The cell is small and damp. It's presumably once white walls now hold a tint of yellow and looks as if each of its panels had been saturated in cheap boxed chardonnay. One corner reeks of urine. The other corner has an exposed toilet with a built-in water fountain as its backrest.

A shitty place for a shitty person.

Bolted to the floor, the steel frames of the bed creak underneath the thin lump of a mattress as Morgan stares blankly at the wall across from him. Black ink stains underneath the tips of each of his fingernails. The police already have his prints in their system, for a few years now actually, but understandably took them again as a precaution to see if they would match with any of the prints found at the crime scenes. Not that the masked man had left any.

He thinks back to the last time he was incarcerated. Well, the time before last. He had been taken in for underage drinking on top of public intoxication after a crazed night of bar hopping with his new fake ID. Instead of writing him a ticket that his parents would ultimately have to pay, Sheriff Martinez thought that forcing him to spend the remainder of the night locked up would teach him a lesson. If only Morgan had learned from that experience, then perhaps he wouldn't find himself back in this familiar spot.

Except this time, it's much darker. The three walls—four if you count the iron bars marking the entrance to his cage—seem to be dragging themselves inward and, with each minute that passes, he senses that he will soon find himself suffocated by the mountain of remorse weighing in on his conscious.

Why is he still alive? Out of everyone—all of the innocent people that have fallen victim to that madman's knife—why is he still breathing?

Not to mention that young boy...

Daniel Levesque, eyes wide and a smile stretching from cheek to cheek, stares through a thin sheet of glass pressed against the picture frame, which trembles in his older sister's hands as she peers down at it in dismay.

She remembers the day it was taken. Kids were lined up in the school's library during the second week of their first semester, most eager for their school photo and the rest dreading the outcome. Daniel was one of the latter. He had buried his chin into the collar of his uniform and, in that moment, Kris could tell that he was more nervous at the fact that this was going to be his first year in junior high and he was being tossed into a completely new crowd in a completely new town. He figured that if his picture came out horrendous, when the yearbook arrived his classmates would see him as nothing but a laughing stock. A title which he feared would carry over all throughout grade school.

"Fuck 'em," Kris, reading his thoughts, had whispered into his ear from behind.

Slowly, his chin found its way back into the light as he turned around to face her with wide, I-can't-believe-you-just-said-that eyes.

"I know what you're thinking," her voice returned to its normal volume. She placed her hand on his shoulder reassuringly. "I thought the same thing. Ugly photo equals douchey kids knocking your books out of your hands and shoving you into your locker on a daily basis. Do you wanna know something?"

"I..." He paused hesitantly. "I guess. Sure."

"Well for one, the lockers aren't human-sized. Second, ninety percent of school photos come out looking terrible."

"Nuh-uh."

"Uh-huh." She smiled, gesturing to the bearded man that stood past the front of the line. He aimed his ridiculously large camera at a child propped on a barstool in front of a cobalt blue backdrop and, with one click, a bright flash startled the boy and the photographer shooed him away as he called for the next student. Kris continued, "I seriously think it's their job to make kids look bad. They wait for you to blink or sneeze or some other uncontrollable bodily function and then—snap—just like that, the photoshoot is over. It's the same way in high school. Just cover your school badge with a smiley face sticker like I do."

Daniel giggled as he dug his hands into the pockets of his khaki pants. She could feel the tension in his shoulders loosen. "Yeah. I guess you're right."

"I know I'm right," she said with a smile as they had reached the front of the line. Nobody else was accompanied by a family member but, luckily for both of them, Kris has always had a baby face so she blended right in with the swarm of surprisingly tall middle schoolers. She hoped that her large overcoat would draw attention away from the fact that she was not wearing a uniform.

"Yeah. Fuck 'em." Daniel, still giggling, repeated in a low voice what his sister had said moments ago. Before he could turn to flash his smirk at her, the back of her hand lightly slapped the rear of his head. "Oww!"

Her smile had quickly faded as her brow narrowed. "Language."

"Sorry." He rubbed the back of his head, knowing that he had probably pushed their bonding moment a bit too far.

While moving here, Kris had lashed out at her parents due to the fact that she had to leave all of her old friends behind. A few weeks had passed and, without anything much to do until school started, she picked back up on her guitar lessons—ultimately developing her melodic method that she uses today. If it wasn't for her father's promotion and the family's relocation to Riverside, she probably would have given up on that dream. It didn't take her long to realize that Daniel was on the same boat as her and, over the course of the summer, the siblings had grown closer than ever before. They became best friends.

"Next," the photographer had suddenly called as he pushed a button on his camera.

Realizing it was their turn, she gently pushed her brother forward as her smile reappeared. "You got this, Danny."

As if concomitant with her reminiscence of the camera flashing as the photographer took Daniel's picture, bright lights flash through the window in front of Kris—the glare of the passing car breaking her reverie and snapping her back to a cruel reality in which her brother no longer exists.

The framed photo finds its place back on the nightstand next to Daniel's twin size bed. She fluffs the pillow and fixes the Spiderman sheets, as if someone is about to sleep on it, before rising from the foot of the bed. She walks to the bedroom door and takes one last look at the picture, tears filling her eyes as she flicks the light off.

"Say something, I'm giving up on you. I'll be the one if you want me to." Minutes later, Kris finds herself sitting in front of her laptop in the living room as she sings a cover of the hit song by A Great Big World. She attempts to look up at the webcam—her old webcam—clipped onto the laptop screen but, as she refrains from crying, she can't pull together the courage to do so. "Anywhere, I would've followed you. Say something, I'm giving up on you."

Propped on her lap is her guitar and, as she plucks at the six strings, she can feel her nerves winding tighter than the wires brushing against her fingertips. She picks up her pace to accompany both the rhythm of the song and the pounding thud of her heartbeat against her chest, carrying on for a couple of minutes until she finishes the final verse.

"Say something, I'm giving up on you." She pauses and takes in a deep breath. "Say something..."

https://youtu.be/L16fMyUSEz8

Her eyes slowly gaze up to make contact with the camera. She quickly reaches forward to hit the 'Upload' button before she breaks down into tears and, as the video transfers to the server, she notices her email is still open in another tab on the web browser.

Kris clicks it and quickly scrolls through her inbox until she finds the forwarded email from Vinyl Confessions that Jesse had sent her a few days ago. She hears his voice tunneling through her head, repeating something that he had once asked her a while back when he first told her about the record label's offer. "What's really holding you back?"

As she realizes that her answer has since changed, her fingers begin to stroke at the keyboard as she replies to the label's message and prays that she didn't wait too late. A solid two paragraphs soon fill the page and her eyes dart back and forth as she quickly proofreads them for error. Once done, she sends the email without further hesitation—figuring that sometimes it's best to follow your gut, even when your heart is pleading for you to do the exact opposite.

On the floor sits the new webcam Jesse had given her, packed inside its original box.

♫ sɪʟʜᴏᴜᴇᴛᴛᴇ / ᴀǫᴜɪʟᴏ ♫
♫ sᴀʏ sᴏᴍᴇᴛʜɪɴɢ / ʟᴜɴᴀ ʙʟᴀᴋᴇ ♫

Do you think Kris accepted or declined the label's offer?