The Lost

3- Not a Child

Lyn

The Lady never found out about the fight. None of the teachers did either. One day passed, then another, and nobody brought it up. Lucius cleaned himself up and covered his bruises as best he could, and not one person said a thing.
Three days had passed since the fight when things started to go wrong.

It started out as a quiet morning. A nice morning. When I awoke in my hideout to the sunlight streaking across my face, I had pictured a peaceful day. It was warmer in the city now that the storm had passed and the wind had eased off. Getting out of bed took forever; it was one of those mornings where everything felt sleepy and slow. Not to mention I was tired after the dreams.

I had been travelling through foggy memories of Lucius fighting with Edward, always those two, always Edward winning— only the places changed. Sometimes they broke into fistfights in the classrooms and Lucius would always get in trouble. Other times the boys waited, they waited and followed Lucius until there were no teacher around, then they initiated a confrontation. Those fights were usually the worst. The bloodiest.
I dreamt uneasily of the hundreds of brawls. They all seemed to merge into one long scrap with the same result— Edward getting away with bullying Lucius. And me, hidden but watching, always watching... watching. Useless. Watching Lucius be beaten to the floor and helpless to stop it, but always wishing I could.

It took a while to wake up but I managed it eventually. Once I was up, I made a point of casting those unhappy thoughts away from my mind. Reluctant to leave my little hideaway in the clutter room, I set to cleaning. After brushing off my mirror (which was actually just a shard of a proper mirror that had broken) making my bed, sweeping the floor that always found a way to get dirty, organising my diminishing pile of food, making the bed again and cleaning the mirror for a third time, I found myself growing a bit bored. In the sleepy calm of the morning, I sat myself in front of the mirror and attempted to tie my hair back. Total failure, of course. I had never been able to do anything with my hair. It always lay over my shoulders, completely white and incredibly fluffy from the toothbrush I used to brush it.

I looked at myself for a long time in the mirror. I looked and looked and looked. At my hair. My arms and knees, all scratched up from how I ran around inside the walls. And my weird face. Weird face. I didn't look like the humans. My hair was white and so were my eyes... none of them had white hair. Again, I wondered if I was pretty. I hoped I was... but how are you supposed to tell? There were no girls in the school to compare myself to. Only boys. Yuck.
But the boys were still... different. Their hair wasn't strange colours and they had proper clothes to wear, not scraps of fabric clumsily sewn together. Whatever. What did it even matter?
I huffed and turned away from my yuck reflection. It wasn't nice to think about. So I just went back to cleaning.

I expected to be exhausted after the unnecessary hours of cleaning. Or at least tired. Instead, I had been filled with the sudden and overwhelming realisation that I was bored.

It was the sort of feeling a person gets when they've been doing nothing for the past few days. As usual, my timing was perfect. It was now a Monday; a class day. Lucius would be doing lessons for another three hours before he had a chance to talk to me, and even then he would only have a few minutes to spare. There would be humans everywhere in the building today. People in the classrooms, the Lady roaming the halls.
The only human I ever wanted to see was Lucius.

Going outside wasn't really an option. So, I sat on the edge of my bed, dragged my bag over from the corner and decided to look through all of my gear. There wasn't much else to do.