Dizzy

Kloey is restless.

The Shadows are relentless in their psychological torture. They pretend as if they aren't doing it, but then they feed horrid nightmares into her head every time she sleeps, and she is never able to escape from them until her body decides it must be time to wake up. The suffering is remotely never-ending.

And these nightmares are not normal nightmares in any capacity. They are simply descriptions of murder. At the very least, it looks that way. Vivid imagery of dark crimson that stains everything in sight. Bones broken, bodies trampled. Shadows prowling through the night.

But this subject of murder seems to be only limited to one person.

Red.

From these nightmares, she has deduced that Red is the strongest out of all of the Shadows. If asked, or if not asked (which is most often the case, mind you), he could slice twenty men in halves in the space of a few soft seconds. His hands, he can form into sharp-as-steel daggers; even with this power, he prefers to use claws, perhaps thinking that claws are much scarier than the glittery knives that humans find so fascinating. Occasionally he uses his horns to ram into someone's chest (from the dreams, she feels the warm blood spatter onto her face, as if she is standing at the scene of a kill), but those are mostly for the purposes of terrifying his victims before taking their lives.

Red is almost the only Shadow who appears in her nightmares. And if it's not him, it's every Shadow, pouring out a building, into the streets, out on the fields, devouring all the blood in fear and sight, soaring into the sky and turning day to night, murdering every human at their will, and abducting children instead of preferring to kill. A black cloud of evil beings overtakes the earth, and she wakes up in tears, shaking in her socks.

She is 11.

I should ask him. I must ask him. I have to ask him. The thought races in her head as she drags herself off of the cold little cot the Shadows have given her, shuffling quietly into the hall. It's better to not invite the Shadows remotely close to her-- situations are rather awkward when she has just been scared half to death and the Shadows are taking their pretty time feasting on her horror.

She has to ask him. She has to know.

All of the humans Red has harmed in his lifetime are adults. All of them. None of the people he has hurt have been children.

Why? Why has he never hurt a child?

She's questioning it, but she doesn't want to... question it. She's afraid that Red will notice his mistake-- if it even is a mistake-- and the tables will turn, and she would not like to be torn to die. Not now. Nope. Not ever. She wants to stand up to him, but she doesn't want to get mauled in the process.

Is it possible with a Shadow like Red?

Hopefully. She pushes open the heavy black door in front of her face and finds herself in a chilling room. Red stands in the middle of it, arms pressed down on an invisible table, eyes closed, breathing slowly in and out. The scene of his blank, dark face is so captivating that she pauses completely, almost forgetting why she came in the first place. Kloey dumbly stares at him, hand still against the wooden door, mouth slightly open in a little line.

Red's eyes open. The room floods with their crimson glow. Using just a glance, he shuts the door behind her, and she jumps at the sudden movement. And then, when she looks back, he's standing to her right, having moved within a split second. After seeing what she has seen for the past however-many-days she has been given nightmares by the Shadows, this is no big feat. It's almost normal.

"What do you need?"

She wants to respond with something snarky, but that will only get her killed, won't it? If her theory is true, then it will not. But the probability that she will be torn to pieces keeps her from being her normal, sassy self.

"I have a question."

He reads her eyes. "I have told the other Shadows to stop, yes," he says, referring to the subject of the Shadows feeding her nightmares. "They don't want to listen."

"They're kids," she says, although it isn't quite true. The Shadows were children, but now they are all mindless, opinionated, vampirish, incredibly strong, and rude monsters. She regrets saying such a thing.

Red straightens his shoulders. "There's something else, yes?"

Kloey nods her head slowly. She wants to take all the time that she can possibly take to answer this question, because she would like prolong her time spent in the silence of Red's company, but she knows that Red is unusually impatient and she doesn't want to upset him. "I... Well, the... I was reme'mbering..."

She falls silent. Why is it so scary to talk to him? It's not that hard! Just say the words!

Her mouth refuses to move. Crap.

Red sighs. For the first time since she has met him, he does not make some arrogant comment about how her fear tastes on his tongue; instead, since he would like to hear what she has to say, he walks over to her and sets a hand on her chest. With his power (whatever power that may be-- she still hasn't figured everything out about him yet), he manages to remove the fear from her, and she finds that she suddenly has the courage to jump up in kick him in the face like she has always dreamed of doing. Her fear is... gone?

If Shadows can taste fear, maybe they can take it, too. It makes no sense-- other than the fact that both of the words start with the letter T.

But she won't jump up and kick him in the face. That is a definite ticket to death. Kloey swallows back her 11-year-old sass and says, softly, "You know already about the Shadows givin' me a bunch of nightmares, right?"

Red removes his hand. "Yes, I do." He does not say anything about how that should already be obvious to her, for which she is silently grateful. Red normally makes her feel humiliated and stupid.

She takes a deep breath. Her words come out as fast as spilled cheerios, landing in patterned scatters across the floor. "I saw you killing a whole bunch of people in the nightmares and it was like I was there too but I noticed because I'm good at noticing things and not dumb that you were actually just killing adults and not kids so I was wondering why you weren't killing kids--" inhale, "--unless you actually secretly are which is why half the Shadows don't even exist but if you are then please don't kill me for finding out because it took me like a week to figure it out and I'm really proud of it and I want to make it a crime board if I ever grow up enough and don't get killed right now to become a detective--"

Red places his hand back. "Breathe, human."

She inhales suddenly, and then holds it in as if she has a horrible case of hiccups.

Red blinks. "Are you sick? Is something the matter? Why aren't you acting normally?"

She spits out the air abruptly. "What's... what's 'normally'?"

Red stares at her; he then shakes his head, dismissing the subject of what he classifies as "normal." "Is that all you had to say?"

"Um." She gives him a glare that only an 11-year-old girl can give and folds her arms. There's a ton more that I could say. Please, do not ask that question again.

Red shakes his head. He finally turns away and begins his usual manner of taking leisurely strides around the border of the room, eyes opened into little, thinking slits as he mulls over her words.

"Do you want to hear The Story?"

He says the words as if they are a proper title. Kloey looks at him, hypnotized by the thought of a story. "If there's a story involved, then yes."

Red takes in a slow, deep breath, squinting at the foggy floor. "You know about my brothers and I, correct?"

She nods. "You guys came from a lab on top of a mountain, and you broke free on Halloween night after you killed everybody in the lab."

He looks at her. "Yes, we did. We certainly did.

"However, upon leaving the laboratory, we encountered a human town." His mouth turns up into a momentary smile. "I was hit by a semi-truck before we entered, actually."

She laughs. For some reason. "How did you live?"

"Shadows are still shadows," he says, as if that's the scientific explanation. "I was nonphysical. I only broke into pieces. And those pieces attract to each other, so I fixed myself, technically, and I survived."

"Woah..."

His smile disappears, and he once again looks at the floor. "It was, as you said, Halloween night when we escaped. We entered the town, which was not a well-made decision, and we found a human child that introduced herself to us."

Kloey shifts. "...Her?"

"She was a girl, yes." He refuses to answer Kloey when she asks what the girl's name was, as the experience of whatever happened must be too traumatic for him to fully recall. "She brought us along with her two male friends as they went from house to house and scraped the candy out of old plastic dishes. And they did not find out we were not dressed in costumes until one of them noticed the blood on our hands."

She tries to get him to tell her the name of the boy who discovered the blood, but he only glares at her in response. That means no, she thinks.

Red resumes calmly. "My brothers and I had had no prior experience with children at the time, but we learned then that they are very protective of each other, unlike the... adults. The children were afraid of us, but we wanted them to stay with us, and so we tried to grab them and force them to stay."

He looks away. Kloey sees a shroud of hidden sadness cover his crimson eyes.

"One of them, the oldest boy, almost knocked me over while trying to free the girl. He did free her, actually, but in my moment of frustration at being overpowered by such a small human, I..."

He pauses, completely. His gaze lingers at the floor. Kloey can see the spikes prickle and then recede at his shoulders, signifying that his emotions on this subject are very mixed. He seems very sullen, and yet angry at himself. And he is also very reserved on this topic.

She unfolds her arms, placing them at her sides, and slowly walks over to him. He seems... sad. Sadness, such a curious emotion; one that no Shadow every regularly shows. They always have an abundance of fear at their taste buds, but in this instance, Red has no fear to devour, and his mind is too focused on events on the past to even try to be "scary."

"Red, what happened?"

Red shuts his eyes. For some reason, the room resonates with the word innocence. Kloey can hear it ringing in her ears, but she doesn't understand what it means, and why Red seems so upset by it. What is innocence, really? And why is is to prominent in this very room?

His eyes open, just a small amount. But he refuses to look at her face. "I killed the child, Kloey."

She frowns, grimacing.

"And not in any kind of... painless manner." Shame drips from his voice like honey from a hive, and the guilt of his tone is overwhelming. "I did not mean to, but I did. All of his friends, and every human within his vicinity ran to try and help him, but my brothers and I already knew that he would die. And we had to leave him behind because the humans were going to capture us."

"But... why are you so upset about it?" The question comes out as a series of timid squeaks.

"He was innocent." Red moves around her, away from her. "Innocent. He had never done anything wrong. He hadn't even gotten a chance to live a significant portion of his life, and I had killed him. There was nothing wrong with him, and I killed him."

"Is that why...?"

"Yes." He goes to leave the room. Any topic that involves being significantly sad about something is one that he does not wish to talk about to any extent. "Children have not had a chance to live any true part of their lives. They are innocent.

"I had ruined that innocence-- and it seems that the Shadows have ruined yours, too."

***

this title makes absolutely no sense but i did it anyway because i was so tired yesterday...

it was a long day, trust me. i got a headache from wearing tight glasses and couldn't think.

so this was a thing i made

hope you enjoyed. leave a comment, some feedback maybe? som'n positive to make my day(s)?