FSE

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I'll be honest with you. I nearly fucking died when that thing landed. It was _way_too close to the house, what with the way in blew the windows into my face just as I turned in the direction of the orange glow.

If I hadn't been wearing my glasses, and even better, hadn't been wearing a pretty heavy sweatshirt to safeguard against the winter chill, I'd probably have bled out right then and there. Not like I'd have been able to drag myself to the phone, or have even been able to see the bloody thing if I'd taken the damage that sliced up my clothes.

I remember screaming "What the fuck?" as my voice broke under the strain, blood dripping from my forehead and a nasty wound on my neck. Some moments of chaos had followed, a frantic stumble to the bathroom before I stared in disbelief at the fire beyond the hillside.

My hands and feet were been pretty cut up too, the concussion of that blast having slammed me into the wall and scrambled my mind more than a little bit. The resulting bolt to the bathroom had turned into more of a drunken crawl-stumble, and now I was bleeding profusely and in even more pain than before. Still, all I could do was gawk.

It eventually occurred to me that I had best get the hell out of there, some smoky smell reaching my nostrils the moment before my brain went "Oh shit".

And so I found myself outside in my slippers in this winter cold, staring glassy-eyed at the remains of my house with the still-burning calamity behind me.

I don't know exactly how long I stood there, until the pain, the cold, or some combination of the two shook my out of my horror, but I found myself stumbling towards the source of this chaos. My sweatshirt, so beautifully warm a few short minutes ago, was in rags, letting through the icy wind that cut just like a knife.

Cresting the hill, I found myself looking upon a scene of utter devastation, the aerial shockwave that had almost leveled my house having stripped the trees of their branches, and ripped up many root and stem. It was like a giant had finished playing some absurd game of pick up sticks, and had just dropped everything where it lay... well, aside from the shining rock in the crater's center, still visibly wafting off heat.

I stepped carefully around the broken branches, or at least thought I did, cracking many of them underfoot and exacerbating the cuts under my feet as I approached that unholy object. What I was thinking, I will never know, as my first instinct should have been to tear away in abject terror, as far as I could get, but somehow I didn't feel afraid.

Maybe it was the concussion; maybe it was something more. I will never truly know, but still I approached.

Eventually the warmth felt nice, and the ground warmed beneath my feet. Weirdly, no fires had started in all the broken branches, and now I was approaching an object that by all rights should be unlivably hot.

And yet it wasn't.

My head really hurt, and my feet weren't far behind it, but still I approached.

Climbing over the crater's rim, I tripped and fell, rolling head-over-heels down the slope. I had cuts and bruises everywhere now, and felt like half-frozen death, but laughed hysterically as I flipped down the slope, choking over the occasional face-full of dirt that resulted from the slide.

Slamming right into the fucking thing, I broke my shoulder in the impact, the pain ripping a scream straight out of my throat. I couldn't take any more. Crying on the ground, I finally gave in, shock and trauma finally blasting their way through whatever remained of my faltering adrenaline surge, head throbbing like I'd taken a baseball bat to the back of my head.

I didn't even notice the crack in that shell, wracked by pain as I was, half a wreck in the snow... but I did hear a squeak a moment later as the crack widened, and barely managed to turn my head, heart skipping a beat in terror as I did so.

You can only imagine my surprise when a tiny black kitten squeaked out a mew, still covered in icky, eggy goo.

"Mew?"

I wept, but all she did was curl up with me, beginning to purr for the very first time.