Staring out at the infinite sea, even if it wasn’t actually so vast as I’d like to believe, was somehow calming to my mind. It wasn’t quite dawn, even as the sky started to brighten in the distance.
I kicked my feet back and forth over the edge of the cliff where I sat overlooking the ocean. The Atlantic, I thought. I wasn’t very knowledgeable about that sort of thing, but I’d traveled around a lot, mostly just because those I… was in the care of… were on the run. They traveled a lot. They used maps often. I could’ve left them, and yet, it was either by some kind of magic or power or my own helplessness that I’d been stuck listening to them, following them around like a lost puppy or just as simply as a slave. There wasn’t anywhere else for me to go.
I did travel in the past too, though. Back when my mother and brother were with me. Not that there were many views… between prisons. They were long gone… Dead or alive? I had no clue.
Probably dead.
There was still one thing that had always stuck in my mind all these years later, all these years that I hadn’t seen or heard from them. It was a look I’d seen on my brother’s face, one of the last times we’d seen each other. I thought about it a lot. He’d been looking at Myrus and his son. It wasn’t quite anger, and it wasn’t blank nothingness. It wasn’t sadness, which we’d both seen on each other when we’d been separated from our mother. Not desperation either, like when they separated us for those odd times that seemed to escape my thoughts whenever I tried to conjure up the memories.
I sighed. I’d never been able to figure that look out. And I had a feeling that I never would.
A lot of my memories of being in that last prison with my brother, in being raised in some odd way with Myrus’s kids, were all very fuzzy and strange in my mind. I’d accepted it long ago that I wouldn’t be free, that I never had a chance at that. I was born and raised in a cage.
I mean, where would I go? Who would I stay with?
Alone sounded like such a scary word. It might’ve been strange, but I would rather stay a prisoner surrounded by a few constant people, than be alone and free to do as I wished.
I didn’t talk to anyone anyway. And neither Myrus nor his kids knew sign language. If I had something to say, I had to write it down. That being said, I still didn’t write much at all.
Sometimes, though, if I was alone, in times like this, I brushed up on my sign language, saying my thoughts, my words I wished I could say aloud, all of them were expressed to the world, to the sky, even if nobody was listening.
The sun started to peek out above the water, shining across the waves, I began to wonder if there was anyone out there who would. Someone alive. Someone that maybe I hadn’t met yet.
What if I’d have already found them if I left these people?
What if I wouldn’t have been alone from the start?
It was too late to turn back from this path now, I told myself. I was far too deep within things I didn’t know. I was involved with criminals, that much, I did know. I probably should’ve cared. But I got food. I got water.
Sometimes, surviving was enough for me.
I could surround myself in plants, in my abilities. It was calming for me to watch a flower bloom in my palm or a seedling peek up out of the soil slowly.
So, sometimes, I could forget that everyone who ever actually cared what I thought was gone from my life forever.
Sometimes…
Those old memories didn’t stay buried.
Those days when the feelings of those memories weighed me down physically and mentally, survival seemed useless, like some kind of drawn-out suffering made just for me, to torment me until I grew old and died.
If I grew old…
Still, I couldn’t escape the survivalist tendencies. If I fell off a cliff, I couldn’t bring myself to just fall silently. I’d reach for rocks to grab onto, use my abilities… anything to survive and stop the fall. It wouldn’t matter if the end of the fall was instant and quick. I didn’t care about a fast or slow death. The only thing that seemed to stay was a will to live, despite everything around me.
I didn’t even know where it came from.
Escape for me… was futile, in any method.
What was I even supposed to escape?
Where would I go?
What would I do?
Who… could possibly understand me when I tried to speak?
Who would care to listen?
Despite not hearing her approach, I felt her quiet gaze on me.
I stared out for a moment more, just a little longer of looking out at the calming water, the tides, waves, the sunlight starting to sparkle on them.
And just like that, I stood and brushed my pants off before letting my eyes find her. It wasn’t hard. She was leaning on a tree twenty paces back, arms crossed. She freed a hand and beckoned for me to follow her. I nodded once, walking to her. She turned around and started back through the trees, knowing I was just a few steps behind her.
Just a few steps…
Just back to my doom.
“Come on, 5-5977,” she said jokingly as she turned her head to peek back at me. “I have a job for you.”
Just before we reached the cabin, she stopped and turned to me.
“We won’t need your help beyond that of what you’ve been doing already. I just need you to grow a few specific plants for me.”
That was mainly what I specialized in, plants, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary to ask me to grow plants… even if I both knew and didn’t know what they were used for on the missions they created themselves, for some goal not even I knew.
“Do you understand?”
I stared at her, unable to conjure up any kind of emotion in seeing her face. There was just nothingness. Not happiness, not anger, not relief, not fear. Nothing.
She smiled at me and I nodded in response.
“Good pet.”
She stepped closer. I didn’t move a muscle, not even as she moved too close for my comfort. Not even as she lifted her hand and ruffled her fingers in my hair.
I simply stared down at her as I normally did, feeling nothing good from it. I didn’t like her closeness. I didn’t like her touching me, whether it was my hair or my arm or my face…
And yet, I didn’t pull away.
I knew the consequences of retreating from her touch. I preferred not to deal with her anger, her claws, or to feel the repeat of the sharp slap that had connected with my cheek once.
She grabbed my hand in hers and started walking again. I followed, careful to watch where my feet landed.
Fighting the urge to pull my hand away, a different feeling started to rise in me. Her hand… felt almost like a sickly kind of warm, as it held mine. I didn’t hold it tight, just firm enough so that she wouldn’t be annoyed. I held my sigh of dissatisfaction back, begging myself to put up with it for now.
She’d let go of my hand eventually.
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