Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25364542-20141029204844

''Here's the revised edition. It's quite a bit longer than it was, and I've fleshed the characters out a bit, and reworded things here and there. (thanks to those who gave criticism on the first edition) I got it done more quickly than I thought I would and I'll admit that I'm not sure if I think it's finished or not, but I wanted to go ahead and put it up to try and get some more feedback on it. Also, I did heavily reformat it, but it didn't translate over too well when I pasted it here. I've tried to edit it back to where I had it as best I could. So, anyway, here it is.''

Sue worried about him after he dropped her off that night. She often worried but was usually able to talk herself into relaxing, but not tonight. It was the look in his eyes as she got out of the car, so sullenly dark, so hopeless. She had never seen him look so distraught.

B was often troubled, the boy had demons, that was evident, but he never really let anything slip that would give a clue as to what their origins might be. It seemed obvious enough that something traumatic had happened at some point in his life, but she had no idea as to what. The few times she had tried to get it out of him had sent him into reclusion, and heavy drinking, so she no longer made any attempt to press the matter not wanting to cause him, nor herself, any additional grief. She just valued their relationship too much to not have him around in body or mind.

It wasn't as though he was all doom and gloom. They'd had many fun times together that she wouldn't trade for anything. In fact, it wasn't until they had been together a few years that she really began to notice his occasional depression at all. He was usually a happy young man who liked to crack jokes at a moment’s notice, a very jovial person. Their personalities clicked and, through the years, they became great friends as well as lovers.

Tonight they had been on a date not unlike others they’d had before. They had hung out together and gone and seen a movie. B was his normal cheery self, but that changed on the way back to drop her off. Some road construction had forced him to take a small winding side road. The second they hit that road their happy conversation stopped. She could almost feel the melancholic tension in the air. But, since she did not want to press him, she let him take her home in silence.

She called him out of worry but the call went straight to voice mail. That was unusual but not unheard of with B, but she couldn't get past the nagging feeling that something was going to happen to him. Despite this, due to the late hour and her own lack of transportation, she decided to let it rest until the morning and went to bed. She lay awake many hours, eventually falling into a restless sleep.

B stepped out of the car after cutting the engine. He moved his eyes slowly downward as though he didn’t want to get a very close look at what laid in his wake. Sure he had been drinking a little, but he was a careful enough person. He simply hadn’t seen him, it was a dark night sure, but the man had come out of nowhere it seemed. He could only muster a weak shout in the body’s direction, but he received no response.

“Oh god!” he sobbed putting his head in his hands, “What have I done?” He began to weep and screamed, “As if I’m not miserable enough, why did I even come back here?" crying loudly and kicking the driver’s side door, eventually falling to a sitting position on the ground, propping himself up against his car.

He became immediately silent as the slain man let out a weak, mangled sound. B crawled over to the man and it was only when he had brought himself down close to the man’s face that he recognized the noise as laughter. B reached his hand toward the man but drew away as his initial confusion gave way to uneasiness and then fear, seeing the man move his mangled body to what resembled a sitting position, his laughter becoming a maniacal cackle. Though he tried, B couldn’t manage to produce words. The desire quickly left him as their eyes met. The laughter ceased immediately.

Hatred, not mere anger or contempt, but cold, festering hatred, filled the man’s entirely black eyes, the hatred felt toward someone who has wronged you irreparably, the type that cannot be soothed with time but, rather, feeds on it. The fearful expression on B’s face gave way to one of disbelief, and with a wave of confusion, he forgot the man, thinking only of what he began see in those horrid black pits.

He sank slowly to his knees, but his eyes remained fixed. In those eyes he saw several people. He recognized them though he couldn’t remember from where, their eyes replaced with those same hate-filled voids.

B suddenly became aware that he was sobbing, and with the spell that held his eyes seeming broken, he looked slowly downward, his whole body falling onto the gravel and dirt making up the side of the road. His face took on a blank expression and he ceased crying.

The man was the first to break the long silence, “Fitting, n’est pas?” His chipper tone belied the hatred in his eyes, though his voice seemed familiar,

“Glad I went for one last grand tragedy, always nice to pull blood from stone.” He smiled.

“Who or what are you, what the hell is going on?” B asked. The man put his finger to his lips, “I am who you made me.” The man replied plainly.

“What do you mean? Who were they? Why do they seem so familiar?” B demanded, panic showing in his voice.

“Oh them? Just memories now,” the man snorted with malice smiling to himself, “But of course you don’t remember.”

“Stop feeding me riddles you son of a-,” B gasped as the man stood up, no longer the feeble form he had been. B was lifted up by the front of his shirt by the now powerful man until he was once again looking into the abyss of his eyes.

He saw the same people but something clicked in his head this time, confused anxiety giving way to terrible comprehension. Suddenly B found himself there surrounded by all of them and he knew why they hated him. There was a little girl, her arms and legs a shattered bloody mess, her head permanently tilted to one side by her broken neck. There were her mother and father, teary eyed just as they had been when he watched them on the news, wishing for answers, asking what kind of person would do this.

He remembered all the details of that terrible evening. He remembered the whisky burning down his throat, swerving on a winding road, the blurry image of a girl, the screeching breaks, the fatal clunk, her broken form, and the roar of his engine as he drove away. He remembered all these things he had fought so hard to forget. At first he numbed it by drinking, and then attempted to end it permanently with several botched suicide attempts. It was really only his relationship with Sue that had finally brought his guilty mind some peace. With her he had someone to be around for, someone to make the pain fade. With this recognition the hate in their eyes became his own. He understood it now, he hated himself.

B snapped to as he landed on the roadside, the man looming over him, though the figure was no longer strange.

“And at last the blind man doth see,” The figure jeered. “You see, everyone has demons, evil things they’ve done, people they’ve harmed or have harmed them, but you, you let those demons in, and so that’s what you became, that’s what you are.”

B looked up at him knowingly, and all of a sudden he was very tired. He attempted to extend his arm toward the man that was walking toward his car, getting in, and firing up the engine, but found it to be broken and useless. He tried to move his legs but found them to be in the same state. As the car pulled away B looked one last time at the figure sitting within, and though he felt that he couldn’t be looking at himself, he knew no one would ever be able to tell the difference. B closed his eyes. 