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12: Hiding
“What are you doing?”

“Lets play hide and seek!”

“Why do you want to play that?”

“You close your eyes and we’ll go hide.”

“When should I stop counting?”

“We’ll tell you when to stop!”

(“She’s so annoying!”)

“One.”

(“Shhh, don’t let her hear you, stupid!”)

“Two.”

(“She’s so weird.”)

“Three.”

(“Always asking all those stupid questions.”)

“Four.”

(“Hey, come over here! We found some grubs.”)

“Five.”

“Six.”

“Seven.”

…

“Twenty.”

…

“Thirty-four.”

…

“Eighty.”

…

“One hundred and fifty.”

…

Confusion

New year, new day. Early in the AM, no alarm bells going off, suspiciously empty bed where a flame-haired Peyton should have been, and the series of realizations that followed. This body. This place. This person. That isn't her. That wasn't you. Fiona's voice. She is dead, she died before you ever really knew her and she left you a pair of boots in her will.

Alarms and red emergency lights. Stifling heat of a power outage. Frantic scrabbling in the hallways: you this way, you that, hit the south beach trainee and be brisk about it. A great rift in reality barely sewn up (he thinks briefly of Watership Down, of the Hole in the Sky, the horrific cleft wound in the clouds bleeding) and the welcome back to a world of chaos and uncertainty.

Cold floor, coughing. Sure his lungs were wrecked, sure his throat had been crushed, sure he'd died. Stranger like a ********' Conan character and covered in tattoos barking a sarcastic greeting in a thick Glaswegian accent. You signed up for this and then the thing he would later know as a lie: it's worth it.

Suits, gas masks; veiled faces and the promise of violence, and someone troubled asking who he was, who they were, and he had no answer.

The baby was crying and the house was empty and at first he'd thought, sick, that this was her suicide note. But his wallet was empty, and her favorite shoes were all gone. (They never did manage to track her down.)

He could never make sense of his own thoughts. He could never find the beginning of one idea and the end of another, and never find anything underneath the roiling blanket of anxiety. "This'll help," someone said, and he believed them. And they were right.

[ 10. Normalcy ]

It had been an essay for school: What is your definition of normalcy?

Shad0ws_Suck had frowned at the question, knowing that answering it would be fairly easy, as long as he put down everything that didn't happen or apply to him. Seeing those scary shadows everywhere...knowing that not everyone saw them...well, that was definitely not normal.

Not even close.

[ 11. Grey ] (already did 8 )

The first day, it had been a winter wonderland. But soon after, the pure whiteness enveloping the trees, buildings, and roads became muddled. Some was due to melting. But a large part was because creeple had been walking over and playing in the snow. And she found that she rather preferred the snow before it had been touched.

[ 12. Hiding ] (already did 8 )

"Where are you?", she murmured from where she was crouching under the table. She swore she had looked everywhere, but no dice. Had she left it somewhere? That wasn't possible because she rarely took it out, let alone outside of the house. Had she misplaced it? Possibly. It sure wasn't in its proper spot when she went to find it this morning. Where had she placed her keys?

Grey

"Your father started going grey at thirty," his mother informed him as she folded the baby's shirts, as if this was somehow a consolation or comfort. His father's hairline had also started creeping back at thirty or earlier, if the pictures were any indication, and although it had shored up a stalwart defense and established an apparently-unassailable hold by fifty, it had done this decidedly after the damage was mostly done.

In a perverse, masochistic way it was satisfying: a couple of stray grey hairs in the beard he suspected he'd have all the more reason to attempt to stave off (a constant losing battle); steadily more forehead despite his vehement denials. He'd stopped feeling like a teenager by the time he was seventeen; he'd stopped feeling like a young man by twenty. This was affirmation, hated and welcome.

"It was a fluke. Fluke," he informed her, and she distractedly and consolingly patted his shoulder.

[5: Beginnings]

He has known for weeks that this was to be his new home, and yet, sitting on a pile of belongings much too big for his room, Harrow still feels strange: a bubble of uncertainty in the pit of his stomach and a lightness to his head that leaves him dizzy. Who is he, now that he is here? And who will he be, once he has been here for a day, a week, a month....

Hiding

He slept on the floor because he'd forgotten how to use a bed, not that he'd have ever said it out loud. He slept in his clothes out of habit; he slept with the lights on for the same reasons so many hunters did.

He slept curled into a blanket underneath the cheap, rickety desk, though, and he would not admit to himself that there was a reason, too, for this.