Lupus In Fabula

By TwinEnigma

Warnings: AU, dark

Epilogue:

"Well, at least my sister's not some psycho!"

Toby turns before he can even think about it, something hot and strange boiling in his blood, and punches the boy in the face.

Luke Farthing is a few months older, a little taller, and heavily built. His face contorts in an ugly scowl as he raises his hand to the red mark on his cheek.

"Sarah's not like that! She's sick!" Toby says, shaking with rage and adrenaline.

I hit him. I hit him. He's going to kill me. I am so dead.

Luke lets out a roar and jumps at him, knocking him to the ground. He punches him in the face over and over and Toby isn't even aware it's stopped until their teacher is pulling Luke off of him and asking him if he's okay.

"Oh, Toby, honey, why did you do that?" his mother asks later on, when they're in the emergency room.

"He said mean things about Sarah," Toby says, not very sorry at all. His head still hurts and his left eye is hidden under bandages. There's something wrong with it, the doctors say.

His mother is quiet and he crawls next to her, resting his head in her lap. He is a big boy, but he is not that big, not yet, and his head hurts.

Days later, they let him leave, but there is something wrong with his eye. It doesn't see things where they should be and it gives him headaches a little. In the mirror, the black part nearly swallows the blue in his left eye. It looks cool.

In school, everyone shies away from him more than normal. Your eye is creepy, his only friend tells him.

Luke sneers at him at recess.

"Look, it's the goblin queen's knight! Come to defend her royal craziness again?"

Toby glares back at him, his eyes narrowing in anger and undisguised hatred at the bully. Sarah is his big sister and no one insults her in front of him. Sarah's sick. It's not her fault she says funny things sometimes.

The teacher turns away to stop Jimmy from pulling on Mary's pigtails.

Toby's lips move almost of their own accord, shaping into words he remembers from once upon a long-ago dream: "I wish the goblins would take you away, right now."

Luke begins to laugh.

There is a sudden, rolling clap of thunder as the sky darkens and then the shadows come alive.

When he looks back, Luke is gone.

No one is laughing now.

AN: Oh shi-

Maybe magic after all.