We Who Are Jaded

Chapter One

"Oh dear Evans, did I just think that out loud?' Kieran murmured as he dared to over step a mark. I would have smiled if I could have. This was Kieran, all boyish charm and confidence. I remembered a time when he had been someone to fear and not the man who made me answer to my beating heart and shallow breathing every time he drew near.

Indigo Boy had appeared exactly a year after my suicide attempt as the demon that haunted my nightmares and chased my shadow. The mere thought of him had been a threat to the fortress I had my sanity and feelings locked within. What was an ex suicidal supposed to do when an apparently invisible indigo eyed stranger appears in the middle of her fifth period history class?

All logic dictated I should have stayed away from that indigo eyed creature but then who would have saved me from the clutches of Devon Taylor or from being run over by a prowling Mercedes or from the one they called Red? It had only been a month since I had been taken to the underworld of Edinburgh but the feeling of fevered hands on my skin and candlelit stone walls still ruined me. It was not uncommon that I found myself waking in a blanket of cold sweat with Devon's red, lustful eyes shattering any resolve I had attempted to muster.

While I was in pieces, I was grateful that Beth, my best friend and companion in captivity remembered nothing of the event. Beth felt nothing of what it was to fall apart every time I closed my eyes. Beth was blissful in her ignorance and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

"Seriously Kieran's there's thinking it...and then there's visualising it. I do not look like that!" I teased as though his imagination had revealed something inappropriately racy. While Kieran pieced me together I sought for nothing more than to keep him from falling apart. For as soon as Indigo arrived at his destination he would lose himself to the guise of the master of the suicidal and all would become dark for a while. The darkness was when he became cold and in that state of his mind I became vulnerable.

"I know what you're thinking Chris. I'll try to control myself but you know I can't promise," Kieran confessed, my mind being too open to him it seemed.

Kieran was no stranger to what he could do to me. The icy sensations he sent through me were intoxicating and crippling all by the gaze of his indigo eyes or touch of those chilling fingertips. I bruised easily and for him to see that was more devastating than the marks he left upon me.

"I'll be fine. I always am." Kieran grunted, his jaw clenching for a moment. He pulled a shaky hand through his seam black hair. His eyes strayed to beyond a stairwell and his whole body seemed to recoil.

"We're here," he muttered as he drank in the tenement building before us. The gloomy façade had begun surrendering to the untamed vines that wrapped themselves around drain pipes and framed the windows pockmarked with holes.

"It's always a guessing game but something tells me I know..," whispered Kieran, looking away from the task in hand. "Are you ready?" He sighed, his hands now clawing at his gaunt face. I was aware of every crescendo of distress and anticipation that filled him. He could hide many things but this pleading for circumstances to be different was not one of them.

"You have to go in Kieran," I paused. "But I'm here..." I began, wanting to continue with some kind of sentiment to soothe him but lacking in the courage to say the words.

"I know," he replied and that was enough for both of us.

His thoughts took a moment to organise themselves, slowly enough for me to grasp some sort of understanding. Kieran was a mess but with every right to be so. After the length of time Kieran had been doing what was demanded of Indigo you might have presumed he had grown numb to his duty and yet, from the sincerity of his emotions, every day was just as scarring as the first.