A/N: Written for the Prompts in Steps Challenge, step 3 – prompt #007 – bloodshed.

Sign-ups

When the five children had selected "yes" on their phones, they hadn't thought they'd be risking their lives – or taking others. But that was exactly what they'd signed up for, and by the time they realised what that was, they were in too deep.

If they'd been adults, more experienced with the cruel ways of the world, they wouldn't have invested so deeply into a world that had nothing to do with them. But then, they might not have felt that need to invest in such a place: a place that could save them from the troubles they faced in their own lives.

Adults had their own troubles, but those were different to the troubles of children. There were far more children than adults who could think of games as the pathway to something greater. Not the sort of games children thought of anyway: games like the stuff they could find at an arcade – and it was like that at first, transforming and fighting monsters…but even then, they'd known it wasn't all a game, because they'd been scared as well.

And they'd started to miss home eventually, realised their game world wasn't a game in the end at all. And that fighting monsters meant their hands were getting stained with blood each time, and that they were growing up in the adults way instead of the childish notion they'd thought they could get away with…

And it was better for them, in the end, to grow up like that. But they could have done without all those lives they'd had to take because it came to haunt them years afterwards, when they were truly adults and couldn't look at the world as being black and white anymore. And they could have done without the fear of their lives – because they had lost one of their own, even if he had come back.