✓ | 3. soldier, soldier, spy [STEVE HARRINGTON]

twelve.

CHAPTER TWELVE:
ANCHOR

[ THE FLAYED ]

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           "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know whennnn," Stanley Müller sang as the flickering hospital lights watched him pass beneath. He drew out the notes he was supposed to, and as he did swung up an arm and a leg – graceful, like ballet, but so teasing, so wrong. His bloody limbs were gangly and pale, and the ballet was made demented – not only by this, but by how his left hand gripped the limp ankle of Thomas Mirkwood.

         The hospital lights watched Thomas, too. Watched his eyes flicker in his sleep and the shadows cast across his face as he was dragged, on his back, along the linoleum behind Stanley, so that his shirt had untucked from his shorts and ridden up to his breast bone. Blood smeared from his head along the tiles.

          "Keep smiling through, just like youuu, always dooooo," Stanley crooned, twirling on the spot with glee.

They rounded a corner, and a flickering EXIT sign above a closed pair of elevator doors watched Thomas begin to stir.

           The lights appearing and disappearing above him, the dull pounding in his skull, and the sensation of being used like a broom along the hospital floor, all contributed to a feeling of immense dizziness, almost motion sickness, when time reshaped itself again and Thomas managed to open his eyes.

           "Stanley," he groaned under his breath, and his voice was so weak that he wasn't heard over the clicks of Stanley's Docs, nor the slide of his shirt on the linoleum. He could hardly recognise the boy, especially because he'd lost his glasses in the previous fight and from the angle on the floor, but the clothes and the dark hair gave it away.

Oh, God. Stanley.

Thomas twisted his head, looking for Jonathan, but when he tilted his gaze to stare behind them at the upside-down corridor, he saw nothing but the flickering, bluish lights. Panic began to wash away the haze of sleep.

Slowly, things started to come into focus: the dull ache in his head, Stanley's singing and occasional swooping dance move of delight, the distant sounds of shouting. He blinked, stared at Stanley's hunched back, as he dragged him back his ankle down the corridor. Fear bit him like a knife.

"Stanley," he said, loudly, intentionally.

The boy stopped short, whipped his head around, and the look on his face was so savage, so angry, that he looked not like Stanley at all. He looked inhuman, like a beast, a tiger woken from its slumber.

Thomas jerked his head, and Stanley, without much effort, was swung off his feet by an invisible force and flew into the wall on their left, as if he had a rope around his chest that dragged him. There was no hesitation. Thomas didn't even stop to have the satisfaction of watching his enemy fall. Ignoring the pain in his back, he twisted, scrambled to his hands and knees, then his feet, and he was running.