Review Responses:
LyssiLuvr: John and Gamzee are my two favorite characters, besides KK. John is just so cute and derpy; and being a Capricorn like I am, Gamzee is soooo HNNG. I can't even describe. thank you! Momma Lici: sorry for taking forever to respond to this. i'll link you with the other Gamzee/John fics I've read by PM! i have to warn you though, there aren't a lot ;3; and thanks so much! Nyx: i absolutely adore this pairing. ADORE. even though it's low on the radar ;D thank youuu! Patchworkhearts17: the answer to your question is in this chapter! :D Anne-Mangaka: i try to pay attention to detail as much as i can, even though some details are kinda' trivial, but it's still fun! thanks! KARKAT: moar you shall have. Cheddar132: more has been brought. thank you! The mysterious Y: oh yes, you'll definitely find out, but prolly not later into the story. way later. in order for secrets to be revealed to another, usually, a sense of trust must be formed! so i'll have to get through that bit. :D and thank you so much for reading and liking this! amaya-nights rain: always and forever SomersetAldebourne: thankies! Hey-Fay: HERE YA GO.
Your back is pressed against your bedroom wall, your fingers gripping the bed sheets for dear life. It's deathly quiet in your room, save for the sound of your frantic breathing, and the silence is really starting to unnerve you. Your mouth is propped open, but you can't seem to find any words to express how utterly petrified you are right now.
This wasn't a good idea after all.
You should have left him in your backyard and called the police, which would have been the most sensible thing to do. You could have gotten him medical treatment sooner, and by professional's at that. Oh gosh, you think to yourself, shaking your head. How stupid can you be? What made you think you could possibly take care of things by yourself when it's quite obvious you're way in over your head here? You feel utterly guilty for feeling this way, because this boy is clearly in some sort of trouble and you really want to help him, but you're scared.
You're scared because the boy is staring at you with lidded yellow eyes, so eerie and foreign and alien, and you're scared because there is purple blood still dripping from lacerations that streak across his body like smears of paint, soaking through your bed sheets, and you sure hope it doesn't seep into your actual mattress!
You're scared because this boy is not human. Nothing about him is human. He's too gangly and thin and his facial structure is too freakishly sharp, and all that blood is still collecting and forming into small puddles of purple all across your bed. Before long, you find yourself trembling, the back of your head softly thumping against the wall as you try to get your wits together. What would Dave say if he ever saw you sitting here shaking like a leaf? He wouldn't find it ironic at all. You realize you have to pull yourself together; you have to get your head in the game and man it up!
All of your courage escapes you when the boy slouches, and for a second you think he's going to start sobbing because his shoulders are shaking and his head is softly swaying from side to side, but then quite suddenly he leans forward and he's taking a tumble off the bed. He lands on the floor with a harsh thud and you find yourself rocketing across the bed, your fingers finding purchase on the edge of the mattress as you peer over in panic.
"Oh my gosh are you okay?" you call down to him frantically. When he doesn't respond, or even twitch, you scramble off your bed and plant your knees beside his prone form, keeping your distance. Now that he's awake, you'll have to take extra precaution. Getting any closer could be lethal.
He's scrawled across his back on the floor, arms splayed on either side of his head, fingers bunched into weak fists. His eyes are pried wide open, staring listlessly up at the ceiling as if he's found something particularly interesting and can't tear his eyes away. Purple veins frame his eyes like spider webs, branching up his temples and down along the sides of his face. You watch as tiny rivulets of blood dribble down his chin and down the expanse of his neck, where the runny liquid eventually seeps into the collar of his shirt. Speaking of his clothes…
Though his clothes are in a state of distress, you can still make out minute details. His pants are really weird—they're black with gray polka dots dotting the fabric, which is a really strange pattern to begin with and they sort of look like pajama pants on account that they're really loose and thin. His t-shirt is black and resembles something akin to a band tee, but the peculiar purple symbol on the front kind of throws you off. The symbol sort of looks like the letter "n" with a round little bubble sticking out of it. You have a feeling that you should ask Rose about it later on; she always knows everything, she is so smart!
You stiffen when you hear a strange gurgling noise come from his throat. It isn't a growl; it kind of sounds like he's choking…holy crap is he choking?
Instinctively, you shoot your hand out and make to prop his head up, but then the worst happens. Suddenly, your wrist is hurting like a mother and it feels as if a thousand sharp needles are stabbing into your skin. You let out a cry of pain and try to jerk your hand away, but you realize with horror that your wrist is caught between two rows of shark teeth. The boy's teeth sink into your flesh like a knife to bread, and the pain is so concentrated that your eyes begin to water. You're frantically trying to pull your wrist away from his iron-jawed death grip, each jerk of your hand sending the serrated tips of his teeth further into your flesh. Vermilion blood starts to burble from around the boy's fangs and pretty soon you see it dripping down your wrists onto your bedroom floor. Oh God it hurts so badly.
"Ow, ow, ow, let go, let go, let go!" you shout at him, desperately trying to pry yourself away. You're starting to wonder if he even understands English, but then you realize what a stupid thought that was because you heard him speaking English loud and clear before.
Your voice is pitchy and your limbs are starting to go numb because you are that scared. The pain is starting to get to you and all you can do is continue to shout and scream for him to let go, but of course, your pleas go on deaf ears. Though you're grateful he's no longer increasing the pressure, you're really starting to panic now and you're afraid that he might permanently damage something, so with some hesitance and a deep lungful of breath, you rear your other hand back and slap him hard across the face. The resounding slap echoes about your room, shrill and sharp, and your fingers are tingling from the impact. Your hand comes back coated in inky purple ooze.
His teeth immediately leave your skin, a garbled whimper quipping from his throat. You pull your hand back so hard that you fall backwards and land on your bottom, your bleeding wrist pressed protectively to your chest. You scramble a couple of feet away from him, your arm starting to throb with a pain so intense that you have to take a couple of seconds to regulate your breathing. Your buckteeth worry at your bottom lip as you try to blink away the tears. Come on, you have way more mangrit than this!
Fluttering your eyes open, you anchor them back on the boy who has yet to move an inch. He's still lying on the floor with his limbs spread around him, but this time, thank god, his eyes are closed and his chest isn't heaving, but steadily rising and falling. Crap, you hope you didn't smack him too hard!
You sluggishly get up from the floor, wincing a bit when you accidentally put pressure on your punctured wrist. Red perforations run a dotted line along your wrist, and thankfully, they aren't too deep. You flex your hand, grimacing when the inflamed skin stretches and your cuts start to sting. You look back at the boy's motionless form, glad to see that he still seems to be out of it. This is the perfect time to dress your wounds.
Your eyes widen.
"Crap!" you hiss under your breath, hoisting yourself up from the floor. There's purple blood all over your room and even more outside in the hallway, and the stairs, and the kitchen, and oh god, the backyard! How in the world are you going to clean up all this mess before your dad comes home? You realize with dread that you're not going to be able to, it's impossible, although fortunately you do have an advantage here. The boy's blood is an unusual color, and for all you know, your dad is gullible enough to mistake the purple goop for paint or something. Yeah, you can totally do this; you can totally trick your dad! You can tell him you're doing a school project and that you're sorry for staining up the house, but you'll clean it right away! However, there's still one tiny problem. Even though the blood isn't standard human red, it sure smells a lot like blood: bitter, coppery, and harsh. How are you going to mask the scent? You decide you'll worry about that last bit later. Right now, you have to patch yourself up and try to clean as much as the blood as possible.
You softly tip-toe past the comatose body, sighing in relief when he doesn't even flinch when you walk by him. Once you're outside in the hallway, you carefully close the door shut behind you and quickly jog to the hallway bathroom. You shuffle around your medicine cabinet, snagging a box of Transformers Band-Aids and a small bottle of peroxide. You stare at the box of Band-Aids, a frown capturing your lips as hindsight slams into you like a bag of bricks. You don't want the Band-Aid's adhesive sticking to the torn and shredded tissue along your wrist—it'd hurt like a bitch, seriously. You chuck the Band-Aids to the floor and bend down to pull open the white cupboard underneath the sink. When you spot a small roll of medical gauze in the back, new and unraveled, you swipe at it and stand back up.
You've never really tended to your own wounds before, always letting your Dad do it for you while you always just sat and stared wistfully at the world around you. Since you're in a hurry, you don't really care how shoddily you patch yourself up, as long as the cuts are covered. You turn on the faucet and jam your arm underneath it, letting the cold water wash over your wounds. Water streams down your arm and pools at the basin of the sink, the water tinged a rosy pink, and once you've done a good enough job, you turn the faucet off and pat your arm dry with a nearby towel. The towel comes away stained red, but you just shrug and drape it over your shoulder. You'll dispose of it later in your room.
You grab the unstained part of the towel in your hand and bunch it up. You unscrew the brown bottle of peroxide and tilt the bottle on its side as you let the liquid pour onto the towel, effectively soaking it. Once it's damp enough, you quickly press the sodden part of the towel to your injuries, gritting your teeth when fiery shots of pain sprout up your arm. Although you can't exactly see the chemical doing its job, you can feel it, and you guess that you can suffer through a little pain if it's going to clean your cuts up. Once you remove the towel, you pat your arm dry again and rip off a lengthy piece of gauze, wrapping it around your arm hurriedly. You curse at yourself when you realize you completely forgot you need to bind the end of the gauze together or else it'd fall right off. You wonder if your Dad happens to have medical tape lying around the house somewhere, but you quickly brush the thought aside. You don't have time to look right now. You'll have to improvise.
You search for the discarded box of Band-Aids that you had chucked aside previously, your eyes lighting up when you spot it right behind the toilet. You pick it up and nearly rip the top open. You slide out at least four Band-Aids and proceed to rip them open, slapping the sticky beige strips to the gauzed part of your wrist. When you're done, you can't help but shake your head and laugh. Your wrist looks completely ridiculous wrapped in loose gauze and taped together with Transformers Band-Aids, but it'll have to do.
You exit the bathroom and sprint down the hallway, slowing down your gait when you near you room. You gently place your hand on the doorknob and tentatively push it open, allowing yourself to peek inside the room before you completely open the door. When you find the boy still lying in the same spot, you sigh with relief and step over the threshold.
You drag the soiled towel from your shoulder and hurl it across your room, where it lands in an already formed heap of dirty clothes. You scan your room once more, shaking your head at the mess. You'll have to clean up your room last, you think to yourself. The most important parts of the house to clean are the hallway, the stairs, and the kitchen. If you have time, you can get to the backyard, and once done with that, you can start on your room.
You stare at the floor and find your eyes roving over the boy once more. His chest is rising and falling ever so gently, and heated puffs of breath occasionally escape his paint encrusted lips. You're not sure how long he's going to stay like that, but you hope it's long enough for you to cover up the evidence.
You chuckle at that; it sounds like you're trying to cover up a murder.
You are so glad you don't have carpeted flooring. Cleaning up the bloodied mess down the corridor and the stairs proved to be easy enough. There was nothing a wet rag and a spray bottle of Oxiclean couldn't fix. All that purple mess just wiped right off! Billy Mays was right! You are suddenly struck with sorrow. It's too soon; you can't deal with thinking about Billy Mays right now.
On to more pressing matters…
You are on your hands and knees in the kitchen, spraying parts of the ceramic tiling that are starting to crust over with drying blood. You swipe the stains with an already dirtied rag, once or twice heading over to the sink to rinse the rag out. Before you know it, you're standing by the sliding glass doors leading out into the backyard, looking over the kitchen with a lazy smile on your face. Yes. You are done. You are done cleaning up the most important parts of your house. Now all you need to clean is the backyard, and you don't even need to worry about your room. You can get that done on your own time.
With a sudden rush of energy, you practically skip all the way across your backyard until you halt in front of the fence. You grimace as your eyes trail over the thick, goopy smears of purple splattered across parts of the fence, and when you stare into a muddy puddle of water tinged purple, you feel your insides churn. Even though the blood isn't red and doesn't strike you as gruesome, the smell is still completely overbearing.
You quickly jog over to the hose that is propped against the fence a little ways ahead of you. You unravel it and turn the nozzle, waiting for the water to travel through the hose until it eventually starts spurting from the end. You walk back along the fence, pressing your finger against the hose's end and letting the water jet out across the fence. You watch as the water washes down the barrier, most of the water tinted a very faint purple, eventually getting soaked up by the grass. It takes you at least 10 minutes to hose it down, occasionally spraying the fence with a few spurts of Oxiclean to urge the cleaning process along. There's not much you can do about the blood caked into the mud and grass, so you just briefly hose it down, the blood further dispersing into the mud. It gets so diluted by the water that you can't even tell where the blood is anymore, and you suppose that means you achieved your goal.
The house is spick and span and the backyard is mostly clean, and the tension in your body starts to recede when you realize you can at least relax a bit now. You jog back to your house and enter the kitchen. Immediately, you wrinkle your nose. The cloying scent of bleach and blood, but mostly bleach, fills your nasal cavity. You didn't realize how badly it smelled in here. There's only one solution, and you have to act fast.
You make for the kitchen sink and bend down, opening up the Lazy Suzy. You rotate the cupboard and shuffle your hand through its contents, grabbing the Febreze bottle lodge towards the back. You stare down at it as if it's your darling baby, and as of now, it kind of is. You have never been so glad to see the words Hawaiian Aloha labeled so elegantly across the bottle. Never.
The next couple of minutes are spent frolicking about the household. Why not make it fun? You twirl and pirouette your way through the living room, spraying Febreze throughout every square inch of the house. You're spraying like your life depends on it. You spray in the kitchen, in the living room, in the downstairs bathroom, and even though this is possibly the worst time, you find yourself laughing and giggling. It smells like a beautiful sunny day on the shore of Hawaii and you bite back the urge to whisper a quick "aloha" as you continue to spritz.
It's when you finally make it to the stair case and look up that you halt in your tracks. Your body is literally frozen. Your eyes are the widest they have ever been and your legs feel like jelly, your feet practically glued to the floor. You vaguely register the Febreze falling from your now slack grip, clattering loudly to the floor where it rolls away and rests against the bottom step. You're staring up into the face of insanity itself.
The boy's body looks withered and he can barely even manage to hold himself up, using the banister as support. His shoulders are hunched and his free arm is hanging limp by his side, his clawed fingers occasionally twitching by his thigh.
You gasp and snap your head towards the front door when you hear the telltale sound of your dad's car pull up in the driveway, and oh boy, you're in panic mode now. This is the worst, the absolute worst. Why, why, why did your dad have to come home at this very moment?
You look back up at the top of the staircase, your mouth hanging open like a fish. The boy blinks at you, and it's when you watch his slight frown turn upward into a manic smile, all toothy and jagged and completely terrifying, that your stomach drops.
Please review everyone and tell me what ya' think! Any questions or thoughts? Drop a line, even if it's just to say MOAR, it encourages me to write faster! OuO