No Dogs Allowed

Tailless Wolves (PouncerBiter)

(ty for reading, you are so very appreciated :D the little star is happy to see your face)

(EDITED) (Note to readers: Some chapters ahead may not be in line with the new edits.)

There's a recurring dream Elias and I both had when we were young, and was likely the only thing we had and have in common with each other. How befitting of our dynamic: to keep everything good for ourselves and share the worst with each other.

I'm sitting down. I'm counting something in my hand. Sometimes they're coins. Sometimes they're eyes. Sometimes they're Eliases. Sometimes they're wolves.

The room is dark, the kind of dark it gets when there's a distant light on elsewhere that you can't reach, when the glow of someone else's lamp gives you scraps and crumbs to see from. Sometimes I see Elias in it. Other times it's only stray dogs.

"Aren't you scared?" someone asks, but not to me.

Elias says, "Of the echo? Why would I be? It's only an echo."

I drop what I'm counting and they crash. With an echo.

"Aren't you scared?" I ask him.

"Of the echo? Why would I be? It's—"

"Of what caused the echo."

No one cares for the shadows. They only care for what made them.

Elias and I are wolves and running. Sometimes it's on a beach. Other times it's in my father's house. Most times it's on a race track. There's so many numbers on every corner. On the screen. On the walls. Under our feet. In his purple eyes. In my yellow ones. They go up. They go down. No one knows why.

My mother is the only one in the stands, screaming something unintelligible. Elias says, "Umma is calling. We have to go."

"No," I say. "Not yet."

"We have to go. We have to go now." He swipes a clean cut across my vision. Things go golden, go red, back and forth, a royal massacre. "You fucking dog. You listen to no one. It's why you're losing. Aren't you sick of losing?"

"Not yet," I pant. "Not yet."

It's never not dark.

The buzzer rings somewhere in the distance, but I can't see, not through the blood. Hands bring my face up, and my mother says, "We can't stay. We're not allowed."

I lose my temper at that, and slash her to pieces.

Elias and I are back to back in the center of the unlit track, our hands out as we go on counting. We say the numbers out loud. It's gone from one two three all the way to one thousand and four one thousand and five one thousand and six. I've counted in French. I've counted in English. I've counted without speaking.

The world begins to crumble in fragments, pieces of it falling off into a deeper black like it's withering away with the seconds. My father bends down, his face years younger; he looks like my brother. He holds out his hands to us.

We hand him what we counted. I am always one short.

My father says, "We should try again next time."

Elias says, "We should."

He takes my father's hand. They turn their backs and walk away. The world continues to break, sectioning off in poor cuts and jagged slices. I scramble to my feet, holding my ripped-up face, holding out my empty hands.