Darkfic: #064: Ghost
Challenge at 50_darkfics
Title: The trick is to keep breathing
Author: lilhobbit
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Prompt: #064: Ghost
Rating: PG-13
Warnings angst
Word Count: 1464 words
Characters: Original Characters
Series: Turning Blue
Author's Notes: Whoa, an Antonio centered drabble. Don’t get much of those, really.
Previous installments:
· Turning Blue timeline [and Envenom]
You run across land and sea, always looking, always believing. Faith is the key ingredient of your quest, the one thing that keeps you going.
He has possibilities, he has chances - could make himself into a doctor for example. He’s always been sharp, done his homework early and caught on things quickly. He could be a politician; he has the charm, the face, the appearance of a celebrity. They wouldn’t need to bake him that much, only racism could be his downfall and nowadays the one who’s different is the one who succeeds.
He doesn’t want to be a doctor, or a politician, which is why he chose sports, beating himself up each day and night so he might forever memorize his name in people’s minds. Just like all the other options he fully set his mind on this, succumbed to it completely. He practiced; he tormented his body and mind and gave up the small pleasures. It made him feel good for awhile, made him whole. Without anything else but the run, the rush, the victory, he could forget what he’d sought out to run from originally.
But that didn’t last long. The question he’d always wanted to be answered wouldn’t leave him alone. Old memories began crawling back into his mind through dreams, through flashbacks. He’d munch his cereal in the morning and see his mother put the milk on the table, kiss his forehead. She’d be as vivid as anything and just a figment of the imagination. He’d lose his focus, his place and his value.
And once again he’d ask himself, how could love be so corroding? How could it make you see the wrong things right?
Was it an issue of too little oxygen in your brain? Or maybe a mental illness so severe you just didn’t understand the different between reality and fantasy? No, he knew it wasn’t that. Even the sanest were its bitches. Even the collected ones could be easily overthrown. It had to be something else.
Soon he’d already crossed the border to sedition. He couldn’t adjust, he had to know, had to find out.
Each time a demon comes along you know it’s this one, the one who corrupted everything dear to you. It has to be this one, because it cannot be anyone else. The quest tires you, drains you and your faith. And yet the answer lies right in front of your eyes: brutal and unthinkable.
As long as he’s been, he’s known the official tale had to be a lie, a fabrication - a fucking conspiracy! He couldn’t understand it, how his little world fell apart so easily. How he could’ve been so adolescent not to notice - That knowledge sullies it all, sullies each memory. He hasn’t seen his father in fifteen years. He has never visited the grave. He wanted to forget it’d ever happened, but it haunted him to the breach of insanity.
His mother smelled like herbs, wore clothes with veils and scarves with golden lining. Her hair was as black as the night, her eyes kind and green. When father told him she was sleeping, he wanted to wake her up again. Father told him she was like Sleeping Beauty, waiting for a kiss to be revived. So each morning he went to his mother, kissed her lips and patiently waited for her to wake up. He brought her flowers and her favorite clothes and perfumes. She never woke up.
How could he not know the lies? How could he not see she wasn’t animate anymore, that she was already gone and nothing was left but her doll’s shell? He was so stupid, so childish. He didn’t want to believe it after she began rotting, didn’t want to accept she was dead. And father, he still read his morning paper, poured himself coffee and told him that he must’ve been doing something wrong if she was turning ugly. He’d even put the paper away and said maybe she doesn’t want to come back to such a clingy child.
Now his father is just a shadow, just a black hole in his memory. Did he like mystery novels or lighter reading? What color was his hair? He’d seized being the day his son had realized what had happened to his mother. Dead from a blunt strike to the back of her head, fractured skull, internal hemorrhage… All statements he didn’t want to understand.
You’re so close to the end now, the truth behind the lies. You’re sure it’s this one, it sounds just like in your memory: cruel, unfamiliar, violent and mischievous. So you make it talk, tell you if it still remembers that day 15 years ago. The day it corrupted your life, made it fall apart. And it tells you you’re so fucking blind. You can’t understand that the monster is the human, not the demon. And you deny it; because faith is the only thing you’ve had ever since learning monsters existed in this world.
They said he’d been afraid she’d leave and acted so he might keep her with him forever: preserve her beauty, hold the family together. But he’d known it wasn’t him, he wasn’t frightened of her absence. He knew it was someone else, he knew father was just lost without her. And he denied it all, refused to help them, to testify. They took him away anyway, gave him a shiny, plastic life.
And when he wanted to get to the roots he learned there were monsters in this world: Gruesome, corrupting creatures that feast on the pain of mortals. He was sure it was one of them; one had done this to him and his father, because father wasn’t like that. He’d never touched his mother to inflict pain.
And he hunted, and traveled and searched: Always a new scapegoat, always a new enemy. It wasn’t any of them. It wasn’t any of them, because the darkness he was so adamant to find existed only in weak hearts, possessive hearts - The kind that were beating in both his and his father’s chest.
He’d done all he could to block the pain, block the truth. He never wanted to believe humans were capable of such evil just because they wanted to preserve something beautiful, freeze time. And even when he was told the truth, and he gave up trying to deny it, he couldn’t understand how someone could love so much that the purity of that feeling became tainted.
Even now he doesn’t understand the first thing about his father, about his deadly passions.
But then he meets her, gets to know that electrical surge that keeps you from thinking straight. He comes to know the bliss a deep addiction can give. And suddenly he’s seeing a familiar pattern, a familiar setting. He’s falling for her, can’t understand why she’s so special or why he can’t walk away. Pain is redefined. He runs again, beats himself up, and tries to clear his head, block it.
But she remains there and when he’s with him he forgets he should fight it. She fills him, becomes the air in his lungs. When they’re apart he knows nothing else but the thought of her well-being. It frightens him, brings anguish on his doorstep. Now he knows why, finally grasps the motive, the reason behind his father’s evil.
He hides his anger in laughter. He still wants to shout at people to tell them how much it hurts. He’s still looking for someone else to blame and yet he blames himself the most, because he knows why as he’d do anything to keep her as well.
He can see himself in that same garden, holding that same rock and killing her just so his torment would end. Then she’d be still and more pleasing. He could live again, not worry over her belonging to someone else, not worry - not think of her.
The thought never leaves, even when she’s giving him the sweetest pleasure and joy. He fights it, fights the insanity, the destiny, the heritage. It feels stronger than anything. His father’s ghost is there, looming about, watching him. Even though Antonio can’t even make out his face, he knows who it is. It wants him to succeed him, forgive him and finally admit he knows why.
The reason is something he never believed he’d come to unveil. It’s strong, venom at its strongest. Jealousy, possession - some Satan must be whispering into his ear every spare second because he’s never been like this before.
He runs more, inhales, exhales - Keeps up the balance. As long as he can do this he can fight it. When he stops breathing, it’ll have worn him out, made him into a murderer if only in his mind.
- fin