~ A few weeks earlier
A young man sat in the ICU waiting room, the plastic chair digging into his spine with a persistent, nagging ache. It was that specific brand of institutional furniture designed to ensure no one ever got too comfortable.
A subtle nudge from the hospital administration that "waiting" was a temporary state, even if his life had been on pause for months. Above him, the fluorescent lights buzzed with a low frequency that felt like a persistent migraine drilling into his temples.
Hiss-click. Hiss-click. The ventilator's rhythm had become as familiar to him as his own heartbeat, marking time in four-second intervals that translated directly into dollars. Each mechanical breath was the sound of a meter running that he was begining to be unable to afford to pay.
Thorne closed his eyes, and for a moment, the antiseptic hospital smell transformed into acrid smoke. The fluorescent lights flickered behind his eyelids like the orange-red dance of flames consuming the apartment complex.
He could still hear the screams—not just the victims', but the raw, animal sound that had torn from his own throat when they'd pulled him back from the police line as he watched his father free person after person from the engulfed building.
His silhouette appearing briefly at a fifth-floor window, a child cradled against his chest, before the ceiling collapsed inward. The newspapers had called it a "heroic sacrifice" when Paladin and Junebug's battle had sent that building up in flames. They'd printed his father's name in eight-point font on page six, below a full-color spread of Paladin's victory pose.
The floor was a sea of glossy wax, polished to a mirror finish that caught the crimson glow of the "Emergency Exit" signs, making the tile look like it was perpetually stained with fresh blood. Thorne shifted his weight, hearing the vinyl groan like a dying animal. His sweaty hands clasped around a piece of paper and an envelope within them.
The envelope was bulkier than usual, with a blue strip across the corner indicating His stomach dropped. He knows this color code; it means the bill has moved up in the queue, closer to collection, closer to default, closer to the moment when they shut off the machines.
He looked down at it. Final Notice was written in bold at the top of the document. $2,150.00.
The red light for the sign above struck the ink in a way that seemed to fit his mood at the moment. To most it would seem just it was just a number. However, to him it was a death sentence written in a font that looked suspiciously like a polite invitation to the morgue. The young man's thumb traced the numbers gently, his mind spinning through the grim arithmetic of survival.
'Two grand,' he thought. His hands now slightly crumpling the paper. 'That's seven hundred and sixteen shifts at the warehouse, assuming Henderson doesn't dock me for the thirty minutes I was late yesterday or the day before. maybe, If I sold a kidney... well, in this economy, I'd probably still be short.'
He folded the bill and places it into the blue envelope. Then he stuffed it in his backpack.
'_If only ignoring, your problems meant they would just ignore you as well. Maybe a hero will swoop in and fix everything. He almost laughs at the thought, but the smile comes out twisted.
"Thorne?" A gentle, worried voice pulled him from his thoughts.
He felt a small hand tug at the hood of his sweatshirt. He forced his features into something less severe, easing the tension from his face so it looked like he was bracing for a hopeful reunion, not a funeral.
"Are you all, right?" The girl hesitated. "I know it's a dumb question, considering where we are, but your face just now—" She was no more than fourteen, worry lines creasing her forehead.
Rose, his younger sister, stared at him with her hazel eyes as if trying to strip away every layer of grief he was desperately concealing. She wore a Star-Gazer T-shirt and blue jeans, her hair in pigtails perfectly mirroring the heroine on her shirt.
"If you keep furrowing your brow like that, you'll end up with permanent frown lines." Thorne wagged a finger at her forehead, attempting a playful grin.
Rose immediately covered her forehead. "I don't have any frown lines, that's rude." She shot him a glare before her expression darkened. "It's probably why you don't have a girlfriend." She dug in her bag for a small mirror and began inspecting her face.
Thorne's feigned cheer vanished and his mouth fell open. Rose had struck effortlessly.
"Do you think Mom will wake up soon?" Her voice dropped, small and fragile—like she'd reverted to a six-year-old who still believed in Santa and the Tooth Fairy. "The nurse said if we can't pay—" Her words faltered. Her fingers traced the hero on her shirt. "They might turn off her ventilator."
"Mom's going to be okay," Thorne said, voice rough as gravel. He reached out, closing his fingers around her wrist before she could squeeze her figurine too hard. His hands trembled—hunger shakes from surviving on caffeine and hope. He gently freed the tiny hero from her grip, then took her hand in his and held her gaze.
"We'll work this out. Like we always do."
Rose looked unconvinced, but some of the tension eased. She yanked her hand back and rubbed her wrist.
"Tsk, why'd you grab me so hard? And why are you staring into my eyes like that? Are you a sis-con now?"
Thorne tried to form words to respond to her statement but all that came out was a huff of air.
Rose reached into her pocket and pulls out a packet holding a single, battered sphere of foil. She unwrapped it with all the gravitas of a surgeon prepping for open heart, then presented him the treasure: a gumball, pink with the suggestion of its former vibrancy, clotted with gray lint from a thousand previous adventures.
"Here," she said, voice pitched low as if the transaction was classified. "It won't do much, but you haven't eaten all morning. Your blood sugar is probably, like, negative right now."
The universe dangled the lint-fuzzed orb before Thorne as a dare. He takes it, grateful and ungrateful at the same time, and bites. The gum is cold, the flavor a chemical approximation of strawberry. Sugar scraped his molars. He almost laughs at how quickly his mouth floods with saliva, the sudden spike of glucose sharp enough to make him dizzy.
He tucked the wrapper into his pocket like it was state's evidence. "Thanks," he managed, and the word tastes as pink as the gum.
Rose slumped into the hard plastic beside him. The two of them, side by side, are a study in opposites: she is all raw nerves and kinetic energy, he is a tangle of exhaustion held together by caffeine, debt, and the sort of stubbornness that refuses to let a little thing like despair win.
For a stretch, neither speaks. Thorne listened to the ventilator in the next room—hiss-click, hiss-click—and the periodic alarms that come and go like sirens in the distance, too familiar to register as crisis.
The taste of the gum brings him back, unbidden, to some lost childhood memory: the three of them in the cramped kitchen, their mother in a faded bathrobe, Rose in pajamas with feet. There'd been a cake, a real one, store-bought and slouching to one side, and their father had stuck in the candles at random angles.
Maybe it was a birthday, maybe not. Rose had blown out the flames in a single gasp, Thorne following up with a spit-laugh to extinguish the stubborn one. Nobody had looked worried then. He tried to hold the image, but the memory flickers and gets devoured by the fluorescent lights overhead.
She glanced at the figure on her crushed t shirt, smiling softly. "You know Stargazer says everything happens for a reason, I can't help but wonder what reason the universe could possibly have for trying so hard to take both our parents away" Rose whispered. Then turned her gaze towards the ICU.
He watches the way her thumb rubs at the superhero logo on her shirt, Stargazer's blue silhouette faded from too many wash cycles. For as long as he can remember, Rose has collected these stories: the exploits of heroes who never seemed to say the wrong thing, who always showed up just in time. She scours fan forums, memorizes stats, builds shrines out of cheap merch. It's her version of hope, or maybe just another kind of armor.
Thorne reaches out and pets her head, careful not to muss the pigtails. "Stargazer gets paid in gold to spew poetic bullshit. She can afford to be philosophical." He almost says it out loud but bites his tongue. Instead, he says, "I have no idea, Rose. But mom's never been big on grand plans. She's a fighter. The universe will have its hands full with her."
The lie is gentle and obvious, and Rose gives him a look like she knows but wants to be fooled. He settles for the comfort of the lie, and so does she.
Thorne stood up, the joints in his knees popping. He shouldered his backpack, which felt like it was filled with lead bars instead of work clothes and a half-eaten granola bar. "Gotta get to the warehouse," he said, scanning the hallway for the clock. Ten minutes to jog to the bus stop if he cuts across the med school's parking lot. "War can't be fought without supplies from the backline, you know."
Rose pointed at him, her chin up and eyes narrowed. "Why do you sound like an old man?" she demanded, and the smirk she gave a signal pure trouble. "You're barely nineteen."
He winced. "You're going to regret roasting me so hard when you're at my funeral."
"I'll wear black, just for you," she shot back, but the words are lighter than air.
Thorne ruffled her hair and walks toward the lobby. For a moment, he slows to look through the window of the ICU room, where their mother floats half-awake inside a cocoon of wires and beeping LEDs. Her chest rises and falls with the pulse of the ventilator, alien and peaceful, as if she were practicing for a better world.
He memorizes the shape of her profile, the way her hair fans out behind her on the pillow, the hollow at her temples where the doctors had shaved to make room for electrodes. He makes a silent promise.
"One more shift, one more call, one more favor traded for overtime. No matter what it takes I'll keep that machine on"