Pain
The blood was still spreading when the dream pulled him back into it, the same dark continent widening itself across the same grimy stone, and above it the same red-haired man crouched low, grinning, knife hanging loose and wet from one hand.
He hadn't stopped screaming, not really, not in the part of the memory that never properly ended. The wound in his side had opened wide and ragged, and the man above him laughed at the sight of it, a high, broken sound that came apart at its edges the longer it went on, and then the laughter changed shape, curling into something worse, and the boy in the memory understood, a half-second too late, what was coming next.
The kick landed square in his open wound.
The pain didn't arrive the way pain usually arrived. It arrived all at once, entire, a white detonation that swallowed everything else the moment his eyes had held — the man's grin, the alley, the slow dark spread of blood — replaced instantly by nothing but the pain itself, vast and total, and beneath it, worse than the pain, the wet give of something inside him tearing further open than it had any right to tear, warmth and weight spilling out across his own hands where they'd come up too late to stop it.
He screamed.
It came out of him high and raw and endless, a sound with no shape left to it, no words, nothing but the body's oldest and most honest language, and the man above him laughed harder at the sound of it, delighted, gleeful, kicking again, and again, each impact landing in the same ruined place, until the boy's scream thinned out into something smaller, a whine, a whimper, the last sound a throat can make before it stops making sound at all.
He woke sitting bolt upright, or tried to, his body lurching against the cold stone floor of the tunnel with a violence his own muscles had no real strength to sustain, a raw gasp tearing out of him into the total dark, his hands flying to his own side on pure reflex, feeling frantically for the wound that wasn't there, that had never been there.
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There was nothing. No blood. No open ruin beneath his palms. Only his own thin shirt, damp with sweat, and the cold, unbroken skin underneath it.
The adrenaline hit him in the same instant the memory released him — a hard, bright surge, heart slamming, breath tearing in and out too fast — and for one single, suspended moment his body remembered what it felt like to be young and whole and capable of fighting something.
It didn't last.
Whatever sickness had been working through him for weeks now reached up and smothered the surge almost as quickly as it arrived, the way a wet hand smothers a struck match, and the strength that should have carried him upright, carried him running, carried him anywhere at all, drained back out of his limbs before he'd even finished rising. His arms gave first. Then his spine. He folded back down against the wet stone in stages, the adrenaline's last sparks fading into the same grey exhaustion that had put him here in the first place, and by the time his breathing slowed again, ragged and shallow, he was too weak even to properly feel afraid of how weak he'd become.
As he sat there crouched, he remembered the visage of the man who caused him pain. His dazed eyes slowly remembering his features as words that were long lost, resurfaced as he faced a quiet lonely death. His grey, empty eyes staring at the damp concrete floor as droplets of sweat fell down endlessly from his sweaty countenance as he wordlessly muttered,
“Father.”
The darkness slowly claiming his dying body as the rats he had ventured so deep to find, stared hungrily at the soon to be corpse.