Taylor Swift is a very sheltered little girl.

Mike watched her greet her aunties from the relative seclusion of a shaded nook.  Despite the growing warmth of early summer, Taylor was wearing a high dress and gloves, a swatch of bright silk wrapped firmly around her throat.

Mike had had suspicions as to why Taylor had agreed so readily to their fake ( Read more... )

Mike was lounging in the chair by the large bay window, watching the snow start to drift down. The winter was closing in fast now, the sky steel grey, hard and heavy above their heads.

He didn't even bother straightening up as his father came to stand beside him, snifter already in hand despite it being mid-afternoon on a Sunday. "The zeppelins will ( Read more... )

When 'the natural superiority of the upper classes' comes up in conversation with his supposed peers, especially in conjunction with their right to rule, Mike is out the door. It's difficult even listening to the way they talk about the poor as if they're somehow less than human.

It happened once at a gentleman's gathering. The weather was fine, and ( Read more... )

Crowds got ugly quick now; a rabble-rouser or two was all it took for a peaceful group to become a baying mob. In the space of a blink, the tone of the street had changed, and Nick tried to ride the currents to the edge, a fence, a gate, an alley, anything he could run down or escape over.

But in amongst the jostling arms, as he fought to keep his ( Read more... )

The fire turns everything upside down.

It's not often that Mike lives through times he is certain he will remember until his dying day, but he has no doubt that he'll never forget the horror as a twisted, burned body is recovered, dead if they're lucky, still breathing if they're not. The sheer terror of frantic hours spent filtering rumors and half ( Read more... )

Looking back, parts of it will always seem more like a nightmare than reality.

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Kevin has been going to the point of exhaustion and beyond, hauling people out of the wreckage. Finally, Joe gives up and calls in the big guns, and sends for Mike to make Kevin stop and rest. Even Mike gets kind of intimidated trying to talk Kevin down when he's like ( Read more... )

Mike is still covered in soot, reeking of smoke and blood. His cuffs are stained, his shoes are filthy, and his hair is greasy and tousled from where he has been running his fingers through it in frustration at not being able to do enough.

Before him, his father paced. Mike had tuned out the ranting ten minutes ago. He'd only come up to get sturdier ( Read more... )

Nick hears that no one's even trying to get into the foundry, that they're giving it up as a lost cause because half of the structure's totally unstable, and even though the fire never reached the fuel room, it's only a matter of time.  Nick knows that Greta stays in the foundry to do her own projects when everyone else has gone home , but no one ( Read more... )

The fire was the most terrifying thing Ashlee had ever experienced. Their little house was spared the worst, though the ash and the soot in the air made every breath a struggle. She made a tent out of the linens, dragged their meagre supplies in under it, and sealed herself in with her son, hoping that the extra fabric would save them from the ( Read more... )

The thing is, the more she worked with Kevin over the years, the more she adopted the neighborhood into her heart, and it hurts to see the place so broken. It hurts to know that she is herself too broken to help rebuild--Greta is entirely unused to feeling useless. Macy has to damn near sit on her to keep her in bed - for her leg to heal, she needs ( Read more... )