Aleutian Sparrow
A/N: This story is all about Dallas Winston and his life; I'm going to go through his entire life and I'm not going to have him die like he does in the book because I love him too much and he is my gallant hero! I'm going to start this off with a short poem that I wrote about a friend of mine named West who reminds me of Dallas Winston in A LOT of ways, so here goes!
Dedication: Andrew "West" Weston
Narrator's Point of View
The boy that I love with his cold, blue eyes
The boy that I love with his casual lies
The child in confusion
Never known to do right
My strong, gallant panther with hair of blond-white
Dallas Winston didn't want to die gallant because even though he knew the definition of the word, he hadn't wanted to die gallantly. The only way he had wanted to die was alone, or so he had thought before.
Visions of Dallas bleeding to death with slit wrists warmed him at night as he reminded himself that he had one less day to live on earth; one less day for his father to beat him and one less day of trying to remember the scant breath of his mother and her kindly love for the young boy.
And although Dally -as his mother had called him- was just nine years old, he could still remember his mother perfectly. The other children of the neighborhood had referred to her as the two-dollar whore, but Dally knew better than that. His mother had really and truly loved him with all of her heart and Dally had known that fact, and it was the only thing that kept him from committing suicide like he so dearly wished to do.
Whenever he stood at the edge of the public pool he saw himself peacefully floating, dead in the water and that vision would always help him through the day. 'One less day, Dallas,' he would remind himself again and again until he felt the need to cry out in joy, but he wasn't going to cry; crying didn't help the pain, it only made life more of a burden for Dally to drown in his sorrows, which was most likely why he rarely drank booze.
There was no doubt in any of the neighbors minds however that Dallas was a good kid with bad ideas; he certainly wasn't like any of the other children in the neighborhood. He didn't cry, he didn't drink (although he did smoke and swear,) he fought but only when offended and although his honesty tended to more often than not offend people, he still never told a lie unless it was to protect a friend.
He hadn't a care in the world as to whether or not his honesty hurt a person's feelings because his mother had always told him to be honest except in a bad situation, so he was going to comply with that wish, as well as her wish for him to not dye his hair black.
Dallas absolutely hated the idea of himself being a tow-headed youth, but his mother had had the same beautiful, blond-white hair and Dally swore to her that he wouldn't go trying to turn his hair black with the ink that his father had once kept in his night-stand alongside a bottle of wine that Dally had stolen a week after his mother's funeral and had gotten extremely drunk, for the first time in his entire lifetime. His mother hadn't told him he couldn't get drunk, and she had also not said that Dally could run away from home...