After Jack went looking for June when she leaves with the radio, his trust in his friends collapses along with his hopes of keeping them together. So instead of waiting for the inevitable, he runs away and ends up injured and lost in the process.
A...
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Waves of lights flew over him as they brought him into a dark room. His skin burned with immense pain as his mind went numb, for all he could see is darkness; empty and cold.
The sudden bang and blindness was the next thing he felt, causing his eyelids to whip shut like curtains as the room lit up.
"Stay with us! Stay with us okay?" One voice implores, muffled by the sharp ringing in his ears, which was all he could hear over everything else around him as he was placed on a cold metal table. He didn't feel his clothes get removed from his body as they began medical procedure, swabbing him down from head to toe; cleaning most of the dried blood and filth from the Earth off of him. But his body was numb. From the previous agony as well as his mind, occupied with the trauma he felt earlier just before they found him, he couldn't feel anything. He felt light. Lighter than a feather.
He couldn't tell if he was even alive anymore, nor sure if his breathing was steady or ragged like it was before from all the screaming. They lifted his head up to have a comforter placed beneath him before wiping off his face with a rag. His eyes, which had been aching from the dulling pain of illumination, fluttered opened as long-standing shade was provided to him against the blinding strobes; in time to see a large hand gently cover his mouth and nose with a oxygen mask.
Another voice said, this one he heard clearly. "We're ready. Close your eyes son."
He did so. And welcomed the solace of slumber...
Life would always be like that for him. No matter how hard he tried, everything was never enough.
He had hoped that he had gotten what he always wanted in his friends, a family. A family that looked out for each other. A family that cared for each other. A family that loved him. But... he never saw that, at least to a satisfying extent.
Jack remembered the first time he wanted that.
He remembers being six years old when he first got the concept of what's it like having an actual family; something that would never happen to him throughout his childhood. Never feel the comforting embrace of a mother, and neither the encouraging and sympathetic words of wisdom of a father. Both figures were nonexistent in his entire life. Even for those that were for a short while, never stayed long. And instead, was always put down afterwards.
He'd since have long ago given up on hoping that somebodies or someone that would care for and love him, as many of the households he's been through were either cold or abusive. And even at school, the kids always made fun of him, usually the morbidly obese type of kids that envied him for his lankiness. He'd always wanted a big brother to protect and look up to whenever he was picked on.
He couldn't help but hope that maybe one day as he got older that his new family would accept him, and maybe even like him.
