"Oh my, why are you blacking out alone in a corner again?" said the lady. He wants to answer but his mouth refuses to form words. He rises—should he stay or flee? His feet decide before his mind can, carrying him toward the exit. A yell from behind freezes him between steps. That voice—he both craves and dreads its familiarity. He turns, heart hammering with hope and terror. The figure stands half-illuminated, mouth moving. He strains to hear, desperate for the words yet afraid of what they might reveal—but consciousness tears him away..
He drags himself through the motions—toothbrush scraping enamel, razor slicing stubble—another day in this suffocating existence he can barely tolerate. Yet he persists, clinging to survival because of that one lifeline: his friend. The friend whose name and face swim just beyond memory's reach, yet whose presence burns like a beacon in the darkness. This friend who absorbs his every confession, who mirrors his thoughts before he speaks them, who has never once betrayed him with falsehood. Not that trust factors into it—he possesses the terrible gift of seeing through everyone's skin to the pulsing, naked truth beneath, reading souls like open wounds.
But that day, something was off. His friend's smile never reached his eyes. He recognized the dissonance instantly—the way #### held his shoulders too stiffly, laughed a beat too late. After school, he approached him. "You okay?" The response came too quickly: "It's nothing, just tired." He nodded, accepting the lie while rejecting it completely. He shouldn't follow—friends respect boundaries—yet his feet shadowed #### anyway, keeping twenty paces back. When his friend slipped into a black sedan with tinted windows, he froze, torn between walking away and banging on the glass. Was this concern or control? Protection or possession? The questions multiplied until they drowned out reason, until darkness swallowed his vision entirely.
He jolts awake, pine walls closing in on him. "A wooden cabin?" The words scrape from his throat. His pulse remains steady, unnaturally so—blood flowing like cold mercury through his veins while human screams claw through the walls from outside. He doesn't move. Doesn't flinch. Survival instinct whispers: whoever dragged him here wants him alive. For now. The screams suddenly choke off, replaced by a single piercing cry that shatters something inside his mind. Memory fragments slice through him—a child with hair like bone and skin pale as death gripping his wrist, eyes burning into his. "Did you kill your owner this time too? Why are you back? Did he break you like they broke me?" The child's voice drops to a razor-edged whisper. "Don't you want to escape? Be like those stars—nothing above you, nothing holding you down, nothing left to burn."
Pain explodes through his skull like white-hot shrapnel. He thrashes against his restraints, rope cutting into raw flesh as he drags himself toward the window. Through blood-blurred vision, he glimpses a hulking silhouette—a man in tattered clothes clutching what looks like a primitive stone blade, its edge glistening wet. Darkness crashes over him like a wave. When consciousness returns, he's bouncing against someone's back, his body oddly detached from the horror of his situation. His eyes coldly catalog the unfamiliar terrain until a gravelly voice cuts through the silence: "Hey lad, nice to see ya wake up." The words crawl up his spine. It's the man with the knife.