”What did you just call me?”

The teen with blue tipped hair growled at the boy who stood with his friends, grinning in a far too smug way. Green eyes narrowed and if anger could have taken a physical form, the air around him would have danced with heat.

Ever since December, school life had become unbearable. Every day he had to get up and go, and every day it was the same old s**t replayed over and over. Classes he didn’t care about. Teachers who either thought he ‘wasn’t living up to his potential’ or that he’d never amount to anything. Homework that was as pointless as it was long. Punk assholes who thought it was fun to poke at a kid who was already hurting, like dogs turning on the weakest in the pack to drive them out.

But the joke was on them. Matthew Gowan wasn’t the weakest member. He wasn’t even rightly a dog, was he? He was a wolf, a lion… a dragon. He had lost his mother, then his father had retreated into a world his children couldn’t reach, and now the only person in his life he had ever felt he could count on was gone… and the worst part of it was that he hadn’t even known how much he could miss someone until Orah suddenly wasn’t there any more.

“What, didn’t you hear me, Dickhead? I called you a Twink.” The brunette sneered, grinning as his friends snickered behind him. “Its what you are, right? I mean, you work in a ******** flower shop, you’ve got hair like a girl, and that ******** emo look going on. If you like c**k, I got something right here for you.”

The teen palmed his groin in a lewd gesture, but he had barely completed the motion before a fist smashed square into the center of his face. Cartilage crunched as Matthew’s knuckles connected with his nose and then chaos erupted in the shadow of the Meadowview gymnasium. Matthew managed another swing after his sucker punch, landing solidly in his antagonist’s stomach to double him over, but then the bully’s friends were on him, hands grabbing at his arms and dragging him backwards. Rage took over and everything got jumbled from there.

Later, he would remember swinging wildly, landing punches wherever he could reach. The bruises would tell the story of where fists had landed on his own body, and after he’d fallen to the ground, boots. By the time they were done, the teen was left curled up on the ground, blood running into his eye from a cut on his forehead and the taste of copper in his mouth. They laughed as they left him and Matthew felt the sound burn into his skin.

Despite the shame of losing, though… there was something satisfying about laying there in the dirt, blood in his mouth and pain running down his nerves.

I don’t understand why you do this, his father had said. Why is it so important to meet every insult with your fists? It doesn’t solve anything. Orah would be… would be disappointed.

Art had trailed off then, leaving a suddenly charged and awkward silence.

Do you like getting beat up like this?

Matthew felt his lips curl in a smile that had no pleasure or amusement in it.

Yeah, maybe I do.

Word Count: 560