PROMPT ONE: SHELL SHOCK

The misty breath of the sky hung low and damp in the air, as fog. It was a blinding, heavy, tangible force, that seemed to bind his body where he stood, frozen. He shivered. The air, crisp and brisk, had no large part in this, although the temperatures were vastly lower than normal for a supposedly warm, August evening.

None of this, the cold, the fog, the heaviness of the air, nor the eerie weather changes, had any impact upon his trembling. No, this act was caused solely by a memory. A nightmarish, scarring, horrifying, never-ending memory that haunted the boy-ghost. As he stood, waiting, at the bus stop.

The memory of a fear, a presence, an echo of something awful, something unspeakably horrifying, a something that he had done. The mere echo of this something made him quake with revulsion and self-loathing- for, he had been that very something.

He was his own worst fear, and enemy.

No amount of coldness in the air could numb that feeling, however hard he tried. No amount of heaviness of the fog could outweigh the burden of living through a nightmare- a nightmare, mind you, of his own design- and the trauma afterward. No amount of white, sky-breath could blind his eyes from watching the flames rise in a quick, white flash-

Gone. Everything had died in that one instant. The fear of repeating those actions, the fear of making those horrible, unspeakable things true once more, that alone made him tremble.

He stared blankly across the road. It was as if he held a daemon's gaze from ten-thousand miles away. A blank, numb gaze that was worn by soldiers, and disaster victims. A gaze that held no place within the eyes of a schoolboy.

He waited until the bus arrived- an infinity within itself, for time held no relativity to one who was trapped within a long-forgotten instant. When the yellow, rickety, foul contraption arrived, the boy-ghost stepped inside, and made no complaint, nor any comment did he utter.

He wasn't even there, not really. His mind was miles away, experiencing the horrors of battle, war, and death. Deaths, including his own. His mother, his father, his sister, his brother in all-but-blood, his almost-lover...

He was lost, lost within a war that never even happened- not to them, anyway.

The part of him that had been innocent, and naive, had been left behind. He had left it with the part of himself that he hated, the part that he feared, and rejected. He wasn't whole anymore. That something that had made him childlike, and energetic...was gone.

He was tired, traumatised, shell shocked…

He was broken.

Well, that was depressing. I'm currently doing a writing prompt challenge for Ectober 2015. I'm not doing the Tumblr challenge; I'm doing my own. Send in your ideas, and I look forward to writing them. If you don't send in anything, I'll be forced to write a horrible parody involving sparkly vampires and sentient cheese slices who have terrible grammar. (Just Kidding) You have been "warned". Thanks for reading,

Asphodel Gray.