Metamorphosis
The viscosity as it flowed through his half-spread fingers felt different, even the feel of it pulsating around his body had changed as if it had risen in temperature. The rhythmic movements of his hands created a continuous explosion of silver orbs that broke against his face as his momentum propelled him forward towards one of the barriers that defined the extend of this realm.
Forced to retreat back along his path with the small liquid steel spheres for company, he relished the easy at which his arms rose and fell, slicing, carving, almost clawing his way forward, battling for every inch of locomotion that his mind and body could create.
Gliding through the muted audio of the underworld, all was peaceful here but he knew such paradise was fleeting as his body betrayed him yet again and forced his face from this inverted heaven to the hellish babble that awaited his consciousness in that other plane of existence as if his soul were trapped in purgatory and he could only sample the delights of nirvana before being cast out once again into the waiting bedlam cursing his constant need to return to that forsaken place.
His stay in that reality was mercifully brief, the time it took to fill his lungs and he was once again immersed is that solitary existence where the sounds of the anarchy that raged above only reached his ears once it had been filtered by the untold billions of molecules that now separated him from perdition.
He was once more captivated by the ease at which he thundered through this environment, the motion of his arms and legs in pure synchronicity, it was as if his old form was being sloughed away and his body was been remolded into a new unknown configuration. He could feel the alteration in his surrounding, as if the change was not occurring within in but was instead coming from the Elysium that enveloped him.
He was enjoying the contradiction that this murky netherworld was more appealing than the actuality that awaited his return. He once more marveled at the subterranean illuminations that lit his path from barricade to barricade and how he wished those walls did not exist and he did not constantly need to deviate from his heading that he could instead just concentrate on the next rise and fall of his arm and kick of his leg, distilling his awareness to that single repetitive movement.
He heard a piercing shriek that sounded like the cry of a banshee and knew his time in this Eden had come to an end and he would have to journey back to the surface of reality. But he was not going back a boy, he had been reborn a man, baptized in the waters of euphoria.
Breaking the layer above him he grabbed the edge of the swimming pool and pulled himself up onto the cool ceramic tiles in one graceful motion. He looked around at the other students laughing and talking, theirs voices echoing in the large space, like harpies screeching at each other.
“Good work there Daniel, you really seemed to be improving. I’m thinking I might get you to sub in for Toby at the friendly tomorrow night, just to see how you are in competition”, Coach Morgan said to the sixteen year old boy.
“What the hell Coach! My knee’s fine I don’t need to rest it up, I can swim in tomorrows meet, we don‘t need that loser” said Tobias Mercer looking over at Daniel.
“Shut it Mercer, I say who’s on the team and who’s not, got it. Now get showered and changed before the girls team gets here, you‘ve got class to go to”, bellowed the Coach.
Daniel did not even bother to look in Toby’s direction, for he no longer mattered to him, the Daniel that was afraid of Toby and his sycophants had been washed away in the cleansing.
Daniel just nodded at the coach and walked into the locker room to shower and change, he had a study period next and wanted to get a start on the mountain of homework he received today so that he would manage to get some free time for himself over the weekend.
Striding into the locker room he spotted two of Toby’s minions from the swim team leaning against the half wall that separated the showers from the tall narrow metal lockers that the boys used to store their school clothes and swimming gear. Daniel looked at them, something he would never have done in the past, usually he would slink around these roving packs of jackals in search of a safer route to his destinations, but not any more, he felt the power flowing through his body almost to the point of what it must feel like to have an out of body experience, his flesh felt electrified, his senses heightened.
Daniel had always been a pudgy boy and an even chubbier teenager, but underneath the few extra pounds he always had a fitness level to rival many of the top athletes in the school, he was not built for the sprint but had the stamina of an endurance competitor.
As a solitary young teenager most afternoons he would cycle far and wide around his locality, from the nearby forests to the seafront that was only a stone’s throw from where he lived, and on the weekends with more time available to him he would ventured as far as the mountains climbing as high as he could in order to look down over his town, at that distance it looked no bigger than a child’s toy and it helped him put his worries into perspective, that little town was only a speck on a map and there were bigger and better things awaiting him.
He enjoyed the diversity of these locations, they made a change from the day to day life inside a concrete and stone battlefield populated by individuals who he could not seem to connect with. His peers only wanted to assert their positions in this society with petty attempts at power plays as they all sought their place in the world.
Daniel for his part had been content to let them have their jibes and took the occasional push or verbal attack as they would wish any potential victim to, with out reply or attempts at defiance.
But that was before today, he had been training hard at swimming over the summer months and now that a new year was starting in school he was ready to contest for the leadership in all things, his daily exercise routine had dropped most of the extra weight he carried and had improved his swimming ability from merely just been able to go from one end of the pool to the other without drowning to feeling at home in the water.
Today was a new day, a new year and Daniel was a new man. They had killed that young boy with their small hatreds and now like a phoenix from the flames rose something else in that boy’s place, something that did not contain the lost boy’s empathy for all life, this boy forged into a young man by the heat of a thousand insults now saw his peers as nothing but obstacles in his life path, and once he revealed his new stronger id those obstructions would remove themselves from his consciousness or be removed from it forcefully, the choice was no longer his to make. It was a simple equation, an either/or scenario.
Ignoring the two boys he turned the corner into his aisle and came face to face with Toby and another of his henchmen.
“Hey asshole, you’re gonna call the coach tomorrow morning and tell him how sick you are and can’t make the swim meet, otherwise I’m gonna break your nose, got it”, Toby said leaning against the metal door of Daniel’s locker. Daniel’s clothes were strewn all over the wet floor and the contents of his schoolbag had been tipped out at the foot of his locker.
“I don’t think so Tobias”. Daniel said.
“What the hell did you just say,” Toby snarled at Daniel pushing himself off of the locker and raging into the aisle with his fists clenched as his side and sniggers of his so called friends reverberating in his ears.
Daniel knew the time had come to reveal his nature reborn and weighed up the consequences of creating the enmity of one or generating the fear of many. That question had already been answered the moment he had called Toby Tobias, a no-no since kindergarten, one of the iron rules of the law in this jungle and to break it meant an example would need to be made of him so his course of action was laid in stone as soon as he uttered the word Tobias.
Daniel move a step closer to Toby and whispered, “Tobias”.
The enraged boy moved at Daniel with speed and his fist raised to strike a blow into Daniel’s face. Daniel had studied long and hard over the summer and practiced the required movements enough that they were burnt into his sub consciousness, he had trained his mind in this way as much as he exercised his body in the pool.
Daniel shot his right foot out driving his heel into the soft tissue below Toby’s knee, the knee that had been supported in the pool with a strapping that Toby had removed once back in the locker room. Toby’s menacing advance crumbled just as he did as he went crashing down on his knees onto the wet ceramic floor of the changing room with a strangled cry of pain, the boy’s cry turned into a wail of agony as his damaged knee further crushed itself against the hard tile surface, Daniel stepped forward and grabbed the crying boy’s face in his hands and drove his knee into the nose of his enemy with enough force to break it but not to send shards of bone into the boy’s brain.
“What the hell is going on in here,” the Coach shouted as he walked into the room to hears the cries of Toby as he lay on the floor in a semi-conscious state.
“Tobias slipped on the wet floor and he hit his face off one of the lockers,” Daniel calmly told the coach while he looked at the three other boys, each in turn, daring them to contradict him.
“Jesus but you’re a bloody fool Mercer, looks like you’ve screwed up your knee in the process. You two pick him up and get his to the nurses office, I’ll follow you down when I get the chance,” Coach said to the two boys now standing away from the shower wall in a state of shock. Their world had just been flipped on its head with two blows to the alpha male that had left him whimpering like a lost puppy.
“Well, move it dumb asses before he bleeds to death all over my locker room floor,” Coached said rousing them from their catatonia.
“And on your way back from the nurses office drop into the janitor and tell him to get up here and clean this bloody mess up.”
Jumping at the coach’s commands they picked the crying Toby up and proceeded to half carry, half drag him miserably down the aisles of metal corridors on the way to get some medical aid.
The coach looked over at Daniels clothes and school books lying on the ground and turned to the last remaining member of Toby’s posse.
“Now I don’t think Daniel here dumped his own stuff on the wet floor, so what I’m suggest to you Charlie Moore is that you place every last item back the way you found them and then take yourself down to the principles office and explain what you did here, got it boy?” the coach asked Charlie, turning away without waited for a reply.
“Daniel, back to the pool, I checked and you’ve only got a study period next class so I want you in that pool training hard for the next hour, it looks like we’re going to have a full time opening on the team and you’re gonna have to fill that spot for now.”
Daniel looked at Charlie as the boy began picking up his clothes and noticed that he would not make eye contact with him. The fear of many he thought to himself as he walked back out to the poolside and moved to the middle lane and began some stretches.
The girls swim team moved out from the dressing room and he watched impassionedly as they filed pass him, some snickering as they believed they were looking at the Daniel of old, and some sticking there noses in the air ignoring him.
But Daniel was not interested in these girls for he had caught sight of Grace Monroe walking towards him, she had pushed her long raven black hair up into her swim cap and was hiding away the remaining errant strands when she noticed him.
“Hi Daniel,” she smiled as she moved past him.
Daniel smiled back and as watched her dive into the pool barely causing a ripple on its surface. Grace smoothly carved her way through the water and effortlessly flipped into a turn and returned to her starting point. She stopped briefly, looking up at Daniel.
“Are you going to stand there all day or were you thinking of swimming?” she asked, winking at him and diving back under the water. Daniel smiled at that and executed a perfect dive back into his domain.
The young Poseidon had found his Amphitrite.
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