🏆Featured on TeenFiction | Head Over Heels
To Leroy 'Lee' Hiew, home's never felt like home. He has a huge mansion, a big car, and more money than he could ever spend. And yet, the idea of home always seems to elude him.
Armed with his dog, Socks...
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It seems like forever before Jack finally stops screaming.
Lee stands frozen through the whole ordeal, thorny roots twining themselves around his sneakered feet and pinning him to the weathered ground. He tries---so desperately, to move, to run over to Jack and drag him out of the same nightmare that still consumes the back of Lee's brain ever so often. But he can't. He can't do it. He stands, stock-still, a tangled mess of atrophied limbs and misplaced muscle and phantom pain. Ice wraps itself around his golden skin, and as Jack's haunting shrieks ebb into quiet, halting sobs, Lee wants to scream too. He wants to plunge back into the abyss that had swallowed him all those years ago and join Jack in his new darkness. He wants to feel him, revel in their now-common agony.
But he can't. So he stands, aural cruelty blooming up his toes and his calves and his thighs. On the outside, he's a living doll, porcelain and still. On the inside, he's a howling, crying storm.
Lee wishes he can't imagine the pain that Jack's feeling right now, but he can, because he'd felt it three years back, and he'd screamed until his lungs were raw, and his vision had flickered bright red, and...
Danny and his gang saunter past Lee's unmoving form, laughing and jostling like all's right in the universe without sparing him a second glance. Lee lets them. He's a little ashamed of himself for that.
Lee doesn't unfreeze until Jack's soft sobs are almost too much to bear, a particularly loud whimper shattering his trance. Even then, his feet move like they're on autopilot, jellied legs shuffling over to the all-too-familiar wall. In front of it, Jack's curled in a fetal position, quivers wracking his prone body, and Lee feels his own heart snap in half.
At the sound of Lee's approaching footsteps, Jack lifts his head ever so slightly, and Lee didn't think his heart could break any more, but he's proven wrong at the sight of the crystal puddles pooling in Jack's eyes and rolling down his cheeks.
Rivulets of blood trickle down Jack's canines, bottom lip splitting around the visible clench of his teeth. He's obviously trying to hold his tears back, all hard grit and taut misery. One hand's clamped to the side of his neck, collar pulled askew, tie hanging off his throat in a wide loop. The other's wrapped around his stomach, as if hugging himself will make the pain stop.
(It never really stops. Lee's learnt that the hard way.)
"I suppose you're going to say I told you so now," Jack forces out through teary eyes and gritted teeth, every syllable flecked with blood.
Lee doesn't. Instead, he kneels down next to Jack and folds his starched collar back, gently yanking his hand away from his throat. Jack offers none of his usual resistance, making the last shards of Lee's heart fall to the floor.
The side of Jack's neck is all flame-red skin and crumbling ash, smoke still lightly curling off it. But what catches Lee's eye is the small, circular ring of black, stark against Jack's pale skin. He doesn't have to touch it to feel the blistering skin underneath, crimson and raw. He doesn't have to look at it to know it'll scar.
