The bundle that had been unmoving throughout the entire ordeal.
My heart skipped and then continued its thundering rhythm as Nathan blinked his eyes open, widening on me, illuminated by the flames.
Small amounts of black covered his cheeks, but he was unhurt.
I laid him down and explored every inch of him. He was unharmed, coughing, but not hacking or suffocating as I was.
He must have been mostly protected in the cocoon of blankets I’d fastened around him.
“Momma,” he said, voice raspy. Never had there between a sweeter sound.
Tears, not from the fire but from my soul leaked out of my eyes and I clutched him to my chest. “Baby,” I rasped, rocking back and forward.
He started beating on my back in panic. I immediately let him go, searching for some hurt I’d missed. His eyes were wide on the flames eating at our house.
Our home.
“Feebo is in there, Momma!” he screamed, trying to fight me. “He can’t burn!”
I struggled to contain him.
Shit.
It was then that two figures came running.
One had a phone to her ear.
Karen crouched down, worry painting her face. She was in her pajamas. They had bananas on them. I had the urge to laugh hysterically.
But the terror on her face stopped me.
She put her hand on Nathan’s head.
“Oh my god, Elena! Are you okay?”
I couldn’t answer, because Nathan was still struggling, screaming for Feebo. Real pain saturated his voice.
I made a split-second decision that turned out to be very stupid.
I thrust my son into Karen’s arms and went sprinting back into a burning building for my son’s soft toy.
The last thing I remember was clutching a stuffed bunny by the ear and telling myself I had to get it back to my son.
I did not wake up gently or peacefully.
I woke up painfully.
With someone yelling in my ear.
The world was shaking.
Or someone was shaking me.
Someone who was gripping my shoulders to the point of pain.
But pain was pretty relevant since it blanketed my entire body, inside and outside.
“Wake the fuck up!” a voice growled.
Not gentle.
Or kind.
No, furious.
“Stop shaking her like that,” someone else, someone decidedly more feminine snapped. Someone who sounded concerned but sharp.
Karen.
The grip only intensified and the shaking did not stop. “Elena, I swear to fuck, if you don’t open your eyes and breathe—”
I sucked a painful and deep gulp of air through my lungs as I realized that in all the time I’d been noting these voices and the emotion in them, I hadn’t been breathing.
The grip on my shoulders relaxed a smidgeon as I coughed and spluttered the oxygen I’d been greedily trying to suck up seconds prior.
My lungs didn’t seem to work properly.
My throat was scraped and cut open to the bone.
Or at least that’s what it felt like.
Memories and comprehension flooded back to me. Flames. Burning. Smoke. Carrying my little boy through a house fire.
Our house fire.
I struggled to sit up, my eyes blinking furiously, filled with grit or dirt or something that made them itch and sting and made the world around me blurry and tinged in black.
The arms at my shoulders where tighter than before, not being used to shake me but now to hold me down. I struggled harder, still not able to see, not able to lay my eyes on my kid, the last time I’d seen him he’d been in his Avenger PJs outside a burning fucking building.
Nothing mattered at this point. Not the fact I was still coughing, lungs tight and unable to produce a healthy breath, not my raw throat, or my painful near blindness.
Nathan was all that mattered.
I struggled harder, the iron grip on my body loosening some against the wild, animal movement of my body. Pure adrenaline and motherly fear had me fighting against one of the strongest people I’d encountered.
“Let me go!” I screamed. Well, I intended on it being a scream, but it came out as a bare, fractured whisper. Still, I did not stop fighting. “Nathan!” I screamed again, my voice managing to get a decibel higher.
“Stop.” The words were uttered with force, just like the grip on me. I had thought it was firm before, I had thought Lance was using his full strength to contain me.
I was wrong.
Because I couldn’t move now.
I figured I’d probably be in pain if it wasn’t for the agony in my chest at not having eyes or hands on my boy.
“Nathan is fine,” Lance said, coming into vision as I continued to blink smoke and soot from my eyelids. Every blink seemed to move broken glass across my eyeballs but I didn’t stop because I needed to see.
“Where is he?” I demanded, my voice sadly not sounding as strong or as furious as I intended. In fact, it sounded utterly weak, broken.
Lance’s jaw was a hard line. He had black marks on his cheeks. “He’s next door. We decided that him seeing his unconscious mother outside his fucking burning home would not be okay for him. Eliza’s with him.”