Cobblestones

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This page describes or alludes to topics that may be uncomfortable or upsetting to readers. Please avoid this page if you are sensitive to blood, violence, or slight amounts of cursing.

Small piece of ventish writing done by a distressed Tilan after an incident in her school.

...It was not the most pleasant of incidents.

## Begin Reading

"He bit me! The cunt *bit* me!"

It is in a rather isolated part of the school, an old corner of an abandoned courtyard that leaked plaster and dust. There is a half-broken marble statue that has fallen down fron its pedestol, which is now lying in the dirt with a cracked face, a broken shoulder, and a beard scribbled on by a marker in the distant past. The ground is unclean and has a few benches dotting the waste, and the benches were wobbly and have vines squirming across the wood. The vines do not have anything on them, because the vines are dead, and leaves, which are usually the only things that grow on vines, for some reason do not happen to plants that are dead.

Birds avoid the place, not because it is creepy or gloomy, but because the place has a complete lack of both food and nesting materical. The place isn't gloomy in the least. It is just old, unwanted, and uncared for. It seems unable to host life of any sort, even if the life in question is a just an innocent piece of mould wishing to devour a banana peel.

Well, all life except the three boys clustered around a seemingly completely normal piece of the wall - completely normal, apart from the smaller boy backed up against it. He has a speck of blood on his lips, and he looks about to either burst into tears or develop a severe case of unprovocked rabies at any moment. Perhaps both.

He isn't cowering, but he isn't standing defiantly either. The larger boys are in their fifth year, and they know how to deal with both. But this one... he just stands there and looks at them, eyes wide with some unidentifiable wild light. Fear? Panic? Yes. But also a hint of menace, and a definite suggestion that their owner is on the saner side of things only by sheer force of willpower.

It is making the three boys starting to feel uneasy.

"He bit it clean through, he did," mumbles the one who got his finger bitten clean through. "It's bloody well bleeding."

If there is one thing that you never do it is that. You can tease, taunt, torment, and a lot of many other unpleasant things starting with t, but you never descend into savagery. Society has its limits, especially in this school. It is supposed to be education. It is all about being civilised.

Civilisation is a strange thing. It means that you could plan murders, use guillotines, deal in human trafficking, and devote yourself to the slave trade, but you couldn't go off and live in a nice little cave somewhere. Killing thousands of men by leading them onto a battlefield against other men for no apparent reason is considered courage and glory; careful negotiations and deals with the other nation to save countless lives isn't.

Likewise, while it is perfectly fine (and even somewhat fashionable) to hire an assassin to kill another person, biting a person, even someone who "started it first", is simply out of the social agenda.

The eldest of the three boys tugs on the first one's sleeve. "Let's go."

Words pass unsaid. Of course, they can technically report it to their dorm master or whoever, but the school was not made for wimps and they'll be the laughing stock of the whole term. Going to adults for help? Unimaginable. Dammit, they'll be snivelers in everyone's eyes if they ever told anyone else. And of course there will be that question of why they are hanging out with a tiny kid in the abandoned courtyard anyway. Some things are better left unanswered.

"You," says the eldest, whipping back with the grace of a swan in mid-flight and pointing a thin digit at the figure by the wall, "will be dead meat by tomorrow. We've got our eyes on you, you hear? Dead meat."

They leave.

The ten-year-old is left alone. He stands there, not doing anything in particular, not even bothering to wipe away the blood, just staring after the retreating figures. It is hard to say whether his eyes are of fear or of victory.

He keeps his tears in. It isn't until the three older students are well out of earshot when he starts crying, long gushing drops tumbling down his cheek and splashing into the debris beneath his feet. He cries like someone who has learnt to hide his tears the hard way, his breathing controlled, letting no whimper escape his throat, no sound ride on his intakes of air.

He doesn't bother wiping his face. Wiping it means that any watcher from far away would know that he has cried, and he is one who kept his emotions to himself out of habit. He will wash it later. Everything can happen later.

He lives in the past and the now, and he can't have cared about the future less. Let it come. He will bear it.

He has to. There is no other way, is there? Life comes and you take it. You don't argue with life, just like you don't argue with teachers and parents. They have strength and power and authority and all those things that make them the rulers, and you're just a weak kid with nothing of your own. Children aren't supposed to have personality, independent thoughts, or the ability to speak. You don't argue with the people in charge. You just listen to what they tell you and you try your best to manage through.

Life hurts. He has so many gashes in his heart that he feels more made of space than matter. Perhaps time heals all heals for some. Some people learn to forget, but he doesn't. Every slash, rip, tear, and thrash is still fresh in his mind, to the point where he has started to think that he is mouldier than his wounds himself.

He doesn't worry about the threat. It was empty, like the hole in his heart.

But he has learnt one thing. He acted out of animal impulse today. He did the thing that must not be done, he broke every social rule that existed for his class, and the result was that they stopped hurting him. He got breathing space, even if it will be only temporary.

The older boys were scared of him back then. They were stronger, taller, more experienced, and he wouldn't have lasted a second against any of them. But they feared him. And that made them go away.

He would like to *keep* them away.

There were three ways to avoid being hurt, he reasoned: being liked, being out of it, and being feared. But he was never one of those likable children, and he doubted if he would develop proper charisma as an adult. Not liked, then, and the second strategy is the one he has been using up till this day. Stay inconspicuous? Keep out of trouble? He got hurt all the same.

That means only the third option. What do people fear? They fear things that hurt them, and they fear things they can not control. Like the darkness, or the void.

Hurting other people means that he will have to be more powerful than them in the first place, and he doesn't want to hurt anyone. He just wants to be left alone. No.

But the void... it sings out to the emptyness of his heart. He could be that. He is halfway there already, isn't he? Break the rules, surprise them, make it so that they never know what you can do and will do. They fear the darkness because they don't know what the shadows hold. Be the void.

It'll mean that he becomes an outcast, but that is fine to him. He doesn't get much social interaction anyway, and there are worst people in the world than school bullies. He would rather be left out than left dead.

He turns and walks away. Somewhere out there, dinner is starting, and he'll have to return sooner or later - after he gets a wash, of course. He needs water. And then he will walk into the dining hall and get his custard or whatever and he'll sit down in a quiet corner like he usually does and perhaps, just perhaps, this time the three older boys won't bother him again.

He knows what he will do anyway. Let them come.

Let life come. He just doesn't care anymore.