hotline anonymous

prologue

Regal is no more.

She can feel the phone in her hand, pressed against her cheek. She can feel it warming. She can hear the doctor calling her name, asking her if she's still there. But she feels numb. Detached.

She sees it, when everything breaks into chaos around her, just as she says it out loud. His mother and father break down crying. There's consolations, murmured words, delirious shrieking, still more crying, shaking, and her

Falling

Down.

The phone slips out of her hand and thumps on the ground beside her.

That moment flashed in front of her eyes, when she found him, clinging to what were possibly his final moments of life. Blood leaking from his chest, in a slowly trickling fountain.

She saw the light dim in his eyes.

Everything feels muted around her. Her sight becomes unfocused and blurry with the tears that won't fall. The living room feels like it's fading into a void.

But then, he is there. Seemingly out of thin air, he is standing right there, in front of her, in the flesh. In all his  breathtaking, black haired, brown eyed glory.

She cries out and reaches her hand out towards him, but she ends up grabbing at air, the vision of him nothing more than a mirage to her desperate, thirsty soul, longing for him to come back to her.

She drops her arm back down, her heart falling with it.

The noise of the chaos around her filters back in. She hears it, but it's just that. Noise. No sound indistinguishable from the next, just a medley of painful noise.

Her thoughts echo louder than all of it.

It took weeks for this news to come, and she had already picked up that something was off.

The police never met her eye. Not when she questioned their abilities, not when she asked them questions about Regal, and never when she tried to pry further. Always fidgeted with something, always around her.

Regal's parents weren't making the rounds of the hospital like she was, resorting to only worriedly asking her about Regal. Maybe it was because they couldn't bear to see him like that. Maybe something else entirely.

In a small town, people deal in secrets. All sorts of secrets.

In a small town, people do whatever they can to keep those secrets hidden. All sorts of things.

People were keeping secrets about Regal and the circumstances of his death. And she would be damned if she didn't uncover every last one of them.

She would get to the bottom of this. She would find out what happened to Regal and she would make whoever was responsible pay dearly.

She would do it, if it's the last thing she did.

And with such thoughts swirling in her mind, the seeds of an unshakable determination taking root, she got up on shaky feet, with unfocused eyes and a steady mind, finally acknowledging the chaos around her, and allowing it to engulf her whole.