The High School Escapades!

Memory

"Why can't you do this?"

"Look, just go in there and talk to him. I have a plan."

Ted raised an eyebrow at that, but something coded deep into him told him to just go along with whatever everyone said, so, heart still pounding, he took one tentative step into the room.

Relax, he told himself, you don't know anything about this thing. It could be friendly.

Something hit his head, almost like rain, but thicker. Oh, yeah. The blood.

Suppressing a shudder, he walked toward the thing, trying to think of a way to talk to it, when its head snapped up (like, audibly snapped) to stare at him. Its eyes were completely blue-green, almost bug-like. It also had other, smaller eyes just above and below the main pair, like a spider. Ted didn't like thinking about spiders, but at the moment, he wasn't thinking anything at all except WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK

It fucking hurt, somehow, and he scrambled backwards to the wall, unable to break eye contact, which sucked, because the eye contact was definitely what was causing this.

"What's it doing!?" asked Billy, alarmed.

"It's" -he paused a moment to think of the right word- "molesting my soul!"

"He does that sometimes," was the nonchalant reply from Will, and also the last thing he heard before his vision faded and his hearing rang with static, with sounds of broken glass and dripping liquid and voices, echoing in a chorus of memories, and as the sights and sounds of the present faded, they were replaced by the past. By his father, all but selling him like property, and that awful thing that took over Kid's mind and tried to... to touch him, even when he had said no, and the countless nights he came home to a drunk mother and an angry father, looking for someone to hurt just to vent his anger, and the one night that someone wasn't him, but Felix, and he heard it all, and all the times Felix had hurt him, belittled him, treated him as a lesser being, all the way back to that one fateful day in kindergarten that started this whole mess.

And then it was over.

Of course, Ted couldn't see it, but Will had grabbed Beetle's shoulder, told it to join them, and it had fearfully agreed. Fear of what, no one knew but Will.

Ted stayed on the ground a little longer, trying to make sense of what had just happened, and eventually just giving up. Slowly, he stood up, almost expecting not to be able to, before he realized that he wasn't physically harmed at all. He went to the rest of the group, feeling... a lot of things. Mostly violated, with a dash of emotional drainage and a huge heaping of get that thing away from me.

But it was staying whether he liked it or not (because he never got a say in anything, apparently) so all he could do was follow behind, praying that he'd finally seen it all, and hoping that whatever fresh hell was next couldn't be as bad.