The Half of It

Chapter Three

"What the hell am I supposed to do if my family sees you? You need to go back, I'll fix the sigil! I'll do anything, but you gotta get out." Lance was panicking, but the chain around him only tightened and pulled him back to where the guy was standing as soon as he tried to move across the room.

"Well good fucking luck with that." The demon scoffed, forcing Lance to pick up on his irritation.

But Lance wasn't waking up from his nightmare, and the chain around his hand showed him that he wasn't going to, to begin with. Maybe if the demon only allowed him to him re-do the sigil, perhaps he could open the portal again and shove the black entity back in. Somehow. But considering the demon's fixated anger, Lance had to believe that he knew more about whatever was happening than Lance did.

"There has to be something, anything." Lance was into his face, desperate and looking for a trace of hope on the creature's calm expression.

"If there was your anything I wouldn't still be here, you dimwit.'' The demon said in an exasperating tone, pulling on the chain and causing Lance to stumble.

''Listen up, you,'' Lance accusingly pointed a finger at him.'' Go back to Transylvania or whatever Tim Burton movie you crawled out of and get yourself a hobby, or I don't know, a new haircut? A new life? You're wack, man. And this whole thing is fucking crazy. I used to play pretend when I was seven, but then again maybe you're a late bloomer." This time Lance yanked on the chain but without a proper pressure-measure which almost resulted in the demon violently crashing into him. The demon, however, had an admirable control over his body's strength and in a jiffy, he was stable on his feet and glowering at Lance with a life-threatening stare.

"You summoned me, blockhead!" Demon venomously retorted, "And now you want me to go when you have ruined my only way back. Do you realize how idiotic this whole thing is?"

Lance was assured that whatever was happening, couldn't be happening. This was some sort of a bad, really awful hallucination. The buzzing in his ears was getting worse.

He had to get out.

Lance broke into a run, pulling the guy along with him, and with one foot on the ladder down the wooden opening, he was expectantly held back. The demon was crouching and lingering above the crack on the floor, looking down at Lance who had a scornful look plastered on his face and a body frozen in a climbing position. Lance freed his chained hand from where he was supporting himself on the ladder's side and harshly tugged on the string, but he immediately lost balance and found himself slipping backward, momentarily falling to the ground with uncontrollable speed.

Except for the fact that he had never made it to the ground.

He found himself carried bridal-style, legs thrown over the demon's forearm and Lance's hands instinctively pressed against the demon's chest as if he was searching for protection, for a steady ground to land on.

The demon had an unimpressed look on his face, and Lance felt his breath hitching when he noticed how close their noses were.

"This time only, but from now on, keep your hands to yourself." The demon proclaimed in a husky tone, albeit with no change in his expression.

His eyes were roaming over Lance's frightened features; boy's bitter and squinted eyes from before were open wide and honest, almost glowing and the demon thought that that was what he heard humans call vulnerable, whatever that meant. He saw it in movies. The boy's chapped lips were slightly parted and his skin of pale-mocha tone looked softer than under the candlelight. Lance's face smelled like musk and lemon, and the demon remembered the fragrance of the boy's hair from earlier which caused the flicker in his eyes to spark up with something new and foreign.

But when he looked down into Lance's defenseless and teary orbs again, he suddenly dropped the poor boy to the ground.

Lance hissed in pain. "What the hell was that for?" He shrieked as he reached out behind himself to rub his backside. "Are you a sadist? This thing feels you up?'' The chocolate boy moaned in pain, and he shot a stern look at the demon who observed him with mouth agape.

Something on his cocky and pretentious face had changed because if Lance dared to trick himself, he would say that the demon was looking at him with wonder. The tan boy couldn't decipher cogwheels behind the other's stuck-up face and he didn't know what the guy had in mind if anything at all.

"Your eyes." The demon suddenly mustered, dumbfounded and taken aback, still eyeing the boy on the ground. He didn't blink, and Lance did adore attention, he did, but this began to make him feel slightly uncomfortable. The guy who threatened to snap his neck had just saved him and Lance hoped his bipolar roulette didn't land on the murder-suggestive label any time around, so he tried to crawl backward, but there was no use; he was tied to the guy. Lance wanted to mentally slap himself.

"Your eyes - they are weird!" The demon exclaimed, and it would be a lie to say that Lance wasn't beginning to join the freak-out streak.

"They have a color! Your eyes, your eyes have a color!"

Lance's ogled him, perplexed. "All eyes have a color, duh.'' He gently shook his head. ''It's a universal human thing and probably like universal space thing, too. What are you so shocked about? Even your eyes have a color.."

The demon reached for his face in a slight surprise, touching his cheeks, rubbing the circles around his eyes, and it put Lance off to see the confident guy from before losing it about such a trivial thing. He didn't get it. The sky was blue and the grass was green, and Lance was sure they for a matter of fact had those in Transylvania. At least the sky. The grass was of a lesser probability.

"But yours are,... How do I put this... They are not red, and neither black nor white. They're-"

"-Blue." Lance absentmindedly blurted out. "My eyes are blue. Like... Like the ocean! Or the sky! The water, you know?"

The demon inquisitively raised his eyebrows, and for a split of a moment, Lance wondered how could a demon be able to pull out such humane expressions?

But the demon stood petrified. "Blue." He tested the word as it rolled off his tongue, trying to process the new and astonishing matter, but it all just displayed on his face like a mild puzzlement. The mocha boy observed him with a hint of curiosity.

"Why are you so surprised about it? That's a common thing." Lance asked flatly, and the demon just tilted his head in reply.

Lance sighed. "The blue thing, remember?"

The demon looked him straight in the eyes, and he spoke with such vulnerability in his tone that it made Lance's stomach drop.

"Because I can't  see the colors."