All That Remains: Day 1

Word Count: 6,013

Summary of Events:

Will boarded the charter plane to fly back to Brussels from Frankfurt and deliberately sat off on his own to stew in self-castigation for his personal error that had allowed Eintracht to score the goal that had made the score 3–1 in Eintracht's favour, and had allowed them to take the victory 3–2 in total goals. As the plane was accelerating down the runway to take off, he heard teammates crying out in alarm that a plane was coming at them on the runway and got up from his seat to make for an emergency exit when he was knocked unconscious. Chloë returned home from a hair appointment to find a police officer at her front door, who informed her that Anderlecht had been in a crash at the Frankfurt Airport. Since she'd accidentally left her phone at home, she checked through all the messages and other notifications that had come to her as a result, including a video one of her friends on social media had found…

Excerpt of the Day:

She tapped on the video, scrolled it back to the beginning, and paused it to take in the scene. The person was filming an aircraft on the runway which was very clearly emblazoned with the livery of the Belgian-based airline which Anderlecht always chartered when they needed to fly somewhere — in part because the airline were an official sponsor of the team.

In the background, there was another, larger aircraft which was rather close to the runway, but because it was perpendicular to the Belgian craft, she couldn’t see any livery markings whatsoever.

Allowing the video to play caused her phone to spout a cacophony of noise, which was mostly the sound of alarmed and anxious human voices, none of which seemed to be speaking a language that she knew even a small bit of.

One voice, clear and calm, came over the rest, but it wasn’t a language she understood any more than the others. She presumed the voice to belong to the person filming the video, who almost sounded like a news reporter, albeit for a foreign country.

The footage showed the Belgian craft heading down the runway at an increasing speed as the larger craft headed straight for its forward end with equal speed. Suddenly the Belgian craft turned toward the assembled group — although they were too far away to be in any mortal danger for some time — and lifted sharply.

She thought she saw sparks come from the tail of the Belgian plane before it dropped back to the runway with the larger craft looking too close to not be touching it, at which point she noticed the Belgian craft seemed to be tilting, as its wing she could see was getting closer and closer to the ground.

Suddenly the wing buckled and the craft tipped over enough that she could see the nose of the larger craft was completely ravaged by damage, while the forward fuselage of the Belgian craft was comparably ravaged, which caused an increased outcry among those gathered with the videographer watching the scene unfold.

The video didn’t last long after that, for which Chloë was grateful, as she felt sickened by what she’d seen, even if she’d not understood a word of the commentary which had been offered by the person filming the video, nor had she been able to pick out any familiar words in the cacophonous cries that had served as the background audio.

She left the video and checked the rest of her notifications numbly. Even if the incident hadn’t been quite what she’d expected, seeing as the closest thing to a fire had been when it looked like the tail of the Belgian craft had struck the ground and sent up a few sparks, it was still bad, and there was definitely the possibility that Tristan hadn’t merely been injured, but that he could well be dead.