Run - 1. Chapter 1

Run

The open door poured a torrent of light from the hallway, throwing his father's figure into a hulking silhouette.

All thoughts of "fixing things" disappeared from Rover's mind as he stood rooted to the spot.

His father took a thundering step across the threshold, shedding shadows. Moonbeams cautiously sought him out, illuminating an angled ghost of a face. His hair should've been swept immaculately to the back, but a night of booze had disheveled his style. A stained pea coat hung from his neck, and he wore it like the carcass of a freshly killed doe. Despite the fine lines spanning across his skin, his eyes still shared that same shocking blue as his son, though while Rover's pulsed with electricity, his father's were two flints of ice. Glassy. Impassive. Terrifying. The muted reflections in his irises glinted as he swayed, ever so slightly, back and forth.

In his left hand he held an empty Martel Cognac bottle, rotating it slowly between his forefinger and thumb, palming it like a knife. Drawn to his full height, he too, was just under five-foot-ten. But Rover felt like his father was far taller than himself.

They stood like that in silence for awhile, seconds crawling slower than hours, moments passing more painfully than years. Rover attempted to will his frozen legs to unthaw, but he could barely force himself to breathe.

Then, his father spoke, his voice a guttural groan in the base of his throat, encompassed by that familiar stench of acrid vomit and pungent ethanol.

"I was dreaming."

Rover blinked, startled by his choice of words. Dreaming?

His father used to start conversations like that, but that was way back when Rover was still seven. Back when his father used work a lot more, drink a lot less, and care about those little things that, in retrospect, actually mattered, such as faithfully attending each and every one of Rover's school arranged soccer games, or routinely driving Rover and Somerset to Isabella's Charity Church every Sunday. Or remembering his son's birthday.

It was way back when Rover remembered smiling and laughing quite a lot more, and way back when he remembered scowling and cursing and cowering in fear, a hell lot less.

So was his father here to punish him? Or could he be here to talk?

"I was dreaming," his father repeated. His words were distinct, the consonants only ever so slightly slurred, but Rover could hear that anger hidden in the depths of his intoxication.

With slow footsteps, his father closed in. As each thump of sole against granite thrummed through the air, his smile grew, inch by inch, into a leering grin that swallowed half of his face. Slivers of glistening blood appeared on his cracked lips, tiny threads of red snaking into his paper white teeth. He seemed to be immune to the pain.

Rover backed up into a wall.

"About what?" He threw his words out hastily, successfully halting his father's progression. There was a pause, in which he seemed to think about his son's words.

"About your mother." His father's chest heaved with a long sigh, his uncanny grimace disappearing. "About Alexandria. About her long, brown hair, and her amazing hazel eyes... and about how she smelled of roses and the sea..."

With every other word that rolled out of his father's mouth, Rover's heart sank in perfect harmony. There was no doubt about it. His father hadn't come up here to talk. He knew what was coming.

"... about how her eyes crinkled when she smiled, and how beautiful she was while she was fast asleep. You have her smile, Rover, you know? I remember that your uncle used to tell you that all the time."

His father's expression darkened, but his grin only stretched tighter across his face. The contrast clashed horribly, and he was a laughing devil.

"You have her cheekbones," he continued. "You have her red lips. You've got all her beauty -- all that made you the young and handsome thing you are today. But you're missing her brains, you know? She was the smart one. Too bad you didn't inherit any of that good old stuff -- them precious dendrites -- did you?"

He allowed a brief moment of silence to slip between his words and surveyed Rover, as though expecting some sort of childish retort. Rover felt a rattling breath seize at his ribcage, so he hastily held his stomach still, trying to maintain his composure. He cocked his head slightly to the right, glimpsing his bedside window. It was closed. If he made a break for it now, it would require a few seconds to open, which was all the time his father needed to grab and wail on him with that damned bottle.

The only other exit was the doorway out of his bedroom. As Rover pondered about his limited escape options, he knew he would have to do something drastic in order to get out from such a cornered position. He would have to go through his father.

In theory, Rover could do it. He had less muscle, but he was more than adequately athletic. He wasn't drunk. And it wouldn't exactly be the first time he threw a punch either.

Yet, as Rover looked at the madness that ravaged his father's visage, he was certain that he would be fighting a losing battle. Intoxication never seemed to take a toll on his father's reflexes, and he was twice as likely to lash out -- with all his might -- when he felt the slightest irritation. And most of the time, this irritation was triggered by Rover's inability to respond, for he was always too scared to do anything.

His father's grin began to fade. The impassive expression in his eyes, too, began to ebb away.

"Mother taught you manners," he said. "You remember, right? Do you?"

A respite between hissing words, then a deep, commanding echo.

"Do you remember, son?"

"I do." Rover swallowed the tremors in his voice. He glanced once more towards the closed window, willing himself to inch over. He could not. Fear had possessed his blood, pure and noxious as it was, unadulterated by any traces of hope.

"I was dreaming good dreams about your mother and you and I." His father's voice rang louder with each word he spoke. "And son, you woke me up. Are you sorry? Did mother not teach you to not drop metal clocks in the middle of the night?"

"Yeah..."

Rover glimpsed a hurtling fist, then a flash of pain exploded in his left brow.

His head snapped backwards, colliding with the stone wall behind. He cradled his face as warm blood streamed down his left cheekbone. Sparks blossomed in his vision. His father threw an elbow into Rover's stomach, and he crumpled to the ground.

"Lie!" His father screamed. Rover felt it shake him to the core. Spittle flecked his father's jaw. "Mother didn't teach you that. She taught you not... to... lie."

Rover scrambled towards the window on his knees, an arm cradling his midsection, then fell to the floor face first as his father threw a foot into the side of his waist. The skin on Rover's chin instantly split when it snapped into the floor, blood spilling onto the polished granite. He barely had time to push himself back up when his father kicked him again, aiming for his stomach. Rover twisted and the foot sailed into his ribcage. He gasped for breath as a sickening crack resonated, accompanied by an instantaneous burst of agony that split along his side.

"Lie." His father snarled. "Lie, lie, lie!"

And then it began, the worst of Rover's nightmares. Ceaseless began the blows, one after the other. Falling in his chest, against his face; working to break him, to tear him, to tear apart his sanity bit by bit. His lip snagged on a flying fingernail, his hair stained with blood. Each strike followed the other, the hard surfaces of knuckled skin and bone inflicting punch after punch of pain.

His ears filled with shouts, his nose drenched, and he threw his hands in front of him as if he could stop them from coming. His nails flipped where his father's pummels tore through Rover's attempts. And amidst it all, a lucid interval flooded through Rover's mind, and with a bloodied hand, he instinctively caught a hurtling fist, slower in its progression than the rest of the blows, and screamed:

"Stop!!"

A shocking respite.

Rover shuffled to the side, disoriented, and fell against the wall behind again.

"Stop?" His father repeated. A cold, maniacal laugh. "If a rat screamed stop to a cat, you think the cat would turn away to search for another meal? You think if a moth screamed stop to the spider, it would let it go free? You think if your mother had screamed stop to her tumour, it would've crawled out of her ass and died in a puddle on the floor?"

Another moment of burdened silence, punctuated only by the panicked sounds of a fluttering heart.

"This will stop," his father said quietly, almost in a whisper, "If you can fucking stop me."

His father raised his bottle and swung it in a vicious arc. Rover raised his right hand to shield his face, but the force was enough to shatter the glass. Sharp pieces sliced his open palm, and smaller fragments which dispersed upon impact grazed his cheek. Fresh stings of pain. Staggering. Head throbbing. Cherry red juices welled up in the split flesh, rivulets trickling down his arm.

Father uprighted himself, paused like a butcher surveying the best way to cut the meat, this time brandishing the broken, jagged hull of his bottle, and then lunged.

This time, Rover was prepared.

With a burst of hidden strength that he had found -- the instinctual portion of his brain that the years of violence had somehow, finally unearthed -- he caught his father's leg in mid-swing, yanked it to the side, and tugged with all his might. Momentum carried his father forward, and he pivoted as his legs left the floor. A deafening thump of bone against granite and a yelp snapped through the air as his father landed flat on his back.

Rover pulled himself up, and ran out of the room as fast as his damaged body could carry him.

He ran from his room, ran down the cold stairs, ran across the sweeping floor; past the glorious chandelier, and past his butler who shouted at him to stop. He yanked on his shoes, pulled open the heavy front door, and then rushed into the darkness of the night.

The sub-zero air seemed to welcome him in whorls of sudden steam and glimmering flakes of fresh frost. As the frigid breeze passed gently through, the cacophony of white confetti was swept to his feet, swirling in tight curls on the frostbitten glassphalt.

Although the comatose streetlights seemed to grow dimmer in Rover's vision as he shuffled on, he knew he wouldn't stop.

He couldn't stop.

Not once did he look back.

*