Hide and Seek

Burn, baby, burn.

"Like fire! Hell fire!"

Hellfire, The Hunchback of Notre Dame

The sound of the first scream rose above the crackling of the burning house like a crescendo bursting forth in the climax of a requiem, or the booming of a gunshot in the middle of a dark, silent night.

It reverberated endlessly, sinking through the surface of her skin and chilling the marrow of her bones. It tainted her blood, pushing rapidly throughout her entire body, giving Santana the maddening sensation of the scream being everywhere all at once.

The second scream felt like a punch to her chest, expelling the air out of her lungs like helium squeezing painfully through a tiny hole on a balloon. Out of breath and rapidly approaching a dizziness, Santana felt her knees buckle under her weight.

The third scream seemed impossibly louder, tinged with an undeniable urgency and distinct desperation. It blocked all other signals from entering Santana's brain until all she could register was screaming, screaming, screaming.

It was overwhelming, and horrifying, and it unlocked the dark room in Santana's mind that she swore never to visit again.

Santana didn't even notice when her companions begin to yell for them to clear out. The present image of the burning house a few meters away was replaced by a past, preserved one, of a man standing over a woman with his fists flying frantically in the air. The stench of burning wood was lost to Santana as she remembered the metallic tang of blood fogging up her nose trills.

Both memories were different in so many ways. Time. Place. Circumstance. Villain. Victim. But in Santana's mind, the one thing that made them so alike, the one thread that tied them both together, was the sound of that screaming.