Felixentric

Scene 3: Whoops. My Hand Slipped.

He sprinted down Highway 3, its apparition-like features poking at his brain. The trees were black figures in the five-shades-dark-of-navy sky.

After passing the lot with the partygoers, he continued on for another fiveish minutes and stopped just before middle-of-nowhere touched urbanism.

The bully was trudging at a slug's pace, with his back turned on Felix. Dried blood clogged his nose and his arms were slack at his sides. He turned around when Felix cleared his throat. Tired eyes. A raspy voice. "You followed me?"

"No. But I saw you. Long walk, huh?"

"Is this some sort of prank? What do you want? Is that kid with the gun your friend? Was the fight just a setup?"

Felix shrugged to each of the questions. It must have been just past midnight by then, but it was only a guess.

"Come back to end it, one-on-one? Thought you didn't want trouble, anyway." He grumbled. "Because if you changed your mind, I can do you the favor of fucking killing you."

The bully couldn't see Felix's eyes, but if he could, he would see his pupils microsize out of his irises. "I saw you trudging here from a motorcycle..." Felix said, his voice like an unenthused, audiobook narrator. "Soaked in mud and feet probably aching." Felix backed up one step. "I thought about how crazy this world is. And then about how you threatened to kill me. I came to tell you that killing isn't something to joke about, but also to say that I'm sorry for you."

The bully flashed glances in every direction. Was he expecting Quinn to jump out at him again? When a bullet-crazed maniac didn't come crashing out from the dark tree line, the bully eliminated the space between them and jabbed him in the chest with a thick finger. "You made a fool of me." He clenched the finger into a fist and - finally, finally! - pushed Felix's chest. Hard.

Felix fell to the ground, hitting rough dirt near the road.

No one cheered this round, but the unnamed boy wasn't doing it for the attention. In a heated adrenaline, he tried to stomp on Felix's face.

"Don't you want to know what I mean?" Felix rolled out of the way in a duck-and-cover maneuver. A foot caught his arm and uprooted dirt flared into his eyes. He pushed the foot off and heaved himself up quickly enough to hold defense. "Don't you want to know what I mean?" he repeated in a panicky tone, as if he had some long speech planned, which he kind of had.

But the bully didn't care why Felix had come back for him anymore. Only that Felix got back what he'd given. He kicked dirt at Felix and hurled himself at him, arms flailing.

Felix ducked and backpedaled. "I have something to say! Will you just listen?" He cinched his sweater sleeves to his elbows.

The bully charged again.

Felix ripped the leather glove off his left hand and threw it into the road where he'd be able to easily find it later. The hand's skeletal structure began moving up and out. It looked like a huge wave of water growing into the air. At the wrist, it twisted around Felix's forearm like a snake readying itself to squeeze the life out of him.

The bully stopped his repetition of attacks. "What the h-."

"Haven't you registered who I am, yet?" Felix ground his teeth as a thick gloss covered his eyes. He hoped the kid distinguished better than to think this was some drunken illusion. Take me seriously.

The bully gasped. "You said you didn't wanna hurt me. Remember that? You said that!"

"It doesn't hurt."

When someone goes into mental shock, their blood vessels are constricted, which increase the rate of heartbeats and breathing. Veins pop from their neck and blood rushes and air gets caught all in one place of the body, like someone hitting their neck with a hammer. There's a pounding in their blood vessels if they put their hands up to them.

The bully fell to the ground, his symptoms of shock taking over.

Felix gave his go-to, infamous phrase. "No one will ever be able to hurt you again. And neither will you be able to hurt anybody else."

"That doesn't make any fucking sen-." Before he could finish, he turned into a splash of one of Felix's dissonant paintings.