Lark was sulking. He had just blown up on his parents after a particularly heated discussion about his future. He just didn’t see the point in going to college if he was just going to fail out and waste his parents’ money. They had so much faith in him, but he knew himself better than anyone else, and he knew that there was no way that he was going to be able to make it for another four years of schooling. 

Lark was exceedingly grateful, he really was, but he just didn’t have enough faith in himself. He'd give the world and more to his parents for what they’ve done for him. He just couldn’t. After the discussion moved onto the topic of therapy, that was the final straw. He was not some fragile little blossom that needed to be nursed back to normalcy. Lark knew that they were just trying to help him and that these thoughts were unfair, but he just couldn’t bring himself to care. He couldn’t bring himself to care about much of anything. 

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising he turned out this way, as his childhood was not exactly pleasant, but Lark hated using that as an excuse. He preferred just blaming it all on himself, that was much healthier. 

Born with a combination of ocular mutations, he had purple irises and slit pupils. This was extremely unusual, and as far as the doctors knew, he was the only person like this. They originally thought it was a combination of albinism and cat eye syndrome, but his melanin levels in the rest of his body were normal, and his vision was perfectly fine. The only real consequence was the fact that his eyes were off-putting, and looked demonic. Born in the bible belt, this was not a combination that led to having many friends. 

His biological parents, especially, were not thrilled with his condition. It made people look at them with distrust. His parents, of course, absolutely deserved mistrust, just not for having a strange child. They were, as Lark dubbed them, a tweaker and tweakett, and it was mostly their fault that he was treated so poorly. Because even more than being different, being dubbed trash was worse. Being trash that was alien? Now that was a fate that Lark wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. 

He was treated very poorly by his parents, and his parents didn’t exactly treat each other great either. From hiding in the closet when he heard his father abusing his mother, to his father sometimes turning that abuse on him. He prayed every night for someone to take him away from his parents, and it took years for someone to actually do something. It didn’t take that long because his father was subtle either, it took years because those chickenshit bystanders couldn’t bring themselves to make a phone call. 

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There had been multiple occasions where people saw what was happening to him, and they did nothing. They just assumed that someone else would do it for them. Lark hated them even more than his parents, they had freedom, they had power, and they could have done something. 

So Lark had some trust issues. Luckily for Lark, someone did make the phone call eventually, and he was sent to foster care. It wasn’t much better, but it was comparatively adequate. In an absolutely miraculous stroke of fortune, he was adopted fairly quickly. 

He was not a great child, but his parents didn’t blame him for that. They showered him with adoration and approval until he had no choice but to love them back, and he valued that more than they could imagine. He wanted to be outstanding for them, he wanted to give them the world. Unfortunately, he was not great at the whole ‘education’ thing. Having a childhood constrained to a room in a trailer was not exactly a great learning environment, so it was fair to say that he was a little behind his peers. He gave it his all, but he was just never very good at school, and he didn’t have many interests outside of reading. 

So Lark told his parents that he didn’t want to go to college. He had just graduated from high school, narrowly, and he didn’t have any solid plans for the future. Construction perhaps? His parents who had been saving for his college fund were not pleased. They saw greatness in him, but he couldn’t see it himself. Personally, he thought them biased, they were too blinded by affection to see the reality of the situation. 

So after he told them that, they uhh, they didn’t take it amazingly. It devolved into a shouting match, and now he’s here. His favorite brooding spot. A little bridge over a river. It was built so long ago that he couldn’t actually find the records of its construction. He was sure it must have been built semi-recently because of the steel used in its structure, but besides that, he had no idea. The only thing he was certain about was that it was built before OSHA was founded because this bridge was absurdly hazardous. It’s why he came here to sulk, no one else was fearless enough to walk on the dilapidated piece of shit. 

Lark didn’t understand the trepidation. Sure, the handrails were a thing of the past, and the road itself was a little… not great, but the drop into the river beneath was only eight feet. It wasn’t exactly a raging rapid down there either, it was rather placid. The worst case, as he saw it, was that he got a little wet.

“I need to apologize. What I said was uncalled for, and I do love them quite a bit. Yelling at them was immature. Granted they yelled at me too. God, I suck at this.” Lark complained to the air after sitting at the edge of the bridge for a bit.

As he was getting up to go home, a strong gust of wind blew him off the bridge or tried to at least. He managed to grab onto the edge and was debating just letting himself drop. He didn’t have his phone on him, so it would just be a mild soak. 

While he was debating with himself, the concrete he was holding onto gave out, and he began to fall. Now he was panicking, not because of the fall, but because of the two-hundred-pound slab of concrete that was descending with him. He tried to push himself out of the way, but the briefness of the drop worked against him this time. 

He landed in the river bed moderately okay, and the water had slowed the momentum of the concrete a little but had weighed him down enough that he hit his head and was knocked unconscious in the river. Water plus Unconsciousness equals going to the forever box.

Well, for him, it just so happened that death's claws couldn't quite hold him that long.