~ ☾~
I was staring at my hands.
Hands that I knew, better than anyone, but that I didn't recognise as my own.
Steel rings decorated my — his — fingers. Two on his left hand, around his index finger and another around his ring finger, and one on his right. I had never asked him if they meant something, but I had never seen him take them off.
Damaged skin. Scarred knuckles. Rough finger pads from the many hours spent strumming the guitar.
Right now, they were curled around a phone, elbows resting on knees, feet on the ground, body bent slightly forward through the widely opened car door.
The screen was cracked in a familiar pattern, but the words on it were still easily readable as I — he? — scrolled through them.
They were names.
A whole list of them.
Alphabetically ranked.
Some barely filled up a sentence, others were too long to fit one line. Most I scanned over without much difficulty, others were too foreign for me to properly pronounce.
A lot of them had been crossed through; a straight line jagged right through the middle of each letter.
My eyes moved over them as he kept scrolling, until he reached the one he had been looking for.
A family of four, all sharing the same last name.
He double tapped the first one. Crossed it out. Put a line through the second one. Then another one through the fourth.
My gaze lingered on the one name in between, the third one, that he had purposely left undamaged.
J̶O̶S̶E̶ O̶'N̶E̶I̶L̶L̶
E̶R̶I̶C̶ O̶'N̶E̶I̶L̶L̶
WARNER O'NEILL
C̶A̶S̶P̶E̶R̶ O̶'N̶E̶I̶L̶L̶
My head shot up when a heart wrenching, roar of a cry blasted through the forest, not too far away from me, and I immediately linked the names to their owners.
Jose and Eric O'Neill, two terribly beaten up parents who seemed halfway down their forties, had both been forced against a tree, metal chains keeping their hands bound together all the way around it.
The mother had sunken down to her knees, her body spasming and convulsing as it uselessly fought against the electric current that ran through her veins.
She wasn't the one crying, though.
That was, without doubt, the young, blonde haired boy sitting across from her, who's arms were also tied back. He seemed no older than eight, those typical childish features still marking his face.
Children's emotions are pure. Raw. Unfiltered. The proof of it was here, right in front of me.
The boy was crying and screaming at the top of his lungs, struggling to reach his parents as big tear drops rolled down his cheeks.
The sight of the young kid sent images of Reese, who couldn't be much older than the boy, through his head and therefore also through mine.
His cries only got louder with each time the cattle prod forced another stroke through his parents, the electricity scorching every fibre it touched as it clawed a way through their bodies and towards the ground.
Their eyes started glowing from the pain, a bright shade of gold and an even fiercer shade of red, that I was surprised to find belonged to the woman. The electricity wouldn't let them shift, though, no matter how hard they tried. It only ended up hurting them more.
YOU ARE READING
Changing You ✦ The Sequel
Fanfiction𝑰𝒏 𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒄𝒉; She's forced to change him against his own will. "There's no way he's going to survive this as a human." I knew how much he feared losing his humanity. His eyes begged me to let him go. But I couldn't watch him die. I couldn't lose...
