I just found an old piece of coursework that I didn't hand in on time and it isn't half bad. I want to finish it but I don't remember the end.
The room was cold. Rather ironic, Finn thought bitterly. The weakened floor creaked unfaithfully beneath his still damp shoes. A glimpse in the blackened mirror showed him a compact figure with rough features and stale clothes, rugose from a night disturbed by ghosts and itchy bed sheets. And his hair, blond and uncombed, still had little specks of grey scattered through it.
Finn felt his knees give out, yet caught himself on a nearby table. He hadn’t forgotten, not for one second, but the name of his kin chilled his bones, chilled his entire being to far below the temperature of the room.
The door leading to the floor below had been hacked off its hinges by a fire-fighter and his axe. The staircase to below twisted in such a way it cut off immediate viewing to the basement. Descending it in the day was easy; descending it in the night was simple; descending it when your heart is in your throat and your legs refuse to function and all you want to do is find a nice dark corner to cry in was getting tricky.
The final step is the hardest however. A leap from the darkened oak floorboard only differing from its predecessors by the destination: a warm and familiar rug, now singed and sopping, spread lazily over the cold stone beneath. Finn couldn’t do more than stand in the doorway to the basement. He still had the vague warmth drifting down from above at his back, and he wasn’t brave enough to let the chilled centre of the room finish him. He would stand at the gateway to what he had done, and he would let his composure crack.
The room was warm. The little light of a cigarette but flitted about around the entrance, and the jingle of keys filled the barren atmosphere. It was soon followed by a soft shushing as the young man at the door attempted to reason with his non-sentient pieces of metal. The small ember bobbed along with the steady, light footsteps. The man was almost at the staircase to below when he heard an unsavoury click from behind him.
Ash stopped mid step, the step that would have seen him safely down the stairs and to his cosy bed. Finn heard him before he’d ever switched on the light bulb that dangled in the centre of the room between them. He had come down to get a glass of water, and, following the sound of jingling, he saw the glowing flame his brother was addicted to. Although he had only seen the sandy strands at the back of Ash’s head, it was blindingly obvious what he was trying to sneak past.
There was the raised voice, the frantic hand gestures, all from Finn. The glass his brother had not filled all the way to the top splashed half empty in his clamped hand. Every action and word was the same as Ash predicted. For such a cold guy, he thought, he sure has a lot of hot air. The boy sighed a light sigh, taking the cigarette from between his teeth and turning towards his legal guardian.
After a good minute of flopping like a fish out of water, Finn decided this could be resolved in the morning.
But they didn't get a morning. Not both of them. A cigarette butt lay next to the dead boy's charred bed sheets. They used to be yellow, thought Finn, like sunshine. He could hear a subtle drip, drip, drip coming from a place he couldn't see. Each droplet struck his mind until he could no longer repress the memories of the morning before.
He stumbled for the silver handles, turning both together to save time. There were more taps upstairs in the bathroom, so he ran to turn on the shower, the taps, anything he could think of. The gushing of blood that swirled in his head was joined by the sound of gallons of water running past his feet and to the lower floors.
The heat tore through the house in lashes. The creak of the stairs was drowned by the crack of the fire. An angry orange glow rose from the basement. A boy tucked under the false security of his golden duvet slept still, as the alarm on his bedside was set for a later, more sensible time of morning. Fire does not have an alarm. It has a trigger. What that trigger was had yet to be discovered.
Finn mentally punched himself. The blood rushing through his mind had dazed him. Now he had regained his senses, he had only one objective. The same aim he'd had for seventeen years, nailed in to his mind for so long and so often it had become instinct; protect his little brother.
As he descended the house as quickly as he could the heat became more intense. Water splashed around his heels in their shared rush to the bottom floor. The door handle burnt under his skin. The wood splintered under the force of his elbow. Beneath him the staircase glowed a sickly amber. At the bottom he found a barricade. Timber, probably an ex support beam, fallen over the gateway like a finishing line to a race no one can win. It burnt with the ferocity of the man it obstructed.
When the soles of his boots hit the bottom stair he was knee-deep in water. Inside the room, the flames clung to the furniture and unlikely pieces of wood that had broken off and now floated like menacing sharks, made of fire. Wrestling with the blazing lumber did nothing other than burn him. The low bed frame of his brother was getting harder to see through the smoke and steam. A blurred noise came from outside, some sort of siren. Finn opened his eyes long enough to see his brother's soft hair swaying gently in the small repercussions of falling debris. The blanket pushed towards his feet had lit up. Ash's nose had fallen below water level. Finn screamed against his constraint, burning up his knuckles as they fell powerless against it.
The body was burned and choked.
