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The figure in grey sat idle on the side of the road with his hesham bag in his hand and a cruel hook sitting by his feet, dried blood on his fingers and specked upon his face. He was out of The Nest; finally after years of torturous repetition and servant desperation from those about him, smiling wondrously but inside he knew they were all hollow, he could feel it.
He had helped his sister escape their clutches and he sat waiting to meet her, a place their father had told them of, that at the end of the coldest day, when the grey sheath pulled back over the fawning city, they would meet, before the new dawn, and they would go together to New Utopia, as one.
It had been many years since he had heard his father’s voice; since he had said good bye and been traded to The Collective. The whole deal of their trade and of The Child Market was for this; to get close enough to The Collective, to enter their business, garner their trust and to take back what was rightfully theirs; a father’s daughter and a brother’s twin.
He had to train his voice to be not like his father’s so as to to be able to pass as just another Child, ripe for the picking without any suspicion. His goal was to infiltrate the impervious Nest, find his sister, no matter how long it took and get her out, no matter what that meant.
He entered The Nest as a young boy and he escaped a young man and though he gave himself to their teachings - to their strangled will - he never once cleaned himself of his father’s face or of the sound of his assuring voice and what hurt more, was spending so many years inside that prison and feeling his twin so close yet not knowing where they kept her and what insanity they were administering to her.
When he found her, he only had time to quickly hug her before he took her out of the laboratories and to the end of the field where she escaped through a small hole in a wire fence probably dug by the animals that made passage in and out of the field scavenging the crops. His escape would require much more in the art of lie; walking out with The Collective as one of their own, slipping into the night and waking to meet his twin and his father; waiting, where he waited now.
Donal waited for so long that he fell in and out of dream, his head dropping to his lap as his consciousness crept away from the cold that pestered his skin. In his subconscious dreaming theatre, he stood alone in a pit of blackness.
He could sense hungry wolves snarling and salivating somewhere in the distance. His senses told him that he was surrounded and the slightest movement would invite them to murder so he stayed completely still, trying in vain to calm his beating heart and shallow his breath.
With his hands pinned to his side, the tremor wanting to build in his legs suppressed in the caverns of his mind; willing upon himself, absolute paralysis. A bead of sweat formed, just above his brow and it trickled down his nose to his inner eye, flooding it and blurring his vision.
His every sense focused on ignoring the desire to move his hand and wipe away the water from his eyes. His every desire wanted to see what wasn’t coming.
An itch started in his foot, in the arch and he told his brain it wasn’t real. The itch then ran up his leg and at the base of his spine, the fine hairs on his back started to tickle. He felt a million bugs crawling all over his body and as much as he wanted to squirm and shake the sensation that he knew wasn’t real, he couldn’t, for the beasts that he knew were not really out there, would eat him alive.
The snarling grew louder as the itch turned to burning at the nape of his neck and his focus compounded blocking all signals to and from his thalamus until his rising temperature brought another bead above the other eye and the bead ran slow and thick down the length of his nose and down to his lip. He tasted sweetness on his tongue.
That made no sense.
He licked his lips and fell to the ground under the incredible force of the charging wolves.
He screamed; “father” but the weight pushed harder forcing his face into the cold ground. He screamed again, this time clinging to the tail of his desperation and following it back out of his subconscious state into wake where before him and hanging over his head sat a matted little dog, its tongue hanging from its mouth dripping saliva onto his face, his maniacal panting, stealing the empty silence from the cold grey August morning and his tail wagging haplessly as it did throughout most of his life.
As Donal opened his eyes, Ruff barked appreciatively prancing forward and back, throwing his front paws forward and inviting Donal to play. The boy screamed and jumped back rushing for the claw that lay on the kerb just out of his reach.
“Get back beast” he screamed waving the hook with his right hand far from his body and leaning to the left away from the dog trying to get his leverage to run.
As he swang to the left, Ruff dove to the right and so on; the young boy in a sinister grey cloak brandishing a cruel instrument of torture trying in desperate vain to protect himself from an agile forceful beast whose only increment was to cause him pain or at least in his moments of panic, so he thought.
As he waved the hook back and forth trying to fend off the savage beast, trying to hide the fear perpetuating through his defensive screams, what the matted dog heard from his action was “Yes, I would like to play” and thus Ruff sought no threat in his demeanour and no danger in his dialogue.
Instead, he took upon the young boy’s invitation to play and wove and dove about, dodging his grasp, coming a little closer to tease the boy into chase, then running away exhilarated when his body just came out of reach.
Eventually, Donal stopped swinging the hook and stood upright, screaming at Ruff to stop. Immediately Ruff’s ears fell flat and his bum hung low to the ground. He lowered his body to the wet earth and crawled slowly over to Donal, his big eyes looking up to the boy remorseful and obedient. His little paws pulled the earth that separated them under his cowering body until his snout touched upon the boy’s shoe.
Ruff lowered his bum to the ground and sat upright, slowly lifting his head but the entire time, never taking his eyes of Donal’s, the dog, who had never for such a long time, sensed himself lower than a human and of the human, deserving of respect and of his wilful obedience. His ears stayed flat and his head moved forward to where the young boy now sat on the floor.
The boy shook nervously, and as he should. Dogs were never kind to humans, not in a very long time. Ruff pushed his head forward until it lay on the boy’s lap and the heat from his body filtered through the boy’s clothes and warmed his body. He felt a shiver run up his spine as he and the dog sat completely still, seated by the kerb once again, waiting for Safrine and his father.
Donal rested his hand on Ruff’s head and ran his fingers through his matted hair. The sensation brought him to ease. He let go of his conscious panic and just stared out into the distance, waiting, with the dog.
He had spent the previous night hiding in the stairwell of the building behind. He didn’t remember much, everything had happened so fast, it was a blur. His heart had been racing and adrenaline had rushed through his every sense. He had only thought of one thing; escape and he would have done whatever he had to, to be back with his sister and his father; and if that meant lying, then so be it; if that meant living as a monster within a den of monsters, then so be it and if the effect of this had made him a monster, then so be it.
He stared at the splotches of blood on his hands. He remembered walking from The Behemoth under the acuminate eye of two White Hearts wondering if they could sense his lie and whether the architecture of that night was just for his elaborate execution.
Everything up to that point had seemed so simple; the infiltration, the learning, the studying, the pretending and the building of trust. But as he walked off into the night dragging the hesham bag behind his body, every beat of his heart seemed to scream of his treason dissentingly. Every breath seemed to carry with it, the breach of his trust and every step, in his own paranoid ears, seemed to spell of his exact direction, even though he crept off into a different part of the night.
Inside the buildi
ng, his memories fragmented as the heightened nor adrenaline rushing through his body, scattering his immediate perception, making it more difficult to form solid memories - images with an emotional reference; smells, sounds, sights, senses on a canvas of conscious conception.
All he could remember was swinging wildly into the dark with the cruel instrument in his hand, catching on something, what he thought was some cloth, maybe the bark of a tree. Feared by the sound of whispering in the blackness, thinking that The Behemoth had caught wind of his treachery and was waiting like heavy sleep; to sneak upon him, he swang that hook to and fro, his eyes pinned shut even though they were already painted closed by the darkness, his mouth clenched, gritting his teeth, thinking only of one; his sister and his father; family.
He had heard screams but assumed they were what would come from the collection, keeping completely lifeless, clinging to the steel railing and at times ducking as he heard the rampant rush of feet pounding the steps, clearing his tiny body as they leapt into the darkness and away from something obviously more frightening than he. What came after that could have been anything and could have happened to anyone. His mind offered him little support and maybe for the better.
Maybe he shouldn’t know what lived in the dark of his mind, in the recess of his memories. Maybe a boy should only feel that kind of fear once in their life. Whatever the reason, when it was he found himself clinging to the metal railing on what he knew must have been a stairwell because of the cool draft running through the centre of the room, his mind failed to make a back-up.
But finally after what felt like an eternity, he was free and he despised that hornet’s nest so much. The Collective and especially those White Hearts were viscous savages.
Under the guise of well-being, they committed daily torture on the innocent and weak Famined. They would speak of love, while they tore out your heart, they would speak of liberation, while you were bandaged in their binary bondage, they would speak of peace while they whispered sweet insanity into your dreams and they would speak of war while they cowered behind great walls, feverishly domesticating their enemy but never fighting for anything greater than the keeping of their own specific delusion.
He hated everything they stood for. He hated the white heart they wore on their chests. He hated the orders that commanded their focus and the men who gave their orders and he hated what they had done to his family, what they had done to his sister. But she was free now and she was with their father and they would be together soon and they would go to New Utopia and they could be happy again, away from the remnants of a squandered humanity.
He longed so much to see his sister smile again and to be held in his father’s loving embrace; the three, united and complete; a family.