fallen

001; water

The blood lingered for only a moment. For the thinnest sliver of a split-second, it pooled like a halo across the stone patio, staining everything within its reach. And then it was gone. With a crack of lightning across the black sky, the puddle of red was swept away by a downpour of rain.

"He fell," and Bertholdt was gasping at last, his fingers trembling as they brushed through his tousled hair. "He fell, Reiner, you saw that, right, he fell, he just-"

"He fell," Reiner said.

He stared, distracted by the rain. It poured onto the patio, slapping against the stone. For every drop of rain that fell, another drop of blood leaked out, only to be swept away like loose sand in an oncoming tide. It captured him. For a moment, he forgot to breathe. But then he was coughing and choking, just as frantic as nail-biting Bertholdt.

"He fell," nail-biting Bertholdt repeated.

They looked down together. They were standing, their bodies pressed together between the two open frames of the stained glass window that arched over their heads. It was a terrific view, usually. When the sun rose over the forest in the early morning, it cast a rosy glow over the valley and reflected off every golden flower in the school gardens. Reiner liked to look out over the grounds in the mornings, with a stolen cup of coffee and a secret cigarette, biding the time until the chapel bell rang for breakfast, commenting to an absent Bertholdt (he was always there in spirit, though really he was hanging off the bed in his sleep) on which manicured hedges looked the most phallic that day. Sometimes he would flick his cigarette ashes on the track team, who gathered on the patio below to stretch after their morning practice.

There was no one down there that night. Well, not anymore.

They looked down together. Marco's head had split open on the stone patio, and as the blood spread around him, the rain drove it away, down the steps and into the grass until it disappeared. It seemed to just keep coming, even after as much had poured out as Reiner thought possible. It just kept coming. He never knew a body could hold so much blood: a warm, human body.

Somehow the view wouldn't be as terrific anymore.

"He fell," Reiner echoed.

"Shit," Bertholdt said. "Oh shit."

--

Trost School for the Gifted and Talented- "talented how," Reiner had said with a smirk, and that was how he spent his first weekend at boarding school in detention- was less of a school and more of a penitentiary. The students at Trost were no more gifted or talented than any of their peers at other schools across the south. Their parents just had expensive taste. They were the sons and daughters of the South's wealthiest, the heirs of snakes who built their fortunes on oil and rum. Every corner of the school reeked of something just as prideful: from the elaborate stone masonry that worked around every curve of the outer walls, to the sprawling dual level library with leather bound books filling the dark wooden shelves. Even the name had an arrogance to it, as if anyone would be fooled by the notion that Trost's pupils were "gifted and talented" in anything other than trouble.

Reiner had resisted the idea of boarding school, at first, but when he had arrived, that hot afternoon in September, he realized the other students were just like him: truants, rule-breakers, and criminals in the making. They were too troublesome for any normal school, but too rich to end up in juvie. Their parents had sent them away to keep them out of trouble, or else there may come a day when not even money would save them. Boarding school gave them the independence they needed. He wouldn't call it freedom, exactly- school didn't come without rules, and rules were found in abundance at Trost- but it was structure and stability: something most of them had never known at home.