The Perceptions Of An Observer: A Short Story Collection

III. The Fallen Star

He was happy once.

It seemed almost impossible to even imagine in the present, but once upon a not so distant past, The Fallen Star had not fallen.

He was just an average boy, surrounded by a select handful of close friends, ones who he thought were incapable of hurting him, of leaving him to fight the world on his own.

But then they did just that. They left him alone, no warning or known reason behind it. They just left.

A few tried to bridge the gap, to stay behind and stay with an old friend. For a while, The Shadow and The Bull were still by his side, albeit from a slightly distanced stance.

But then they too left one day, the gap between old friends too forceful for them to handle as it pulled them away.

While he didn't know when for sure, The Fallen Star had a feeling this was when he really fell.

It didn't take long for him to find solace with The Puppet Master and his clique, a clique The Fallen Star used to be more familiar with, until he broke a bridge between him and them.

Now that broken bridge was finding repair, but not without irreparable damage.

When he had first drifted, The Puppet Master was not yet The Puppet Master. He may have been plagued with his toxic traits, but none to the level that they were now at. None to the level that made him The Puppet Master.

But those days were gone, and the new era was one that would bring unimaginable pain and suffering to the life of The Fallen Star.

It started with scorn from the mouth and actions of The Puppet Master. Judgemental looks, commentary, every little thing suggested that The Fallen Star was not good enough.

And so he tried to change himself for the sake of The Puppet Master. He tried to make himself smaller and less intrusive for approval.

But he could never get approval, and he just ended up hurting himself to try to gain it.

And that is what truly turned him into The Fallen Star.

The departure of old friends and the crushing weight of not being good enough for The Puppet Master broke him down little by little with every passing day.

With each day that went by, he became more and more withdrawn from The Puppet Master's clique. He couldn't leave, couldn't bring himself to be alone again, but he was still fading away into the darkest crevices of his mind as they kept throwing snide remarks in his direction, ones he couldn't always half laugh off like they were no big deal.

Those snide remarks made their way into his heart and burrowed themselves there, forcing him into a withdrawn shut down period if they cut too deeply.

Every act of cruelness kept spiraling out of control until the day his happiness, or whatever happiness he had left, was completely destroyed.

He didn't care if he faded away forever. It's not like anyone else would either, he believed. He wasn't worth anything to anyone. He couldn't even find his own self worth under the battle scars of battles with himself and the clique that he had continuously lost.

He was dancing on the edge of life and death, and he didn't have the will to keep fighting anymore.

Nobody could save him, not even himself.

Nobody could save him, except for maybe The Angel, who tried tirelessly and without relenting to do what he could to keep The Fallen Star from fading away.

From the very first appearance of The Fallen Star, The Angel knew something was wrong. He could feel the cracks in his mind and in his resilience.

And he could feel how close he kept on inching to the end.

With all of that in mind, he made it his goal to reach The Fallen Star and drag him back from the edge.

It would, in theory, be easy as they were old friends, The Angel thought.

It really couldn't be that difficult, right?

And maybe in the beginning, it wasn't that difficult. In the beginning, The Fallen Star was able to come back to life under the influence of The Angel. Only The Angel was able to bring him back when he was fading, was able to bring a sort of luminescence to him that he almost never had otherwise.

And around The Angel, The Fallen Star felt a happiness truer than one he felt around anyone else.

At least, he did for a while. Eventually, even The Angel's shield over him was not strong enough to withstand the brutality of The Puppet Master and The City Boy.

The Angel could try every trick he had to protect The Fallen Star, but it wasn't enough. He was falling deeper and deeper into the darkness despite his efforts to stay alive.

He was fading away, diminished to nothing but dead eyes and ribs through skin as he continued to hurt himself more and more, fueled by a lack of food, a lack of genuine emotions and a lack of sleep in his desperation just to feel something other than the numbness that was taking him over by the daily.

Even as helping hands tried to hold on to him and bring him back to the person he once was, he kept on dancing closer and closer to the verge of a final self destruction, one that even The Angel would not be able to bring him back from.

The world and its cruelty was becoming so unbearably forceful that if there was one wrong move, The Fallen Star would be gone.

Forever.