A/N: Written for the Sinnoh League General Challenge, route 201 (part 2): write about something that doesn't strictly belong to you (Chimchar restriction: that something is an object). And dipping our collective fingers into Higurashi this time. :)
Murderprints
When he first sees the bat, innocuously sitting in the locker, he's attracted like a moth and the bat's the flame. And he reaches out to touch like like the curious child that hasn't yet learnt that touching everything bright and shiny can be bad for your health (like a hot poker) and it turns out to be a hot poker or a vat of acid because, when he first touches the bat, it burns in his mind and his heart and he drops it.
It clangs, unbearably loud against the locker, and doesn't help the sudden headache that's formed one bit. Doesn't help the nausea that creeps up his throat either, and the way the metal rolls, shining yellow light that's catching red somehow - red reflections, bright red, blood red -
- and the sickening sound of bat hitting flesh mixed in with those metallic clangs.
Sick feeling, bile cold and bitter, the bat is warm with the excess the spill over and he really does vomit, thankfully into the wastebasket and not the floor like what might have happened before.
He wants to touch it, see if it's slick or crusty on the handle, but the rest of him wants to run as far away as possible and he winds up caught between the two, stumbling back and falling into an ungraceful heap just shy of the other wall. It's partially luck, otherwise he'd have a painful lump on his head that won't help the nausea still there and the smell rising up from the wastebasket doesn't help either but the greatest player is still the image of pounded, bleeding flesh that still dances in his mind.
The bat has rolled away from him and he wants to chase and doesn't want to chase it too. He doesn't want to even look at it but the part of him that does wins out easily. Glistening steel that calls him in when clean and makes him recoil when stained with bright red blood and where's that beaten, bloodied body that's his doing, his fault?
And he shuts his eyes and opens them and there's two, red and green lit up like christmas in the west, lit up and fallen and he can't chase it. There's nothing to chase but shadows. It rolls on the wood and he hears it bounce a little against the wall like a familiar, chiming thud.
And he's gone, leaving the bat with another boy's murderprints to take the fall again.