When Darkness Hides the Flames

He was incased in darkness; the adrenaline coursing through him as he opened his eyes…and saw nothing. He was a strong man, a man who had lived his whole life by the barrel of a gun, a modern day warrior, a gangster, a thug, a criminal without hope for renewal with an attitude that would not waver. Angry at all those who looked down on him for his mistakes….all the things he had done wrong in the past and the man who had raised him. Like Father like Son right?

He was a monster in the people's eyes…setting fire with his words and his actions. Arson had been his only refuge… burning down the trees in the park and the houses of his enemies out of bitterness and spite. His name was F-stop… because if anyone, but her, called him Francis they'd get a hit to the jaw and a kick when they were on the floor without even having finished his name. She knew him by many names…Frankie…F-stop…Hot-Streak…but most intimately she knew him as her Francis, hers and no one else's.

He was her angel; she was his light in a world filled with darkness, his only hope at redemption. She was his only friend…and secretly his heart…and though he'd never admit it, she was the only thing that held him together and kept him from falling apart. After all…he knew he was broken… the stares and glares from people on the streets told him he was…broken…trash…but at least he had his pride and his physique.

Yet the only one who didn't look at him that way was Lexa…because apparently… she saw deeper than what he put on display for everyone else to see and though she never took advantage of it…he was soft on her…becoming softer for her…making him want something better, a turn around, a breakthrough…wanting to be told by the one he secretly loved that he was worth more than what everyone had told him with the way they treated him.

All the same…even though she made him want to shine…and through that bright smile she wore…and the optimism…she was just as bitter as he was at the world…or more precisely…the world she lived in-her world. Mostly…she was angry towards her brother and bitter because of her sister's… illness. Her older sister was diagnosed as a psychopath at the age of 9 when Lexa was 7 and her older brother Atreyu was 13.

Since their father left them and Lexa's mother passed away a year ago her brother has taken care of Lexa…and her sister Eclipse; taking charge as their legal guardian. Maybe the loathing she felt for her family…is what brought her and Frankie closer together.

He didn't know…but if he could help fix her like she had begun to fix him…maybe he could start making amends for his crimes. Only Francis knew the extent of her anger… while he feared losing himself to keeping in all his rage…she feared what would happen if she let all of hers out.

If only Atreyu would put Eclipse in an institution to save her sisters soul… or the countless others that she might harm with her lack of empathy. She sometimes wondered if they were even related…what with her ice blue eyes, platinum blonde hair and their own ebony locks and amber brown almost red eyes giving the siblings almost too great a contrast to be of the same blood…if only Lexa's face wasn't identical to Eclipses'…then she'd have some doubt.

She was also broken…not in as many pieces as Francis had lost, but she still had cracks. Even though they were both cracking into pieces…they both somehow ended up holding each other together…yet all throughout them scraping by… all it would take would be a good chisel and hammer to make them break.

But Francis Stone wasn't thinking of all this as he was surrounded in an aura of numbness…the prelude to terror. A terror that took hold once he was aware that his eyes were open and he could not see.

The man known as Francis Stone took a shaky breath like a man who had just been told a chilling secret he couldn't comprehend…because right now he couldn't comprehend…the darkness. Breath caught, arms at his sides, legs relaxed and the warmth of medicinal smelling sheets all around him. It all seemed so… real. It reminded him of a time before… a time when he'd been in one of these exact beds for three years. Only one bed could produce a suffocating mixture of self-loathing, anger, and weakness within him.

A hospital bed…a cot where the sick and weary came to rest…where the useless come to wallow in the pity of others and the place where the weak came to die…where only the strong got up and left as he had, never looking back. He knew this at once only for the fact that he'd spent three years of his life in the same exact place…now reliving the old feelings mixed with a smoggy presence of fear clouding in his head.

Eyes open…realization sinking in, his whole body tensed…his breathing now coming out in short terrified puffs. He shot up from his reclined position, back straight, eyes open…still not being able to see anything. Perhaps they had just left the lights off?

But as his breathing slowed and his body lost only a very small portion of its tension…confusion began to corrupt his mind like a mental illness, like a virus in his brain causing it to be impossible for him to produce clear thought.

'Why am I in here again? Is this a dream… why is it so dark?' Francis thought franticly.

His own hands, large and male flew up from where they'd been resting in the sheets that had pooled around his waist, to pat at his face…a moderately handsome one from his perspective…he wasn't as vain as he pretended to be. These hands…his hands had done things…many terrible things…but nothing an apology couldn't fix, right?

If only that were true.

Frankie couldn't feel any bandages around his head or eyes…so that wasn't what was stopping him from being able to see…he pressed harder to feel for bruising…no signs of being hit and having detached retinas…yet one thing was evident. The gift of sight had been stolen from him.

Yet still, he fought this notion…even as he began to hear birds outside…he guessed it was an open window. He turned his head in the direction of the sound; now something else became clear…his face was accosted by warmth. But that wasn't possible!

He grimaced…this had to be…a very vivid dream.

He shook his head, now looking at his lap, hands once more at his sides…without being able to see anything…not the crisp white of the sheets, nor the brightness of the sun glaring through the open window on the first floor of the hospital…he was…no way was this possible.

The sun shone brightly outside…into the small room of the large hospital, as a breeze blew in to ruffle a newly blinded young man's auburn hair. The young man began to shake as he choked on his own denial and with his head turned down…gasped out a noise of despair; suddenly, voices approaching outside the walls of his room.

With a look of fear and confusion he looked around as the footsteps seemed to echo in the room and then he heard her. The voice of his undoing… how could he face her now?

TBC…