They’d never meant to raise their eyes - never meant to look him in the face; to aggravate that purpling mass of skin and eyes, skin and slits for noses and mouths and all sorts. He was a human, or so he claimed, but they saw him as a monster. Not a monster to be feared, but one to be pitied. They were too young to know any better - too young to know that monsters didn’t need pity, no matter how much they demanded. But they were too young to have fear bleeding through their veins, and so their eyes dared to find those of a monster.

A science lab was no place for a stand-off such as this, but a science lab was where both participants found themselves, the youngest armed with sparks of mischief swimming in their eyes, the older with his incredible mass and the fury coursing through his body. It was a stupid, stupid event which brought them both this close to each other - usually, the younger would’ve slipped away already, washed out of the lab with the waves of students who so often occupied it, but they had been stopped by one bulbous hand, crowned with five straining, fleshy fingers, and it was all because of something so stupid-

“I saw them, Turner - you know I did, and I know I did.” Every word was surrounded by the raspy pants of days spent lounging in the same spot on the same old sofa, consuming the same junk food and watching the same monotonous daytime TV day after day; that was why they, in all their childish naïvety, they felt pity towards him. “If you just hand them over, we can be done with all this nonsense. A Year Seven like you, you shouldn’t be involved in anything like this-”

“Like what, sir?” And there it was - the joyfulness which he couldn’t possess, not anymore, came so easily to this small incarnation of youth. “Haven’t got involved in anything, sir.”

“If you’re holding onto them for someone else-”

“And what would they be, sir?”

“ENOUGH!”

Slamming itself into the slightly charred top of a lab desk, the repulsive hand made itself into a fist, clenching and unclenching, and shaking as if it were shivering, but the room was not cold and neither was the red-faced teacher within it. They tilted their head to the side a little, more bemused than amused, believing - stupidly believing - that some invisible wall between them and him would keep them safe.

If that wall ever existed, he shattered it with the pulsating hand, clammy with sweat and rough-skinned, reaching over like a claw and swallowing a bunched up section of the front of their pearl-white button-up shirt. Vital breath left their lungs as their small face became level with the monster’s frog-mask - if it wasn’t a mask, then they pitied him, wrongly pitied him. There was a furious smugness about that mask, as if he was infuriated but incredibly satisfied about how this Friday afternoon was turning out.

“I’ll get this out of you, Turner. One way or another.”

That wasn’t smugness. It wasn’t fury, or irritation. It was cold - colder than ice. All of a sudden, they found themselves feeling something which they hadn’t felt in an in age, and never in this place, where they had been so secure in their safety. They felt fear.