Mercy [Buzzfeed Unsolved]

10. Why?

"Shane?"

Shane's vision quite literally drifted from the plastic slide to some old monkey bars. Stevie was hanging upside-down from them, thin legs hooked around the bar. Shane barely had a grasp on passing time, and he couldn't tell just how far away Stevie was from him - or the rest of the playground equipment from each other, for that matter.

"Where are we?" he asked, still glancing around. He felt the need to do it quickly, as if he would run out of time. The park didn't even seem to have anything around it, as if the surrounding trees in front of some sort of sky void were a wall to whatever room they were trapped in.

Even though the park was outside. Huh.

Stevie laughed. "You don't know?"

But now Shane did remember. Something in his head told him that this was the park just a block down from his childhood home. He only recognized it when he thought about it.

"Is this a memory? Or a dream?" Shane thought to himself. His legs were his normal, long, adult legs. Just how he was yesterday, and the day before that, and the week before that. Stevie was still how Shane remembered him.

How well did Shane remember him? Both the image and voice of Stevie had blurred over time. There's just simply not enough storage in his brain to remember everything that's happened to him in the past twenty or so years.

"How would I know?" Stevie replied instead, swinging gently on the bar. "It's your head."

"Maybe it's both," Shane decided with finality. He kicked himself off the ground, now watching his own figure on the creaky park swing as if he were some sort of floating spectator. His figure was already swinging high, on the verge of slipping out of his seat. Shane couldn't stop it, so he let it stay that reckless way. "That also means that I won't be able to stay for that long."

"Why not?"

"Because this is a dream. I'll have to wake up at some point."

Stevie made no comment at that. In fact, it was almost as if he didn't hear Shane. Instead, Stevie flipped around on the bars a little more, changing his position. Shane warily noticed that they were the only ones on this isolated playground. There wasn't even proof that anything even existed outside of the park.

"I wanna play for longer," Stevie finally said, flipping over the bars so that he was hanging upside-down again. Shane's attention snapped back to his friend.

"Something important is happening outside of my dream," Shane murmured. He wasn't quite sure if he was speaking to Stevie, or how much Stevie could even contribute to the conversation, for that matter.

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Like a police case or something."

"A detective case? That's so cool!"

He could feel his face break out into a tiny smile. "Yeah, I guess it is."

"But can you play with me right now?"

"What are we going to play?"

"How about cops and robbers?"

"Sure."

Despite deciding what to play, they still sat where they were. Shane didn't stop swinging, and Stevie hung down like a rag doll on the bars. Neither made any move to decide anything further, so they stayed like that.

"What would you do," Shane spoke up, briefly wondering about his predicament, "If there was a criminal going after you?"

Stevie hummed pensively, taking his time to answer. "Are they coming to kill me?"