Coming of Age -- Ending Two of Four is up!

So! Ending #1, aka the really miserable ending. It's short and to the point, because it was really hard to write... after all, too much bad stuff in this one! So, read on, but when you're done and MAD AT ME, remember that the other ending, each happier than the last, are coming.

Read, and reviews are so well loved!

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The cold was everything. It flowed off the lake, setting Lila’s teeth to chattering and freezing her tears almost as fast as she cried them. She buried her face against Quinn’s chest, feeling the erratic heaving of his breath, the way he convulsed and shuddered. It had been too long, she knew, Connor had been under the surface for almost half an hour. He was dead. She was absolutely certain of it. She felt the gun against her cheek, the one Quinn was hiding under shirt, and lifted her head. Quinn was staring at her, tiny crystals of ice suspended in the fluid in his eyes. He tried to say something, just the tiniest movement of his blue lips. She slipped her shaking hand under his shirt and wrapped her fingers around the gun.
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Connor floated, his eyes closed, his limbs heavy. He’d swam as long as he could, fighting the fatigue, the pain, the cold. Eventually he couldn’t fight anymore, so he just floated.

Silence, and darkness, and pain. Somehow, all these things seemed fitting. He didn’t find him. He couldn’t make things right. He knew he was dying; somehow, that was fitting too. He’d wasted his entire short life on trivialities and selfishness; and when he’d finally found something worth it, finally made a connection and found happiness, he’d let it get away. After that, after Jin, what was really the point? Jin had made life worth living, he’d made the world something new and fantastic. Without him, he’d go back to his old life, and he knew deep down that idea scared him more than anything.

So he let go. Closed his eyes and floated. When he felt himself beginning to drift, to lose consciousness, he spoke into the water, his mouth almost refusing to form that one syllable.

“Jin.”
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When he awoke, everything had changed. He felt different, in his head, his heart. Even the shape of him felt different, and he slid his brand new hands along himself, feeling and analyzing. He gave his legs a gentle kick, and it was like flying. He laughed, moving through the water as though he were a part of it. He raised his hands in front of his face to study them; they’d changed, but only a little. The webbing was more defined, the lines smoother, the nails longer. He could differences in all of him; from his elbows to his neck to his knees. Things had shifted in him. It was beautiful, and somehow he knew that he was beautiful too.

Then he heard something; the tiniest of sounds through the water, like a whisper of a dream he didn’t really remember. A name, he knew… something he’d been called once… He turned and swam towards the source of it, curious. His wonder and excitement at his own newness disappeared when he saw the boy.

He knew him. Some part of him, deep down, knew the human boy in a way that made his heart hurt. He closed the distance between them, and the serene, empty look on the boy’s face spurred a strange, desperate panic in him. That buried part of him began to fight towards the surface, and he knew it wanted the boy alive and safe.

He wrapped his arms around the boy’s torso and kicked towards the surface.
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When the surface of the lake broke, Lila screamed. The sound was so loud, so enormous. She took the gun away from Quinn’s temple and wrapped her arms around her head.

Quinn was making a low, terrified moaning sound beside her. She looked up, saw the pale, strange figure on the ice, and the boy in its arms. She dropped the gun without thought and ran towards them. She needed to get Connor away from the thing. He was dead, she knew, but she wouldn’t let it have him, no matter what. If there was a chance…

The huge, gaping cracks in the ice prevented her from going out on the lake. It was close enough for her to see the change in it’s face; the shape of it’s eyes, the color of them so brilliantly blue that they seemed to glow. It’s hair had become something different, somewhere between hair and tentacles and seaweed. It’s ears had lengthened and pointed, it’s mouth had changed; the lips fullers, the teeth smaller and somehow more needlelike. It was terrifying and beautiful. It’s legs ended, not in feet, but in long, delicate looking fins, and it had grown spiny ridges along its back and legs. It reminded her almost of a lionfish, and still looked like nothing she’d ever seen before. It looked up at her, its arms wrapped around Connor’s body, and she realized with horror that the thing was crying.

The cold changed suddenly, became more than a permeating pain; it became violent, forcing its way through her like an unwanted lover. She screamed again, her legs giving out, and fell to her knees on the ice slicked dock. The cold went through her head like a lightning bolt, and with it came the sound of the thing’s sobs; like whale songs and nails down a blackboard, and behind those, something beautiful and horrible and alien. She clamped her hands over her ears, screaming, but she couldn’t look away from it.

Jin cradled Connor against him, his hands working through the wet, half frozen hair. The thing inside of him that remembered Connor was so close to the surface he couldn’t control it. Neither of them noticed Quinn. Neither of them saw the way he half crawled, half dragged himself towards them, the way he held the gun as though it would somehow preserve his life.

So when he pulled the trigger, when the bullet caught Jin in the chest and jerked him backwards, neither of them knew what had happened at first. Jin’s voice broke off suddenly, like a record needle knocked off a groove. He looked down and the inky black liquid flowing down his chest with wonder and confusion. The pain was so sharp, so immediate, that his brain wouldn’t even acknowledge it at first. He lifted his head and looked at Lila, then past her.

Quinn coughed, his eyes rolling, and put his forehead against the dock’s icy surface. He shuddered once and was still.

Jin and Lila stared at each other. In that moment, Lila realized just how incredibly wrong this had all been. She’d hadn’t saved Connor. She’d played a part in killing someone. She believed now that Jin was a person, and not a thing. No thing could look the way he did; the empty, all consuming sorrow in his eyes. She saw that he was not scared of dying, only of losing Connor. She watched Jin lower his head, the blood running out of him staining his chest and covering Connor from neck to waist. He sobbed once, silently, and buried his face against Connor’s neck. For a moment nothing moved.

Then the ice shifted and slid, and the lake swallowed them both.

Lila sobbed, putting her hands against her mouth to keep the sounds in. She pushed herself backwards until she felt Quinn, then fumbled until she found the gun in his hand. He was dead, too, she knew. She looked up at the moon, saw the way it rippled and broke apart through her tears.

She knew now that everything that happened was a mistake. She’d destroyed something so beautiful, so rare and unimaginable. She watched Quinn kill it, and she had done nothing. She’d killed Connor, too, in a way. And she had killed something that was worth more than each of them apart, she’d killed love. She knew that. Connor had loved it… him. He’d loved him enough to do what he did, and it got him nothing but his own death. That, too, was her fault. After all, she was the only one left, and the only one to shoulder the blame. Someone had to be blamed for all of this. It weighed far too much for her.

She lifted the gun, amazed at the warmth the barrel against her temple. She held onto that warmth for strength.

She pulled the trigger.
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“I just don’t get.” The blond cop muttered, and took a hit off his cigarette. He watched the body bag being loaded into the ambulance and thought about his own children. He prayed to God he never had to go through something like this.

“What do you figure that rock is?” his partner asked, watching the two divers talk to the chief of police. He didn’t want to think about the kids. The boys, both drowned, although one was on the dock and the other in the lake. He didn’t want to think about the huge, unexplainable wounds in the boy’s face, the serious frost bite around the wounds. He didn’t want to think about the girl they’d found beside the boy with frost bite; the mess she’d made when she shot herself was enough to make him want to throw up. It had been a very, very bad day so far.

“Fuck the rock.” The blond cop snapped. “Why’s the lake half frozen? It’s August.” As strange as that was, he did have to admit there was something about the stone they’d found cradled in the arms of the boy in the water. It was beautiful. Perfectly smooth, the color of sapphires. There was a patch of fog in the center, the only imperfection in the thing, which was the size of softball, but that imperfection made it even more beautiful.

When the paramedics had first pried it from the boy’s hands, it had been frozen to his skin. The blond cop had watched from the sides, and he’d sworn he’d seen the fog inside of it pulse. He hadn’t told anyone, though.

When he went home that night, the kids were already asleep, his wife passed out in front of the television. He’d walked her to bed, then laid beside her. Despite the horrors of today, the three dead teenagers, the frozen lake, the dead wildlife in the surrounding area (all of them seemed to have died of hypothermia), he thought of the stone they’d found.

That night, he dreamed of long, pale human like creatures, beautiful and alien, hundreds of them, flowing through water as blue as that stone had been, their huge, brilliant teal and blue eyes turned up, towards the surface. He dreamed that they sang, a low mourning song, and in his sleep, he cried for them, for what had been lost.

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A little side note to all of my repeat readers... I know I said I would put up the endings (and more chapters to my other stories) like a week ago, but hey, real life happened. It sucked. Sorry!