Wonder • Five Hargreeves

21

"Extra Ordinary"

There are people... and there are monsters.

The People- they are easy to explain. The good. The normal. The ignorant. They are everywhere, living in their innocent bubble of life, perfectly unaware of the things that make nightmares.

But the monsters? Not so easy. Monsters... are the twisted and the abnormal. The ones who know a little more than they should about life. They are broken and not right, and thrive when things get messy. The bad. The wrong. The knowing.

There are people and there are monsters and lucky for everyone, its very hard to tell which is which.

So, of course, they "intermingle"

Monsters fall in love with people, and people fall in love with monsters. They all have little babies who grow up into either another sheltered human or a wily monster.

This is stability. Not too much of one type. The evil and knowing cancel the good and naive. The world is balanced.

Everything is how it should be.

Until it isn't.

Because sometimes—just sometimes— the monsters find one another instead. They don't fall in love with people, but with each other.

Things don't cancel out and thats when everything starts to get shakey. The world in balance? How it should be?

All of civilization lives on the skin of volcanic molten rock, hurtling through space- constantly drawn toward a star and its destruction.

Chaos is the natural order of things, and sometimes it takes two monsters falling in love to remember that.

Five Hargreeves reveled in this fact of life as a particular platinum blonde hurdled around the alley corner in a stolen van, her head stuck out the window and laughing with delight.

Because Winnie? That girl was a monster too.

Its hard to see sometimes because shes so sweet and loving. A little girl whose only flaw is that she loves her family too much? What's so monstrous about that?

But Five knew.

He knew she liked chamomile tea and sundresses that flowed. He knew she liked the odd mix of classic rock and jazz. He knew she liked art museums at night and laughing so hard she'd cry.

And he also knew;

Winnie was the one who masterminded every childhood midnight escape. Not the activities- the escape. All 8 children who disappeared regularly, never once getting caught while they were all together. Only because of Winnie.

She was the only one who didn't flinch the day Reginald made Diego throw and knives around them. So calm and smiley, like nothing was wrong, because nothing was wrong to her.

She was the one who used to run her fingers up and down his thigh at dinner time, just to watch him squirm. Sometimes her touches were innocent... but most times it was just an act, and she knew exactly what she was doing.

Winnie was so good at just being a person. So good- that almost everyone liked to ignore the moments when she wasn't just a person. When something more peaked out.  When something wrong peaked out.

She's normal! She's just ignorant!

People don't go into a situation like the Hargreeves, and come out unscathed. They don't come out normal or ignorant. She was a monster, just like the rest of them.