Freaks Like Us

Cookies

He came to in an unfamiliar room, an occurrence that had been happening all too regularly in the past few weeks. Except this time as his eyes adjusted he was not met with a standard room, he was met with gray concrete walls and when he tried move towards the iron door his legs caught on something. Looking down wide eyed, he was able to see the shimmering while material that was tying his feet together and to the back wall.

He tried to snap it, to tear it away; it didn't look very strong, but no matter how hard he clawed and pulled at it, it remained tightly secured around his ankles.

"Hello?" he called out into the darkness, for it was dark in that room, the only available light entering through a small barred gap in the top right corner. Unlike the other parts of the circus, if he was even still at the circus, the room was bare, with only a simple bed in one corner, the one he was currently sat on, trying to piece together his disjointed memories.

I did something. The thing...it made me do something.

His ever sensitive ears alerted him to the soft thuds of approaching footsteps. "Hello?" he called out again. "Is anybody there?" No one replied but if he concentrated even harder he could just about make out the shallow breathing and then...the gentle beating of a heart. Somebody had definitely decided to pay him a visit. "I can hear you!" he shouted, the stranger agitating him as he clenched his fists.

But before he could get fully worked up, a subtle scent drifted its way over to him. He took a deep breath in, calming his nerves, and followed the trail of fresh flowers and cedar wood, and something that smelled like baked goods, to the small gap in the wall. "Kirstie?"

A face appearing at the grate, eyes blinking at him in the dark, confirmed his speculations. "Seems Harold didn't knock your senses out of you," she muttered, wriggling onto her front so she could view him from a better angle.

And at the sight of her everything suddenly came flooding back. Scott's vision about him, the boy hiding it from him, Mitch getting in his way, Mitch shouting at him, Mitch on the floor, Mitch covered in blood with his limbs twisted, all the others terrified faces.

They haven't kicked me out...or killed me. Maybe the want to torture me, or punish me for hurting one of their own.

And why was Kirstie here? Was she here to enact her own revenge in Avi for hurting her friend or had she simply come to view him in his prison, like an animal in a cage.

"Where am I?" he asked the girl, voice quivering as he stared up at her small face inspecting him.

"A safe room," she replied simply, not breaking his gaze. She didn't appeared frightened, but then he was tied up. However she didn't exactly look disgusted with him either.

Darting around the small, stark room, he corrected her. "It's a prison."

"It's an isolation chamber," she corrected him in turn, leaning her chin on her hands. "It's designed to protect us from you, and you from yourself."

Frowning in confusion, Avi held his hand up to the stone walls and to his surprise found them soft and squishy to the touch, completely appearance deceiving. And he supposed that was why he wasn't bound by metal chains, if what Kirstie said was really true; that they intended to keep him safe from himself.

But why? He thought. What have I done to have them give a damn about me?

"I was..." Avi started to talk about the incident that brought him into the room in the first place, but he found his tongue was heavy, the words the stuck in his throat. He wanted to ask about Mitch but at the same time he was scared of the answer he might be given. "How long've I been in here?" he settled for instead.