placebo's machine

Hid 15

Hid

The boy’s face fell, as if he had been hoping for something that had been snatched away under his nose. “I’m sorry, I didn’t...”

Eva shook her head repeatedly. “No. Who are you? Who are you? I know you! I do! But-I-don’t-know-who-you-are!”

The boy didn’t say anything. Eva panicked, wondering if she really didn’t know him and he had found out about her wings. “You can’t tell anyone. Please.”

He put up his hands as if in surrender. “It’s fine. I won’t. Don’t worry.”

“Really, you can’t tell a soul. Or even something without a soul.”

He hesitated. “I can prove it.”

“Go on,” Eva said. Her nerves were jittery, but she didn’t know why, something that was really starting to bother her.

He reached for the collar of his shirt, which was somehow a pristine white. His hand stopped, and he seemed to think better of it. Instead he reached around to his back, touching something on the back of his neck.

A glow went up behind him, and an audible tearing noise came. Behind him, a bit hard to pick out from the darkened sky, was a pair of whirring wings almost identical to Eva’s, if not for the darker purple lights as opposed to white.

They stared at each other for a few long moments.

The wind picked up again, and Eva wondered if she could really trust someone who was obviously her opposite. Black not white. Wrong not right?

Her mind told her that she should not. But some residual memory in her heart told her that she had to.

“I suppose you need someplace to stay.”

He nodded.

Eva didn’t know if Kurt and Jan would accept him in. They only seemed to want a daughter, and Jan wasn’t the most trusting. Once she had gotten her wish of a child, she was not likely to want another. Not to mention the fact that Kurt and Jan would likely judge him by the dark colors on his wings and refuse him. But Eva couldn’t hide the wings, otherwise they would be even less inclined to trust him.

The only course of action was to hide him.

There was a shed, rusty and generally unused, behind the airship entrance to the house. Generally Kurt and Jan didn’t go in, because they could fit most supplies in the house. Jan had once said that it had doubled as a bomb shelter, leading Eva to hope that there might be food or a bed even for him in there.

Eva began to guide him in that direction, but paused. “Turn off your lights, or they’ll see.”

He jumped a little. “They?”

“Yeah,” Eva jabbed a thumb in the direction of the little farmhouse. “The couple who lives there. Kurt and Jan?”

“O-oh,” he let out a breath.

Eva held a finger to her lips in a gesture to stay quiet (though she figured that he already knew to do that.) and crept in the shadows towards the shed. The door was rusty and had a thick bolt keeping it in place. When she jiggled it it moved a fair bit, but it scraped her fingers and let out a quiet grinding noise.

Eva grit her teeth, and pulled harder. It moved about an inch, but then stopped with another screech louder than before.

The boy tapped the back of her hand. “I can do it.”

Eva stepped aside cautiously as he wiggled the bolt twice, braced himself, and them ripped it off completely in a split second. It only made a slight squeak as it was misplaced so quickly, and was much looser than before.