The road less travelled...

So I'm finally getting around to writing the stories for fanfic100. For some reason I'm doing them in order, so I present the first five:

#1 Beginnings
Title: Special
Word Count: 179

The boy never cried. Jacob would always be surprised by that. The others had cried, but this boy simply sat in the back of the car, his head covered by the eyeless mask, and waited. Jacob waited too, to offer, if necessary, the forbidden comfort. The affection that he knew his brother would never provide, because Sydney believed in the doctrine preached by the Centre, that work must come first. Jacob wasn’t so sure about that. There was a place for affection, Jacob was sure. Catherine had always thought so, too. Jacob half-smiled as he thought of the beautiful woman and the little dark-haired girl who looked so like her.

“Why am I going?”

The boy’s voice broke the silence of the car and Jacob almost jumped.

“Is it because I’m special?”

“Yes,” Jacob paused briefly to look down at the paper on his lap, “Jarod. It’s because you’re special.”

Jarod nodded as if confirming something, but there was a note of mournfulness in his voice as he murmured words that Jacob almost missed. “I wish I wasn’t special.”

~~~

#2 Middles
Title: Difficult Years
Word Count: 147

Sydney was worried. For the third time, Jarod had stopped in the middle of his latest Sim. To think, he explained when Sydney demanded an explanation. To lose focus, the man fretted as he watched Jarod leave the desk and sit on the floor of the Sim lab, staring into space. After a moment, he picked up the microphone that stood on the desk in front of him.

“Get on with it, Jarod.”

The boy started violently and stared around in a bewildered fashion. After a second, he pinpointed the camera through which Sydney’s view of the room came and glared at it. With an exaggerated sigh, he pulled himself to his feet and dragged himself back to the desk. It was almost, Sydney thought in wry amusement as if the weight of the world was on Jarod’s shoulder. But then the teenage years always were difficult…

~~~

#3 Ends
Title: The Pain of Loss
Word Count: 237

It had surprised Jarod how heavy Kyle’s body was as his brother fell, struck by Lyle’s bullet. It was only later that Jarod realized part of the weigh was part of himself dying and falling at the same moment his brother was struck. Jarod was familiar with death, but this was the first time he had really experienced the pain of loss. He had always believed that simulations showed him everything, but now he found that they were only a shadow of the real pain of death. Jarod had thought that it would not be possible to feel that way very often, or else how would one survive?

He looked down at the woman’s crumpled form in his arms, the life gone out of her blank, staring eyes, her hair hanging limp around her face, and a thin trail of blood trickling down her chin, evidence of the terrible damage that the bullet had caused inside her. He wiped it away, staring at the reddened tips of his fingers.

“It’s time to go, Jarod.”

Lyle’s voice was quietly threatening, but Jarod could only look up at the man blankly.

“You shot her.” There was something of a small boy’s astonishment in his tone. “You killed her.”

“And I’ll kill you unless you get the hell up,” Lyle snarled, nudging the man with his foot. “Now move.”

“You killed her,” Jarod repeated tonelessly. “You killed my Mom.”

~~~

#4 Insides
Title: Gray
Word Count: 146

Gray. That was the strongest memory that Jarod would take with him through his life when he thought about the Centre. The pain of the simulations faded after a time, but he never forgot the gray. The walls were gray. The computer was gray. All the furniture had been black once, but chips and cracks revealed the gray steel beneath the paint. The sheets on his bed were gray, as were his clothes. In Jarod’s recollection of those years, even Sydney’s suits seemed to be gray more often than any other color. Jarod thought that was probably intentional, so that he would look forward to the arrival of his Sims as a break from all that lack of visual stimulation. From memory, even his food was gray.

Jarod shuddered and licked his bubblegum ice cream. Florescent pink was as far from gray as he could imagine.

#5 Outsides
Title: The Good Things
Word Count: 207

The ice cream slid, deliciously cool, down his throat and Jarod cleaned his mouth with a napkin, feasting his eyes on a flowerbed near the park bench on which he sat. It was definitely the color of the world around him that Jarod appreciated most. When he thought about it, he was glad that he had escaped at night, when color was muted, as the brightness of the world around him could have stunned him so much that he might not have managed to escape. Reaching into his pocket, he flipped open his phone and held it to his ear, licking up a drip of ice cream from the waffle cone while he waited for his call to be answered.

“This is Sydney.”

“What did you miss most when you couldn’t see?”

There was a short silence on the other end of the phone. “Movement,” Sydney admitted. “Movement and color. Knowing things were going on around me that I was missing because I couldn’t see them.”

Jarod nodded silently and rescued another drip.

“Why the question, Jarod?” Sydney asked.

“I just wondered how alike we really are,” the younger man stated and then hung up, knowing that the psychiatrist would eventually realize the purpose for his call.

Comments please!