Chapter 1: A butterfly wing
~Prologue~
Leonard Marliston was dying.
Or he was dead, he was currently unsure exactly what was happening. He couldn't feel anything. He knew he's been shot. He knew that blood was seeping from the wounds in his body. And he couldn't move.
But everything felt slower.
Still.
And he thought.
He pondered how it had come to this.
He thought he'd gotten everything so right.
He had thought he'd finally beaten them all.
That the memories swimming across mind would stop.
But they didn't.
They kept rushing passed him in a blur, some on repeat.
And then he saw her.
The eyes in his mind that calmed him.
He'd never before known joy or happiness before he had met her. Her words drifting into his mind that were so much more wiser than he could have hoped to hear in his lifetime.
And he began to question his life as everything fogged over slowly, as if engulfed by a black, oozing liquid.
What if Leonard Marliston, a quiet English teacher from the small town of Cherry Falls Virginia, had not murdered young teenagers due to the cruelty he had met at his mothers hands?
What if, the quiet teacher had found a kindred spirit in the form of one of his pupils?
What if, the only true way to defeat the hate and blackness that festers inside of someone, is finding someone who would love them?
And then.
Everything reset.
~Cherry Falls, Virginia~
There is a girl who watches him when he doesn't look. Or at least, that's what Leonard likes to let her believe.
As he arrives at school, as he teachers his classes, as he eats his lunch and sometimes, even on the weekends when he's out shopping.
He can tell when she's watching him.
It's subtle, but it's there.
Sometimes, he'll catch a glimpse of her hurrying away or looking to the side of him, as if to push away certainty, but he knows she watches him.
He's had to deal with a couple of girls who have shown an over amorous interest in him. One found it thrilling, the idea of a secret liaison with someone in a position of power.
The other girl admitted that if it helped to boost her grade, she'd happily do it.
But this girl made no advance.
Nor did she flutter her eyelashes or dot her 'I's' with little love hearts. She was one of the top scoring students, always turning in her work on time, never getting into trouble.
She was a quiet little mouse he noticed.
When he wasn't doodling how each one of the kids would look, strung up in his classroom, in various grotesque poses, with their heads ripped out, or their organs pulled from inside to out, she was never there.
He didn't think it was important, but he could never quite imagine her with her neck snapped.
Instead, he would draw her eyes. And when he attempted to glorify the picture by drawing pins going into them, he would scribble over it furiously, claiming, that he disliked it.
The quiet girl who didn't bother anyone, but stayed perfectly quiet and good, bothered him relentlessly.