declan strauss / two. fin

You don't see Jason's face in your sleep anymore.

You have to stop and take a second to wonder if that's something that you're grateful for or not, try and remember what it's like to have taken your tiny twelve-year-old fists and beat them into the other boys face until blood was everywhere—dripping from the slope of his nose, all wrong from where you'd bashed it in, hoping the cartilage would shatter up into his brain and kill him quickly; from his mouth where you couldn't bring yourself to look too quickly but you're pretty sure his bottom teeth had gone through his lip at some point you'd hit him so hard and you can't be sure but he might have actually lost a tooth in the process; all over your face, where he'd spit on you.

You used to see him every night.

But not anymore.

What you see now is worse. You see all of the others killing each other, over and over and over again. Liza slaughtering Sarah and not feeling a lick of remorse, encouraging Isabelle to be worse than them all. Finn killing Anabelle while you stood on the sidelines, trembling with rage, doing nothing. 

Worse. You see yourself standing over all of them, fists bloody, a crown on your head, and you shiver when you can't help but feel that thing in the pit of your stomach that's proud of that image. 

Right before you wake up: Bambi, still too small for her age, putting her little palm on your cheek.

"You're not as bad as people say you are," she says.

But when you wake up, you're still the boy who beat one foster father and murdered another, and you still don't feel bad about that. When you wake, you're still the boy who took the first kill in this damned house.