Original -- You Know What They Do
Title: You Know What They Do
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 464
Warnings: dark, violence
Summary: The air nips his lungs as he sucks it in and banishes it again.
Author's Note: Written to and titled after the My Chemical Romance song. Has little to do with me personally, but that I used to have dreams where I was running through the town, and I gave this kid something to run from.
YOU KNOW WHAT THEY DO
The air nips his lungs as he sucks it in and banishes it again, and he imagines needle-teeth pricking the alveoli, popping them like those balloons you stick with darts in the carnival game. It sears in and out of his esophagus, and he feels strangely alive for dead meat.
It was the bastard’s own damn fault.
Houses loom out of the dark, all white fences and demure beige paint, the pools of tended lawns black beyond the rich yellow light that seeps out the windows, and he really does wonder who’s responsible for all the landscaping that blurs by, because it’s quite lovely.
Sometimes the meeting of plates and silverware tinkles through the frigid air to reach his ears, and sometimes it’s the aimless ferocity that only a dog’s bark can convey, but mostly he hears nothing but the slamming of his sneakers on the pavement, harmonizing with the ragged gasps of his breathing and the hammer-to-anvil ring of his heartbeat.
A siren screams, sounding like a child in pain, and he trips unsteadily to a stop, ankles betraying him. Almost before he’s fully sprawled on the asphalt, almost before it’s bitten into his palms, he scrambles to his feet and scuttles like a cockroach under the oleander hedge to his right.
They’re coming for him. They must be. In this narrow world of ravenous air and bobbing streetlamp glows and muffled stars’ sympathies, there are no other criminals, and there are no other choices. It’s him they’re after.
His stepdad called his sister a stupid shit today. It burned like a brand to the skin, and he could almost smell the singeing of his flesh, but he bit his tongue to keep it still.
Then his stepdad asked her, in a voice like soured honey, why she was crying over the truth.
He hit the stupid son of a bitch so hard that his knuckles split.
His stepfather spat on the floor, and a marbled swirl of blood and saliva quivered on the linoleum for a long moment. Then the chef’s cleaver came out of the knife block, and he ran-ran as though his life depended on it, which by all accounts it probably did.
Chest heaving, mouth arid, face prickling in the cold, he crouches in and below the hedge, pale swaying flowers brushing his cheeks insistently, his fingers clenched in the damp earthiness of the crumpled leaves splayed on the ground before him.
The keening of the siren fades, but he stays, panting, for a long moment, in the shelter of the sword-like leaves. When his pulse is just a dull murmur in his ears, he takes to his feet and starts down the sidewalk, eyes searching the shadows.
There are places to hide, if he can reach them.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 464
Warnings: dark, violence
Summary: The air nips his lungs as he sucks it in and banishes it again.
Author's Note: Written to and titled after the My Chemical Romance song. Has little to do with me personally, but that I used to have dreams where I was running through the town, and I gave this kid something to run from.
YOU KNOW WHAT THEY DO
The air nips his lungs as he sucks it in and banishes it again, and he imagines needle-teeth pricking the alveoli, popping them like those balloons you stick with darts in the carnival game. It sears in and out of his esophagus, and he feels strangely alive for dead meat.
It was the bastard’s own damn fault.
Houses loom out of the dark, all white fences and demure beige paint, the pools of tended lawns black beyond the rich yellow light that seeps out the windows, and he really does wonder who’s responsible for all the landscaping that blurs by, because it’s quite lovely.
Sometimes the meeting of plates and silverware tinkles through the frigid air to reach his ears, and sometimes it’s the aimless ferocity that only a dog’s bark can convey, but mostly he hears nothing but the slamming of his sneakers on the pavement, harmonizing with the ragged gasps of his breathing and the hammer-to-anvil ring of his heartbeat.
A siren screams, sounding like a child in pain, and he trips unsteadily to a stop, ankles betraying him. Almost before he’s fully sprawled on the asphalt, almost before it’s bitten into his palms, he scrambles to his feet and scuttles like a cockroach under the oleander hedge to his right.
They’re coming for him. They must be. In this narrow world of ravenous air and bobbing streetlamp glows and muffled stars’ sympathies, there are no other criminals, and there are no other choices. It’s him they’re after.
His stepdad called his sister a stupid shit today. It burned like a brand to the skin, and he could almost smell the singeing of his flesh, but he bit his tongue to keep it still.
Then his stepdad asked her, in a voice like soured honey, why she was crying over the truth.
He hit the stupid son of a bitch so hard that his knuckles split.
His stepfather spat on the floor, and a marbled swirl of blood and saliva quivered on the linoleum for a long moment. Then the chef’s cleaver came out of the knife block, and he ran-ran as though his life depended on it, which by all accounts it probably did.
Chest heaving, mouth arid, face prickling in the cold, he crouches in and below the hedge, pale swaying flowers brushing his cheeks insistently, his fingers clenched in the damp earthiness of the crumpled leaves splayed on the ground before him.
The keening of the siren fades, but he stays, panting, for a long moment, in the shelter of the sword-like leaves. When his pulse is just a dull murmur in his ears, he takes to his feet and starts down the sidewalk, eyes searching the shadows.
There are places to hide, if he can reach them.