Flight (#3)

He looked up, mismatching eyes widening fractionally. Mouth opening the to say "I'm fine," or "it's okay." But the strength he thought he had left crumbled at the regret in her eyes.

I killed your brother don't you pitty me.

He shook his head hastily. And for that moment he felt no older than the seventeen years he was. Cracked and more than a bit broken, a kid with a smiling mother and a proud but stern father. A kid who came home one day to see there was nothing to come home to but ashes.

Fifteen and alone with no one to blame. Lost and searching for an answer to 'why are they gone?' that wasn't a pitying look. Grime under his nails and suspicious looks from soldiers. A hand on his shoulder he could never turn fast enough to see.

Sixteen and aflame, smell of gunpowder and metal polish and coppery blood following him like the weight of the family he lost. A boy with eyes that were his father's, his mother's. A boy with enough anger to destroy him.

And then he was seventeen and he felt every minute of those years as a weight on his chest. And his home was gone once again and the itch in the back of his mind, to hunt had returned. His shoulders shook with a silent sob. "I did this." He stated like it was a plea, begging for himself to be wrong. "He's gone like all the others." He made a hopeless gesture at the room. Faces of men who had been in newspapers and on the radio. Faces that had left the world with the scent of gunpowder and copper tracing behind them.

His head shook aggressively, as if trying to physically shake the assurance off of him. "There was a letter," he covered his reddening eyes with shaking hands. "Harboring fugitives my ass," the bite of the insult was erased by the brokenness in his voice. "They wanted me to give you up, I couldn't-" he slumped further into himself. "I made a counter offer, I didn't think they'd-" a pause, keeping himself from breaking into hysterics.
"I'm seventeen Annette," It was the first time he'd said her name, odd sounding in the boy's mixed accent. "It's happened so many times I should be used to it by now."

"Of course." He looked up with a crooked, broken smile that didn't reach past his mouth. "He's 'Missing', you know, that's what they put in the headlines if they don't find a body, or if it's too old to tell for sure."
He remembered they'd said that about his parents, anout him, the family was 'Missing' because death was too much for the public to bear.

His hands clenched as he regained his composure, looking down. His voice was tight when he responded. "Of course, It was irresponsible of me to loose my head like that." He swallowed sharply, standing.

"C-" he swallowed past the knot in his throat. "Confrontation probably isn't our best bet, do you, by some chance, know of anything we could use to make a trade? Friends, Family, information? It's not the most kindly approach, but it's far less messy than attempting to break him out."

"Who?" He turned, something dark flickering into his eyes, like a cat quiet and deadly waiting in the grass. It looked out of place on the usually cheery boy, but all the more frightening for it.

"You can always prove the truth." His hand flexed, looking, to any casual observer a normal action of an angry man, the clenching of a fist. To one looking closely, however, it was obvious, a mimicry of the grip one would have on a blade. Iching for a weapon in his palm.