A week passed in the blink of an eye.
Ikaris had discovered something unfortunate about friendship—it was an abrupt discovery, even though he had been doing it already. There was something freeing about doing something you were meant to do without realizing it.
But when it became an obligation.
He didn't particularly like that flavor of socialization.
The expectations were not particularly demanding; Keith still required his three daily poems, Sarah continued to partition her lunch according to some incomprehensible aesthetic principle, and Isabella Swan had developed the peculiar habit of smiling whenever their eyes met.
Bella was the most troubling part of his day.
Not because her smiles were unpleasant; quite the opposite, he recently started having the urge to smile back at her.
A quirk of the lips, a dip of the head in acknowledgement, and now, eye-contact.
She is a dangerous girl.
And Ikaris, who had spent most of his life avoiding complications in therapy, at school, and in almost every other aspect of his life, was beginning to suspect that he had avoided the very thing he needed all this time.
How the mighty have fallen. He thought.
Unfortunately, reality had a habit of correcting excessive optimism—even if his optimism was already tempered by an unhealthy dose of realism at all times.
And on that particular Friday, reality taught its lessons in the form of dodgeball.
…
Dodgeball was an honest sport—violent enough to sate the darker impulses, while remaining civil enough to pretend it was something other than what it was.
Ikaris liked the thought of throwing things at the people he disliked in the form of a sport, but at the same time, he knew it was never a sport he could participate in. After all, it was like asking a junkie to guard the latest drug shipment.
Violence was so encoded into him that engaging in it would leave little to no parameters—everyone else would be playing a game, but Ikaris always had a hard time suppressing the urge to hurt someone.
This instinct did not grow from a place of malice, but a place of necessity—every punch and kick in the orphanage could be your last, so it was an absolute prerogative to make each one count, even at the detriment of the self and psyche.
And such lessons were hard to unlearn.
Rules, in his eyes, existed to distinguish civilized violence from the considerably more entertaining alternative.
But the underlying principle of most sports remained unchanged.
Hit someone. Avoid being hit. Repeat until one side had been morally, mentally, spiritually, or physically defeated.
Ikaris was so engrossed in the game, he hardly noticed when Bella stood at his side, a little closer than she usually did. Then again, it has been weeks since their friendship established itself formally and in all that time, she had moved cautiously like the concubine of kings of old.
It was somehow made worse by the fact she hardly had the intention to intrude—quite the opposite.
So, as she stood beside him in the gymnasium, staring at the collection of rubber balls with the expression of someone waiting for death, Ikaris couldn't help but notice her brows furrow in something reminiscent of defiance and resignation.
"I hate this game," she muttered.
Ikaris glanced at her. "You haven't started playing."
"That's usually when I like it best."
A reasonable argument.
He looked toward the opposite side of the court—students mingling, talking, genuinely experiencing high school as the most important time in their lives.
And he admired them—the naivety, the hopefulness. It could become a study of its own into the human condi—
Stop it. Ikaris's thought halted.
He caught it in time—the moment he started to think of himself as something more. Something other. A couple stray thoughts during the day, and something his therapist had dubbed 'the cycle of false reinforcement'.
Then something else caught his attention. He didn't know when it particularly happened, but he had grown sensitive to things outside of himself. When the book Keith liked had been snatched by other students, he was sure never needed the reading material.
When two unknowns lingered around Sarah's vehicle a little too long during a particular lunch break. And most of all, when someone was looking at Bella.
Nobody looked at Bella, so when they did. He noticed.
"That kid with the fake blonde hair has been looking at you for the past two minutes," Ikaris hummed, examining the boy in question—he noticed the emotion. "He's jealous for some reason."
Bella looked at the floor. "Authur Vancent." She spoke.
There was a way she made herself smaller as she spoke the name that irritated Ikaris. As if she was saying 'I am lesser'.
He felt the urge to groan—something he had hardly ever done. Caring about someone was quickly becoming a level of irritation he didn't need. And Bella was a particularly difficult specimen to care for, physically and psychosocially.
The next whistle signalled Bella's turn to take the court.
She moved as if lead was baked into her bones.
Each step was a silent protest until she made it to her spot, somewhere in the middle where—unsurprisingly—it would be easiest to get hit.
Ikaris regarded her for a moment, and ultimately chose an encouragement instead of a warning. "Try not to get hit." He gestured to a spot that was least likely to be targeted.
Bella, misunderstanding, waved a hand signal to indicate she got what he meant—she didn't. She never moved.
Thirty minutes was all it took. The first ball struck Bella's stomach with the force of a gut punch—it was too direct, too intentional to be anything but malicious.
Several students gasped instinctively.
Ikaris's eyes narrowed, a single heartbeat echoing in his chest; not powerfully, not like the first time he acknowledged Isabella Swan, but louder than it should have—than it needed to for what had occurred.
Arthur Vancent.
Ikaris could map it in his mind, using an understanding older than himself—something of his dreams, which had almost managed to fade into the background due to companionship… due to Bella.
And he saw it. Jealousy. An urge for ownership. A sense of helplessness when Bella drifted to his side. The moment the decision sparked to do something about it—first cruelty, then something softer, less tempered due to a consistent upbringing.
Arthur was not as bad as he could have been. But close.
And to Ikaris, there was little difference between a burn and a raging fire—both were unpardonable offences.
The coach reached Bella in a second, helped her breathe with the practiced hand or someone who had seen this too many times; and then, Brandon—another student, kind and confident—escorted her to sit just a few feet from Ikaris.
And all the while, he did not move.
There was no change to his expression; only the linger of an all-too-powerful heartbeat.
Arthur's voice came twinged with apology from the middle of the court. "Sorry, Swan!"
Bella rubbed her stomach, leaning from one bleach, across the gap, and resting her head on the other. It was comfortable and enough to hide the tears prickling at the corner of her eyes. "It's fine," she muttered.
And when that wasn't enough insurance, she signed ok.
But it was not okay. Not particularly because of the pain. But because Arthur had been watching her before throwing. He had chosen her.
Deliberately.
Ikaris said nothing; did nothing.
Bella was absorbed enough in her own pains, content by simply being near that she did not pay attention to the expression on his face—she hardly missed a shifted, but this time, she did.
The rest of the day was like the prologue to a video game—Ikaris didn't even know how he got home; he blinked, the school day had passed, and he was heating noodles in a microwave for dinner.
...
The night was dreamless until it wasn't.
Ikaris felt the burning, the choking smoke thick enough to blind machines of war, and when he looked down at his hands—golden blood.
It radiated something fierce.
The blood coated his arms, shimmered off his warrior garbs, and dripped from his fingertips in thick, luminous streams.
The ground beneath him was black.
Not asphalt. Not stone.
Something scorched beyond recognition. The sky burned.
Great vessels moved overhead, their enormous shadows passing across a battlefield that extended farther than his eyes could see.
And everywhere—
Death.
Creatures surged toward him. Lycans.
The name arrived without explanation.
He knew them; he knew them the way he knew the great houses of Yoran, the deep seas of the Merfolk, and the wetlands of Nether.
Ikaris knew the jagged arrangement of their teeth, the unnatural length of their limbs, the way their bodies twisted between animal ferocity and something almost human.
Their eyes burned with hunger. Their mouths opened too wide. They came in thousands.
And Ikaris—
No.
Someone else.
Someone wearing my body.
Someone who remembered this place.
Someone who had stood beneath burning skies long before the first human civilization had learned to write its name.
He raised his head.
Golden brilliance erupted from his eyes. Two streams of incandescent destruction swept across the battlefield. Lycans vanished beneath the light.
Their bodies broke apart, armor and flesh consumed in an instant.
He turned.
The beams followed.
Hundreds fell. Then hundreds more.
The air filled with the smell of scorched metal and burning earth.
A creature leaped from his left.
Its claws raked across his shoulder.
Pain flashed.
Another struck his back. Then another.
Their attacks came in relentless succession, teeth and claws scraping against skin that refused to yield.
A thousand cuts. A thousand attempts to break something that had never been intended to break.
His skin held.
Mostly.
The golden blood continued flowing.
He could feel every wound.
And beneath the pain—
Something terrible.
Exhilaration.
Not fear. Not horror.
Joy.
The savage, intoxicating certainty that he was exactly where he belonged. He knew how to kill them. He knew where to strike. He knew which creatures would retreat, which would sacrifice themselves, and which would continue attacking long after their bodies had begun to fail. He had done this before.
Countless times.
A Lycan lunged.
He caught its throat.
No, this isn't real.
Its teeth snapped inches from his face.
He tightened his grip.
I don't want to remember.
Golden light erupted again.
The creature disappeared.
And then—
With a single thought—Bella—everything fractured and vanished.
…
Ikaris gasped awake, a single, powerful heartbeat shaking his bed, the tremor travelling through the house like a gentle wave.
He silently prayed it hadn't woken the old woman.
She had taken him in, though she'd hardly looked at him since. Not that she could, given her deteriorating eyesight. But she needed the cheque at the end of the month, and that was incentive enough to take in a kid who, for the most part, looked after himself.
And now, he looked after her, too.
Not that he cared to learn her name, or ask about the medals hanging on the wall. He could guess well enough at the story behind them, from the sorrow that seemed permanently etched into her face.
She did not wake.
But Ikaris did. And sleep, it seemed, had no intention of taking him back.
It took a trip to the toilet, a piss, and several moments of staring into the emptiness of the dark before something white caught the corner of his eye.
Toilet paper.
And just like that, an idea sparked.
Bright and narrow, a way to exact revenge without surrendering to his worst tendencies. Because he was always prepared to be something worse, to do something worse, and the dream had left him with an appetite for a little chaos.
…
That night, when Bella heard the first thump against her window, she should have ignored it, turned over, and slept the night through.
But she had been dreaming of Ikaris.
Of him sneaking through her window in the dead of night, though what business he had being there, or why she had imagined him coming at all, was something she would rather not examine too closely.
The first thump had barely disturbed her sleep. The second, however, was considerably louder, and she stirred beneath her sheets, still caught somewhere between the dream and the unpleasant business of waking.
For a moment, she lay perfectly still, listening.
Nothing.
She might have convinced herself it was a branch, or some unfortunate creature that had mistaken her window for an entrance, had there been a tree close enough to blame.
Then came a third thump.
Bella frowned.
There was something particularly irritating about being woken in the middle of a good dream, especially one she would never admit to having. And so, with considerable reluctance, she opened her eyes, squinted towards the window, and saw—
Well.
She had little idea just how ironically prophetic her dreams had been.