Sure to Shine

Eric and Skylar had been sitting, motionless, for about an hour before Skylar finally moved, turning to look at Eric. Eric felt the gaze rather than saw it, as he was resting his head against the wall with his eyes closed, enjoying the fact that he finally felt calm.

He opened his eyes to meet Skylar’s gaze.

"What?" he asked. He was wary of the fact that Skylar might be pulling something else out of his mad brain, but for some reason, he was no longer scared of the young man sitting next to him. Rather, he felt he understood him. He couldn’t explain how he understood him, or even exactly what he understood, but he felt that there was a definite understanding between the two of them now.

"You learnt a lot tonight," Skylar said, going back into his bag and pulling out a packet of cigarettes. Eric gladly took one when it was offered, and for a couple of minutes the two of them smoked happily.

"Well, I learnt that running off into abandoned buildings can be fucking scary," Eric shrugged. "If that’s what you mean."

Skylar grinned.

"You have no idea, have you?" he chuckled. "You’ve experienced something many people don’t, Eric. Something amazing. After tonight, nothing will faze you anymore. You know why?"

"Why?" Eric asked. He knew that there had been some reason for Skylar doing all of this to him, and now it looked as though he was about to find out. Eric was slightly excited. After the night spent in the cemetery, he had realised that Skylar had an understanding of life far deeper than anyone Eric had ever met before.

"You pushed your mind to its boundaries tonight, Eric," Skylar explained. "On one end of the scale, you experienced what it feels like to know you’re about to die. One the other side of things, you realised what you would feel had you killed somebody. Although both events turned out to be completely innocent, you still truly believed at the time that it was all real. Do you understand now why everything else will now feel as though it’s nothing?"

Eric did understand, perfectly. Skylar was right. At the time he had pointed the gun at Eric, Eric had one hundred percent believed that he was about to die. He had been convinced of it, and he had never felt fear like it. When Skylar had thrown the dummy straight at him, Eric had truly believed, if only for a minute, that he had killed someone. He knew what it felt like now, and suddenly every other problem in his life seemed insignificant.

"But does that make me one of these monsters?" Eric asked Skylar softly. "I mean, yeah, I thought I’d killed someone, but I freaked out a fair bit."

"First of all you demonstrated that you could do it," Skylar explained. "Like what we were talking about earlier. Animal instinct. You felt threatened; you took action to defend yourself. But tell me, Eric, what did you feel afterwards?"

"Fear," Eric said, after a short pause.

"Fear that you would get caught? Fear of the trouble you would get into?"

"Yeah," Eric agreed, nodding. "That’s exactly it."

"But did you feel guilt?" Skylar asked.

There was a pause as it dawned upon Eric that he hadn’t felt anything of the sort. No guilt, no remorse, no sadness.

"No," Eric said softly. "I didn’t. Just fear and …"

"And?"

"Excitement," Eric mumbled, feeling his heartbeat start to quicken again. "I was really pumped. Like I could do it again."

Eric looked at Skylar to see that he was grinning through the darkness.

"You see?" Skylar asked quietly, his mad eyes glittering in the little moonlight. "It’s in all of us. Give us the right situation and the right frame of mind and we’ll do it. So why not carry that with you? Keep it there all the time and no one will ever mess around with you again. You’ve pushed your mental state right to its boundaries tonight, and you coped fine. You thought you were going to die, you were beaten up, you were terrified and you thought you’d killed someone, and here you are sitting here chatting away about it with a cigarette. I think that’s pretty impressive, you know."

"You do?" Eric asked, for some reason pleased that Skylar was praising him.

"Yeah," Skylar replied. "Considering when I first met you, I thought you were one of these kids who were just going to waste what they had."

"I don’t think I was a total waster," Eric shrugged.

Skylar smiled.

"Not in the respect of intelligence," he replied. "Thank God. No, you weren’t one of these idiots who would sit there stupidly, letting life pass them by. But I saw in you a potential for great things, and I thought you were just going to let them slip past you."

"Great things?" Eric asked, spluttering a little with laughter. "What? You’re going to tell me I’m some sort of chosen one or something?"

Skylar grinned.

"Great in this sense won’t actually be conventional, Eric," Skylar told him, and his voice suddenly had the hint of a warning to it. "The things you’ll end up doing won’t be great as in heroic. They’ll be great as in shocking. Huge. Something no one sees coming."

Eric blinked.

"What do you mean, Skylar?" he asked. "You mean I’m going to be some sort of serial killer or something? I’m going to end up living this sort of monster’s life? I don’t want that."

"You don’t have a choice," Skylar grinned. "You’ve seen what you’re capable of, what you can cope with. It’s already begun. And I shouldn’t worry, Eric. It’s not like you’ll hate it."

Eric sat back against the wall again, chewing on his lip thoughtfully. He felt as though he should be concerned with what Skylar had told him, but for some reason, he wasn’t.

"We had a survivor of the shooting come and talk to us today," Eric told Skylar. He glanced at his watch. "Well, technically yesterday," he added.

Skylar turned around, interested.

"Really?" he asked. "What did he have to say?"

"He used to be one of Ben’s friends," Eric explained. "He was well freaked out when he looked up and saw me."

"I’m not surprised," Skylar laughed. "He probably thought he’d seen a ghost."

"That’s what I thought," Eric laughed. "He took the last ever picture of Ben. He was saying about how Ben was going to shoot him, but didn’t."

"Is this Jeremy Pritchard?" Skylar suddenly asked, and Eric nodded, no longer surprised at how much Skylar knew about the subject.

"Yeah, that’s him," Eric said. "Do you have another cigarette? I’m craving them."

Skylar handed Eric the packet without a word, and only spoke again once Eric had lit up the new one.

"I read about that incident," he explained. "Ben dragged him out from under the table, but only ended up hitting him across the head with the gun. Sound familiar?"

Skylar chuckled as Eric’s free hand went instinctively to his still sore head.

"Yeah, thanks for that," Eric muttered, and then he noticed the dried blood which had streaked down his arm from his thumb and index finger. The trail disappeared up his sleeve.

"That’ll be from the gun," Skylar explained, before Eric could ask. Eric sometimes got the feeling Skylar was reading his mind. "Sometimes, when the barrel is sawn a little too short, like this one is, the gas escaping from the gun can cause cuts and sometimes even blow fingers off. You were lucky."

"I’ll say," Eric muttered. Now he had noticed it, the cut was stinging again. "I didn’t realise these things were so damn powerful."

"They get like that when they’re sawn off a little too short," Skylar said knowingly. "You had better get a cover story, though. These things are illegal."

"I can see why," Eric muttered, glancing at the mangled mess which had been the dummy. "Skylar?"

"What?"

"What is the purpose of all this?" Eric asked. "Why me? Why are you frightening the shit out of me?"

"I told you," Skylar shrugged. "You’re going to do great things."

"I don’t know if you and I have the same idea of great," Eric told him, and Skylar grinned, taking another sip of whiskey.

"I think we share a common goal," Skylar told him. "You just haven’t found it yet."

"What do you mean?" Eric asked curiously. Skylar Mitchell intrigued him just as much as he frightened him.

"Eric, you struck me as a pretty easy-going guy when I first met you," Skylar said, turning to face him. "But I’m good with first impressions, and I sensed something in you. You’re fed up. You’re convincing yourself that you’re happy but, in realty, you’re not. You want to do something, but you don’t know what you can do. You feel boxed in by other people’s expectations of you, and that’s a dangerous place to be in. I just want to make sure that, when you finally snap, you do something awesome."

Eric blinked.

"Skylar," he said firmly. "I’m not going to shoot up my school."

"I never said you would," Skylar smiled, letting out that mad little chuckle of his.

"How did you get to know all this, Skylar?" Eric asked. "Who taught you?"

"Myself," Skylar replied.

"And do your parents notice that you’re never home?"

"No," Skylar replied. "My mother left, and my father isn’t all that observant now I’m technically an adult."

"Same," Eric agreed. "Except my father would probably be a little pissed if he found out what I was up to lately."

"That should make it all the more fun," Skylar winked. "Come on. We had better get out of here. It’ll be daylight soon, and the last thing we want is to be caught trespassing."

"Were there any signs?" Eric asked, as Skylar grabbed up the whiskey, cigarettes and the shotgun, and put them all back into the bag.

"A couple," Skylar said. "The security guards are never here, though. Just as well, really. A shotgun blast is pretty distinctive. The last thing we would want is some guy to come storming in and find you firing at a dummy like a loon."

"Guess I’m in the right place," Eric shrugged. They made their way back out into the hallway.

"Careful on the stairs," Skylar told him. "I’ve put my foot through several times, and it’s a pretty long way down."

"Skylar?" Eric asked, as they hugged the walls and stayed on the very edge of the stairs. "What was the purpose of beating me up?"

"You fear pain," Skylar said simply. "The best way to get over a fear is to face it."

With that, Skylar kicked backwards, catching Eric on the shin. Eric cursed.

"Fuck’s sake, Skylar," he muttered, through clenched teeth. Skylar only laughed.

They made it out without falling through the stairs. As they walked out of the main hall and into the overgrown grounds, they passed what must have been at least ten No Trespassing signs.

Eric found this fact rather hilarious.