coming after you - a fairly short, very inconsistent story

Chapter Three: An /Actually/ Later Prologue/Introduction Thing

((A/N: there are some references to murder and also really, really bad parenting. also sorry i haven't updated in, like, forever.))

eight years later

Nathan didn't regret killing Cliff Bowers. Something had changed within the brown-eyed, shy boy in the fifth grade. Something dark. Something Nathan would never be able to return from.

He was on the run. Well, he had been. Nathan had left Ashborough to pursue something, but even he didn't know what that something was. After he had killed Cliff, he felt this odd sense of... freedom. He had thought it all out. Nathan hadn't been caught, and he had killed two birds with one stone.

Nathan was returning to Ashborough. Just for a day. Just for a visit.

Nathan took a seat in the chair residing by the dirty window. He peered through the small jail window and picked up the dirty phone that allowed him to speak to the prisoner on the other side.

"Hi, Dad," Nathan said. Time to play it up.

His father looked terrible, but at the same time, a bit more...peaceful. His short brown hair had grown long, greasy, and gray, and his eyes had lost all of the fire and passion behind them. The fire and passion that he had used to damage his wife and son, both mentally and physically. He was grayer. Quieter. Older.

Mr. Byrd looked up to the window on the other side and his jaw dropped. He hadn't seen his son in eight years. Since he'd been sent to jail for killing Cliff Bowers.

Which he hadn't done.

I told you that Nathan had killed two birds with one stone. He'd gotten rid of the boy who'd crushed his dreams, and gotten back at the man who'd crushed his mother's.

Nathan's father's eyes, while dull and gray, seemed to light up, just a bit. But not necessarily in a good way.

"Where have you been, boy?"

Nathan had just the right answer in mind.

"The question is, Dad, why did you do it?"

The sparkle that had been in his father's eyes again flashed back to an ominous gray.

"I didn't."

"Dad, please," Nathan pleaded. He was "playing it up," completely acting. For his own safety, of course. Even his father couldn't know what he'd done.

"Why are you doing this to me? To our family? I'm just trying to understand!"

"Leave."

A word so simple, yet with so much meaning to Nathan. A word that Nathan had heard constantly throughout his short life from a variety of people: when he saw his father yelling at his mother, when Cliff had tried to get Nathan suspended from school, when the police officer at the bus stop told Nathan he couldn't sleep there. And now, when he thought his father might, for the first time, need him.

"Fine." Nathan slammed the jail phone back into place and stormed off. So be it. That had been Mr. Byrd's last chance. That had been when Nathan blocked out any sympathy or regrets he had for sending his very own father to jail. It was all gone.

Nathan took a step out door of the Ashborough County Jail, and into the swirling snowflakes of the outdoors. Nathan closed his eyes for a moment, trying to think of where to go next.

He had gotten pretty good at living on his own. Making some pocket money, just as much as he needed to survive.

Nathan took a step onto a train that would lead him out of Ashborough and into Southbrook. Where his newer life would start. Where the coppery smell of blood on his hands wasn't a burden to remind him of who he had become, but a reminder of who he would be.