Shadows of the Night - Brahms Heelshire x Reader [The Boy 2016]

Chapter 10: A Mask of My Own Face

Brahms sighs, pushing his hair from his face and fastening his mask. He just ate breakfast with y/n and then disappeared to his secret apartment to shower while she got to work on some of her commissions. It's been a few days since their mini row over her art and the night of his memory-dream and while he and y/n have fallen into a comfortable routine of togetherness, Brahms can't help but feel like the ball is going to drop soon. So far in his life happiness was always closely followed by pain in all the worst ways, and he's never been happier than he is now so he feels as if the pain that will come from this will be the worst of his life.

He shakes his head to get his hair to sit right over the forehead of his mask, and he rubs his chest with one hand trying to dispel the growing knot of fear. He tidies up his apartment, not because he needs to but because he is crackling with nervous energy he doesn't know how to dispel otherwise. As he makes his bed he pauses having remembered the fact that neither he nor y/n has gone into his childhood room since he stepped out of her closet, meaning that it's still torn up from his tantrum. He frowns behind the mask, annoyed at his past self for the destruction.

He finishes tidying up, throwing his handmade doll under his bed before going to his childhood room through the walls, hoping to avoid explaining the room's state to y/n. When he gets there he creeps across the room and checks the hallway to make sure y/n is still downstairs and when he determines that she is, he softly closes the door again before turning to the mess.

His bed is practically on the floor and the Brahms doll is tossed to the side looking very much like a murdered child from the odd angles of its limbs. Broken toys are strewn along the floor like glass from a broken window, drawings hang in shreds off the walls, and a decanter of his father's bourbon sits nearly empty on the floor. Brahms shrinks into himself as he observes the aftermath of his drunken rage, something he had completely forgotten about in the overwhelming newness of being reunited with y/n and leaving his life in the walls, two things he never thought would happen.

His parents are very strict about him staying in the walls, stressing that no one must ever see him and that includes them. He has spoken to them throughout the years through the walls, requesting food or to be given some of his father's hand-me-down clothes as he grew but always in the childlike voice his mother asked him to use. She would ignore him if he used his natural voice so he had to learn from puberty how to sound like he had before he went into the walls.

His mother commissioned the Brahms doll not long after that day, soon enough after that he was still bedridden in the walls covered in slapdash bandages, sloppily done by his eight-year-old self when he could hear her dote on the doll through the walls. The fire had almost destroyed the right half of his face and severely injured parts of his chest on the same side. The damaged skin was pulled tight in the wrong places by not having healed correctly as he was forced by circumstance to tend to his own wounds, aided rarely by his father who would check on him every couple of days and drop off some food and water.

Back then his apartment hadn't existed, it was just an empty room that his parents had hurriedly shoved a child-sized bed into. For weeks after the fire he had practically wasted away on that bed, choking on the scent of his unwashed body and the smell of his own burned skin. He had almost died, he can remember the feeling of his heart starting to slow and the darkness of his room beginning to wash over him, smooth and cold, but he had thought of y/n at that moment and the darkness receded. He gasped at the feeling of warmth he got from her memory and somehow he survived that night.

He doesn't remember much from that time beyond the constant pain, every breath would pull his wounds tight and make him cry, but he was so dehydrated no tears actually came out so he would end up just shaking in his bed, every movement agony that only led to more. He eventually healed enough to leave the bed aided by a walking stick his father had left him. He had immediately set out to clean himself of the filth of weeks of neglect, his father had cleaned him intermittently but never to the degree Brahms would have liked. His sheets were a Pollack painting of dried blood, pus, and dead skin and the sight of it made him sick.