Page 11 of Natural-Born Cullers

Breathing heavy, hard, Light stilled as he reached the edge of the indoor swimming pool. Wiping a hand over his face to brush away the water, he kept his head low, the scent of chlorine playing his sense as his look stayed focused on how pool water tried to settle around him. He failed so badly in the next moment as he glanced off to his left.

“Yeah. You carry on trying to ignore me there, bro.” Back by the floor-to-ceiling windows, a soft shimmer of blue particles filtered into red as if blown by a gentle breeze. “I’m going nowhere. And you—”

Water dripping off his nose, Light pulled himself out of the warmth of the pool and tugged a towel from one of the chairs, shaking everything away, how the particles shifted to a darker maroon. Steam from the pool settled less argumentatively with the water, and Light glanced around as he rubbed at his long hair, allowing his body to drip-dry.

“Right here, bro…. You look everywhere but at me.” Brin shifted, settling into a softer blue, but, stilling, Light refused to look back, feeling more than seeing the change.

“C’mon. Try using my name once in a while, yeah.”

Christ, Light needed to obliterate all… this. Everything about this whole damn place: the summerhouse, long walk across the green, the empty rooms of the manor and its long corridors…. Everything locked in colour and… silence.

“Notthatquiet, bro, right?” Brin rested against the window, his soft blues more clearly defined.

Light briefly screwed his eyes shut. He offered such a bittersweet taste: all Brin in one breath, then I-dosing and the need to get lost in the drug as sound found colour and bounced like echolocation off the walls. Only the drug had been twisted lately, carrying mostly only Brin’s sound, all his colour.

Light’s heart fell with it.

Long gone were the drives back from Shenstone University, fighting traffic on a Friday with a rattle of alcohol coming from the boot, all of them chantingdrink, lads, drink,as Friday night rolled around. No music blared from the car radio, no adrenaline rush that came with mixing smoke flares on the kitchen unit, no big grin and swing of arm around his shoulder as….

“You really going to make me do this again?”Brin’s hard sigh came from back over by the window and a fine trail of blue particles drifted on it.“Fuck, really, bro?” Silence. “Okay….Light? You in any trouble?”

An undeniable tug pulled at his insides, almost wrenching him apart.

“Christ, fucking stop it,” snapped Brin. Blue shifted back into violent reds, almost reaching to grab him by the collar. “This… here? Us? It isn’t healthy, you know that, right?”

Light refused to look back anymore.

Fuck. Gray didn’t get it. He didn’t need the swimming pool, the warmth of a bed, the offer of a beer on Saturday.

He needed the silence to fucking… stop. Because when it didn’t, all he had left was….

Red shimmered into soft blues and violets. “Yeah,me. Always stuck on bloody replay that locked us both here, right? Nothing but—” A breath brushed Light’s ear.“You’re lucky Lee smacked you one last night—you put our fucking lives on the line for this—”Light jolted as a finger jammed into the back of his head. “—for your fucking ego over always proving you think faster, harder, rougher than anyone else? For a fucking dark web game?”

Light shivered it away, and like sickness to radiation exposure, he went to turn back, breath to breath, as much caught in the reaction as—

A gentle touch brushed his arm and seemed to go skin-deep, rebounding off one bone, only to hit another until his body shook. “Let it go. Don’t look back. Don’t drag me through it again. Please.”

Light kept his look on the door, away from the breath dusting down the back of his neck. But after a moment, he started to turn, to look back….

Blues and violets shifted into black. “Fine….” A monotone snarl, nothing more. Then a shift of stance behind him, a fold of arms, the hard breathing and shift of black particles down Light’s neck, so bloody annoyed now. “Well, you wanna fight…?Come on, then, bro.”

Light jolted. He wouldn’t. Ever. Not fight with Brin.

Only he had, hadn’t he?

Light tightened his jaw and looked back.

He stood alone, and the heavy weight of it all threatened to take him back under the pool’s surface as he looked out of the window.

He hated all of this.

The long walk outside offered nothing but a reverse oubliette, where instead of a small, confined prison with only one way out to torture the mind, the space around him offered him a sea of grass and tree line, where it cut out the noise of London, the roll of tyre on road, talk on the pathway, a walk back into the city where silence and colour just… bloody… stopped in the mix of music and heartbeat. There was no heartbeat here, just this damn…colourthat laughed around him, offering to drown him in it as much as never surfacing from the pool. All he had here was memories. And those memories of here were few. Just chaos. Just… Brin. Just… fucked-up colours and tones….

“Hey.”

Another touch brushed his arm, and Light jerked back.

“Easy.” Simon wrapped a towel around Light’s shoulders and pulled it tighter a moment later. “You look so bloody pale lately. You okay?” Simon didn’t smile, just offered a long sigh. “Because you don’t look it. So I’m going to keep repeating this every time I see this look in your eyes. No matter what’s done, what’s been done, any time you feel ready to call enough, I’m here to make it stop.”

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