Guilt devours him.
His footsteps pound against the forest floor, leaves crunching with each urgent thump. The sounds of the school he has left in unimaginable distress fade into the distance as the wind rushes in his eardrums and the beating of his heart consumes his chest. The stretch of woods he follows is thin and strangely silent- as though all the birds know what he has done, and are too afraid to utter a single note in his ghastly presence. The few leaves still clinging to the branches of the trees have become paralyzed as he dashes beneath them, still with fright for the figure that has just changed the course of a life entirely, who now dares to run beneath their treetops and abandon the victim of his crimes. What kind of person would do such a thing?
But the boy of blood is not a person- he is a monster.
Sweat soaks the back of his neck, trails along his spine. Lungs conspiring against him, he slows, struggling to catch a breath through the seam of mucus clogging his mouth. His stomach coils and writhes, and he bends down to the ground, mind and body punishing him to no end. Spittle skews across fallen leaves, as lifeless as the existence a child had once had. And he'd been the one to take that life, wrench it from a child suffering from the same pain as he had, and he knows there had been nothing on the planet that could have made that child deserve such an earth-shattering transformation.
He vomits. His heart beats only for redemption. The trees are repulsed by the mess he's made- both of a life and of the land.
The empty parking lot is still empty when he locates it once more. Cars shoot past unthinkingly, though he's sure they would dawdle if they'd known what he'd done. He wipes the remaining blood from his face and hands with the towel he stores in the glove compartment, almost vomits again as he pulls down the mirror and sees the scarlet from a scarred child smeared across his lips. He wrenches the car door open once more only to dry heave with all the blood rushing to his head as he leans toward the gravel underfoot.
Misery weighs him down. The town roads of his old home flash by, and he tries not to glance at the landmarks where he remembers only pain, where a little boy was pried from his family piece by tortured piece. He revs the gas, slams his head against the steering wheel, honks the horn at red lights. He flicks the radio on, only for it to start blasting the kid's station.
He should have gone back for the child. He shouldn't just be driving away, back to the shelter of the Clan.
Would he rather have his face plastered across the television, suspect of an abduction? His conscience begs for him to turn around, but he knows he can't- he can't just walk into his elementary school without a plan and take the child from right under the noses of a hundred teachers, of a nurse who's probably tending to the wound he'd caused with utter bafflement.
Either that or complete nonchalance, for the child most likely shows up there every day with a new injury- just as he had, fifteen years ago. But nobody besides him would remember that.
He almost misses the turn onto the highway. An unbroken string of curses escapes his mouth as he wrenches the steering wheel to the far right, frustration his very embodiment. The boy of blood has made far too many mistakes, and he wants, needs, an out.
No, he realizes. He doesn't need an out. He needs an out for the child. For if the child were alright, if the child were normal, if the child had never come into contact with him, there would be no reason for him to despise the boy of blood the way he does, no reason for such passionate self-hatred, no reason to cut the wounds lining his fingertips open again. But he feels that need to punish himself once more, to drag his fingers along the fence he cannot, most likely, return to ever again.
