Crushed and Created- Tangled series (Overprotective famous brothers)

Oprah

ALISHA

I could smell the smoke all over again. I could feel the heat, I could hear the voices, I could see every detail in a new light now.

All of it was happening again, more vivid than humanely possible. Every single detail was precise, more precise than anyone could ever imagine. It was like I was in the same situation, only with slow motion, HD technology.

I was outside, my brain skipped the first part of the attack. I was outside in the corridor, thick with grey smoke that had spread across the floor from a bomb going off. Suddenly, it all fast forwarded. We found the bombs within a minute. And then he found us. He found us, the victims playing a game against them. Against terrorists.

He stumbled down on the floor thanks to a savior who stabbed him from behind. I lost contact. It all happened too fast in my nightmare. Then it seemed so slow, like every minute was a decade. Right now, it seemed like we were in another dimension, where time flowed by way too fast.

I needed to wake up, the worst was about to start. I didn’t want to relive those dreadful minutes again, I couldn’t survive it yet again. Not tonight, not after days of being free from the torture.

I had to open the windows, only then could the Special Forces come in. if they tried to open the doors from outside, it’d trigger all the bombs. We’d all die. I had to help them get in and save us.

That’s when I heard them. A terrorist called Tango Charlie and another person were in a short conversation in broken Hindi. They were talking about how Tango would die and that’s trigger the bombs. They were dead set to kill us all.

The words were just as I had heard them a month and 2 days ago. No difference at all. They still sent a chill down my spine and made goosebumbs rise. My heart skipped a beat as I processed the information and evaluated my next steps. The information I now had had flipped the scene upside down.

I was running down the stairs to tell the others, to warn them and to somehow make Tango Charlie live. He couldn’t die. But they saw me, they caught me. Getting into a classroom, I tried my best to keep myself and Tango Charlie alive. Throwing acid at the gun and the other person with him, I tried to distract Tango. He was furious…and he used me as a punching bag.

Kicking and shoving me into the wall, he gulped a cyanide pill just as he heard the choppers. Then, getting a knife out, he played with me like cats played with mice before eating them. He enjoyed me gasping for air, me begging with no voice to stop the pain, the fire I felt in every cell of my body. Even death seemed welcoming and less scary over the agony.

I woke up with a jerk, gasping for the purified air coming from the air conditioners of my huge bedroom. Just a nightmare, nothing else, I told myself. Chugging down the water, I went back to sleep. The last thing I wanted was to wake anyone up. And thanks to the exercise today, my sore muscles pulled me into a fantasy land where I was fighting tigers sitting in a kangaroo’s pouch.

I could not stop tapping the ground nervously as the stylists tried to make me look presentable. Late in afternoon, I was back from training and therapy for the day, and now at the studio to meet nobody other than Oprah Winfrey. I was wearing a top with legging and boots, nothing over the top. All the stylist was trying to do was make my makeup look natural.

“It’ll be alright. And you don’t need to worry.” Salman squeezed my shoulders for the gazillionth time and I nodded at him. Being my eldest brother, he had always wished I made my tv debut- if I ever did- with someone huge. Oprah Winfrey easily was at the top ten in the list. But still, the topic we were gonna talk about was something we all wished had never happened.