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     Gabriel blinked calmly at the sight, contrary to the commotion of the students around him. Fraternity drunks cheered on, making encouraging chants, while the girls all seemed to have mixed emotions about everything, especially when the blood spattered on the cement every so often. A series of sickening thuds sounded in unison with a muffled grunt, and a pattern-esque cracking balanced out the rythmic motions of violence.

     A young man collapsed to the ground a second time, but immediately pushed himself up again. A trailed snapping sound, like cracking ice, repeated itself as the fallen student stumbled to hold his position for an attack. The sound reminded Gabriel of the crunching of chips, and his stomach growled. He'd have to step in soon if he wanted to get any food later.

     The young man couldn't have been much older than Gabriel, but his face had been torn and bruised with such sadistic treatment, that his face seemed wrinkled, as if it had aged fifty years. He punched forward clumsily, missing both his attackers, and the two opposing students resumed their rythmic brutality. Finally, the victim collapsed to the ground, without the strength to fight back. Still, his attackers continued to kick their victim, spreading more blood onto the concrete.

     Stepping into the small ring of the fight, Gabriel was met immediately with a quick shove and a strong punch to his jaw. His lips parted, and he tasted fresh-flowing blood in his mouth. Gabriel blinked, and the crowd pushed and stretched away in a sunburst towards the sky. Only darkness could be seen as the light dimmed in Gabriel's eyes. The image of the two aggressors warped itself, twisting and expanding and contracting. Gabriel's left arm went numb.

     The darkness swirled, and Gabriel dreamt of black light swirling with crimson clouds in ripples of infinite speculars, like sunlight bouncing off steel.

     Ambulance sirens wailed nearby, and Gabriel found himself collapsed across the sidewalk, without the energy to move. A crew of police officers surrounded him. As he was lifted off the ground, a puzzled expression dominated his face, and he glanced to the nearby ambulances, watching the emergency teams lift up the body of a student.

     Blood spattered over this student's torn, white, button-down T-shirt, and a stream of blood still oozed freely from his mouth, which had been forced open by a broken jaw. The student's face was badly beaten, eyes swollen and sunken, blood bending around the bags of his eyes and wrinkles of his swollen bruises. The small space between his brows was blackened and bevelled and the skin crushed, the bone beneath shattered. The blood trickled down over his left arm and trailed to the cement below him.

     Gabriel glanced to his own arm, realizing a moist sensation on his hand. Deep crimson and black fluids trickled down his knuckles and dripped with every step of movement.

     "W-what the hell happened?

     Gabriel sat in a plastic blue bucket chair, his head over his knees, staring at a semicrumpled sheet of paper. From the various eyewitness reports, the police eventually made the most accurate descriptions of what had happened, and at Gabriel's request, gave him a copy. Gabriel was shocked at its contents. Nothing came to his mind while reading it. The last thing he remembered was Lucas' appearance during the fight, and the blood that had sunk into the cement.

      You stepped in. A voice whispered in the back of his head.

      "I . . . stepped in . . . ?" He whispered to himself under his breath. "That's right, I remember that. I pushed into the fight, and . . . and John? John punched me. But, I don't remember any-"

      The blood.

      Images flashed through Gabriel's mind. The same images that had flashed into his head the second he tasted his own blood.

      "My blood . . . I remember the taste, and then . . . that's it.

      Gabriel leaned back into the chair and closed his eyes. Instant throbbing pain tunneled into the sides of his head. He opened his eyes immediately in alert, and his sight was filled with unreal images. Flames sprouted from wooden doorways, licking against the framing, shaded in a deep red. One of the doorways opened, and a black shadow stepped out, its eyes glaring white, its skin shimmering with obsidian plasma. Gabriel forced his eyes shut once more. The visions stopped.

      It was Dr. Lucanius. The psychiatrist they had assigned him was an annoying man, Gabriel though. For once, his own twisted hallucination was fairly accurate: A shadowy, lifeless, malevolent creature. Dr. Lucanius sat in a chair opposite Gabriel, opening a manila folder, and sifting through hordes of papers. He pulled out one packet of information, returning the folder to its place in a black briefcase beside his chair.

      "Gabriel, do you know what this packet is?"

      "Yeah, my psychiatric records, right?" Gabriel favored speaking poetically when talking to the doctor, in an attempt to throw the doctor into a rage, but today was not a good day.

      "Yes," Lucanius growled, "These are the reports on your mental condition, collected police reports, notes taken during our management sessions, and the results from various psychiatric tests. Normally, we would never release this information to a patient, but your case forces me to comply to different means."

      "Yes."

      "You short-amnesia connected with this upsetting event clearly shows that you have an emotionally-managed memory. Testing confirms that you are a manic-depressive, and also that you are serverely detached. The witnesses mentioned that you had no emotional response to the savage beating of your roommate. Either you hate your roommate, or you are naturally adjusted to violence, as if bloody massacres are an everyday sort to you. The incident you were involved in, by eyewitness accounts, said that you seemed to become more and more violent at the sight and taste of blood. You also mentioned vague remembrance of hallucinations, which may be a serious sign of illness. I've never personally seen anything like this, and I've only heard of a similar state twice." The doctor seemed fascinated with a disease.

      "Is there a term, then?"

      "Well . . . yes," the doctor shrugged, laying the papers flat on his lap. "You have berserky psychopathy, bloodlust, and you avoid the consequences of reality by hallucination. What's worse, and what we cannot determine, is that if you have had this disease for an extended period of time, you may have seriously injured, even killed people, and you would have never known about it."

      Gabriel pulled himself out of his strange trance and into startling realization. He hated being trapped inside buildings, and an asylum or prison was just that. "Then what's going to happen to me?" Gabriel questioned hesitantly.

      "Like I said, we cannot determine that you have murdered anyone, or ever done this before. You are expelled from the university campus and are to be assigned to the nearest mental institution."

      The two exchanged glances, and Lucanius passed Gabriel three papers, prewritten prescriptions for various drugs. Later on the same day, the school council meeting informed Gabriel of an official expulsion notice. About a half hour later, two officers arrived to escort Gabriel to the institution.

      As Gabriel left the building, he couldn't express anything. His face was blank, and forgotten images sped through his mind. The face of a man chiking and gasping for air from a shattered esophagus. The look in the faces of two teenage punks, blood trinkling from their hairlines. Hundreds of similar pictures flashed through his mind, each incident progressively less violent, and finally, the last image, the least violent of all: The image of a college student named Kyler, his right eye swollen inwards in a sunken cavity, a small slit of pink peeking out of bloody wrinkles. And his shattered nose, cascading blood, forehead dotted with four black-bruised welts; signs of bone fracture. The images passed and faded. Gabriel closed his eyes.

      The clouds turned pink, then red, and the entire world was crimson. And Gabriel blinked again, and his memory was cleansed, his past forgotten once more. He hadn't even noticed the police car was almost four miles from teh school. Through the window, monocolor leaves took flight from brisk Fall winds, many sticking to serrated blades of grass.

      Winter was coming soon.