A Feeling in my Chest

I’ve spent a lot of my life swallowing my emotions. It’s how I’ve had to survive - pretending I was fine, that I didn’t want anything, just to keep one foot in front of the other. In no way is it a good way to live - I never want to imply that life was easy this way. It merely...was.

No one knew if I was happy, if I wanted attention, which I always did but hardly got, if I had an opinion, or that I had a name no one else knew - Percy. One foot in front of the other, day by day, letting everything fall out behind closed doors. Emotion took the color of crimson, falling out of my body and out to white ceramic in painful silence. Pain and numbness became every emotion, but in pain there was so much catharsis. It wasn’t pleasure- that too became a task I had to fulfill in exchange for some wicked kind of attention, but closure. Release, because in that moment I felt everything, knowing that the blood was mine and no one could take that from me but me.

How cruel is that? I didn’t know someone could take that from me too.

Edeline had a talent in taking things from me. Yanked them out of my chest, until that numbness and pain mixed. Took my dream, my belief in myself, and my name. The feeling of emptiness became a pain in itself, and in the pain there was no catharsis, just hollow wounds bleeding out.

She was good for one thing, though. When she took my blood, my body, my life, she gave me something else. A fire.

I didn’t know it was there at first, it was only an ember deep in my heart. Telling me, at least subconsciously, that I needed to survive. That even though I had to steal my blood, it could still be mine, as long as I kept moving, and kept hunting. That Edeline wasn’t everything.

But it got fed.

Every time I got called ‘useless’, ‘falling behind’, a ‘disgrace to the pyramid’, ‘Mary’, it grew brighter. Sometimes, it let itself be known as a beast, clawing at the bottom of my throat telling me to let it go. Let it burn. But I didn’t, it was a creature, something inherently inhuman.

But there it grew.

At the time, I didn’t know that it could be controlled, tamed, used as an extension of my body into the Thaumaturgy I was beginning to both detest and rely on. I just knew it was there, and every time I got ground into the dirt it begged to be let free. I didn’t know that I could take the life of another, rip up a soul like flesh and muscle in the jaws of the predator I felt myself becoming.

I was scared of that predator, that monster that had laid its home in my ribcage. It twirled between the bones and around my unbeaten heart like a snake, baring its fangs dripping with crimson venom as I tried to twist its jaw shut. I wanted to hide any sign of it, modifying even my aura to hide it away.

Edeline thought it was a gift she gave to me, and she made it very clear. To be fair, she did give me a gift, but she didn’t realize what it was either.

“Maybe if you weren’t so obsessed with pretending you’re a boy and a magi, you’d actually be useful!”

It's almost sad, that after twenty-four years of torment, nineteen years alive and five years dead, that’s what breaks the fire out of me. A raging blaze of anger and pain, tearing at cold skin and piercing through what was left in a rotten body to take back what’s mine. What was once a small razor cutting under skin turned into fangs hungry for vengeance as much as it was hungry for blood, a raging inferno that could only burn itself out.

I don’t remember any of it, just the scars of the fallout. A mortal soul can’t handle the heat, but it can piece things together from the cinders left behind. What I did, to a degree, doesn’t even matter, but it's what I got back. Edeline only gave me three things, and it was in her death.

My blood,

My name,

And the ability to feel again.