On a String

Chapter 20

He was delusional.

He was blind. Blinded by nightmares, by fear, by anger, by helplessness.

So what did that mean?

He was ... insane.

...God, he was insane. If a word could bubble and crawl, this one did; dancing merrily in time with his breathing, as if it had not just suggested the unthinkable.

(You're insane.)

What if that little word was right? If it wasn't just a possibility, wasn't just a word, but something with meaning; something monstrous. Something which could grow and stalk and kill and infect and destroy-

(-Have mercy-)

-And if that word had indeed infected him, then what did that mean?

(-Tear us all apart-)

.... 'Insane'.

You're insane.

Not with joy, not with passion, but with pain and fear.

Insane with pain.

Breaking at the edges.

Out of control.

[But he'd always known that, though. Known it from the moment he forgot what 'home' meant, from the moment his shoulder had burned and thenhebelongedtoTHEM, from the moment Clarissa was executed in his name, from the moment he'd held dead blood and dead bone and (dead) life in his pale, bruised fingers... he had always been insane. Just too scared to admit it; to understand it.]

Unfortunately, you cannot defeat that which you fail to understand.

And you cannot understand it without first acknowledging it.

And acknowledging it means facing an even greater problem.

(The problem being that people could control him, yet he couldn't control his own mind. He wascontrolled to the point where self-control no longer existed.)

And he sat in the dark room and wondered about that.

Because it made no sense.

Because his mind was his NOT theirs but still, they wandered and stroked and trampled through it as they pleased, taking whatever they wanted.

(Teeheeheehee, you can't control, you can't control, you will never control...La-la-la la-la!)

Because it never was like this, because he once had control, because he once knew what he was doing (but that had been so long ago), and he had no idea of how to get back there.

(So was he stuck here, forever?)

If he couldn't understand, then he doubted that anyone else would, either.

And, and...

What if the team found out that he was scared... that he was insane?

Would they lock him up?

...Hide him away in some hospital?

Label him as a 'lost cause'?

Leave him? (Oh my God, no, please, anything other than-)

They couldn't know. They could not know, and if all went well, they never would. He'd done well at playing the cold, capable taskmaster for these past few weeks- it was a convincing act for sure. All he needed to do was keep that up.

(To live a lie.

To live in pain.)

There were so many lies. So many, but what was one more shadow in a darkened room?