Dragonfly; Phan

XIII

Dan wasn't ever one to follow the rules. He was barely four-years-old when he heard a man on the TV tell the world: "If they give you lined paper, write the other way."

The quote seemed to apply to every aspect of his life. His current life. He wasn't going to go from fourteen years of not following the rules to fourteen years of following them, especially when he was dealing with the tragic story of a dead kid.

So he skipped school the next day, with the other three. They'd developed a quite inflicting sense of fuck you all since it felt like everyone (everyone with the slightest possibility of remembering) they passed were content on burying the memory of their friend. It was like living, opposing their surroundings.

They knocked on Martyn's door around ten minutes after school had started. He opened it after a couple demands, slowly and with reluctance, like he had done the first time.

"You again," he said to them. "Do you ever even go to school?—"

"Excuse me," Dan shoved past him, forcing him into the wall for room to enter the house. He ran to the stairs and darted up them despite Martyn's yells of disapproval, each one creaking frailly beneath the weight of his body, and started on the first door. He flung it back on it's hinges.

Bathroom.

Cat opened the next, getting there before Dan and—

Master bedroom.

"This one!" Chris shouted from the other end of the hall, standing beside PJ.

Dan and Cat ran down to them and the open door. It was a small bedroom, much smaller and most probably the smallest in the residence. A little bed with blue sheets, made neatly, was set in the corner. There was a chest-of-drawers resting in the other and a series of shelves above it. Placed directly in the centre was a window, open ajar, blue curtains faltering in the soft winter breeze.

The wall behind the bed was yellow.

"Fuck me," Chris cursed, under his breath. "This is—This was his room—"

"You can't be in here!" Martyn clattered down the hallway. He attempted to pull the door closed, but the kids stepped inside, defiant.

"This was your brother's room," Cat turned to him, not at all angry, rather sympathetic. "We know what happened to him, Martyn. What happened to Phil."

"And we know you're yellowwall," PJ spoke up. "The guy messaging us on the forums."

"Okay," Martyn spluttered, a bit out of breath. He leant against the frame and closed his eyes. "Okay, okay. It's me. I was—I saw you trying to get attention for that fuck of a place and I couldn't just sit back and let it rest. I'm not like everyone else, happy to bury it. I want people to know what happened there but nobody outside of the town does and it's so wrong."

"Your brother died there," Dan's voice shook. Right beside where he stood was the indentation of a measuring chart carved into the doorframe. His mind was still struggling to comprehend that Skye used to sleep in this room, used to live and laugh and play when he just a baby. But he'd grown, right up into a boy with a heavy heart and an even heavier story. It was okay to forget him, apparently. To act like he never existed. But his father had taken him and used him as an experiment and tore him away from the kid with trophies on his shelves. He'd cut up his childhood happiness into tiny pieces over the course of four years and killed him.

He had killed him.

Phil was dead.

Skye was dead.