006: Pure Again Daylight, Chapter 4

[beautifultragedy]

 

Fandom: Breath of Fire
Story: Pure Again
Summary: Very Bad Things happen when rogue demigods try to reverse time.

Through the Eyes of the Son

 I absolutely hated cliques. Everyone had their little group, where they stood around, and pointed and giggled at everyone else for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I'd rarely see any of these people together after school, or at any social function related to school or otherwise, and they always pissed me off, what with their giggling and being completely unable to hold an intelligent discussion.

 Of course, they loved to point and giggle at me. I was the absolute smallest kid in my class. Even when I hit fourteen, I still had the stature of a 10-year-old. Height-wise, that is. "Fairyboy" was a common 'insult' to them, which stemmed from the black butterfly-like wings that protruded from my back. They weren't just black, and were actually quite attractive, I was told; there was a mess of deep violet and midnight blue in them, and the black had an almost metallic look to it. But they were there, and no matter how attractive they were to adults, to my peers it meant that I was gay. That didn't really upset me much. What upset me was that my classmates somehow found out that they were ultra-sensitive to the touch, and if someone grabbed one with enough force, I'd collapse in pain, screaming.

 That made it very difficult to win fights, so I avoided them when I could. But if I needed to, I would. And what pissed them off even more was the fact that despite having an enormous handicap, I'd still win every single fistfight I was in. A gay fairyboy could beat the class bully. It was not good for his reputation.

 The class bully just happened to be my step-uncle, Byron. Two years older than I was, he made sure he made my life a living hell in return for being able to fight him off in school. Between him and his older sister, my step-mother, I frequently wondered how I was surviving.

 At one point, I asked Dad if I could have the wings surgically removed. He agreed, reluctantly, and went to talk to Mom about it. She didn't take kindly to the idea. In fact, Dad came home that night with a rather painful-looking handprint-shaped bruise across his face. Neither of them ever told me exactly why Mom got that pissed off about it.

 At around my thirteenth birthday, I did something nasty to my best- and only, it seemed sometimes- friend, Thomas. We were roughhousing, and he moved to hit me in the stomach. He wasn't trying to hurt me, in fact it mostly tickled. But I reached out myself to stop his fist, and when our hands connected, a burst of ice exploded between us. A handful of icicles just appeared. Tommy had to go to the Infirmary with frostbite that nearly took three of his fingers. It scared the crap out of my parents. Kids very often have magical abilities, but when they do, they generally appear right before adolescence, and it's a gradual process, not sudden like that.

 So that's how I came to be in Advanced Combat Magic. And I found myself in a clique. We were a little different than the other cliques around school, as that we hung out almost all the time, and we actually had some decent, deep discussions. There was me, of course, the youngest in that class- second in line was Sorrow, who was fifteen.

 Sorrow was the pretty girl that Dad had taken in when I was four. She'd since moved out with Valerie, Dad's second wife, but the three of them were still pretty close. Sorrow was apprenticed to Valerie and Dad, learning to be a healer and eventually a doctor, like Valerie. Sorrow had a way about her, an aura that could make just about anyone feel better simply by being near her. Why she was in ACM, I had no idea. She sucked at fighting.

 Thomas and Alex were next in age- seventeen and nineteen, respectively. I loved Thomas. I really did. He was the only person, before I was forced into ACM, who ever really bothered with me, other than my family and Demeter. Thomas was my confidant about just about everything. We were together a lot before I got into ACM, and now that I was in a class with him, we were just about inseparable. Alex, before then, I'd liked well enough. We were friendly with each other, but we didn't really consider ourselves friends, what with a five-year age difference and all. He didn't want a baby hanging around him. But he was a pretty cool guy. I found I really liked him.

 Byron and Anna were both sixteen. I didn’t like Byron. He’d been fine, until a year ago, like an older brother to me: protective and caring, in his own stupid way. I loved him, too. And then he changed. It was sudden; it was as if he and Demeter decided that they would coordinate their abuse of me, to do the absolute most damage they could, inflict the deepest wounds they could. I endured it; I didn’t know why they were attacking me like that, or what else they were capable of, and I had two little siblings I had to watch out for, Janus and Sara. They were my world, even more than Tommy.

 That's why I didn't say anything to Dad, or insist on living with Mom. For their sake. I didn't know if Demeter and Byron were capable of hurting Janus and Sara like they were hurting me.

 Anna was Rzalyn's daughter. She was absolutely gorgeous, as well as the most caring and giving person I'd ever known, aside from Thomas. She was quite good at both healing and combat magic. I had such a crush on her, and I don't think I ever quite got over it, even when I became so close to Thomas.

 Finally, our teacher, Rzalyn, who was more of a father to me than Dad was. He was always willing to help with any subject after class. He kept me sane. He figured out that something wasn't quite right at home, I think, and made sure I flunked one of my tests so he had a reason to keep me after class. He didn't pry. He just reviewed why he flunked me, the proper way to cast that spell, and told me that if I ever needed help- with anything- to just ask. After that, I was after school just about every day. I played it stupid in class. I overheard Alex and Byron discussing, on several occasions, the virtues and downfalls of putting me directly into ACM instead of Basic, since it was clear that I didn't have an advanced hold on my abilities at all, as powerful as they were.

 So we had our happy little clique. For less than a year, I saw something that I could remotely consider happiness. Then Thomas found out what Demeter was doing. The shit hit the fan.

 Thomas was sneaking up under my window and heard one of the exchanges I had with her. Every word, every plea, every muffled scream, he heard. He couldn't believe it. He confronted me with it, demanded to know how long this had been going on, and to give him a good reason not to tell Dad, or Mom, or Rzalyn, or Alex, or their own parents, or all six of them. I broke down then, and he agreed to keep it quiet until I'd calmed down and had a chance to talk to him about it.

 That night at dinner, Demeter and Dad told Janus and me that they were having another child. I excused myself right then and there, and went to Alex and Thomas's. I told Tommy what had just happened, to which he listened with an increasingly dark face. Tommy asked me to go to Mom's, instead of home, and that we'd get together the next day with Alex and Rzalyn, and we'd discuss with Mom everything that was going on.

 I did what Tommy said. It was the last time I saw him alive. Alex was over at Mom's the next evening, after a day of being watched like a hawk. I thought that someone had found out exactly how deep our relationship ran, but that wasn’t it. Thomas was dead from a gunshot wound to the head.

 I didn't even have the strength to go to his funeral. It had been ruled a suicide; Thomas asked Alex to borrow his gun; one of the weapons assigned him for training in the Wyndian Army. He then locked himself in his room, used his magic to silence the blast, put it to his head, and fired. That's what they said must have happened.

 I knew Thomas died because of me. He didn't kill himself. He was murdered. No one would listen to me, though. Everyone took my words as the “ranting of a grief-stricken teenager.” But I knew that Thomas would have never committed suicide. Not with what I was going through, and not with what we had.

 Gradually, life started to fall back into the same old pattern. Minus Thomas.