(no subject)

[tru7h_serum]

Family.

Forgot what that word meant. It’s different now. Different when your life flashes before your eyes and now you’re here, tied down on a fucking stretcher, needles and tubes and wires stuck in your flesh and sending all sorts of electrical and biomechanical impulses through your veins, commanding you and telling you what the fuck you’re supposed to be thinking.

Funny, how ‘different’ is the only word that comes to mind when I think of then and now.

Looking back, I can’t say I would have done anything any differently... unless I had been given a chance, a choice... a cause. But I wasn’t given shit.

No matter.

If there’s a point in sitting here, thinking of everything I could have done better, then I don’t see it. What’s done is done. Remember it and move on. Learn from it, but don’t dwell on it. If there’s a single fucking lesson that’s been battered into my brain, it’s the one that screwed me over and landed me in this shithole. I used to think life was hell.

Never again. Never, never again will I make that mistake.

“What is that.”

I pretended not to hear her and continued scratching my pen against the paper, digging the tip into it as hard as I could. Black ink was smudged on my hands and face, and I was pretty sure I got fingerprints all over the desk in the process.

Not that I cared.

Mother, however, was a different story.

“Xirtrian, what are you doing,” she said, her voice getting louder.

Again, I ignored her. If she was too stupid to figure it out herself, then that was her problem, not mine. And here adults thought they knew everything. Figures.

“I’m talking to you, Xirtrian, now answer me-“

“Answer her, you dumb fuck,” I heard my father growl from the living room. “You stupid or something?”

I refrained from rolling my eyes at him. No reaction. That was the key.

“Xirtrian, you’re making a mess. Clean that up and put it away.”

When I didn’t move, she got frustrated with me and snatched the pen out of my hand. “Listen to me.”

I stared at her blankly. There was something indistinguishable in her eyes, something that was always hiding there.

I saw her gaze flicker to my father, and the spines on her shoulders went limp. Fear. So much fear and pain and hurt in her expression, but it was so brief that it was hardly noticeable.

Except to me.

I saw it clearly, in every movement, in every word. That absolute fear.

Never understood it. Never understood what was wrong with the foundation of my life. My support system. My family.

I loved my mother. At least, I thought I did. It was hard to understand the tangle of emotions that spun around in my head. Right now, I felt absolutely nothing.

I stood up stiffly and walked away without a word.

The second my door shut, I heard her pick up the paper. I assumed she was looking at it. My curiosity got the better of me when I thought about seeing her reaction, so I opened the door a crack and looked down the hallway. She hadn’t even glanced at it. I watched with disappointment as she absentmindedly dropped it into the trash and started scrubbing the table.

Well, whatever. No big deal. What did I care, if she was interested or not.

That’s when good old dad must have finished his television show. I closed the door, not wanting to listen to their screaming.

As if it blocked any of it out.

I turned off my lights and crawled under my bed, pressing the side of my head against the cold hard floor. The dark seemed to bring some kind of solace, even if it was hardly there to begin with. I dug around under the bed until I found my headphones, then put them on and turned the volume up so loud that I couldn’t hear anything else.

Anything else at all.

Laid there for hours in the dark, listening to the same disk over and over. Couldn’t sleep, no matter how hard I tried. The doctor said I had insomnia, or something similar. Then again, I hadn’t seen the doctor since two years ago, back when I was five. We couldn’t afford health insurance anymore, so for all I knew, I had a trillion other diseases and medical issues that I had never heard of.

Ignorance is bliss.

I was supposed to go to school tomorrow, but I really didn’t feel like going. I’d just pretend to go, like I did every other day. Besides, mother and father both left for work before I got up for school anyway, and we didn’t have a telephone anymore so the school couldn’t really notify my parents of my absence. I’m sure they’d find some way to contact them eventually, but until then, I didn’t plan on attending.

A couple hours later I heard my door rattle in its hinges and knew the front door had been opened and closed. It wasn’t long before I heard it again, and knew both parents were gone.

Now I had the house to myself.

I got out from under the bed and set my music player on my desk. Then I proceeded to walk through the entire house and shut off all the electronic devices and all the lights, like I did every other day. Apparently, the parental units had no concept of conserving energy-and therefore, having a lower electric bill.

Not that they paid any bills, ever.

Humming to myself, I opened up the food storage, hoping to find something edible.

You know, there really is a reason why they tell you to never get your hopes up about anything.

I closed it and walked into the living room, picking up the empty beer bottles lying scattered all over the floor, along with several cigarette butts that my father had tossed on the coffee table. When I went into the kitchen and threw the bottles into the sink, I stepped back and noticed the faint stains of blood on the tile. There were a couple of busted chunks of glass underneath the kitchen counter. Obviously mom had missed some when she swept the mess up.

I stared at the stains, knowing that I had ignored the abuse that had gone on last night. Blocked it out. Stopped caring. I frowned, wondering if I should be feeling any kind of remorse or sadness.

All I could feel was hate.

I bent down and grabbed the pieces of glass in my fist, feeling them cut into my skin as I took them into my room and put them in the bottom drawer of my desk. Why I felt the impulse to do that, I have no idea, but it felt right at the time, so I went with my instinct.

I stood there, a blank stare on my face as I watched the desk. I’m not sure exactly how long I stayed there, completely motionless, but I know it was at least an hour or two. By the time I snapped out of my crazy little reverie, I heard the front door open and close.

Dad’s home.

It wasn’t fear that gripped me; no, it was common sense. To be caught alone in the house with my father was a stupid mistake that I shouldn’t have made. Immediately I started calculating the best escape route.

I bent down, ready to crawl under my bed where the air vent cover was. Too slow.

The door burst open behind me, and I stood there with my back to him, unmoved.

“What the fuck you doing home,” he snarled. I was dwarfed by his shadow, and I suppose I should have felt threatened, but no emotion went through me at all.

I said nothing.

“Look at me, I’m talking to you. Look at me!”

When I didn’t move, he snatched me by the back of the neck and jerked me off the ground, clenching his fingers around my throat. My breath was cut off and I immediately saw the room start to sway in my vision.

He was shaking me, but I was too confused by the spinning motion of the room to really notice the pain that was snaking down my spine. I could smell the foul odor of alcohol emanating from him, and it was enough to make me sick-along with my apparent dizziness. My equilibrium was going haywire.

He suddenly let go and I caught a brief vision of the wall seconds before I slammed into it. Then he kicked me, coughed up a slurred string of curses, and shut my door.

I laid there upside down against the wall for a long moment, trying desperately to reorient myself. The room was spinning so fast that I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. There was a deep throbbing pain behind my eyes, and it was far too bright in the room. What the hell was going on?

Finally, after an agonizing eternity, the room came to a stop and I slid onto the ground, gasping for breath. I tasted blood in the back of my throat; started choking on it. Gagging and coughing, I rolled over onto my stomach and spat it onto the carpet.

Every time I moved it seemed like the dizziness came slithering back, and it took a long while for it to finally fade altogether. I laid there stupidly, and by the time I had enough sense to get up, I heard my mother come in the front door.

Didn’t want her to see me all bloodied and bruised like this. If she did, she’d make a big fuss about it, yell at father, father would yell back, there would be a big argument, mother would tell me to go to my room, and then father would beat the shit out of her for yelling at him in the first place.

Ah, the irony of idiocy.

There was absolutely one thought on my mind, and that was getting out of there as fast as I possibly could. The vent cover seemed like the only intelligent way out, although even though the more I thought about it, it seemed like there was no intelligent way out of this situation. No matter what I did, I’d have to come back, and it’d just happen all over again.

I stared at the vent cover. There was no choice right now. Think about it later.

No. Choice.

That, for whatever obscene reason, made me very, very angry.

It wasn’t my fault this was all going on. I didn’t do this. My stupid parents couldn’t figure out what they were doing, couldn’t pay the bills, couldn’t keep a steady job, couldn’t stop arguing over everything-

“Where’s Xirtrian?” my mother said quietly from in the living room.

Fuck it.

I ran forward, slid my fingers between the wall and the vent cover, and pried it off. Somehow I stayed calm, even though I heard her coming down the hallway and new she’d be in my room any second. I crawled into the vent, turned around and grabbed the vent cover, then pulled it back into place, scuttling as quickly backward as I could without making any sound.

Then I waited.

A few moments later the door opened and light shined in through the doorway, illuminating my room. I saw my mother’s feet as she walked in, worriedly calling my name a couple times.

“He went out with a friend,” I heard my father say, his voice slurred from whatever alcohol he had spent his time consuming over the past couple of hours.

“Which friend?”

“Hell if I know.” He paused, then muttered, “Hell if I care, either.”

Mother shut the door and proceeded to twitter at father.

I wasn’t going to stick around to listen to the oncoming argument.

Sliding backwards on my stomach, I kept going until I felt my feet hang down over an edge. I moved back as far as I could, hanging from my fingers and stretching my tail down to feel the bottom. I had no idea why the vent would go down, other than to lead to a basement, but to the best of my knowledge, we had no basement, so there wasn’t much purpose.

I finally felt my tail rest against some kind of floor, so I let go and dropped down a couple of feet. The further into the vents I got, the dirtier it became. Halfway through, I was already coughing and hacking from the amount of dust that I was inhaling.

After trudging through the dirt and grime for about a quarter of an hour, I managed to find my way outside-unsurprisingly in our “back yard.” The wall of the back of the house behind ours seemed to stretch on in both directions for quite a long distance. I replaced the vent cover absentmindedly, beating the dirt out of my pants without much success.

So here I was. Outside. I had never really gone around the back of the house before, and most of my escapades through the ghetto pretty much consisted of me hurrying to school and back without much looking around between.

Thunder suddenly cracked through the sky, shaking the ground and making me jump like a sewer rat. Rolling my eyes at my paranoia, I started walking down the alley slowly, staying alert and cautious but not feeling afraid. It was strange, what growing up in a house that stank of fear could do to you.

But I guess that’s life.

I roamed for a while, just walking wherever the alley took me. I lost my way fairly quickly, but it didn’t concern me in the least. If I really wanted to go home, I would have paid attention where I was going.

A flash of lightning followed by another roar of thunder made me more aware of the oncoming storm. I saw another bolt of electricity rip the sky in half seconds before a sheet of rain started spattering all over the ground, pelting me with icy cold water. Ducking for cover, I moved underneath a shabby overhang and leaned up against the wall, listening to the thunderstorm with calm interest. I slid down to the floor and sat on the wet concrete.

Gorgeous weather; so much better than sunny days. Sunny days were so typical, so boring, happened all the time... but the thickness in the air, the tension, the uncertainty of a storm...

It was so comforting.

A sudden rush of nostalgia gripped me, and I wasn’t quite sure exactly what I was feeling nostalgic about, really, but it hurt. It hurt bad. I felt the breath leave my lungs and I stared at the rain splattering on the ground in puddles, feeling an incredible sense of loss. It hurt so bad that I lost track of my actual self for a long moment, reeling from the onslaught of memories that flashed through my brain. They were all from before we moved, when I was still young, but somehow they were vivid and powerful.

Captivating.

For a while all I felt was confusion, because I couldn’t understand how I was remembering these things from so long ago. Then I stopped wondering, stopped caring, and just let the memories come to me. A lot of them were bad, and painful, and uncomfortable. A lot of screams from my parents. A lot of violence. Then again, there had always been violence.

But this was the beginning of it. Back when I didn’t really understand what was going on.

Not that I did now, either, but I could pretend I did.

I remembered how my mother used to be so proud and tall. She would always speak her mind to my father, and at first it wasn’t a big deal. But then he decided he didn’t want to hear it anymore. And he hit her.

Everything was different after that.

My father wasn’t ever a good man. I can say that easily and believe every word of it like it was spoken straight from the mouth of a god.

But who was I kidding. As if I was some angel sent from the heavens, such a good little child. What did I ever do that was worth anything. I was just about as useless as my fucking parents.

What am I trying to prove?

It started raining harder and it thankfully drove the thoughts out of my head. Hours went by and I couldn’t force myself to move from the ground, even though water was rushing over my legs and it was unbearably cold.

Go home. That’s what I should do, really. Just go home, go to school, and get over it. Sure, it hurt. But everything hurt. All the good things that happened in life always had a catch-kind of like getting shot in the stomach with an arrow. It hurts like a bitch at first, but then someone comes along and gives you the anesthetic to make the pain go away, and suddenly it’s okay, everything’s good, you forget all your worries as you’re drowning in your head from the drug, total euphoria, things couldn’t be better... and then they rip the fucking thing right back out and you remember everything all over again. Not to mention that you’ve got a huge hole in your torso and all your organs are spilling out onto the ground in a big bloody mess.

What is the point? Will someone please explain to me the purpose of dealing with it, day after day? They always tell me to look towards the future, but honestly I can’t see anything past these dingy grey walls.

Maybe I’m just stupid.

“Hey, fucker, get your ass out of the gutter before you drown.”

I glanced over to my left, not surprised to see another Zentharian glowering at me. He was obviously a grifter, judging by his clothing and the thick accent that made his words hardly understandable. I went back to staring at the ground.

“You deaf or just stupid?”

“Neither,” I murmured.

“Good answer.” He leaned against the wall next to me, staring down at me. “You lost or something?”

I ignored him. Maybe he’d go away. Or maybe he’d beat the shit out of me, see if I had anything of value, and then go away. Who cared.

“Ay? Don’t talk much, do you?”

“You talk enough for both of us, so I don’t see the point.”

He looked genuinely surprised. At least, I think it was surprise. “Got quite a tongue on you, you do, ay? Well then you’d better keep it in your fucking mouth or I’ll cut it out, yes sir I will.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’ll remember that.”

“What’s your name?” It took my brain a second to process what he asked me, because it sounded something similar to “wass-yh-nhyme” and made absolutely no sense.

“Does it really make any difference?”

“Nah, not really, nobody gonna care what your name is when you dead, ay?”

This was just getting ridiculous. “You’re going to kill me for sitting on the fucking ground in the alleyway?”

“Who’say I’m killing you, yeah?”

“Can’t you speak intelligibly?!” I cried out, standing up. “Or does that require too much effort?”

“Don’t be a smartass, kid, I’m twice your age, you little shit. You dumb as a rock. You fuck with me and I’ll kick your ass.”

“Age has nothing to do with intelligence.”

“And neither does the way I speak.”

Good point. “All right, then.”

“Xirtrian’s your name, ain’t it,” he said slowly, eying me up like I was some kind of threat all of a sudden. “Little boy who don’t speak none a word to his parentals, ay?”

“You’re fucking retarded.”

“Am I now, well at least I don’t have parentals that can’t decipher a two-bit from a nine meter-“

I punched him right square in the face. No idea where that reaction came from, since I really didn’t give a shit about my parents, but that didn’t mean he was allowed to say so.

He looked, again, genuinely surprised. “You’re fucking hardcore, little man.”

Wow. This was getting even more stupid.

He held out his hand. “I’m Jagger.”

I stared at him blankly.

Jagger laughed, flashing his teeth at me. “Damn, for a kid you sure got an attitude. You got a problem?”

“I didn’t ask for your name and I didn’t ask you to talk to me. I’m not the one with the problem.”

He seemed to think about that for a second. “You know how to griftboard?”

Way to change the subject, dumbass. “No.”

“Want to?”

“Oh, yeah, like you can griftboard. You can’t even balance an equation in your head, let alone your body on a board.”

Jagger howled with laughter. “Damn you’re mean. Your parents beat you or something, ay?”

I went cold and said nothing.

He stopped laughing, as if coming to a sudden realization that everything he had said had been invariably stupid. From the looks of him, he probably used to have some kind of brain in that decked out head of his, but he suffered from long-term usage of some stupid drug. There was definitely intelligence in his eyes; he just couldn’t seem to tap into it. That’s what drugs do to you, I guess. Sad, really, but I didn’t give a fuck one way or another. He was threatening me for absolutely no reason and was going to get his ass kicked if he tried anything stupid.

The silence stretched for a while, with him looking awkward and uncomfortable and me standing there like a wall.

What the hell was a grifter doing in this part of town, anyway? The thought burned into the back of my skull but I kept my mouth shut. Some questions were better left unasked.

Grifters were basically scavengers that lived off the main population. Nobody liked them, nobody knew them, and nobody really cared, except when they felt like bitching about somebody, and then grifters suddenly became the topic of choice. Jagger was a prime example. He had a couple cans of spray paint on his stud-encrusted shotgun-shell adorned belt, which was one of many that were crookedly settled below his waist. His black pants were covered with white and neon splotches of paint, came down to his knees, and had several purposeless buckles, straps, and zippers all over the place. He even had a couple chains here and there. His t-shirt was formfitting and neon yellow on the front, black on the back, and had weird symbols scrawled on it, along with more zippers and buckles. The amount of random things dangling from his clothing was strange enough, but it was even more bizarre to see the numerous piercings he had-his lower lip, his eyebrow, and several all the way up his jaw spines. Judging from the way he talked he probably had his tongue pierced, too.

Jagger was one of the few Zentharians that had no skin pigment, so his skin was almost translucent but glowed a light off-white color. His eyes and spines were obviously enhanced with something, because they changed color with his expression. I briefly wondered where a street grifter could get the money for something like that, then figured he probably got it done cheaply in some side shop. Like it mattered.

I was getting tired of this game. He came around to toy around with a little kid, and now had his tongue tied up in a knot in his mouth.

“I’ma thinkin’ I made a bad ‘pression on you, ay, Xirtrian? You giving me weird looks, now, and that ain’t cool.”

“I wouldn’t be giving you looks if you didn’t push my buttons.” I noticed that one of the spray paint cans on his belt had a dagger case on the back. I took careful note of it, along with the zicon pistol he toted on his left hip.

“You half my height yet you talk shit like you can back it up.”

“And what makes you think I can’t.” Fine, let’s play the who’s-tougher-than-who-ghetto-game. Stupid, stupid street kids.

Jagger whistled through his teeth, his tongue rattling against the roof of his mouth as he mockingly snarled at me, shooting me a sly grin. His hand was hovering over the pistol nonchalantly, but I caught everything, from the way his eyes kept sliding to my throat and the slight twitch in his tail. “You real stupid, you know that, ay, Xirtrian? Gonna fuck with a grifter?”

“I don’t need a label to back up what I say or who I am,” I said, somehow knowing every movement he was going to make. I was ready to counter anything he could throw at me.

“Ain’t that so, liars don’t make no friends.”

“You aren’t here to make friends, and neither am I. I don’t know who you’re kidding.”

He grinned at me, and his eyes flashed a light orange, then darkened. “You ain’t in no position to be talking shit, Xirtrian.”

“What is the point of this game you’re trying to play with me, Jagger, you’re not going to accomplish anything but prove to me how much of a dumbass you are-“

That did it. He snatched the pistol out of its holster and whipped it up, pre-aimed at my forehead. Not even two full seconds had passed and he snapped the trigger, the sound of the gunshot echoing through the alley.

I should have been dead.

But I was around behind him, grabbing the dagger out of its case and kicking him on the upper heel. He staggered, caught off guard, and he didn’t have any time to counter me before I knocked him up against the wall, ripping his shirt down the side with the dagger before thrusting it up to his throat, smacking the gun out of his hand.

“I backing anything up yet, Jagger, ay?”

Jagger laughed. “Nice, very nice, especially for such a-“ He stopped in the middle of his fast-talking bullshit and suddenly slammed the palm of his hand in my face, kicking me in the stomach and shoving me to the ground. Reeling from the blow to my forehead, I stumbled and fell, smacking my head on the concrete. I barely regained my bearings when he leaped on top of me, punching me in the mouth and cutting my air off with the other hand.

He went to swing at me again, but I caught his wrist, bent it around backwards, and arched my back, using my tail as a counter weight. I threw him off me, snapping his arm in the process. He snarled at me, grimacing from the pain in his arm. I scrambled to my feet, leaping for the gun. My fingers closed around it and I flipped over onto my back, cocking it just as he fell right onto it.

His eyes widened and he froze, the gun pressing hard against his breastbone.

I raised an eyebrow and smirked at him. “Bang bang, you’re dead.”

Jagger’s mouth was twisted in what looked like fury and fear all mixed up and confused into a single expression on his punk-assed face. “You bastard,” he murmured, in apparent disbelief at being outdone yet again. “Gonna shoot me, now, ay?”

I was amused how he still tried to play the tough-guy even as he was shaking in his pants. “Give me a reason not to and I’ll consider it.”

“Well I can give you several reasons to do it, starting with the fact that as soon as you take this fucking gun away from me I’m going to shove it so far down your throat you’re going to-“

“Save it, wiseass,” I growled. “You think you’re such hot shit but it’s obvious that you aren’t, since you just got your ass kicked twice in a row by a fuckin’ seven-year-old.”

He was snarling silently, his lips peeled back from his teeth in a menacing grimace. “What is it you’re trying to prove, kid.”

I almost laughed. “I’m not the one trying to prove anything.” Strangely, he started talking a little clearer and didn’t look half as stupid as he did earlier.

He stood up, seemingly not caring that I had a gun pointed at him. “Okay, game’s over, enough of this shit. You’re too young for this, kid.”

I climbed to my feet as well, flipping the pistol around on my finger absentmindedly. “Too young for what, street ranger?”

“Ah, hell,” he mumbled, looking around in a daze. “Where...? Where the fuck am I? Dude, what just happened?”

I stared at him. “Are you retarded?”

Jagger turned around. “Who the hell are you?”

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

“No, dude, seriously, why do you have my gun. Do I know you?”

“Are you on drugs or something?”

He smacked his forehead. “Shit,” he growled. “Shit!”

“...what?”

“It’s that fuckin’ virolyte, I knew I shouldn’t have tried that-“

“Virolyte?! You took virolyte?!”

I gave him the pistol when he held his hand out for it, rubbing his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I’m a dumbass.”

I was perplexed by this strange personality swing.

Jagger, on the other hand, looked pissed off. “Sorry for whatever I said or did. I really had no control over it. My fault for wandering off when I didn’t know how it would affect me. No big deal, though, looks like you can handle yourself.” He looked me up and down, then raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.

I heard my front door slam, and my heart froze in my chest. “Damnit.”

Jagger glanced over his shoulder, flattening his ears to his skull. “Parentals?”

I nodded.

“That’s no good,” he said. “You goin’ home or you wanna come with me somewhere, ay?”

“Where.”

“Follow me.”

God my writing is old and rusty. I'll write this seriously some time. Freewriting keeps my brain going for now. I'll post more later. Bored.

This is just a /sketch/, so to speak. Just... testing the water.