I'm writing a fan fiction on 'The Outsiders' by SE Hinton. It's kind of different from Ninjago; sorry about that. Anyway, if you are an Outsiders fan, then you have come to the right place~
The story of Dallas Winston began in a police station and ended in a parking lot.
In that time, he lived like ice. Cold and sharp. His hair was white-blond, his skin pale and blue-veined, his eyes an icicle hanging from a porch roof. In this way he was like a Soc. He didn't feel. That meant that no one knew him, not really. They knew the idea of him. They knew his name. But they didn't know, didn't even consider that he started off as water.
His story began when he froze.
He hadn't wanted to hurt anyone.
His feet didn't touch the floor when he sat in this chair. The wood bit into his back and he tried to sit up straighter. He'd been told that good posture created a good first impression. He suspected that the blood staining the front of his shirt and his pale hands would counteract the posture.
Back then he was Dallas, not Dally. 'Dal' to the reasons he was here- those reasons being what adults called 'the wrong crowd'. He'd fallen in with The Wrong Crowd and was quickly discovering that falling included being trapped in a prison of crime and cigarette smoke, of which there was no escape.
At ten years old, Dallas was nauseated at the sight of blood. It wasn't until seven years later in a football field that this fear came back to him.
He was ten and his hands trembled with blood on them. Crying was against the law, according to his gang members. Dallas had said, don't we try to break laws? They had only laughed at him, cruelly, and said that this was their law and if he broke it he was out. They also said no whining and no caring about people.
He didn't know why he hadn't gotten out right then and there. If he had, he wouldn't be here swallowing back tears and trying to forget how to shed them.
But life was too short to regret.
He knew he was shaking and he decided that it was because the air conditioner was up so high. Up so damn high; he tested the curse word in his thoughts and found it was an accurate depiction of his current state. There were people talking outside of this room, saying things like minor and switchblade and not dead.
So he hadn't killed that man. Switchblades could kill people. He knew that. It wasn't even his switchblade. He wondered if Tim would be angry that Dallas had let that blade get confiscated by the cops. It was nice. Had it ever killed anyone?
His first rumble was a disaster.
A man came into the room. Sat down in the chair behind the desk opposite to Dallas. Looked at him, then down at some papers. Then back at Dallas.
"So." The man said.
"So…" Dallas said. He was trying to be cocky. He just sounded scared.
"Let's get this right. You're the kid who stabbed a guy."
Dallas thought that stabbed was an awfully ugly word for what he'd done. It'd been more of a jab. Stabbing entailed that the knife went deep, and stayed in. It must not have been that deep. He was only ten.
Still, he nodded slowly.
"Where are your parents, kid?"
He shrugged. His parents didn't care about him, so he didn't care about them. Maybe that was one of the reasons he fell in with The Wrong Crowd. They might have been Wrong, but they were better than home. Dallas found that the only way he could get his parents to pay attention to him was when he got in trouble. He was so starved for their gaze that he was willing to stab (no, jab, jab) someone for it.
"They probably haven't noticed I'm gone." He said truthfully.
The man let out a long, low breath that seemed to hint that he'd much rather be smoking. This would be the first police officer Dallas would get on the wrong side of. After that, the number was countless.
"I have a question for you. You're what, nine-"
"Ten." Dallas corrected. A year made all the difference. He was double-digits.
"Ten years old. What are you doing in the middle of Tulsa's gang problem, huh? What is some ten-year-old kid doing in a street fight with an obviously stolen switchblade?"
The man placed his palms flat on the table and sighed again. "Listen, I don't want to put a kid in jail. You didn't kill that boy you stabbed-"
"Jabbed." Dallas interrupted. "It was more of a jab."
It wasn't that he meant to be patronizing. But messing with this police officer seemed to be the only thing that could keep him from having a full-blown panic attack with blood dripping off his sleeve into the carpet.
"That boy you stabbed. He's in the hospital now. I'm willing to rule that it was self-defense. However, the fact that those boys in our resident cell are confirming you're a part of their gang isn't really ruling in your favor. We've picked a lot of them up before, though I'm guessing you knew that." The police officer looked at his papers again.
"Yeah." Dallas said. "I knew that. They're tellin' the truth. I'm in the gang. I ain't just some kid. I'm just as bad as the rest of 'em."
There come moments in all of our lives where we say stupid things. This was one of his moments. Perhaps if Dallas hadn't been so prideful, or if he hadn't been so loyal, or maybe just if he'd been willing to accept the fact that he wasn't like them, not yet, then he wouldn't have set himself on the path of a hoodlum. He could've had a chance to save himself from the freeze.
The truth was, stealing made him anxious and smoking made him nauseous and anything violent seemed wrong. But his life was miserable. And every once in a while, when he was with those guys, 'greasers', and he was doing something that all morality pushed against, he got this sort of high, and those were the only moments he forgot about his loveless life. It was hard to find, but being in the rumble had done that for him, and he was proud of it. Fights were kind of like swimming pools, he thought. They were cold and terrifying at first. But jump right in and you got used to the cold. Start sinking and chances are you learn to swim.
This was why he didn't deny his association to the boys who were already behind bars. This was why he proclaimed it proudly, though he'd never been more terrified in his life.
The blood in his sleeve went drip, drip, drip.
"What's your parents' phone number?" The police officer said tiredly. He was an irritated shade of gray. The lines in his face seemed cavernous. They reflected Dallas's emotional state.
"They won't answer." Dallas said, but he mumbled the number anyway. He didn't even know why, or how, they had a phone.
The officer scribbled down the number and left Dallas with his scarlet hands and thrumming pulse. His head hurt. He tasted sweat. He'd bitten a Soc. He wanted a drink of water or something…who all had been arrested? Tim Shepard had probably gotten away. Otherwise, the eleven-year-old would be in the same room as Dallas, rifling through the desk drawers by now.
Dallas just sat.
He didn't even kick his legs. They just hung from the seat like they weren't his at all- they were some dead person's legs.
There were people talking in other parts of the police station. But this room, this office, was deathly quiet.
Dallas shut himself in his own head. He almost didn't register when the tired police officer returned to the room. Looking back on it, Dallas remembered nothing about this man's face. Nothing about what he said when he came back. Nothing because he'd forced himself to forget.
He only remembered the man looking with distaste at the dark red spot that had formed in the gray carpeting underneath Dallas's sleeve. And then he was sitting on a different uncomfortable seat in a room that was colder than his previous location, staring in bewilderment at the concrete walls and thick metal bars that stood between him and the rest of the world.
He only remembered looking down at his hands, his wrists encircled by ridiculously small handcuffs. They hadn't even let him change his clothes. They hadn't even let him wash his hands.
He didn't get over his fear of blood. He just got over fear. It was impossible to get rid of, but once he figured it out, it was too easy to hide.
Dallas filed most of what he saw his first-ever week of jail in the deepest cabinet of his mind. He had to. Otherwise the papers would lay in the center of his desk, perpetually scattered and chaotic, inexplicably spattered with his own young blood.
The Ice Age began.