That was the first thing Y/N registered, somewhere between the ringing in her ears and the dust that felt like it had coated the inside of her lungs. She was alive. Which was, honestly, a bit of a surprise.

The second thing she registered was the weight. There was something heavy across her legs, and for one awful, dizzying moment her mind conjured up something she didn't want to look at. But no. It was concrete. Just a chunk of ceiling, or wall, or the entire goddamn building, depending on how the day was going.

The third thing was that it was dark. Not the nice kind of dark. The kind of dark that pressed against her eyes and made her wonder if they were actually open at all.

She blinked. Or tried to. Her eyelashes scraped against something gritty, and she realized her face was pressed almost against the ground. One arm was twisted beneath her. The other—she tried to move it. Pain exploded up her shoulder, and she bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste copper.

Okay. That arm was not okay.

She dragged in another breath, and it came out as a wet-sounding wheeze. Dust. So much dust. Somewhere above her, muffled and impossibly far away, she could hear sirens. Distant. Inhuman. Like they belonged to a world she wasn't quite part of anymore.

She was twenty-one years old, buried somewhere in the ruins of Manhattan, and the last thing she’d been doing before the sky fell in was—

Shit. She couldn’t remember. Her job? Her coffee order? Her own goddamn name? No, no, she knew her name. She knew that. It was everything else that had gone fuzzy around the edges.

Y/N. That was her. Twenty-one. Alive, presumably. Trapped. Alone.

Alone was the word that stuck. It settled somewhere in her chest, heavy as the concrete pinning her down.

She tried to move her good hand, and her fingers scraped against something sharp. Broken glass? She curled them around it anyway. It hurt. That was good. Pain meant she was still here. Still breathing. Still—

Another sound, closer than the sirens. A low, grinding groan of settling debris. She held her breath, listening to the building shift around her, and for one stupid, terrifying second she thought: this is it. This is how I die. Crushed to death in the dark before anyone even knows I’m here.

The dust settled. The groaning stopped. She was still alive.

God, that was going to get old.

She tried to count to ten to calm herself down. She got to three and started laughing instead. A horrible, wet, broken sound that hurt her ribs and made more dust rain down on her face. She was lying in the dark, bleeding, probably dying, and she was laughing.

It was that or screaming. She figured laughing was probably less likely to bring the building down on her head.

She heard something else, then. A voice. Distant, barely there beneath the rubble. A man’s voice, it sounded like, rough and harried and almost angry, and if she didn’t know better she’d swear it was getting closer.

She opened her mouth to answer, but all that came out was a broken rasp of air.

Fuck.