The Promised School

Memories and dead eyes

He was alone, and he wanted that. He definitely did not want to say goodbye to his friends. He knew them so well, the three had always been like siblings. 

But he couldn't say goodbye anyway,  if they had any sense they would be out of the school and among the trees that covered the valley. They would dart between the tall trunks, leap over streams, hurtle through long grass. Trip, steady themselves. They would flee.

İt would have been to hard to say goodbye, to hard to end everything. Well, of course it would have been easy for him... He was going to kill himself.  But Norman and Emma would replay the moment in they're heads, wishing they could have done something. And Ray didn't want that. 

But now, alone in  the dark library, with his hands covered in the blood of the person who had looked after him his entire life, he felt a surge of happieness. And the couldn't stop his wide smile from spreading across his face. 

He felt a shiver run down his spine.

He would finally be free. All his life Ray had lived in depression, knowing that each of his siblings would one day get eaten or preserved to be eaten later.  And Emma and Norman too. But now he could end that. The disapointment in the eyes of those monsters? 

That was too good to even think about. Ah, were they looking forward to eating one of their prize meals? Let them eat ash. He would be long gone before any demon found him.

He stared into the fire and... He felt cold, sudenley. 

No.

He desperately tried to stop it from spreading, but he couldn't.

"NO!" He hissed, clutching his head with his free hand. "No..." He had sworn to himself that this wouldn't happen... So why... He slowly kneeled in the puddle of gasoline, still holding the match He could drop it now, he thought. He should. He had to.

DROP İT, the in his head screamed. DROP İT NOW.

He shook his head, and then... Ray gasped, his wide grin still on his crazy looking face, wet hair dripping, and then the cold feeling reached his mind and took over.

Memories.

He shook violently. Memories. Memories... 

Emma. Norman. Emma happy, laughing. The light in her eyes when she blinked. Her smile when she won at a game of chess.  Norman, worried, his eyes wide and filled with tears, biting his lip and hugging him. Emma, annoyed, giving him her death glare and Ray telling her she looked ridiculous. 

Norman excited, pulling him along to show him a picture he had drawn of the three of them, back when they were six years old and happy.

Emma stealing his book, Norman breaking down and telling him where she had hidden it. Emma and Norman painting his ceiling black because he had wanted it black. 

Emma and Norman, sitting in the rain, laughing. Playing tag with him in the library, terrified. 

Norman telling him he Norman was Venus, Emma was the sun and Ray was the moon, and they would never change.

But they did. 

Ray, Norman and Emma  sitting alone in the middle of a rainstorm at sunrise, meditaiting. Emma pressing her forhead against his and telling him he would never catch her. Norman sitting beside Ray  when he was sad, making him laugh by reading Emma's poems to him.

Emma blurting out random words when she was trying to lie. Norman confessing he had taken Ray's book about stars, bursting into tears and saying he wanted to go stargazing with Emma and Ray. Emma getting moved by this and also crying.

Ray cheering them up by calling them idiots. 

NO. No. NO!

Ray blinked, back from memory world as the voice in his head screamed at him. The real world flashed before his eyes and he rose slowly, blinking tears out of dead eyes. Shadows danced across his face and he smiled, a proper smile this time, not crazy. 

He looked up through the long glass window, and saw the moon, a supermoon, just like it had been on that night. 

'You're a supermoon, Ray. As long as you have the sun for light, you'll always shine, and I'll be right beside you, we both will.'

"I'll be right beside you. We both will." Ray whispered, and he closed his eyes as his memories scattered like Autumn leaves on a windy day. Yes, they would get stepped on by passers by. Yes, their beautiful orange-Red color would fade, but they would stay on the ground and eventually mix with the soil until a new tree grew from the ground. 

And so on. 

With a clear mind, he looked out and saw the milky way, among a million stars. And there was Venus, shining brighter than any of them, shining like forgotten happieness, shining like friendship and sadness, and most of all, loss. Shining like tears falling from a broken soul, but still shining because shining like that made people happy and comforted.

And next to it, the moon. The sign of as many unhappy things as happy, as much pain as comfort.  

But it also shone, with it's stolen light, stolen from the sun. İt took the sun's warm light and made it silver, but that was okay because that was what Ray had always done. 

And he always would. 

Ray didn't look away from  the window, but he could feel the match in his hand and he felt as happy as- no, happier, than that time in the rain, or the time on his birthday. 

Because his friends, his friends were here with him; they always would be.

He smiled. 

"Goodbye, Norman. Goodbye, Emma."

He could feel the Universe watching him - and his heart broke like a china vase on the ground, it shattered, again and again and again and again and again.

"İt's been fun."