He really doesn’t remember much when he opens his eyes for the first time after the explosion. Really, he doesn’t. He doesn’t know who the blonde child standing next to him and crying is, but yet, somehow, he does. He tells him to go find his mother.

“Och, aye, go on, Mally.”

Today is her day at market. Today, she takes the money from the dole and goes to the market to buy food. She’ll be buying some cornbeef and cabbage, he knows, because those are cheap, and the dole doesn’t give them much to spend. Half of the money already goes towards their rent. Then half of whats left over will go towards food. The other half is put in savings, so that some day they’ll move to America together. But Dachian usually finds that money and takes it to the pub.

The pub. That’s why his mother doesn’t let Dachian collect the dole money. That’s why Amir gets it before he goes to school and brings it home to his mother.

His mother. Who is she? Now she is standing over him and sobbing. A redheaded child is clinging to her chest, and another with black hair holds her hand, looking confused. His chubby toddler hand is shoved in his mouth, big green eyes wide in wonder and confusion. Why is his big brother all bloody?

Amir feels like the black-headed child. Who is he? Who is the redhead, the woman, and the blonde? But most importantly, the woman. He doesn’t know her. Really, he doesn’t. He sees the red hair and he thinks of Fiachara, and he wonders why she is crying. He doesn’t know. She looks a lot healthier then the last time he saw her, except she is crying. And Fia never, ever cried. She was always brave, braver then him, even, and he was supposed to be the big brother. He tells her to stop crying, that everything is going to be alright. That she isn’t going to die, because Dachian said she wouldn’t. Dachian promised Amir Fiachara wouldn’t die.

And then they take him away. Just like they took away his little sister. Is he dead as well?

The doors of the ambulance close. Another blonde is at his side now, but he isn’t Malachy. He can’t be Malachy, because he is too old. Well, not old. He must be about 25 or so, and Malachy is only eight. He -this older blonde- forces a plastic mask on to Amirs face and tells him to breathe, but he can’t, and he doesn’t know why. His arm is stinging, his left one. Not the one with the scars from William, no that’s his right arm. It doesn’t hurt, but his left one does. And he doesn’t know why. His eyes are all blurry, and he can’t see much anymore. He can’t hear much either. He can’t hear the blonde medic.

This strange blonde tells him to breathe again, and Amir still can’t find the breath in him. He sucks in, but nothing happens. Nothing.

Now his lips are turning blue. They tell him to breathe, they want him to breathe, and he is trying. He is trying really hard. He doesn’t like the way that they are looking at him, it scares him, and he wonders if he is going to die.

He wonders if Fiachara felt like this too.

Everything is so slow now. Slow and long. It takes him forever for him to blink his eyes, to gasp for that air that never comes.

The blonde removes the mask from his face, and suddenly, it becomes a thousand times harder for him to take that breath. He gasps, he chokes, he splutters. The blonde says something, and its easy to see that he is crying. Not sobbing like the woman with the red hair when he was outside- his mother, yes, that was his mother who was crying. But the tears were still there. He is scared.

The blonde says something else as he digs through the bag at the side of the stretcher, and its just then that Amir realizes they are moving, the ambulance is moving, driving away from Malachy, away from his sobbing mother, and away from the… the school. He was at school, wasn’t he, when it had happened? He was standing up, across the room when the light had come. And then he was here.

A small moan escapes Amirs lips. He wants his mother. He wants his little brothers. He wants Fiachara. He could even settle for Dachian. He wanted someone, someone he knew. Not this strange blonde crying nurse, whom he’d never seen before.

The blonde comes up from his kneeling position on the ambulance floor and he has a new mask, new medicine. He forces it over Amirs head, and his hands come back red. He is bleeding. That’s why his head hurts so bad.

But at least now he can breathe.

The air is so cool and wonderful on his lips- he drinks it up as if it was the freshest, coolest water in the world, and he was parched instead of dying. He chokes again and the blonde sniffles and wipes his eyes, looking as if he were attempting to calm down. He leans over the stretcher bed, knelt down on his knees, bows his head. He makes the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost…Amir recites it in his head.

“Almighty and everlasting God…”

A prayer? He was praying for Amir?

‘…preserver of souls, who dost correct those whom Thou dost love, and for their betterment dost tenderly chastise those whom Thou dost receive, we call upon Thee…”

Amir blinked up at him. He is scared- so scared. What the hell is going on?!

“…O Lord, to grant Thy healing, that the soul of Thy servant, at the hour of ‘is departure from his body, may by the hands of Thy holy Angels be presented without spot unto Thee…”

Wait… he was dying? Amir was dying? ‘At the hour of his departure from his body’. No…

The doors of the ambulance are pushed open. Were they here already? Alexandria Gardens Day Hospital. He can just make out the sign. But he is going to die, so what does it matter?

“…in Heavens name, I pray, Amen…”

“Christssakes, Reilly, yer not prayin’ fer this poor mucker, are ye? Dun worry, kid, hes just faffin’…”

“I am not!”

“You’re scarin’ ‘im, Reilly! Hes just a kid!” those strange grey eyes Amir swears he has seen before stare down at him, “Yer gonna be fiiiine…”

But there is something in his tone that refuses to let Amir believe.

The stretcher bed is finally rolled out of the ambulance and a light rain is falling. Rain rain… its always raining. When he was younger, he hated it, because he was always cold all the time. He and Fiachara would huddle up under the eaves of their tiny little flat on Mersey Street while they waited for Dachian to come home from the pub. His mother was always at a calling at friends with baby Mally, just so she could get away from their dismal little shack. Dachian always had the keys…he didn’t let Amir have one for school, because then he could lose it and one of them damn Protestants could get in and steal… the thousands of Eire worth of things the Shields family didn’t even own?

Stupid Dachian.

The rain was good today, though, he likes it. The ambulance was hot and sticky, and he’d been sweating the entire time. Sweating for fear, sweating for heat- he doesn’t know. And now the rain feels good on his cheeks. He closes his eyes tightly and opens his mouth to breathe in the sweet Irish air to cleanse his soul, then realizes that he had an oxygen mask attached to his face, so that was a stupid and useless idea.

“Keep on, Amir, we’re almost there… don’t go dying on me, ‘kay?”

Amirs starry emeralds fly open to see the man with the lovely, but sad grey eyes again. How does he know his name? And why does he remember him?

Oh… wait…

“Dono…van…?” He barely manages to gasp it out. The man, however, smiles.

“Yeah, ‘tis Tom, ‘member? You was friends with Johnny, weren’t ye, Amir?”

Amir nods.

John Donovan. One of the best lads Amir has ever ever known. Murdered little over a year ago. He’d only been about four or so years older then our little patient,  but the two had been as close as brothers, especially in those couple months between Daires death and Johns own. It’d been a hard, hard time for Amir then, and he’d almost given up himself. But John was always there, John helped him.

“ ‘is Da?”

“Aye.”

“Och.”

Amir closes his eyes a little bit, perhaps to catch a short nap. He is very tired, after all.

-SMACK-

“No sleeping now, Amir.”

“Oww…”

Fine then!

A good deal irritated now, and still rather much in pain for reasons that are just barely starting to become clear to him, Amir blinks tightly and forces himself to keep awake.

The stretcher bed is hurtled inside Alexandria now and despite the outside weather, its hot and sticky in here. The mist that covers his forehead is now nothing more then sticky sweat again. Even though oxygen still flows through the mask into his lungs, the young Irishman still finds it terribly hard to breathe- he gasps and chokes, hardly even noticing that each cough produces dark red liquid into the oxygen mask. Really, it barely seems to phase him.

“’ees gonna hyperventilate if ‘ee doesn’t stop that…” comments an annoyed voice from down where Amir believes his feet to be, and for the first time, Amir realizes that Reilly, the blonde who was praying and crying for him in the back of the ambulance, is still with them, pushing up the back end of the rolling bed.

“You’re gonna be okay, Amir…” the calm voice of Tom Donovan, “…slow down… everything is going to be alright.” His dank grey eyes glance down to the flushed and bloody face of the tiny brunette.

His voice scares Amir for a few moments, but his words scare him even more. How is everything going to be alright? How many times had he seen his own friends and family members rushed into the hospital like this? How many of them had ever come out?

None.

He could name them all, all the ones who’d died in the hospitals, all the ones he knew and loved.

Daire O’Brian, his almost-cousin who was shot last Christmas by his own brother; innocent Stevie Doyle, shot in the neck by; John Donovan, with the pretty eyes, who was knifed; his angel of a sister, Fiachara Alanna Shields, ‘twas the cancer that took her to Gods arms; strong Taban MacIntyre, had his throat slit during a riot; his fathers brother, Druce Shields, well, perhaps Druce got what he deserved; Faunus O’Brien, brother to his mother and completely innocent, ne’er a death by his hands, but it didn’t mean he couldn’t be beaten to death, either; and then there was Sean O’Neel…

Sean O’Neel.

Dave O’Neel.

“You damned Gaels! Get the hell away from here! All of you, before I wring your inbred necks! I don’t want you near this grave; Sheilds, I’m gonna blow you to hell where you belong, you goddamned Catholic-”

“Amir! Amir, wake up!”

-SMACK-

Another slap. Damnit…!

The tired green eyes flicker up to the face of the man above him. Every now and again, Toms own eyes flick back to the hallway in front of him, as he doesn’t want to crash into anything. But most of the time, they cling sadly to the face of the fifteen year-old below him.

The bed is moving so fast, and yet why is it taking them forever to get to where they’re going? Each second seems to take a hundred years, and every blink of the eye is an eternity.

Slowly, as if he is only moving as fast as his mind seems to be, Amir reaches his hand up. He wants to know that Tom is really there, that he isn’t alone and that the bed isn’t moving on its own.

The pain is so great right now, and his entire body is fighting to go numb. His mind, too.

He is slipping.

Toms eyes flicker down again to look at the boys face and, in a moment that seems to take forever, his mouth opens, but just barely. One hand removes its self from the sturdy handlebar of the rolling bed and it slips into Amirs.

Now he can feel it. Amir can feel the rough, callused fingers curling around his own long, slender, delicate ones. He squeezes as tight as his little body can muster, which is just barely a grip. But Tom is strong enough for the two of them.

Vaguely, to the both of them, a voice comes over the speakers: “Dr. Crawford: Paging Dr. Crawford to operating room 312: This is an EMERGENCY. Dr. Crawford!”

312 is their destination.

To Tom, it is so close.

To Amir, it is irony. He was born 3/12. And now he is going to die in 312.

Tom can just barely see it up ahead.

But Amirs eyes are already shut.