He looked further, and he knew that it was the child from the other world. He knew it was him, and so the talked back:
"What are you—" he said and the child turned his head from the bottom of the water barrel into Micael eyes, locking his with his.
Micael never winced a little for he knew that the child would not do harm unto him for he was living in the other side of his very spectrum, and the child talked with a whisper: "Doing here? I am here to ask for your generous help, Aleck." Micael could not believe what he had heard recently. For… your… help seemed so out of the ordinary as he knew that the child was with Jack, and therefore with sturdy guns and sharp blades, he could protect the shape-shifting child by all means, but the child was never deterrent. He made a way from Jack's whereabout into the definite apparent world of Micael and came into a contact and talk, of which he thought was impossible. So, the black apparition of Jack and the child was never an illusion at all? If they could travel back and forth into two different universes with ease, why cannot I? he asked himself inside his thoughts, but he knew he had to ask something much more feasible that the child could comprehend in the vastest way possible, and so he did.
"What's with the help?" Micael's lips separated and came back into contact once more. His tongue was moving and his mouth shaped how he wanted it to be in order to release not just an echoing whimper and hiss from his voice box which reached the child's ears, and sooner his thoughts. "Is it necessary for one to know what help one needs?" the child replied with his voice tamed like a dead lion, and so did Micael. With sad eyes, he talked once more with the littlest of decibel he could utter: "How may I help you, then?" he asked once more. "You, Aleck. You are the only answer of which I need. I need atonement, and looking at you gives me signs what I may need in my life." "What signs?" "Signs of which you should never be bothered of but to help me," the child sang with the littlest of tone and sounded like he was just talking like a normal toddler who was ranting for candies and Micael had sounded like a parent trying to get the hell out of the situation of both the child and him.
"But what about eighteen? Have you known something since?"
"Eighteen was never the sign you and Jack are looking for, Aleck. It is the way." The child's very response sent the bottom of Micael's spine wiggling like a marshmallow but heavy like a dozen of rock being held together by his conscious and apprehending grip. Micael winced no more, and so he asked the child swiftly, ignoring the pain which had been spearing towards him by the straight more than an inch cut on his sole, and it bled once more, dripping like urine and eventually getting mixed into the still water on the bathroom tile, and flowing down the drain and down into nothingness they went, all of which Micael never bothered to take a single glance or even the single nerve coming out from his brain to his foot, and he continued talking.
"What do you mean? I need answers, need palavers, child," he said while his mind had triggered by the quite talk-of-the-tale of the child of which even him could not fathom at the very slightest level, synthesis-wise and connotation-wise. It seemed like he had lost all of his cognition and the only thing that was moving his very body was his blabbering towards the child, and always ended up getting the very same answer: nothingness.
A continuum of time of which at any point of his whereabouts, he would not be able to nearly state back what the child had said to him, and so he went abashed. "Just, fucking, answer me, child. I do not need god damn palavers," and he could not contain his anger, curiosity and patience. He shouted like a coward and he looked like a kid looking at the child, while the child kept on looking at him, and then he heard a crack. It had pointed his attention at the bottom of the water barrel. No. An inch or two up the bottom.
The cracked sounded like one as if the barrel was being drilled, and there he saw something sprouted from the coming of the sound: a straight sturdy steel with a diameter that would suffice the span of his pinky, and so he looked at it once more. The sound had continued like the steel was spinning so fast that his eyes could not even tell him it was spinning, and the child had no question, either.
"He found out," the child looked at Micael with wary and teary eyes, of which his asking had come finally into something much more evident. "He found? Who the hell found out?!" Micael asked with the highest part of his lungs and his hands clenched upon a part of the barrel's mouth, this time he got no reply unto his question, and the drilling had stopped, followed by the slightest and the littlest of silence both of them could hear. There was no sound at all but their heartbeats and the flow of Micael's blood and thoughts around his body.
The blood of his flowing around his very veins, being deoxygenated by his body and travelling back into his lungs without the very sense of moving, and then his ears started to rumble like pebbles amidst tanks crossing like ants. His blood had started dripping into the water drain, dropping down into the very bottom of the pipe, and it metal clanged like it hit another one, and then another followed by another until he heard a much more louder dripping, this come coming from the barrel. He opened his eyes once more, and he saw the metal which had seemed to drill itself from near the bottom of the barrel had started sip water out to the barrel, with what it seemed to be water which was coming from another place he could not think of which was which and how it was possible in the first place.
...