Crystalline

Broken

The TV in the hotel spread a pale, muted light that somehow filled the space that the absence of sound created, as if colour was sound and sound was colour and there was no real difference between the two. The roof above was a pristine white, as was the rest of the room and most of the furniture, even the bedspread he lay on top of, the room too warm for him to think of moving beneath it.

Lissa, Nel and his mother were in the next room over, the two girls having been smuggled into the room wearing clothing that covered almost all of them, so that their strangeness could not be noticed.

When he looked to the side, Riley was sitting up on his bed, eyes wide as he stared raptly at the mute television like it were a lifeline that was about to be cut, and he had to take as much joy from it as he could before everything disappeared. It made him feel sad, that he looked at the TV like that. It made him wonder what had happened to the boy, how he'd lived. How he could bear being in charge of his brother's life; known that, had the situation been reversed, he would have wanted the same thing. Kale could not have said that; he thought he would always choose life, but who was he to say that when he had not been in any other situation?

He shifted, and Riley tore his eyes from the TV screen, yellow and red and blue light playing across his face, making his eyes seem sunken and gaunt. "Ask. You know you want to," he said, his voice and the look on his face far older than it had the right to be.

"You don't have to answer if you don't want to," Kale said slowly, thinking carefully and watching Riley's expression. He was thinking that, had Riley not wanted to talk about it, he would not have said anything; that sometimes it was good to unburden yourself to a stranger, that it felt better to know that you were not the only one with a certain piece of knowledge, a story. Knowledge was a large burden to bear; it was heavy and it was painful, and sometimes having someone to share it with made it easier.

He was quiet as Riley grabbed the remote and clumsily turned off the TV, the small, thin silhouette of the boy lying back on the bed and burrowing beneath the covers before he began to speak. His voice was bitter and raw and tired; it was the voice of a boy who had not been in his body for a long time, and who wished to return to the oblivion of his other form.

He listened to every bit of it.

When he was younger, he'd had the life of every child; it was rocky and it was hard, but it was life, and there was always that to be grateful for. He and his brother would huddle in their rooms as their parents yelled at each other, and then his brother would leave him to go watch TV with their father while he would go and let his mother hold him in her arms til her tears slowed and they fell asleep on her bed. They would eat dinner together and go to the park and watch movies together. His mother would bring him to school in the morning and then go to work. His father would pick him up from school on the way home from work and everyone would be there in time for dinner. And that had been his life. Until his seventh birthday.

It had started with an odd feeling inside of him, as if there were something in his stomach, rattling around and demanding to be let out. An appointment at the doctor's had determined that there was nothing wrong with him; he was a perfectly healthy young boy. But the feeling in his bones that made them seem as if they were boiling on the inside belied the doctor's words.

His first change had been a year later; a year of ignoring the suffering and pain had made it barely recognisable, where before he had felt sick from the barest touch of the feeling in his bones and stomach.

He had been asleep. And then he simply wasn't, as if there was a very thin line between sleep and wakefulness, as there always had been for him, and he had only been hovering on the line; it hadn't taken much to tip the balance. But this was too much.

This was his bones cracking and lengthening, his back arching against the mattress, his skin prickling all over. This was his muscles changing shape, his organs rearranging themselves as his ribs cracked and healed, impossibly fast. This was his jaw lengthening, extending, his old teeth growing into something new and sharp. This was his eyes burning, his ears stretching into points as the shape of his skull changed and his fingers cracked, bone receding and claws snicking free of his skin.

By the time a scream had ripped its way free of his throat, his family had stumbled blearily into his room to see a wolf's body rising fluidly from the place of a young boy, it's eyes flickering from brown to gold until they settled on a disquieting amber. And they watched as he changed back, screaming as his body revolted against its natural shape, not wanting to go back but going back nonetheless, until a small, shivering boy cried against his sheets.

He had been their nightmare. He had been what they had blamed for all of their problems. He had been the thing that they had tried to get rid of.

His brother, the one who had sat with him through storms when he was scared of lightning, was the first to try to kill him. He tried to smother him in his sleep, holding a pillow over the face of his eight year old brother as he thrashed against the lack of air and restraining hands on his arms and legs. Only then had he known that his parents had helped. His mother had been screaming and his brother had been crying and his father had been silent as he had gone from one type of struggle to another, and the hands had retreated with horror as a wolf had backed out of the boy's skin, it's fur still rippling with the change as its eyes tried to settle, it's hackles raised as it growled, showing wickedly sharp teeth.

Next had been the knives that had come after him, driven him from his home as his mother shouted at him from the balcony, watching as her son and her husband cut and slashed at a pale wolf that danced out of the way. Crimson blood speckled his pristine fur as he darted into the trees and stood at the boundary of the property, watching and listening as his mother sobbed and shouted for him to give her son back, and his father reassured her that that thing was not their son; it was a monster, and it was gone.

He watched for a year as his mother called for him to come back, sitting on the back steps in the middle of the night, so that no one could hear her. His wolf body was so natural, so settled, that he could not imagine changing shape. His wolf was the rational side of him; the Hunter, the Tracker, the one who acted on instinct and did whatever it thought was best to do, regardless of emotions. And it changed him back so that he crawled across the garden towards her, a weak smile on his face as he looked up at his mother, on his hands and knees in the grass. And when she looked at the thin, ravaged body of her son, her expression had not changed to one of love and acceptance. Hers had changed to one of fury and hate, and she had stood and left him there, shivering in the cold, nothing to keep him warm but the quaking night. 

The next day his brother had come after him with a shotgun; fifteen was young, but who needed a license when you lived in the middle of nowhere?

The man had found him some time after, taken him into a white van where he lay, his body riddled with bullets but his mind stuck between wolf and boy as he tried to change back, to end his life, the wolf refusing to let him die. 

"You think I wanted to end his suffering, to stop what my brother was going through, the pain he must have been feeling. But I knew what he was feeling, I knew every second of it. And I wanted him to feel it, too. For the rest of his life." Kale could feel Riley's eyes on him through the darkness, shining a luminous amber, as if he were in his boy body but his eyes had refused the change, the wolf not wanting to relinquish its hold.

Riley's voice, when he spoke, was cold and bitter, full of a hatred Kale could not even fathom. "I didn't want to stop it. But the wolf acts on instinct. And his instinct was to stop the pain. The wolf is kind. I'm not."

The older boy rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling unseeingly, a prickling feeling spreading along his skin as he thought. "Maybe you're too broken to be kind," he said, finally, not knowing if this would help but knowing that it was the only honest thing he could say. He did not think that Riley deserved to be lied to.

Riley was quiet for a while before he responded, his voice soft and small, finally sounding as young as he should sound. "Maybe everyone's broken, and I'm the only one who's not. Kindness doesn't seem like it belongs to the world."