Into my pain, our lives intertwined

ALICE

I was unconscious. I don't want to sleep. I barely sleep at night. It's always the same. The dreams. The screams. The yelling. The pain. 

Kenneth was able to push them away. With just a brush of his fingers on my hair, I'm drifting off to a nightmareless sleep. His minty scent, as it fills my nose relaxes my shoulders. His body temperature that is too warm - opposite to my constant cold body - will always calm the maelstrom of insanity knotting in my head. 

When I'm beside him, I was normal. When he sits with me, the hallucinations, the deceptive figures, the bone chilling tortures - will all recede at the back of my mind. 

For the first time in my life, I was happy. He managed to bring out the smile I thought my lips don't know how to pull off. 

When he's gone, the hallucination attacks became fiercer, the pain deadlier, the screams starker. It left me trembling and sweating and panting I became a heap of mess. Totally helpless and ruined. My limb aches, raw scars singeing my skin. I suck in my breath, my throat throb, gasping, calling out - 

To him. 

He's the only one who can make this insanity disappear. His touch is power. He can make me feel like I was normal. That I grew up in a childhood of happy family. 

No more tortures. No more Aunts laughing maniacally. Watching my blood drips out and fill her blood bag. She said our blood is power. She said that's where the strings fixate. The more concentrated our blood, the more our potential blooms as wielders. 

That's the sole reason she kept me alive. Why she left me to exist pointlessly. She needs my blood. Every two days a week she'll take one bag of blood from me. 

Because through me, her power over strings will be much stronger, much lethal, more control, she can utilize the strings to its maximum ability - influencing people. 

                                                                

I watch her twirl a person's blackest string and whispered into his mind. 

"Kill yourself." Is what she said. And the man pulled a security guard's revolver and shoot himself in the mouth. 

Every week, right after she injects herself with my blood, her face will start to flush, her pupils will dilate her eyes look nearly black. She'll sigh as if she can't be any more relax, like a cat in sleepy spur, claws tucked inside her paws, ready to strike at anyone she deem unnecessary in her world.  

When that happen I curl and cover my ears. I know what she’ll do to me next.

I can’t undergo that experience again.

I want to hide.

I want to stay in my happy dream.

Don’t leave me by myself, is what I always beg to you every night.

Ran your fingers to my cheek.

Make me forget my past by your touch.  

I want to feel your warmth once again.

Take me with you.

Drive my nightmares away.

I’d really like to see you just one more time.

My eyes crack open, blinking against a world where I’d rather not be in to. I’m like a water without a bottle. Unsafe, vulnerable, easily polluted, easily abused. I beg the world for a container. It gave me muck. I beg my Aunt for mercy. She break me beyond repair.

When I finally get to experience the word ‘happiness’ I only see in other people’s face, it was taken away immediately. My existence is nothing. He was my happiness. And I get to witness my happiness killed with my own two eyes.

Because of my curse….

“Wake up sunshine.” A human figure, a silhouette of a woman, crimson long hair like mine, deep emerald eyes like mine. I swallowed the scream trying to rip my throat.

It’s my Aunt.

I tug on my arms. Useless. Both my legs and wrists are tied to a chair. I fight the fear crippling my knees. Why is she here? My fingers trembled too much I can’t clench them to a fist.

My heart is pounding against my chest. Like a wild beast on cage. My blood is screaming at me to run. Even my own nerves collapsed on me. The crippling effect of facing the monster who made me a monster for sixteen years.

She stepped back and turn her heels a few paces from me. Her red shoes clacking against the cement floor. Men in black suit and revolvers tuck in large hands surround her like private bodyguards. She take her seat at a velvet couch I find out of place in this cabin house.

She looks the same as I remembered. Crossing her long legs like a queen. Keeping her chin held high, with a black whip she played in her long red nails. Her favorite tight fitting red dress hugging her small frame.

She’s a beautiful red queen sitting at her throne, hiding the insatiable witch at her claws.

A small figure was lying at her side. Blindfolded and tied in a rope like me. The silver hair, the small vulnerable frame. It’s the boy. A shiver ran through my spine. She noticed me gaping in horror. Her red puckered lips twist in a nasty smirk.

“You’re worried for the boy?” She kicked him in the stomach and he wheezed air under the duct tape on his mouth.

I struggled against the rope. Not noticing the two men at my side.  A cloth was tied in my mouth. I can’t scream. I don’t know the boy’s name. I can’t call out to his name. I stared at Adeline’s bright emerald eyes. Sparkling maniacally under the faint ray of sun.

Defiance etched at my face.

She glared at me. “I never taught you to have that look in your face Alice.” Her attention slid to my side.

“Tear that expression from her face.” She commanded. I whipped my head abruptly to my right. And all my nightmares were brought back to life.

A hard blow landed at the back of my head. I cringe in pain. My eyes were swarming, vision bleeding in pure red and flesh I can’t see anything. My nerves were directly amputated. My throat choke sobs in a poisonous air. My ears are ringing distant screams.

Screams of my own. My mind replayed the tens, hundreds, thousands of cruelty my body experienced at her hands. Another hit strike at my temple and blood trickles my face. My eyes are bleeding.

Another hit at the nose and I break. My senses cracked. My breathing splits. My bones, my face, my skin, each part where this man strikes hurt. And I can’t even cry out.

I can’t form his name in my muffled mouth.