THE KIDS AREN'T OKAY , applyfic

000. prologue

When you are children, imagined dangers lurk in the dark, in your closets and under your beds. Nightmares that never learned to stay within dreams, they plague your every footstep, always just behind you, just over your shoulder, but forever out of sight. They are the reason you run from the doorway of your bedroom to the safety of your covers when the lights are turned off, the reason your parents must check once, twice in all the places the shadows linger before you allow yourself to be tucked in and kissed goodnight.

As you get older, you see monsters still, but ones considered real, ones that you can admit your fear of without being shunned as childish, over-imaginative. Monsters that wear pleasant masks of smiles and lies. Terrors that can be held within humanity's fragile view of the world, that fit within your rigid sets of rules and boundaries. A house of cards, kept standing only by determination to keep yourselves in the dark. As if ignorance has ever saved anyone. Far better to see the knife coming, instead of standing blindly by as it plunges between your shoulder blades. But still, you convince yourselves that the only things to fear are those that you have created.

And while these things of humanity, your politicians and your corporations, your criminals and your soldiers, are perhaps worthy of fear, they are not true monsters.

But the things that haunted you at night as you lay paralyzed in your childhood beds, they are not true monsters either.

Both are mere reflections of the truth, or broken halves of the whole. Because monsters, real monsters? They are not human things, like politicians and businessmen, though they often pretend to be, donning similar facades. Nor are they the twisted spectres of the night, though they may share their fangs and claws.

Most are simply people, not human, but close enough in temperament, living their lives without undue intention to harm their more mundane neighbours except, perhaps, in a desire for survival. Some integrate themselves with human society, indistinguishable from you, others living just on the fringes, others separating themselves entirely. Monsters can be found in town and forest alike, in fields and under hills, in lake and sea and river. And so the fact that the vast majority of humanity remains blissfully ignorant of their existence proves their lack of malevolence, for if they truly wished, surely they could topple the fragile constructions of your world like a house of cards, built with care but vulnerable to even the smallest breeze or over-enthusiastic exhale.

The fact that they have not — yet — does not mean there is nothing to fear, however. There is always something to fear. And there are those that are truly everything you have ever been afraid of, blended together and combined, with both souls, such as any have, the colour of pitch and eyes that gleam red. Ones that may fight just as willingly with deception and lie as blade and talon, for the greatest weapon is whatever hurts your enemy the most, no matter which way it cuts into their heart.

Be ever wary, ever cautious of them, these true monsters, in every sense of the word,  though even that will not help you. Nothing will, for you will never see them for their true selves.

Not until their teeth close around your throat.