Status: Completed Oneshot
Stephen
End
All morning the boys had been unsettled, had shifted uneasily under the dark brow of morning fog that had not yet lifted by lunchtime. There was a quiet violence around the playground, and when Harry went for a piss he was faster than usual. As he washed his hands in the basin he studied himself under fluorescent light. His face was the colour of a cage-hen egg and the dark rings around his eyes set them back in to his skull, between his thoughts and memories. They looked like pissholes in the snow.
In period five Biology, James and Rupert kicked each other beneath the desk. Harry watched their back and forth, tit for tat - two quick kicks from Rupert earned one large one in retaliation, that made him hiss in pain. Harry waited as the roll was called, and Stephen’s name was passed over once again. As if he’d been forgotten. As if he’d been erased.
He hadn’t slept since Stephen left, and they wouldn’t tell him why. He had asked again and again – his mother, his father, his teachers, the school nurse – and no one would reply. Instead their faces would go dark, full of storms and secrets, and they would exchange looks in a language that he did not yet understand. They would tell him to go play outside.
The last time he asked, his mother’s face went hard and grey as concrete and she looked past him without saying a word. When Harry turned, his father’s eyes were swollen with tears.
“Harry Waite?”
He looked up and saw Mr Hart at the door, who was asking for him but not looking at him.
“You’d better come with me.”
Harry left his folder behind.
Stephen’s dad was dead, they said.
Harry’s eyes were swimming with an awful, waxen deathmask of the man – pallid and lifeless, colour drained away to paper. Stephen’s dad’s eyes must be like black holes, he thought, like they had been in the mirror. But his brain didn’t generate thoughts or memories anymore – only nothing.
He had small, rough hands with nothing to occupy them.
He’d had raised veins on his arms that had raced life so eagerly through him. Where did all the blood go?
All the adults watched him, storm-eyed again: only this time the secrets were spilled out across their faces and dripped in full sentences across their wrinkles and rising chests. He turned his head to read them, and he felt somewhere deep the sharp pull of understanding that had not yet reached his conscious mind.
“Where is Stephen?” he asked,
but somehow he had already begun to translate, in the clumsy language of a beginner, the dark looks that had been so foreign just a few hours ago.
In period five Biology, James and Rupert kicked each other beneath the desk. Harry watched their back and forth, tit for tat - two quick kicks from Rupert earned one large one in retaliation, that made him hiss in pain.
Harry counted his hits. One, Two. That wasn’t fair. Two whole, human hearts ripped away at once. That was against the rules. He coiled, ready to retaliate.
And in to the cloying fog, not yet lifted and now forming frost, Harry made a sound so low and so awful that it pierced the thick air.
It rang, heavy and raw, across the ghostland of the empty asphalt.
In period five Biology, James and Rupert kicked each other beneath the desk. Harry watched their back and forth, tit for tat - two quick kicks from Rupert earned one large one in retaliation, that made him hiss in pain. Harry waited as the roll was called, and Stephen’s name was passed over once again. As if he’d been forgotten. As if he’d been erased.
He hadn’t slept since Stephen left, and they wouldn’t tell him why. He had asked again and again – his mother, his father, his teachers, the school nurse – and no one would reply. Instead their faces would go dark, full of storms and secrets, and they would exchange looks in a language that he did not yet understand. They would tell him to go play outside.
The last time he asked, his mother’s face went hard and grey as concrete and she looked past him without saying a word. When Harry turned, his father’s eyes were swollen with tears.
“Harry Waite?”
He looked up and saw Mr Hart at the door, who was asking for him but not looking at him.
“You’d better come with me.”
Harry left his folder behind.
+++
Stephen’s dad was dead, they said.
Harry’s eyes were swimming with an awful, waxen deathmask of the man – pallid and lifeless, colour drained away to paper. Stephen’s dad’s eyes must be like black holes, he thought, like they had been in the mirror. But his brain didn’t generate thoughts or memories anymore – only nothing.
He had small, rough hands with nothing to occupy them.
He’d had raised veins on his arms that had raced life so eagerly through him. Where did all the blood go?
All the adults watched him, storm-eyed again: only this time the secrets were spilled out across their faces and dripped in full sentences across their wrinkles and rising chests. He turned his head to read them, and he felt somewhere deep the sharp pull of understanding that had not yet reached his conscious mind.
“Where is Stephen?” he asked,
but somehow he had already begun to translate, in the clumsy language of a beginner, the dark looks that had been so foreign just a few hours ago.
In period five Biology, James and Rupert kicked each other beneath the desk. Harry watched their back and forth, tit for tat - two quick kicks from Rupert earned one large one in retaliation, that made him hiss in pain.
Harry counted his hits. One, Two. That wasn’t fair. Two whole, human hearts ripped away at once. That was against the rules. He coiled, ready to retaliate.
And in to the cloying fog, not yet lifted and now forming frost, Harry made a sound so low and so awful that it pierced the thick air.
It rang, heavy and raw, across the ghostland of the empty asphalt.