White powdered fluff were cascading southward slowly in swirls around his form, bright green orbs mindlessly following flake after flake as his attention remained fixed upward.  The boys mind was pretty blank at this point for once.  The foreboding white building was towering behind him in a large expanse, taunting.  Lights in every window glowed a soft pale illumination as the crimson ‘L’ flickered suddenly in the heading of the building, even more taunting.  The young man could only imagine the masses of nurses and doctors scrambling about with some intent that only they could understand, like any medical “professional”.

            She was inside one of those perfect, fifteen by fifteen rooms, lost in her now apparent own imperfection.  The boy could only imagine her dwindling away, shriveling like a prune with each drop of poison from the IV drip.  He couldn’t handle the idea of smelling her flesh rotting away and distorting slowly, painfully; it wasn’t enough for her.  The voices were whispering to him again, slipping sweet lies into his head with each passing breath.  His lanky, padded arm found its way around his middle tightly, in a failed attempt to fight the cold off.  He couldn’t do this.

            ‘I bet you can.’ He heard one of them wisp across his ear softly.  The jade-eyed boy’s head jerked hard in disagreement, thoughts too jumbled now to produce a response internally.  This shouldn’t be happening now.

            Each step he took carried him farther away from her, farther away from the odd smelling sinful pit that she was trapped in.  The icy air was blistering across his face harshly as time passed but he didn’t care; he never did.  Time was passing, and the image of his stocky oak doorway appeared in his field of vision suddenly.  Pale boney hands came up to wrap around the tiny knob of steel, twisting until a pop clicked in his ears. 

            The inside was dark.  Trusting his memory of this place to guide him inside, the boy moved into the black space. 

            ‘She was a liar Liam.’

            She was a liar.  The picture of the boy stubbing across all those aged slips of paper with their pretty little words skewed across them reappeared in his mind, replaying again.  The boy could remember only specific words now. ‘Adoption’. ‘Sergeant Guardian’.  It was only the small words that mattered in the jumble of his world.

            ‘Not your REAL mother…’

            He wanted to go to his father about it, ask the almost forbidden words but didn’t.  He couldn’t.  He felt conflicted, unsure what to actually feel as he looked about the dark corridors.  This was pointless.

            He didn’t find the answers he was expecting in that house, so he left, just a meticulously as he came.  The boy was even further from the white building and now away from that den of lies. 

The visions of those short little blocks of slate came into sight slowly, watching him.  Brass iron gates surrounded him darkly as he passed through their entrance slowly, eyes staring at the ground empty, blades of grass shriveled and rotting, peaking up through the layer of snow.  His feet were stinging with chills as he grew closer.  His eyes found her name right away.

            “Miriam Klein”

            It was staring him right in the face, mocking. Laughing more then all the buildings and all the little slips of paper and fabrications put together. 

            ‘She was the real thing and they lied to you. They never told you that you were a lie. YOU were their lie!’

            The voices were screaming at him now, throbbing across his consciousness consistently.  They were maddening.  Emotions and thoughts of bitter ill intent, sadness and hope, hope of both kinds filling his minds.  At some points in the storm he was hoping, praying, she was going to die.  Then, his mind went back to sad little bits of sympathy for her, even if she was a lie of a sergeant guardian.

            ‘Lie, lie, lie, lie—’

            They were chanting now as his delicate orbs began to loose focus, clear salty water filling his field of vision swiftly.  The boy’s ghostly hands clawed at his skull, body shriveling sharply at the pain pounding at his cochlea as the voices filled his head, overwhelming his mind.  Waves of shakes racked down the boy’s legs as he fought to stay standing, only to end up failing, succumbing to the force of his rapid confusion.  He can’t do this.

            He pried his tear swollen eyes open again, tunnel vision only allowing him to barely make out the name on the tomb.  All these years she was alive.  She was breathing, living and smiling until just two months ago and he never knew it.

            ‘ITS ALL THAT WOMANS FAULT!’ The entire mass of voices rose up in succession, voices morphing together in an altered demonic voice that chilled Liam to the very bone.

            The newspaper said that his true mother had died in a car accident those two months prior.  She couldn’t have been lucky enough to die instantly; her entire form lit up with licking flames, as that imposter’s cancerous body should have.  The thought, even though he never met her, caused a wave of nausea to build in his gut sharply among the sea of voices.  The salted water finally leaked over the reddened brims of each eye in a water fall, soaking his flesh and drowning the pores along his cheeks.  His body was retreating and curling into itself further with each passing second, trying to escape the screaming taunts. 

            ‘I hope she dies—we hope she dies; so should you. That woman’s a liar, liar, liar—’

            Suddenly, a soft pressure laid itself upon Liam’s back in a gentle caress.  The comforting warmth that spread along the area of contact gave him something to focus on again.  He could now feel a different warmth now too, the sun, beating its heat upon his face, rising up out of a cloud and from behind the slate of stone he was before.  The pressure on his back started to moves slightly, shifting fingers petting along his coated body, further giving him something to concentration on.  Voices began to fade into a less intense murmur, words and phrases blending into incoherent syllables. 

            “Liam.”  The voice was resonating in the world around, in the truth and reality of swirling soft falling snow, was quiet yet firm.  He could do this maybe.

Familiarity of the pitch and tone filled his mind along with this sense of comfort from the physical warmth.  Liam could feel the soft fire filling every fiber of his body now, calming him down.  His vision began to focus to an extent, still warped by tears, but clear enough to make out the face before him.  Gentle icy azure eyes were staring directly into his bright watery eyes; locks of a soft chocolate framed the other boy’s sharply featured face.  “I’m here.”

            He’d never say ‘It’ll be okay’ because that would be a lie, but the warmth of him being there was calming enough.  Neither paid any mind to the twins sitting upon the snow behind them, quiet for once as the two boys just breathed, in peace for once.  It didn’t matter who lived and died anymore; all that mattered was the silence.  The blue eyed boy, Cyle, reached up, hands cupping Liam’s check softly brushing at tear tracks. The powdered white puffs where still falling and Liam realized he found where he needed to run to in that moment.  This was a moment that needed to last forever, a feeling her always needed to climb for.