a/n: I'm not dead! got some lovely reviews this last round; thanks you guys. c: and for your reward...PURPLE PROSE.
Billy writhed on the ground, reduced to fits, to absolute hysterics. Distantly, he could hear himself screaming, but somehow couldn't feel the sounds tearing out of his own throat. He was too utterly lost in the sharp, bright ice filling his veins, blossoming into hurricanes, roaring beneath his skin. His heart was racing, harder than it had been even when he was trapped in the crate. The drug was like a blizzard inside him: the feeling went beyond adrenaline, beyond caffeine, beyond the cold certainty of death or the terror of nightmares. He was falling and flying and drowning in a vat of electric ice and he was so afraid he thought he might die of it, like his heart would just burst to shreds from the strain.
The sensation was so intense that it took Billy almost a minute and a half of horrified thrashing and screaming to realize that he wasn't actually in pain. In fact – if he weren't so frightened and desperate, so panicked at the unfamiliar terror of being lost in his own skin...it might have actually felt good.
The drug kicked his blood into pure energy, all the energy in the world. It was like being fired out of a canon, or jumping off a hundred-story rooftop to plummet down toward the hard asphalt waiting below, just to prove you could. The only thing that could possibly compare to it in all the world was the sensation of being struck by lighting.
But that sensation was so, so far away...
A sudden feeling of lighthearted euphoria bubbled up from Billy's chest and raced out along his livewire nerves, turning his skin into something maddeningly tactile, sensitive everywhere. His eyes flew open and he screamed again, this time in shock, but it quickly tapered up into high, hysteric laughter that felt wrong in his own ears. Billy's nerve endings were on fire, bright and white-electric, yet at the same time he was unspeakably cold. All over, he was cold, he was so cold, he was so cold, yet it felt so wonderful–
Above him, Alex was talking.
" – in the kitchen, first, and you were trying so hard to get my attention that I couldn't not notice," she said, matter-of-factly, leaning over to trap Billy in a cage of her wiry arms. "I usually don't take kids from the shelter, see, but I didn't know if you were coming back to the kitchen the next day. So why not? I told you where to find me."
Billy tried to listen, was trying to listen; but, he kept getting distracted by small details, things he had never known were important until that very moment. Heart thrumming, his eyes caught on Alex's loose strands of red hair, which hung down lank around her face in greasy wisps. Billy stared up at them with blown, wide pupils and felt suddenly overpowered by the urge to reach out and touch the copper strands, to press the individual pieces of hair between his fingers.
He wasn't screaming anymore – even if the omnipresent terror was still bubbling in his veins like many scuttling spiders.
He tried to speak.
"Kn...Knew, not length almost kitchen the link," Billy stammered, voice rasping. His tongue felt foreign and hard in his mouth. He blinked, dilated eyes widening as he registered the jumbled nonsense of his own words. "Agreed...for, listening...r-remembered, remembered get attention law knew started!"
Alex smiled over him, complacently, like someone with a secret.
Twitching beneath her, Billy's limbs jerked as he struggled and gasped for air, lungs full of ice and pounding energy. He found himself unable to look away from the thin scars around Alex's mouth that crisscrossed over the skin of her lower face. With a supreme effort, Billy finally wrenched his eyes closed and let out a high, keening cry of terror, wrapping his arms around himself to stave off the shuddering fear and cold.
"B-Better replied it, windows of a minute," he sobbed weakly.
"That'll be the drug, Junior," Alex said from far away, her voice detached and perhaps the slightest bit amused. "It's a weird one, has a lot of little side effects, depending on the person. The brain does funny things when you tamper with it – that doesn't just mean your arms and legs. You know what they say..." Billy felt the cold-hot touch of fingers pressing lightly to the hypersensitive skin on his forehead, her hand brushing away the sweat-soaked hair from his face. "Kids say the darndest things."
"R-Red, allowance had wrong in it," Billy moaned, his body wracking with heavy sobs. This was a nightmare, the worst nightmare, even with the chemical rush in his veins trying so hard to tell him otherwise. "Calling watch for those pressed, raising his common. Running paid. Running, paid..."
"Don't be like that, Billy," Alex said lightly, continuing to card her fingers through his hair. Despite everything, the touch felt good, felt incredible on his skin, better than anything, and Billy hated himself for it. "Remember, you were looking for someone to find you. Isn't that right? And we're going to have a wonderful time here, you and I – before I cut you apart like the others."
Billy opened his eyes and began to pray.