Hey, everyone! Zoke Week is coming up on Tumblr soon - December 29! - so you're going to be seeing quite a lot of me in the next week. But before I get to posting a lot of shippy fluff, there's a piece about Mike in juvie I wrote a few days ago that I've decided to crosspost over here. It's not very long, but I decided to get it out of my system before the fluff begins.

Vince had seen and heard a lot over his months tangled up in Canada's legal system. Being locked in a building filled with "delinquents" that the city aimed to make proper young men out of led him into contact with all sorts of people, a lot of whom would do and say some pretty strange, unstable things.

But never before had he bunked with a cellmate who wouldn't stop crying.

"Would you stop that?" he snapped at the lump on the other end of the cell. His roommate had buried himself underneath his blanket, but the blanket didn't silence the quiet sobs that came from beneath. "I said stop!" he yelled again. "I'm trying to sleep!"

The blanket shifted, and a head poked out from under it. A scrawny young boy with tear stained cheeks peered out at Vince. The boy's identity made the constant cries even more unsettling. Ever since he'd arrived a few days prior, the boy - Mal, Vince believed the name was - had been a menace and a creep. Vince usually only saw Mal at mealtimes, but Mal would always sit on his own and simply stare into space. He never ate, which probably explained his underfed figure. Sometimes someone would try to make conversation with him, but these attempts quickly led to Mal holding a plastic knife to the poor sucker's throat and speaking poetically about blood until his victim would make a hasty retreat. Vince still remembered the scene he'd witnessed at breakfast that morning...

"Beautiful crimson blood, standing out in bright contrast against dull skin as it runs down… it's strange. People get so uptight about their blood. They scream and cry. They beg me not to draw it. But you don't need all that blood anyway, right? Your body can always make more. More blood, pumping steadily from a fresh wound, dripping down to the white tiles while you beg the blood to stop… but the blood keeps running. It doesn't care what you want. Your heart doesn't realize that the blood it's creating is going to waste. Waste for you, I mean. Not for me. Definitely not for me."

"What's wrong with you?!" a member of the crowd yelled. "You can't hurt him with that knife anyway! It's just plastic!"

With a wicked grin, Mal yanked his victim's head back by his hair and scraped the knife down the outside of his throat. It drew no blood, but it did draw a terrified whimper from the teenage boy's trembling lips.

"Wanna bet?"

Vince left the cafeteria after that. He had no desire to witness whatever was to come. While he was almost certain that Mal did no damage, especially since he didn't hear any news about the other guy needing medical treatment or anything, Mal had a way of making you believe he was fully capable of murdering someone with a butter knife.

When left alone, Mal would mostly sit and stare in silence, although occasionally he'd burst into a disturbing laugh. Vince wasn't entirely sure what triggered those laughs, but some others had noticed a pattern between the volume and length of those laughs, and how grim the story on the cafeteria television was. Mal wouldn't react to a fluff piece about a rescued kitten, but he'd certainly take delight in a story about an arsonist who burned down an apartment complex.

Mal was a freak. But as unpredictable as he was, Vince never would have guessed that he'd hear him cry and see him stare with the wide, pathetic eyes of a wounded animal.

"Where am I?" Mal asked quietly, his voice much higher pitched than Vince was used to.

"Where do you think you've been for the past week? You're still in juvie."

"Why?"

"What do you mean, why? You're the one who keeps bragging about setting your own house on fire and asking if anyone knew if your father suffered enough."

An uncomfortable silence filled the cell before Mal spoke again. "I'm sorry… I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry… that wasn't me, that must have been one of the others… that wasn't me…"

Vince watched, slightly uncomfortable, as the boy shook and tightened his blanket around himself. "What are you talking about?" Vince asked. "I never thought that the self-proclaimed King Mal would be so whiny."

"Mal? Is that his name? I'm not him… I'm Mike…"

This was quickly becoming a bit too surreal for Vince. "What the hell are you on about?"

"I'm Mike…" he mumbled. "I'm Mike, I'm Mike, I'm Mike… I don't belong here… I didn't do it… it wasn't my fault… I need to get out…"

Vince had wondered about his previous behavior, and these events proved it. This guy was officially insane.

"Look, can you be crazy in the morning? I wanna get some damn sleep."

"SHUT UP!" Mal - Mike? - roared at the top of his lungs.

"You're telling me to shut up? You're the one who keeps rambling about-"

"I wasn't talking to you!" his cellmate yelled back, his voice deep like Vince was used to, before slamming his head repeatedly against the wall. "Shut up shut up SHUT UP! Stop crying! You DO belong here! It was your hands, wasn't it? You won't miss the old bastard anyway! He DESERVED it after what happened to us!"

Vince had found him unsettling for a while, but for the first time, a fellow prisoner actually made him fear for his life.

"Dude, cut it out, the guards are going to hear you-"

Mal, Mike, whoever this was, sank his teeth into his wrist and slammed his head against the wall again. His full mouth muffled his screams, but didn't silence them entirely. Vince heard the footsteps and saw the flashlights in the hall as soon as they became detectable, but if his cellmate noticed them at all, he didn't react. He continued banging his head and clawing his free hand up and down the side of his leg until two guards pulled the gate open. Each guard instantly took one of the boy's arms and yanked him off the bed.

"LET ME GO!" he screamed with his higher voice. "LET ME LEAVE! I DON'T WANT TO BE HERE! THIS WASN'T MY FAULT! I'M SORRY! PLEASE LET ME GO!" The guards had no response to his pleas as they cuffed his hands behind his back.

"Sorry about this," one guard said to Vince, without any of the compassion that would typically accompany an apology. The guards then led Mike into the hallway, locked the cell behind them, and walked him out of sight.

Vince still saw Mal in the cafeteria sometimes, but they didn't bunk together anymore.