alive | l. stewart

01 | Run

RED WAS ALL I COULD SEE. It filled my vision until I didn't know any more colors. Red oozing from my nose until I could taste the sickening iron on the tip of my tongue and red bleeding from the cuts on my brother's arms, the same spot where I had them. How did things end up like this? He wasn't supposed to be awake, and we were supposed to be on the next bus, out of Caledonia.

"Stop!" Tears ran along my cheeks till they bled with redness, "Don't hurt him!"

Was it my fault? Was it my fault Emmett was hurt? Was any of this my fault?

"Stop!" I shouted. Make him stop! I curled up against the wall, the tattered up wall, and I leaned in for its comfort. The pain started in the center, and it didn't stop until it reached the edge of my neck. Despite every little urge to scream out my agony, it felt like hands, millions of hands, were wrapped around my neck, shutting up my cries for help, and I couldn't do anything, not when I was desperately covering my ears to block out the faint and frightening murmurs.

"Make it stop!" The haunting noises in my head only got louder and louder until I was compelled to hear nothing but their cruel words, a whisper filled with malicious statements, filled with thoughts, thoughts of him wriggling and screaming in pain.

Do it! Hurt him like the way he hurt us! Make him feel what we felt, the pain, the exhaustion, the begging! Make him understand our suffering.

For a moment, it felt like time had stopped. I didn't hear the shout of Stan's ranting, not Emmett's cries for me to run away, and not the alarming sound of a glass bottle cracked open on the corner of the table. I didn't hear anything, and I didn't feel anything at all. I was lost between terror and affliction even to understand the person I was so scared of was in front of me, standing still, staring above something way past my head, holding a cracked bottle by his side. He didn't move, and he didn't say anything.

But he had this blank look in his eyes. It wasn't the face I used to dream every night when I would wake up, hopelessly, trying to escape his shadowy figure towering over my brother and I like pillars. There wasn't that gleam in his eyes, not the same gleam who enjoys seeing us crying and pleading for help. There was nothing. He just stood there like how I wanted him too, exactly like how I pictured it in my mind.

"Emma?" It felt like piles of bricks were being lifted off of my chest, while I was desperately gasping for air when I heard the familiar voice, my brother's voice, "Emma?" He was struggling to get himself off from the ground.

"Emmett?" I was trying to get my words out, but the longer I tried, the harder it was for me to not empty my stomach from the reek of alcohol and cigarettes, "A-are you o-okay?"

I did it, right? Did I make him stop?

Then it started with a teardrop, and then a scream, a terrifying cry for help, it filled my ears with fears, and it gave me no choice but to look up and see how much pain and terror could be in his outcry. Even if my ears were ringing with an odd sound of a buzz, I could still hear Stan, hear his words, his mumbles, his plea for someone to stop. He was gripping the side of his head, hard enough for his face to redden up with veins outlining the side of his forehead.

Stan was afraid, just like me, like my brother, and anyone whoever met him. And I felt it, even if I wasn't him. I knew those tears, I knew those pleads, and I knew what reflected in his eyes when he looked at the mirror just above my head. He saw a monster just like what I saw in him. It was like he understood my anxiety whenever he would pass by me with a bottle of beer in one of his hands, and the need to always flinch whenever I would hear the simplest footsteps from him. It was like he was me in my memories of how I saw him.