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[E] ''The Accident''
Adrin Doring had just turned ten years of age when the accident happened.
Sitting on a bench set against the side of a building and diligently working at his ice cream cone in one hand, his bright blue-green eyes never left the face of the man beside him; his father, telling him what all they would be doing today after they finished their ice cream and went to pick up his mother. His father was a lean man, his face bore weary scars that told a person his life had not been easy, yet at the same time his wrinkling smiling gray-green eyes told that person it was worth it. Adrin adored those eyes. They told him so much and so little. His father's mystery.
Sirens began wailing somewhere nearby. An ambulance, his father told him, his eyes looking troubled as he searched the streets. Adrin took a smaller bite of his ice cream cone, now distracted by his father's worry. He tugged on the sleeve of his father's shirt, looking up at him with large eyes, "Dad, could we go now?"
"Yeah..." his father responded, still staring, the end of his waffle cone dripping the last of its strawberry ice cream onto the bench. "Yeah. Let's go, Adrin." He stood, finished off the cone and took his son's offered hand as they began walking. His eyebrows furrowed lightly and he watched curious people looking in the direction of the sirens as they steadily grew louder.
Adrin took off the strip of paper around his waffle cone as he got down to the middle of it, his hand sticky from the melting ice cream. He crumpled up the paper in one hand and waited as they passed a number of trashbins, most of which were full and waiting for waste management to collect. His father let go his hand when they reached the light to press the signal for crossing and Adrin took the opportunity to throw away his trash. He dashed to the nearest bin and slipped the paper inside, as an after thought and with a final bite he threw the last of his waffle cone too.
He heard a shout as he turned to head back to his father. In mid-turn he stopped, staring at a car--a half-shredded mass of metal careening out of control... toward him. His body numbed from fear, his eyes widened, his mouth fell slightly agape on the verge of a scream he may never have managed to force from his small throat.
His father was already running to him, forcing his legs to move a little faster, a little swifter, a terrible feeling growing in the pit of his stomach that he might not make it. All around him the screaming, shouting and sirens dulled to a gray sound unable to match the pounding of his heart in his ears. At the moment he pushed his son forward and out of the way, everything in him slowed to a painful crawl. He saw the shocked look in the boy's wide eyes shift to something pained, haunted, terrified. He felt the child running back to him, reaching for him and calling to him, an act he could merely dread and a higher pitch of the gray that didn't register at all as he whipped his head around in time to take in the full impact of the rushing, broken vehicle sliding into him and crashing into the building beside.
A man, a stranger, reached Adrin in time to keep the boy from being taken with his father and smashed into the concrete wall, but not in time to keep him from injury. Much of his right arm, the arm he had extended to his father just as the stranger grabbed him by the back of his shirt, had been sheared clean off by some hanging part of the vehicle as it flew past.
Adrin's burning eyes teared not for the pain throbbing in his arm as the man washed his bleeding, tattered wound with a rough piece of cloth he had soaked in cold water before the medical group reached the scene. In fact, the loss of his arm hadn't fully hit his mind as of yet. He was already grieving for his father. His wonderful father. His now dead father.
His stomach churned at the image his mind conjured of what the body would look like: mutilated, crushed, splattered and heaped in a growing pool of blood. Those gray-green eyes staring, unseeing, unsmiling. He struggled to his side, ignoring the stranger that had saved him when he asked if Adrin was alright. He fell over on the stump of his missing arm, unable to grasp why he couldn't push himself up on the right, why he couldn't feel or move what was no longer there. His face fell in a small puddle of his own blood and he was suddenly and violently sick.
"Happy birthday, Adrin..."
On a random note::
OMGackt...
Much heart s to whoever my anonymous benefactor was for those random letters.
^ ^-
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