Delaware Pyne | District 12 | CDB#3 | Done

He got to see the end of everything once.

They’d just gone done in the elevator and walked down one of the shafts when the whole thing started to shake, and the walls started to cave. He didn’t know if it would be the last time he ever saw anything at all, considering how the lights flickered and went out and left all of them in the dark. A few men yelled out underneath the rubble that fell and he felt a few of them shove past him to run back toward the elevator.

Except it’d been a mistake. They’d been consumed by the gas and fire that followed, with rock coming down over them.

He’d been left watching in the tiny little space, piled on by rock and dust and stuck tight. It hurt, but not a lot. He had enough time to be scared, and to cry. To tell the world that he wasn’t ready to die and that he had too much to live for. Except then time drew on and he was left alone, all the voices that had been muttering the same prayers next to him went quiet.

So the boy was left, tiny as he was and unremarkable, too, to greet the end alone. Hours to pass with nothing but his own mind left to wonder why he was being spared death, until at last, the earth moved and he was greeted with a burst of light.

Of freedom, of savior.

And somehow it had not been the end for the young man, but some sort of new beginning.

If only his mother and father could’ve seen it that way – his brother, too.

But that would have to be the rest of the story.