Author Games Compilation [Cycle 1]

Task 7 + The Non-Existent Choice (NEF)

+The song added to the top is Mirrors by PVRIS which was the song I ended up using for this task.+

MAYBE, MAYBE NOT - 7

Reality had fused with fantasy, all to a boy built from old tales. But were they tales, or things he'd once considered distant memories?

None of it mattered, really, whether he was built from fantasy or reality or something entirely different. He cared not, he cared not one bit, for the panic had taken root. It was a matter of why, why did he feel that way? Why was he scrambling carelessly through brush until it became carpeting, why did he scurry and shriek as if the air was leaving his very lungs with every step he took?

When he struck the mirror, little did he know he'd end up stuck between the shards.

He stared at his fist on constant, for the sight of crimson spilling from little splices upon his knuckles only furthered the flurry - it was addicting, the panic, because he felt some sense of livelihood when everything compressed down on him to make him feel like he was dying. Shards had taken him up, shards had taken him down, shards had taken him elsewhere.

He stood in a bedroom with lights glaring down just as red as the blood on his hands.

'Round the room he looked, only offering the shortest of stares to all that surrounded him. Crunching beneath his feet lay shards that once all came together to make some grimy mirror - when he looked at the wall, he found the frame to be filled with nothing but wood. Pushed in the center of the room against a wall was a bed fit for two, flat and low, with grey sheets all curled and twisted into an unmade mess. Above that, a single window, free of curtains but covered by an old batch of blinds. At the ceiling stuck a single bulb, a red one, scorning the whole mess with a flat expanse of color.

The lights were dark, yes, but for him they were too bright, and he flung himself back into the panic. Against pieces of furniture he bumped, all showing age; he feared tearing it all apart if he couldn't calm down, but he wouldn't calm down.

Breaths came heavy, so heavy he felt himself growing lightheaded, but he never stopped, never slowed. There was an itch in his fingers to dig through every crevice of the room, to search until they were satisfied with what he burned to have in his hands, but he kept them to himself, still staring at the little bulbs of blood springing up. He'd wipe them away, they'd spring up, he'd wipe them away, they'd spring up - it was a cycle that repressed the search, but kept everything in a whir.

The blood and the blood and the blood.

Each breath came as a wheeze, as something almost inhuman. He sounded abnormal, he felt abnormal. He felt like two entities in one body, one half reeling in the panic for something the other half knew nothing about.

The blood and the blood and the blood. Seven years bad luck, that's seven years bad luck.

Everything was a mess: the room, his body, the ground, his mind. He knew vaguely that the room was his own, but felt as though it wasn't home. It was a strange place, and he didn't like it.

Bouncing upon his heels, he tried to get his thoughts together, squeezing his fists to his temples and thinking, thinking, thinking, but the blood and the blood and the blood came and he abandoned everything. Instinct ran him.

He was compelled to the window, so that's where he went, hopping over the expanse of the bed with feet that felt cut but failed to hurt. His knees struck the wall, he didn't feel it. For a while he forgot to wipe at the bumps of crimson, so they fell down in thin streaks as he stuck two fingers between the blinds and split them apart. The sky was of a pitch black, and the streets below were only visible from the white hot blazes the streetlights cast down. Being two stories up, he couldn't hear a thing, but something stirred within him that made him think the asphalt wasn't entirely empty.