Brother's Betrayal

Chapter Eleven {Improvising}

At four in the afternoon, I stood up from the sofa and May. I had been watching a meaningless show for the last half an hour and hadn't retained any of the information because it had been terrible. My hands had been running through my hair and each time they stopped at the sudden ending because of the new length I was stunned at how quickly I had changed.

"Where are you going?" May grumbled as she leant over to pause the television. By standing up, I had accidentally placed myself in her way. "Alice?"

I frowned. "To see Tony."

May nodded. "Are you sure? I can talk to him if you want me to." She looked up at me, her eyes concerned. "I just don't think that he will be in the best of moods."

"It's my fault that he's locked himself up in there, May. I want to apologise." She opened her mouth to speak again, probably to insist that she would see him (but after her show), and she would have spoken if I hadn't talked in time. "Besides, he hasn't seen the new me yet."

May's lips twitched in amusement. "Go show him." I nodded, dazed momentarily by the light colour of my hair as it drifted about me. I knocked on Tony's door as I heard May mutter, "But I'm not keeping it paused."

The room inside was silent. Knowing that Tony hadn't gone out because both May and I had been out of our rooms all day, I opened the door. He could have been asleep but if he was I would leave, content with knowing that he wasn't ignoring me.

Tony was lying as straight as a pencil on his bed. I had no time to observe his room as he patted the space on the bed beside him, which was the only acknowledgement of my presence in his room.

"I'll tell you everything." He stated. Satisfied by my silence, Tony swallowed and spoke again. "You want to know what I'm hiding from, don't you?" As I grew comfortable laying down, I stared back up at the ceiling too.

"If you want to tell me then I wouldn't be opposed to it," I said. "But don't force yourself if you don't want to, I understand."

Tony rolled his eyes - I caught the movement out the corner of mine. "This was maybe two years ago, I think. I was out hiking in the summer somewhere. It was dark and there weren't any clouds that evening and because the moon was so incredibly bright that night I didn't need a torch as the path was lit perfectly. I had been walking for ages, completely surrounded by trees, when I heard a cry behind me. There was a kid. A small child, really young. They were holding onto their wrist, their arm, in one hand, and they were limping badly."

I rolled onto my side so I could watch Tony as he narrated. He didn't show any signs to reveal that he had noticed my shifting and staring.

"She," he swallowed, "needed my help. She didn't understand why she was hurting or her bone was broken. As she spoke, I heard quiet cracks and she fell. She hit her head and a crack followed that. I couldn't move at all because I was so stunned." Tony chuckled but it wasn't humorously.

I imagined myself where Tony had been. In his situation, I would have been terrified too, so terrified that despite the innocent child breaking before my eyes I probably wouldn't have done anything to help them in any way. It made me sound like a monster, it related me to them, but I wouldn't have been able to.

"She stopped breathing. For a minute, her little chest didn't rise or fall or move in any way. I moved a step toward her when I had eventually broken out of my shock and she flinched and her skin began to twist and curl back and grow hair. Within a second, she was charging at me. It wasn't her so much as it being a savage, crazed and wild animal wearing the torn and stretched pieces of clothing the girl had been wearing. She took a chunk out of my side, it hurt like hell and she left a scar too."