Chapter Text
“Maybe I am just bad,” Dark Heart told Mr. Nicholas once the man stopped next to him. The boy had made this proclamation before, and the man had simply waved him off. But maybe now , in light of what he had done, the man would listen.
Outside, the sound of an ambulance’s siren echoed through the neighborhood, loud, piercing, and shrill. Concluding that the noise added weight to his statement, Dark Heart watched Mr. Nicholas closely. The man looked tired, disappointed, and there , as the sirens dulled with distance, a flicker of doubt crossed his face.
Dark Heart expected to feel the stirrings of what Dawn had told him was triumph , when he had spoken to her about a science project, he had excelled at without cheating. The emotion itself was something great that was felt when you successfully achieved a task, which he had finally done. Despite this, nothing made an appearance. Even the increasingly familiar welling of dread deep in his gut was absent, leaving him feeling empty . The absence was familiar, easy to identify, and so much worse.
“Dark Heart,” Mr. Nicholas said carefully. His involvement in the issue had hardly been hidden. Dark Heart had the opportunity to bolt, to have waited until he and Clara were alone, to have thrown some other kid in the throng of chaos under the bus. But he had waited too long to do anything smarter, to choose another option, any option . No, he had simply frozen upon realizing that he had actually gone through with the horrible thought rattling around in his head. The other kids had been quick to rat him out as he stood there, pointing, and yelling amidst chaos that Dark Heart could not even revel in.
He lifted his head to meet Mr. Nicholas’ eyes, remembering the importance that held to people, but the man had reached up to cover them. A boy that Dark Heart could not muster up the energy to remember the name of ducked behind the corner nearest he and Mr. Nicholas. While the man was lost in his thoughts, Dark Heart shot the kid the most murderous look he could muster. The kid shrieked and rushed back into the hall, probably to be caught by one of Mr. Nicholas’ helpers.
“Dark Heart,” the man said again. “Did you trip her on purpose?”
“Oh, is that all?” Dark Heart asked flippantly, glancing at the stairs that he had been stuck standing at the top of for the past half hour, while everyone else yelled and scurried about before the staff had managed to clear the way for the paramedics to take away the girl sobbing at the bottom of them. The words left his mouth unchecked, cruel . “Why do you ask?”
“Because you seriously hurt Clara, and I want to know if you understand what you did.”
“I tripped her down the stairs,” Dark Heart said dutifully. He placed his hands into his pockets calmly. He wanted them to be shaking, he wanted to break down and apologize on the spot, to drag Clara back and offer her the same chance he had taken. He didn’t.
“Do you know what could have happened?”
“She could have died, sir,” Dark Heart nodded, voice flat. He wanted to scream, to get angry, to do something. Internally, he screamed at himself to do something , to show some emotion, but he couldn’t reach anything. “You do not have to worry yourself about it. I have killed before.”
Mr. Nicholas watched him for a few moments. Dark Heart mentally urged him to strike out, to yell, to do anything. Instead, the man simply shook his head. “She isn’t going to die. We have kids fall down these stairs on occasion, she simply landed poorly. The paramedics on staff said that she most likely had a broken arm and a concussion.”
He paused, staring at him. The boy stared back.
“But Dark Heart, it was badly broken. You understand what you did?”
“I do,” Dark Heart replied. He had been thinking about doing something like that for weeks, months, years . The thoughts had been stirring for as long as he had been pushed around by kids who were ignorant of the danger he posed until he showed them. No amount of punching bedding, flinging ice, or going outside to run until he calmed down made any of it go away. Clara, the girl he had moved to trip as she sprang down the stairs, had been stealing from his assigned bed and desk since she had been brought in three months prior. She walked away with Dark Heart’s books, assignments, and letters (Clara hogged the phone seemingly whenever he planned to call Christ and the twins. He had been told off for spending too much time on it, but she never was), but she was a little younger than him (Dark Heart wasn’t growing like he was supposed to. He hadn’t aged. He stayed the same height and his voice the same pitch and his body never experienced any of the changes that he had been warned about, and he was too terrified of waking up to blood-red eyes in his mirror and wisps of smog over his form if he overused his powers to make himself grow. But people were starting to notice ), so he was simply told to let her have her way. Clara screamed in his ear and laughed when he told her off, and she scorned Mr. Nicholas’ stories about the Care Bears, calling anybody who claimed to have met them words that he had been warned away from using.
“I cannot tolerate that,” Mr. Nicholas said heavily. “Not here.”
“ Oh ,” Dark Heart said, finally wavering.
“I’m going to find another place to send you,” Mr. Nicholas sighed. “There’s another home run by a friend of mine a state or so away.”
The boy swallowed. “They will not understand.”
“I know, but I’ve already been asked if anybody caused this incident, and I don’t want you to deal with that fallout. Dark Heart, you’ve gone so far.”
Abruptly, Dark Heart was certain that they were not going to have to worry about him going to another orphanage. Surely, there were already other plans in place. Ones he would have to face. He was never going to hurt anyone again.
The demon-turned-boy wet his lips before speaking. “Okay, sir.”
Mr. Nicholas sighed and reached out to put his hand on Dark Heart’s shoulder. His eyes blurred with unshed tears, and he held his breath until his vision cleared. Lightheaded, he blinked and looked up. “How soon?”
“I’ll call him,” the man stood, retracting his hand. “... we can’t afford another incident like this. You can’t afford another incident like this.”
“There will not be another,” the boy assured as he turned to leave. “...I’m going for a walk.”
“You’ll be back?”
Dark Heart worried his lip. “I will.”
Mr. Nicholas stared at him for a long moment. Dark Heart felt his gaze on his back, and he lingered for another moment to give the man a chance to say what he wanted. When he didn’t go on, he slowly walked down the stairs and out the door, down the street, and to a park a moderate distance away. There was one that he knew had a secluded wooded area where he could sit until one of the Care Bears came to take care of him.