17 Aug 2020, 00:48
Unshakeable Fear
@Persephone Barret
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Selim heard her words, he heard them, but the whispers in his mind still said the same thing, eating into his sanity like maggots, wearing down what little self-worth he had left. They would continue to do so as well, until they turned him into a hollow husk, no personality, no free thought. He would eventually be trapped in that dangerous cage, that cage of emotional self-harm, thinking himself not worth the efforts of anyone.
"Weak,"
They said, whispers hissing like the serpents that made up his clan's symbol.
"You are weak. Worthless, useless-"
He usually ignored these words, but they always tore at him anyway, until he could show anyone the truth that hid beneath his masks. He was too scared to come out of his shell, only to have all his doubts confirmed.
These... personas... they were like a drug. He couldn't stop making them, couldn't stop using them to hide the festering mess that hid inside his skin. He honestly couldn't remember who he was anymore, beyond that boy hat was trapped in that dark dungeon of suffering, beyond the child that had his self-worth tenaciously torn down piece by piece by his own family.
He was terrified that the truth of what he truly was... was just that, a child, tormented, broken, who thinks they're worth nothing more than the dirt on the ground.
It scared him... so he clung to the layers of masks he had built up. They were the chains that hung over the abyss of his identity, his only lifeline, his only safeguard from the truth he was to petrified to even look at.
A sentence the girl said struck at that truth, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking.
There is a person beneath the building blocks that has to be remembered.”
There it was again... that same, damnable hollow chuckle. A twisted perversion of humor that never existed in this boy in the first place. "I... I doubt there's much left of him, of that child."
The girl tried to assure him that he wasn't weak, her largely impartial words and expression more of a blessing than the curse she maybe thought it was. Empathy, sympathy, they rarely helped, because there were few people who'd back up such things. He didn't need his flaws echoed back to him, the whispers already trapped him in that loop.
She said something... the same thing Jack told him when he broke down in that bathroom after he almost killed a dormmate unintentionally. He still didn't quite grasp why that was a positive. In fact, he often came back to the thought that perhaps he should stop lasting, stop enduring his torment.
Because that sounded much better than living the way he did any longer.
He let out a breath.
Inhale.
Exhale.
“Do you…do you want a… pat on the back or something?”
His peer's voice snapped him out of his stupor once more, and he looked up at her, that same weary expression on his face. That didn't hide the dried tear tracks though, the redness of his eyes.
He shook his head, dismissing her uneasy offer of comfort. She was doing fine without such a shallow thing, logic got through to him, not emotions.
Though, the logic she tried to offer did little to break his mental condition.
...
He... he needed to stop this.
He had shown her a hit of what was behind his cracking masks, and even that was a risk, was always a risk. He often learned that the hard way when it was someone other than his older cousin that found him amongst the sakura trees, breaking.
He tried to stand, limbs shaking, and reached down hesitantly to grab his knives, clamping down on the twisting trauma that tried to break through his shell.
"... We should head back... there are dangers about during the night." He spoke, voice hollow, flat.
After he stood, needing to lean against the tree due to the poor physical state he was in, he turned to the girl, expression empty, tired. He was standing at the edge of his sanity, and he only hoped whatever was to come in the future wouldn't push him over the edge.
His father would.... 'fix' that in time.... he just had to endure a little longer, he was close to the next conditioning appointment.
Just a little longer.
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Stats & Abilities:Reducio
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/40
Stamina: 5
Evasion: 10
Strength: 5
Wisdom: 7
ArcPower: 3
Accuracy: 10
Ability: Martial Artist
____ ____ ____
"False Face must Hide what the Heart Doth Know." -Macbeth
S.F
23 Sep 2020, 03:36
Unshakeable Fear
@Selim Faust
Time lost its structure, and Persephone was left to determine her wasted minutes by the position of the moon, breaking through a blanket of thin clouds. Bright stars were more clearly dotting the sky now, little embellishments meant to paint the greater picture of the blackened void above them as beautiful. Their soft gleam danced in her jade-colored eyes, an abyss where they went to die once the girl’s gaze went to find Raven’s again. He was not looking back at her, for the world he was seeing was still only his own and individual to the amber shade, but she could see reality thawing in his iris. With the Slytherin boy’s dark hair falling over his head that way, body a stiff frame as each limb became one, she could almost pretend they were innocent tears, over the petty things in life. Droplets to cleanse himself of surface restricted burdens, to clean the mud from otherwise untouched pale skin instead of feeding the mold growing within him.
That dry, unremarkable and dour laughter sent yet another freezing electric bolt through her spine, a yearning for silence or for fractured sobs to escape his throat in bursts like keeping time. They were occupying a vacant space between emotions, floating in this limbo without a pull in any direction. Persy couldn’t say his intentions with certainty, to shed light on this morose night or to choke his cries down until they broke apart, shed into millions of purposeless pieces, crawling back into his lungs as the air he couldn’t catch. Eyebrows raised faintly, startled by his inhuman demeanor, the words only barely made it to her. They were muddled by his self-hatred, water that the raven didn’t try to fight away, allowing the separate pieces of himself to dawdle. Meaningless words. Words driven by emotion, as they never should be.
At any moment, she could’ve walked away and left this mess behind to pick itself up. Yet, the whirling starlight acted as cement, rooting the girl’s feet to hell and head to heaven, because they were still in that purgatory in between. Something kept her there. Was it interest? Not in the boy himself, little more than a pawn in someone else’s greater game, but in the breeding demons and their spawn-point. Or were there dark-green vines binding her to the grass, wrapped around and around until the universe set her free, let her go with love? Instinctively, her head tilted down, platinum blonde hair falling over, only to see nothing keeping her here. At least, not in this world.
“Much, perhaps not.” The snake replied to his doubts, happily indifferent. A just world would not tolerate the existence of a softening Persephone, she decided. To her, telling him this truth could be just that; honesty. A policy, not a kindness. The skin and bones were a rental. “But that person is to be remembered, not revived. A person cannot be created or destroyed, they can only be reshaped.”
Who were you, before the world told you who you should be?
It wouldn’t have been difficult to sense the hesitance in her offer of physical comfort, the most that could fulfill a wild imagination was a surprisingly gentle nudge with a ten-foot pole. At his declining it, tensed shoulders fell again and a held breath was released. Hell was behind his reddening yellow eyes, one of its many variations. Not the one that lingered in a sleep too long, or that waited patiently behind the plain, white door with a window slightly to the left. One Persy didn’t know, couldn’t navigate with all her senses stopped. But one like a distant family member. With a single shared trait. Only it. Though that was the first thing to draw the gaze of others.
A frailer tree may have crumbled under the weight of his trembling frame and the burdens he bore upon his back, but this one only waved tenderly, perhaps to the passing leaves in the wind or the orbs in their welcoming twinkle. Persephone stood with Raven, gaze bolted on the blades he retrieved with subtle reluctance, as afraid of whose blood they may draw. The raven was his own danger, his own pain, his own suffering, the origin and the dying wish they’d cast on a falling star. For a brief second, their eyes met, both expressionless and without a care. They’d move on, leave, forget the night’s tales, and next she saw him, his flawlessly sewn mask would have an ugly gash and a jagged stitch.
“More than you know.” She whispered, mind loitering on the memory of the giant prefect whose hand suffered for a mere touch. Then, the haunting warnings of the professors this evening, words that had clearly gone in one ear and out the other. That residual effect would doubtlessly strengthen after tonight, left to rot and grow. “Let’s be on the way.”
Don't talk like one of them, you're not. Even if you'd like to be. - Heath Ledger
Sta: 9 | Eva: 5 | Str: 7 | Wis: 7 | Arc: 5 | Acc: 7