A Change Of Fate

Prologue

It was horrifying.

The colour was horrifying. Tainted. Sinful.

Help...

Had he said that aloud? Or was it a simple thought? A thought willed into happening by what was before his very eyes, which were flooded by hot tears.

"...Mana..."

That was out loud. He knew it. He knew it. But... he didn't understand... Why had this happened to him? Tears broke free, sending the dam that had walled them up crashing down, allowing the liquid to pour down over his reddened cheeks. His pale lips trembled, and then parted, another soft plea slipping past them. "Mana... Wake up... Please wake up..."

No response. With that, the young, auburn-haired boy reached out with severely shaking hands, horrified at how stiff his father's shoulders were as he placed his gloved hands upon them. He shook Mana's shoulder, roughly, even when the vigorous shaking of his hands could have done the same thing for him. His voice grew louder, and broke into a higher pitch, his eyes wide and frantic. "Mana! Mana! Please! You have to wake up!"

There was still no movement, not a twitch from the cooling body before him, which slowly went into rigor mortis, stiffening further. Still, the silver-eyed child refused to give up, even with the dark, lurking knowledge that his father was dead residing in the back of his mind. Finally, he tipped his head back, gritting his teeth before screaming at the top of his lungs in one final plea.

"Manaaaaa!!"

...

Nothing...

No... The boy - Allen, as Mana had named him - still gripped the shoulder of his father's coat desperately, shaking, even with the awareness that it wouldn't do a single thing. He was as good as... gone...

Mana's gone...

Those two words reverberated around his brain, sending him into hysterics, his body falling limply to the cold ground. He pulled his knees in, tucked in next to the body beside him, ignoring the blood that soaked into his clothes. He wailed, wailed as loudly as he possibly could, knowing there was nobody left to hear him. His tears fell to the reddened stones, mingling with the blood, and even as his throat grew raw with the volume of the screams and wails, he did not stop. He couldn't. He was alone again. He had hoped... he... he had believed he had finally found the person he could stay with... the person who wouldn't look upon his left arm in disgust and dub him the Devil's child.

He was a child of the Devil. A monster. Because no human would kill their own father. This was his fault. This entire thing... was his fault. Even like this, as a child of barely ten, he hated himself, more than he had loathed anything in the entire world. He was no better than Cosimo. He was no better than the Devil himself.

Right here, in this moment, lying with the dead body of his father...

He wanted nothing more than to die.

Stupid hope... Stupid arm... Stupid, stupid, stupid... The word rattled in his mind, and it hurt, but he deserved it. He deserved the burn of his cheeks and tears rolled down them, he deserved to barely be able to breathe as his small body shook with violent sobs, and he deserved the ache in the very centre of his heart that he felt would never be cured.

It was cold, it was dark, it was painful, and he deserved nothing more than just that.

~XoX~

The creaking of the branches had once frightened him, late at night when he was so tired that his eyes closed of their own accord. Now, they sounded comforting, they were the only things that would talk to him. They sounded like home.