones, pebbles, really, but still—because she was a witch. Her family had never been popular, but at least no one had cared that they were doing strange things in the privacy of their own home when she was a kid. She hadn't gotten weird looks or been called names or had stones flung in her direction back then. But ever since the king had outlawed any religion not state-sanctioned, her family had been forced further and further back into the shadows.