He has returned to the core of his pain, for it is the only way he can cope.

His fragile hands have only just healed again, though he stares at the faint, porcelain scars whittled into the healing skin each night, tracing each repaired gouge with his opposite thumb. He is not in pain- no, that is all in his mind now, just as it has always been.

Just as it always will be.

For a while, he'd tried so hard to push it away, to forget the agony forced upon him and the agony created by his own free will, but he has given up. The physical reminders deface his fingertips, and the memories resurface everywhere he looks. In a child, no matter how carefree, he sees pain. In a fence, whether it be metal or wood or stone, he sees suffering. In houses he recognizes his own, where a family terrorized him, and in families he senses cruelty and ignorance, just as he had sensed in his own. It has not ceased, and the harder he tries to push it away, the more frequently he fumbles with his hands, picks at the scars and remembers.

There is no forgetting.

The wounds do not protest as his fingertips brush against the bark of a tree trunk, grazing the ridges as he stares off into the distance, eyes searching through the brush. Calls resonate just beyond the forest, and he takes another step towards them, shifting to shield his eyes from the unforgiving rays of the midday sun. Boot crunching on a spare stick, he winces, pulling aside branches from a thick bush of barberry. Squatting down to shelter himself, he gazes upon the laughter and the joy, reminiscing.

He watches the children grin as they slip down the slides, giggle as they bounce up and down on the seesaw, hoot as they leap from the swingsets. He remembers, the first time he'd returned, being shocked at the brand new, innovative equipment scattered throughout, remembers questioning if he had come to the right place, or if he'd somehow gotten the directions to another school. For he remembers the paint peeling from the slide, squeals in the seesaw as it rocked up and down, rust coating the chains suspending the swings. He remembers the merciless pebbles crunching beneath his feet that left a knee in smithereens when a child fell, and the sharp shards of metal that severed a palm if it landed in an unlucky location while swinging from one monkey bar to the next.

Fifteen years have passed since he has wandered the inside of those grounds, though.

He's not sure why he's so shocked that the world has kept on going without him- that the gravel has been replaced with foam grounds and the slides are fresh and the imminent threat of injury every child on that playground had seemed to evade has been replaced by new safety measures.

Yet, he supposes, not every child. Not the child who caught his fingers on the fence.

It is the one thing he recognizes amidst a sea of brightly colored playthings and time that has not stopped, that has not paused once he left the playground behind. The fence. It still protects them from the dangers of the woods, and the vines still overflow from the forestry surrounding it, still entwine with the links. He creeps closer, sneaking behind bushes until he reaches a section invaded by ivy, where the children cannot see him.

They did not see him yesterday, or the day before. They have not seen him this week, this month, this year.

But he is always there, lingering just beyond the bars during third grade recess.

He does not touch, does not reach out to drag his hands across the bar. No, it is a test of will- to see how long he can simply be there, staring at the very chains that cut him to pieces, without falling apart. He needs a way to cope, a way to conquer what has plagued him; he needs to find strength. And every day, he goes a little longer without turning away, without retreating from what brings such misery to him. The past throbs in his mind, and he stares at where he'd scarred himself, chin quivering. If he didn't know better, he'd say dried blood remained on the links, right where his hand would have reached at the age of eight.

He is the only one who remembers.

The pain returns all too sudden. He'd hoped that conquering his past would send it packing, that he felt it from the memories that plague him constantly, but it is always there, always- lingering inside his mind... the thought that he could simply end it all, fall asleep and escape to a dreamland where the past would never haunt him again. He wants it to stop, needs it to stop for such anguish torments him. The memories are such a burden, and they have only worsened, only returned in greater detail. The pain- it gnaws on him, eats away at his mind, his soul in sharp flares, shooting through every thought in his mind. Stop, he thinks. Stop. Stop. Stop.

"Are you okay, mister?"

He glances up, barely able to control his actions with the unadulterated pain ripping through him, tearing him apart at the seams. Wide brown eyes stare at him through the fence, ivy pushed to the side. A hand curls around a link in the fence, and he notices a scarlet stain leaking from it down into the chains.

His heart swells for this child.

A cry of agony escapes his lips, and he realizes he's called attention to himself, the boy who should not be there in the first place. He has tried so hard to remain hidden at the fence, but the pain is too great, and the pain he feels for this child has only enraged it, ignited another flame that eats him alive within. He has not felt this empathy in a long time- no, not ever, for he had been caught in worthlessness as a kid and blinded by his own happiness as Pineapple, and by his lack of purpose and regurgitation of memories as the boy of blood and there is a child, putting himself through the same pain that the howling monster outside the fence had put himself through.

He screams again, and the wide eyes just stare at him. The eyes, carrying pain of their own, that struggle reflected back at him. Their combined misery aches within him, and he has felt nothing like this- not from rejecting that offer to forget, not when he'd been witness to a clan leader's death, not even when he'd transformed into the horror he is now. He has felt nothing like this from staring at the fence, where he relives each moment of his desolate childhood, nothing like this when he traces his scars and remembers. Not even when he'd lived those moments of absolute anguish, when the blue tide had pulled him under and he couldn't swim back to the top, back to a hope for happiness. His heartbeat thrums in his ears, and the sweat drenches the back of his shirt; it clings to him, and the child's blood drips from one chain link to the next in oozing, scarlet drops...

Perhaps it is the sight of such a thing that truly overtakes him, that makes his pain and the child's pain and all of it just too much to bear. Perhaps it is as simple as the pain taking control over him, infiltrating every sense until there is nothing left but the animal he had been transformed to all those years ago. Perhaps it is a notion that he will be able to protect the child if they are the same, and they can annihilate their pain together once they are one.

Perhaps it is that which compels him to jump the fence and leap upon the child, in all his pain-crazed desperation, and create a monster out of an innocent who has suffered far too much already.

And the pain is gone, though it is rapidly replaced by the blossoming guilt, the horror at what he has done. All the oxygen has been stolen from the air and all he can do is watch as the child writhes on the ground, blood pooling from his neck. "No," he whispers. "No. No. No."

There have been times when he has loved what he craves- when he was a boy of fruits, he had loved pineapple. Then he had evolved into a boy of blood, and he no longer loved the pineapple, but the clan, his new sense of belonging. Both had given him joy.

But both joys expired.

Now... now he despises the boy of blood, loathes him with every cell in his body, for he has destroyed a stranger he had understood so completely, more than anyone else he'd ever encountered. He felt that child's pain in his very soul, and it haunts him, harrows him that the boy of blood has erased that child's hope to discover himself in every way, and that the boy of blood has changed that child when he had done nothing.

He hates the boy of blood, but he does not know who else he can be.

A shrill scream echoes across the playground, and he glances up sharply, realizing his actions have not gone unnoticed. A crowd of children streams toward him, running to the child he has deprived so much of. His heart swells in his chest, his throat clogging; he knows he needs to get out, but he doesn't want to leave the child. And though he knows fifteen years have passed since he'd sat in the nurse's office with the noxious scent of cleaning solution stinging his nostrils and felt the alcohol burn as the wound is poked and prodded at, he's sure there's something still the same about it. And he knows that kid will wake up and know he is not the same.

But he leaps back over the fence anyway, leaving the kids to shake it and attempt to clamber up the bloodied links, only to be shooed down by their teachers. He runs from his mistakes; he suffocates as they infect him, obstruct his airway. Yet his eyes remain dry, and he does not look back.

He knows it would destroy him if he did.