0: Sparks

"Say, Cheese!"

"Cheese!" Peace signs flashed and silly, wide toothed grins bloomed as they clustered closer together just in time for the click to sound. Permanently imprinting the visual memory inside of a shiny camera. Giggles departed when they shifted away from each other for space while the younger woman stepped away to receive back the item.

The camera weighted in her hands, while the man kept a grin with a flirtatious gleam in his eyes, "Here you are, madam. Hope the picture is good!"

After a few flicks of fingers, the screen popped to the most recent image, and she huffed with satisfaction, "This is perfect, thank you!" She clenched the small camera to her chest, "Have a good day now!" With a sharp pivot of her shoes she didn't allow the stranger a chance to ask for her number and drifted back to her bright-faced family, "Mama, we got a great picture!"

Mama blinked, pausing her tongue from preventing the melting of her ice cream, "Oh, let me see, dear!" She gestured over, and gasped over the latest picture, "Sota, Father, come here!"

Smiling faces shone brilliantly under the perfect sunlight, with emerald green nature the backdrop of a happy, close-knit family. In their hands clenched melting frozen treats and all had a speck or two around their lips. The youngest had his tongue sticking out, with his older sister sticking bunny ears behind his head. The oldest of the family was bursting with joy, his gap-toothed grin spoiling the hilarity he found with the siblings. The middle-aged woman simply smiled over her swirled ice cream cone, motherly warmth radiating from her serene expression.

Sota took a chomp of his treat, "Nice pic!" Grandpa wordlessly agreed, wiping away the cold dribbles on his goatee with a napkin he fished out from a sleeve. Even in America he still insisted on wearing his haori, in spite of odd eyes he'd received.

Happiness and that sense of tranquility she had been lacking for a few years swelled in her chest. Alongside with a hint of strangeness she couldn't recognize. Shrugging it away Kagome bounced toward her family, cheering, "Let's go to the mall!" Nothing like shopping for new clothes to end the vacation!

Sota muffled his groan, but quieted under Mama's rebuffed glare.

She clapped her hands, her ice cream finished, "That sounds like a good plan, dear!" Mama, delighted, hooked her arm with her daughter's, "I could use few new dresses myself, now that I think of it."

With grudging pouts, the two males stepped close behind, the green setting soon faded to the sight of glorious gray buildings that scraped across the sky. Sunlight reflected off the immaculate glass windows, with seamless rows of various lighted advertising signs plastered across these skyscrapers. It was a familiar sight, in a strange land, Kagome amused, having been used to these types of scenery back home. Though, certainly, people were better mannered and more care was given toward garbage and trash alike unlike in America.

She laughed at something Sota said—something about video games, she thought, though clueless at exactly what he was talking about. At which was followed up with Grandpa's ranting on how games were terrible influences on children, with Mama disagreeing and disclaiming keeping things in moderation in Sota's defense.

The closer they were to their destination; the sense of strangeness she felt began to gnaw in her belly.

A terrible scream erupted in a faraway distance.

They paused, but saw nothing out of ordinary. Many people continued to mull on by, stopping only for a millisecond at the sound, their faces lacking empathy or curiosity. Fewer stilled and waited longer than most of the thick trove of pedestrians, their eyes to the sky.

Kagome cocked her head; her ears detecting something like crunching of glass and metals underneath the traffic of people's murmurings. She found her feet completely planted to the gray-black concrete.

A sharp gasp woke her from the odd trance, and hard hands slammed her back in a rough shove. Her feet scampered with a sudden gait, briefly pivoting to catch the sight of her pale-faced mother. A blink, she was there. Next a sailing car took her, vanishing beyond the caved in wall of a nearby building, with crumbling of shattered stones.

"Mom?" She breathed out from absolute disbelief, her heart pounded with unwanted anticipation.

The cacophony of wailing followed with the rain of broken glass and savaged chunks of metal. The old man jerked his granddaughter's hand, jolting her out of what felt like an out of body experience. He was yelling something inaudible, her brother clasped in another hand. Sota's face was of pure shock, reflecting hers, with shiny eyes meshed with confusion.

The screaming traffic of human bodies stormed, stamping over any unfortunate soul that was too slow to get away. Multiple frayed cars fell from the sky, flattening their victims. Sparks of flare and smoke started to rise, from smoking cars and strange objects that too dropped from the blackening heaven.

Dying sobs and words punctured from among the hysterical fear. They were overwhelmed by deafening echoes of explosions somewhere in the nearing distance.

It was chaos. Pure and utter chaos.

Yet Kagome's eyes were still locked on the space where her mother stood not moments ago. Despite the adrenaline rushing through her veins, she couldn't move. She couldn't move! She couldn't even think!

"Go!" Grandpa jerked again, and his grip was unexpectedly bruising, "We must go!" His aged face, set in something akin of fury, "We must live!" Sota's whimpers were lost in the series of howling destruction, "Come, girl! You survived wars! Like I did! Go live!" He thrust Sota to her.

The ferociousness in his old eyes stirred those buried trained instincts inside of her, and Kagome gulped. Her nails dug into her sobbing brother's shoulders, her feet slowly shifting backward.

"GO!" She startled at his anger, her legs gaining flight, and found herself refusing to look back, when a cloud of fire engulfed their grandfather. The shockwave of heat brushing by their shaking backs, narrowly missing burning them alive.

She didn't hear him screaming.

Somewhere deep inside that morbid corner of her mind, she found relief for it.

Sota couldn't stop crying and gasping,

Kagome tightened her grip on his hand, in an unconscious attempt to give him comfort. The desire to get the both of them out of harm's way and to safety being the only thing keeping her from breaking down in hysteria.

Just as they rounded a corner, another explosion rocked the street they were on. A cry of fear from behind Sota caused her to look up just in time for her to see a shower of glass shards raining flying in their direction.

Natural instincts kicking in resulted in her raising her arms up just in time to shield her face from the shards. It didn't save her arms or other areas on her body that was uncovered. The cuts left behind stung horribly, and she had to bite her lips to keep from whimpering. Distressed sounds came from Sota, and Kagome steeled herself.

She wouldn't allow herself to be weak in front of her younger brother. He needed her right now!

Forcing a trembling smile on her face, she turned to her brother. "Don't worry Sota, we'll find somewhere safe and then…" she trailed off, as her eyes widened at the sight of his wide, dribbling neck bare red.

Sota clasped his throat with both hands, bowing down to the cracked ground. Red blotted among the tiny pieces of broken glass and ashes, with wheezing whistles of breaths he was desperate to have. Kagome bowled him over to the surface, with shaking hands squeezing his chilling throat. Choked sobs popped with her eyes wet, "You'll be fine, Sota! We'll be okay! Just have to get through this!" She tried grasping the power that dwelled within her soul, to call it forth to save her brother.

But with her mind such in scrambled shape it simply refused.

"Come on, come on!" Kagome begged to her soul, with tears clouding her eyes.

Sota's bluing face gave that one last look of warmth toward his sister, before his body slacked and the whistles slowed. Kagome couldn't stop that strangled cry, her hands overflowed with her brother's blood still flooding at every fading beat of his heart.

She dragged him to her laps, unaware that she was shrieking, "Wake up! Wake up you son of the bitch!" The shrieks transformed into the wailing of denial, her once pale dress was no longer so pale, with her nails digging into the cooling skin.

The whistles stopped.

Kagome was blind to the chaos that surged around her. Sinking down to the ground, her eyes never left the slack features of her younger brother. The one that she couldn't save. Time seemed to stand still for her, as reality slapped her in the face.

"No…no…no, no, no, no!" she mumbled frantically.

She had failed. Her brother was dead.

Pulling her brother to her chest, she didn't bother trying to stop the tears that rolled down her cheeks.

"Please, don't leave me alone! Please, not like Mama and Grandpa! Don't leave me!" begging hysterically, Kagome looked up in the sky as if to plead with the gods to turn back time. She couldn't stop screaming.

Nothing mattered to her at that moment. The panicked and terrified screams of the people hoping for salvation and grinding and crunching howls of chaos became nonexistent, quiet to her ears. She ignored the heat of the smoldering flames and the smoke that threatened to clog her lungs. None of it mattered to her, she was now alone.

Another shockwave rocked the area as something slammed into the building behind them. Kagome did nothing more than bury her face into Sota's damp shoulder. In her mind, she wasn't here. She was back home at her family's shrine, where she was roped into playing video games with her silly little brother. Where her mama yelled out for her to help with dinner. Where her senile grandpa was sitting in his chair, muttering some sort of prayer, or perhaps a long string of ridiculous complaints—something the family long since stopped bothering to understand.

It was warm there, comfortable and secured in her happy memories back home that she gave no regard to the looming shadow blanketing herself and the limped body she refused to let go.

A voice yelling for her attention became muted, she didn't care. Nothing mattered anymore.

Wars she went through, for the sake of the humanity and the future, a secret that would stay a secret as long as she lived, paled to comparison to the death of her beloved ones. Her defenseless, vulnerable beloved ones. Dead in the place she thought was safe. Gods, kami, still deemed her their favorite joke. Their favorite toy that long since lost the ability to continue entertaining.

Please let me die, she begged to the laughing gods in heaven, let me be with them. Please. Despair festered.

The shadow crunched away, in a sharp turn away from the grieving girl, recoiling against a skeleton of what remained of a fallen building. Taking the rest of it with, inside a mushroom of smoke.

A hard, callous hand grabbed her shoulder, oh very briefly brought her back to the reality. A flicker of absent attention brought her to a familiar face. A familiar face of a stranger. Dusted dark hair framed around a star-nested tiara, with widening bright eyes at the sight of the bleeding burden in her hands.

"Oh, Zeus..." The stranger woman uttered a curse. Uttered a name that Kagome missed.

Kagome blacked out, yet her hands still clenched on her brother's cold form.

It was quiet.

There was no wailing. No sobbing, no heaving for air that tears stole. Nothing heard of glass breaking and caving from destruction. Nor was there deafening scream of skyscrapers becoming dust and rubble, with its steel skeleton moaning against one other. There was only a slow beeping that sounded like it was right next to her ear.

There was no fire burning at her skin, or senses becoming addled with raining sparks and ashes from the fallen structures. Nothing was piercing through her Toms' shoes, not of rocks or shard of razor blade glass. She couldn't feel her minor wounds bleeding through her sweat-soaked sundress. It was cold and uncomfortable, with something heavy and aching up her elbows and fingers.

Nothing was assaulting her nose with foul sulfur of lighted gas or from melting metal. Nor was there dust up her nostrils, battling with oxygen for the pathway to the lungs. But, she couldn't breathe right, there was something bothersome in the way of her nose.

She didn't taste any ashes that felt like sandpaper in her mouth. Simply something akin like a ball of cotton.

All she saw was blackness, still.

She clasped for something. There was a feeling of absence, something that should be there.

"Sota?" She murmured, her brows furrowing from confusion, and unaware that she even spoke at all. Nor that she said a name she didn't much remember immediately. An impenetrable white fog drowned her brain and her throat was blanketed with course dryness.

That was strange. A strange sense of wrongness.

A light moan brought her eyes twitching, fighting to be open at lasts.

"Mama?" Again, she spoke unaware of who she was asking for, "Grandpa?" Her voice was a mouse-whisper, so low she didn't even hear herself.

Whoever she was asking for, all she saw was white. There was nobody in the empty room, save for her and that television suspended in the air in that corner, crackling some nonsensical words and images. Her sight, still blurry, began to right itself.

Shifting her head she found was painful, her shoulders stung from even the slightest movement. The pain dulled, with the fog she felt was in her body began to thicken.

The beeping next to her ear had quickened to match her awakening heartbeat.

"Where am I?" Kagome moaned, again in that little mouse whisper. She squeezed her eyes shut, so to make herself think.

Why was it so hard to think?

She kept her eyes on the ceiling, slow questions began to unravel through the fog in her head but with no answer. Long silence remained cold, save for the beeping that continued to soothe the confusion she felt inside of her wounded, tired soul and that pest of the television casting colorful lights against the white in her room. Kagome pulled the thin cover over her tube-infested arm, to perhaps hide it from her sight. She didn't have any idea what she was doing, but it seemed to make most senses to do such things.

Eyes back to the white tiled ceiling, hoping to understand. Understand what, she wasn't sure.

An eternity must have passed, before the silence was broken.

Something that sounded like glass had exploded outside her lonely room. "I'm so sorry!" was a cry following these terrible sounds, "I'll clean it up right away!"

Wailing. Shattering. Screaming. Raining ashes. Spattered blood. Mama. Death. Burning fire. Hellfire. Flying shards of broken glasses. Falling skyscrapers. Grandpa. Death. Gas-leaking cars. Star-studded tiara. Brother.

Death.

Deaths.

Her eyes dilated, and her heart slowed at the long terrible sequence of nightmares flashing brightly in her mind. The fog was gone, disappearing instantly when she remembered. Remembering such terrible things.

Jolting from her waist, to bend over to clench her heart as it resumed its regular pace again—but oh it hurts. Kagome felt her eyes ladling with salt water, as she stared at her feet that was bend a little awkwardly from her sudden position, "Why?" She whimpered.

She prayed that she is in afterlife.

Trembling, she remembered that there was a television someone had foolishly left on and she glanced up. Watching.

"—was a terrible, terrible tragedy." the male news anchor murmured, his face was enriched with gray—that was the best she could have described how tired he looked—, while fixing his crooked tie, "That day three days ago...won't be forgotten. The truth has come out..." He continued his apologetic commentary, and Kagome found herself lacking patience, but she still stared at his face anyway.

The picture of her brother's favorite hero showed up, his eyes glowing that horrible shade of red, with that menacing look.

Kagome couldn't breathe when she heard what the news anchor had exclaimed.

"Superman, being responsible for all of these terrible tragedy..."

Superman?! That one man Sota adored so much?!

He was the one who took her family?!

"…he was possessed. Mind cont—"

Kagome couldn't hear the rest. Her nails dragged down over the skin over her stopped heart. The pain in her chest was stabbing, stealing her ability to cry. Stealing her ability to even breathe. It hurts.

Let me die, gods!

The beeping machine shrieked at the lack of heartbeats and something outside of her door, was flashing red. Footsteps scampered. The door slammed open and in came the influx of women and men dress in white and blue, their faces fill with terror and determination.

Kagome ignored them, her eyes fixated on the man taking up the whole screen of the television. Fixated on his glowing red glare.

"She's going into cardiac arrest!" Someone screamed, hands forcing her shoulders down to the bed.

They failed to hinder her sight to that television.

Kagome screamed. Hatred festered inside of her soul, but even while her sight faded to black.

The red glare stayed.

"This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
― T.S. Eliot

Beta editors: DeathNoteMaker and Limitless Musings. Check them out! They're brilliant writers who stole my heart!

A/N: Blame Death for this. We were talking about coauthoring again, but that sort of fell through because she had other duties to attend to and I was too impatient. I essentially wrote, like, 95 percent of this story (so far), while she wrote the other 5 percent and mainly edited it.

We're expecting this story to be a bit of short side in term of how many chapters there are. And it will have some...outlandish touches, so to say. There is already an alternative version of this fanfiction planned, but that one is likely to be too mature for this site. I didn't really plan on posting that version any time soon though, until this one is at least halfway done. I hope anyway. Death has...other opinions about it, but we'll see.

And as always, feedback is appreciated!

PS. Fun fact: I wasn't going to post this until a later date but because of this particular date (June 12th) I decided to move it up a bit. The meaning will become more clear as the chapters progress!

(This chapter had been edited as of 2.12.19)