Shorts (Literally. Maybe Even Coming Off.)

Bay and Ash 1

Ash glanced down at his leg. The purple stain of a bruise was slowly fading. It didn't cause him any pain, obviously. It belonged to the person who he would love in the future. His soulmate. Who seemed to end up with random bruises fairly often and in the strangest places.

He was glad that he was the only one who could see these injuries. One of the more recent had been a black eye and swollen lip combo, as if someone had beaten him over the head with something. He felt really bad for his soulmate. They had to walk around school and everywhere with everyone else able to see. Whoever they were, these bruises weren't something you could get by just being clumsy.

Generally, Ash didn't really pay attention to his soulmates injuries. In the past, they had been more commonplace. A scraped knee, a paper cut, a blister or two. More recently they had been very heavy. Ash was fairly sure that his soulmate was being beaten. He wished he knew who it was so he could do something about it. No one deserved this.

A few days later

In the middle of his math class, Ash began to feel very strange. There was a tightening in his chest. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. There was something wrong happening. He could feel it. He needed to stop it but he didn't know what it was.

Ash excused himself from class, before going to hide in the school library. Hopefully no one would find him there. The panicked feeling grew. He tapped his fingers nervously on the floor. It was nerve racking, not knowing what was going to happen.

Suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his wrist. He nearly cried out but he bit his lip instead, tasting blood in his mouth. Raising his wrist to eye level, he saw a thin red line forming over the blue veins crisscrossing his skin.

No, he thought. No.

Another line appeared below the first, this one obviously deeper than the last. It was accompanied by a sort of burning ache.

Why, he asked himself. Why would they do this?

More lines crawled their way up his arm, beads of blood bubbling out of them.

Stop, he whispered. Please.

The line forming on his palm paused. It seemed to be deciding whether it would continue. Then it pressed deeper than the others, cleaving the skin so that it split away.

Ash closed his hand, unwilling to look at the gruesome sight. He curled up in a ball, trying to figure out what he was going to do. He attempt to block these thoughts from his mind but every time he shut his eyes or even looked down, there they were, glaring up at him like evil grins.

There wasn't really anything he could do, was there?

He returned to his classes and when he got home, he dug around in his closet until he found an old pair of fingerless gloves. That and an old hoodie would be his attire until these scars faded. He couldn't bear to look at the gashes inflicted on himself. Some voice in the back of his head whispered that this was his fault. He could have prevented this.