Kid,
I'm not sure if I can still call you that, because you aren't one- you haven't been one for a very long time. I stopped counting days, months, years when I saw it in the paper.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to keep tabs on somebody without them ever knowing... without anyone ever knowing. I was Mr. Sūn in your fourth grade class, though you always gazed out the window in the back of the room instead of paying attention to my half-hearted lessons. I could always see you ticking, ticking with some energy you couldn't get out, some energy you weren't entirely sure was natural.
I could only see it because I felt the same.
When I moved with the class up to fifth grade, nobody questioned it. It had been natural for teachers, especially new ones, to switch grades with the fluctuating amounts of students entering Kindergarten each year. And nobody questioned when I disappeared the year all of you moved up to the middle school, and the elderly janitor was found to have passed cleaning into the next life just in time to hire an eager Mr. Fù. Both men lived at my childhood address, which, conveniently, was just down the street from your house.
The first thing I did when I moved back in- after throttling and then feasting on my parents- was tear down the faded pineapple wallpaper still plastered across the walls of my room.
I never swept you off your feet and took you to the clan. Sometimes I regret it- that you had to grow up so alone in a world where you could be surrounded by people just like you. But I learned far too quickly they were more interested in taking lives than helping others have better ones.
I couldn't take care of you by myself, kid. You've got to understand that. Sometimes it aches so deeply in my heart the pain I felt when you first transformed was nothing but a faint twinge, and the screams I'd howled that day on the playground were soft and painless.
Sometimes I wonder if you remember my face, peering through the links of the fence, if you remember exactly how I'd leaped over it and right onto you, if you remember the brief second of pain as my teeth sank into you with a primitive growl before you passed out.
Sometimes I vomit just thinking about it.
When I saw it in the papers, I didn't cry or scream or yell. Maybe it was because I knew it would happen with time, and I was just waiting for the day that the energy would course through you uncontrollably and you'd no longer be able to maintain it and the urge, however wrong you thought it was, just seemed so right.
I'm sorry I didn't help you. But by the time I started picking up on the way your hands shook wildly every day- not just when you walked out of science class- and how your face was set in a constant frown, it was just about too late.
And I didn't know if you'd blab. I didn't know if I'd lose my links to you if you knew that I'd been watching you for years. Because I couldn't. Mentally, I couldn't. The thought of losing you was unbearable.
Unbearable, at least, when it was me who had to walk away. If it was you, I could understand that.
Kid, I can come up with a thousand excuses of why I didn't butt into your life when I knew you'd do it. You don't want to hear the strongest of those reasons, because they're all so petty they make me cringe- and I came up with them.
I've felt this pain ever since you left. I've felt this pain ever since I quit wiping the floors of the middle school, then high school, always shuffling around undercover. I've felt this pain, and like it had over the three years when I stood just outside that fucking fence, it's only grown worse and worse.
I've felt this pain ever since I read your name in the tiniest Obituary box.
I changed the course of your life, kid. I want you to know that there hasn't been one day since that fateful afternoon that I haven't grieved for you. There hasn't been one day since that I haven't regretted what I did to you.
I want you to know that I'm sorry.
And I want you to know that I'm coming.
~ B.P.W.
