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Disclaimer: Eerie, Indiana belongs to Jose Rivera and NBC, as do the characters of Marshall Teller and Dash-X; they are not mine. Written for ravenbell in the Yuletide New Year's Resolutions Challenge 2007. Notes: since the origin of Dash-X, or the Boy with Gray Hair was never actually established in canon, this is my bit of speculation for the character.
"It's the Journey, not the Destination"
The Boy with the Gray Hair, it's not a very good name but it's a far sight better than hey you, get out of the way, or one of his personal favorites, 'you, get off the lawn, can't you read the sign. When he's had a good day of foraging and later that same evening, a good sleep he finds it all rather diverting. Sometimes the other street people will ask him to come and share the warmth and some friendly conversation over the open fire of large metal trash bin.
He thought about this as he waits for his new friend, Marshall Teller to come join him in their chosen hiding spot crouched down in the row of ornamental hedge bows only about fifty yards or as Marshall would put it, half the distance of a football field. "Football is a dumb sport, all you do is kick, punt and otherwise mangle a oblong object made out pig-skin. Marshall's late. His alarm clock must not have gone off tonight."
Marshall, unlike other adolescents and some adults that he could name, took well to all of the strange going-ons that have recently begun occurring on almost daily basis in this small town of Eerie, Indiana.
The Boy with the Gray Hair allowed a small smile to fold the creases of his lips and feeling that maybe this time, he will find out who he is, who his people are, and where he comes from. A tall order on the face of things because he has very little background from which to work form, and no idea of where to start looking for answers.
He does know that teenaged boys did not normally have gray hair, in the right lights, it almost appears silver, or have distinct almost star-shaped patterns on the palms of their hands. Okay, sure, when he's in a good mood, sometimes it feels like those traits set him apart, but there is also the loneliness and the freak factor to consider.
"Freak?" Marshall Teller used that word before and I've heard others use it, but what does it mean?"
Upon thinking it over, rolling the cadence and the sound of the word over in his mouth, swallowing the liquid at the same time, he realized that he would rather not find out.
He reached to where he kept a bottle of water handy and uncapped it, raising it to his lips and gulping down the contents. Memory is a tricky thing, perhaps he was not meant to bear those marks, maybe this is why he has no recollection of how or why they got there in the first place; and then it might all just be a random coincidence instead of some grand conspiracy, and it has nothing to do with Eerie's only local Masonic Lodge, the Royal Order of the Corn, and this all just some silly prank played on the grown ups by a couple of adolescents with an overactive imagination.
His dreams, when does have them, are hazy and indistinct, there are of him as a baby, the hair still as silver gray as ever, being held in some sort of ceremony by figures dressed in silver robes with black stitching on the hems and sleeves. If the dreams are to be believed, he came from somewhere else, perhaps far away, and the markings must mean something, but what? He just wishes that he knew exactly what that something might be.
That's the problem with this town, the Gray Haired Boy, reflects, wiping his mouth with the back of his shirt sleeve, "There are way too many random paranormal happenings for this to be mere chance, right?
Of late, until he met Marshall, the boy had quite literally saved his life and right when he had all but given up hope,
and was lying in a ditch, that hope had dimmed to a dull ember.
Now Marshall and his brother, Simon, between them have managed to restore some of that hope.
The teenage boy looked up from studying the lay of the land and all of the possible exits and entrances of the Lodge, known as the Royal Order of the Corn, looked behind and all around, then took note of the men posted as sentry.
The marks on his hands were an exact match for the patterns that decorated the front of their uniform lapels; as weird and uncanny as things tended to get in this town, that had to be too weird to have been a coincidence.
As Marshall was so found of quoting an English detective that he said dated back to the Victorian Era: When you have eliminated all of the probable and likely solutions to a mystery; whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'"
"Truth, hah,!"
In the back of his mind, as he thought over the logic of that, the teenaged boy, sat up, as if a light bulb had come on in his head when he heard the sound of Marshall's tennis shows coming up the paved driveway and then around the back to where he crouched in the bushes. Simon, seemingly unable to contain either his excitement or bottled up energy, running along ahead of the older boy.
"Dude," Marshall announced by way of greeting, "what's up, besides you?"
"Not so loud," the other boy replied. "I've just thought that maybe we work so well together, is because we both share something in common, the need to unravel mysteries and find rational explanations for them."
"Hey, dude, cheer up," Marshall confidently said. "It's all about the journey and not the destination."
"If you say so," his friend replied with just the right touch of doubt and hesitation in his voice, enough to get Marshall's attention, to get a cheerful smile in response, some reassuring pep rally speech and the ritual of the raised palms and the nonsense rhyme of 'high five, down low, up high, too slow, and for the moment the boy with no memory of his past, or his origin, begins to believe in hope once more.