The Perceptions Of An Observer: A Short Story Collection

XVIII. The Shark

He didn't really know how he got into The Puppet Master's clique, only that he did.

He must've swum offshore somehow one day and ended up beached in a land of chaos, he believed. He couldn't say for sure, as he was young when he found his spot, young enough to have originated from a time before darkness was rampant.

He did know that he was The Shark, a member but a stranger simultaneously.

His position in the world was one that faltered, a whirlwind back and forth between the cliquey, uniform aspect over which The Puppet Master found a liking to dominating, and a status of no distinguishing traits to adorn it.

More often than not, The Shark found himself drifting from the cliqueness of it all.

He was not unfamiliar to a taste of the uniform organization of the inner workings, but that structure was never quite built for him. In the imagery of the bigger picture, this didn't matter much. It was not overly uncommon for outliers like him to exist in the clique, to be accepted without anyone batting an eye at this presence.

Everyone was an individual at their core, after all. Everyone had something extraordinary about them.

Everyone, that was, except for The Shark. Despite the welcome position he had found, he couldn't find anything that marked him as a true individual, He felt too much like a mix of everyone else's traits and personalities and not like one of his own.

He had considered the idea of the extraordinary in passing, but had never considered actually making a name for himself. This dream was too far off to him to feel like anything he could achieve in a lifetime. He felt it easier to merely accept the card he was dealt and play the role he was given.

That was, until the day he met The Elephant.

The Elephant was one set on looking for his remarkability in a uniform yet unique clique, one that The Shark never considered he could share a likeness in mind to until he realized that maybe with this new allegiance, he could make a name for himself that he never thought he would have.

And so, an alliance began.

While the two of them never found themselves experiencing an additional isolation from the rest of the clique, they were still the two of them, one in the same and nobody at the same time.

But through the dreams of The Elephant, The Shark found himself fantasizing about the possibilities of taking a new power over his predisposed destiny in the world as it stood.

After all, that's what sharks stood for in the works of the past, what he as The Shark felt ever so inclined to adopt as part of himself. Power, authority, that's what he would take over his own story if he joined The Elephant's impossible dream of greatness.

He had to admit, this was tempting.

And so he became part of the adventure.

The Elephant and The Shark's journey for the extraordinary was a long one. There was something that kept them from fully isolating themselves from the people who tried to make them, but there was still the clear distinction between them and everyone else.

The Shark didn't want full isolation anyways, so this worked for him and his personal end goals. He couldn't fully isolate anyways, even if it was a desire. His legacy was too tangled with the stories of others to disappear off the map.

But he did want to know now, thanks to the newfound friend he found in The Elephant, if there was something beyond the predisposed.

Even if the journey was a harbinger of pain in its own twisted ways sometimes. It almost felt hopeless, that journey. The temptation to turn away could grow almost unbearable at times, turning this into an expedition that both The Elephant and The Shark almost turned away from countless times.

But something in both of their hearts told them there was something more waiting for them, told them that giving up would bring more disappointment than the continuation of a seemingly hopeless challenge would. The gut feeling that something greater was on the horizon was undiminishable, and came with the motivation to keep going in the darkest of times.

And for the better, the pair did, as the did find their purpose, their extraordinary, after what felt like an eternity of searching.

One day came The City Boy, a boy that had spent his whole life fighting the world he came from prior to them and fighting the demons that came as a courtesy with this old, nightmarish world. A boy that did not see himself as truly belonging with The Puppet Master's clique, despite being a part of his world, due to the differences in his origin and the ghosts of his life past.

The Shark was drawn to this boy, one hid behind an armor he didn't even know existed around himself, drawn to the boy under this armor created to protect his truest form, the boy that was actually The City Boy. Not the mask he wore around the rest of society to hide the struggles of a past he couldn't leave behind.

It wasn't hard for him, admittedly, to see right past a stone cold armor and into the heart of the boy inside. Even with this protection, The City Boy's good heart shone through to those who could truly touch him, those who could love him despite his haunts and scars.

And in that heart The Shark found his purpose. Someone to love, someone to protect, someone who he could form a devotion to.

Similarly, in The Shark, The City Boy found something in them that could easily gain his trust and the vulnerability of him under the armor he almost never refused to drop. He found love he didn't know prior, he found trust he had never seen before, he found care when he wasn't sure of his deservance of it.

The City Boy found everything he could ever wish for with The Shark.

And in The City Boy, The Shark found his extraordinary, found his uniqueness on the terms which he wanted it, and found everything he had been chasing on his journey, a journey that had finally found a conclusion.