“We both know that I haven’t been able to give myself to you the way you give yourself to me. I haven’t been able to talk, to tell, to say, to bare myself like you do. For me. And that’s because I… I don’t know how, you see. I don’t… I never learned and… But the thing is, Poe, the thing is that if I’d do it, if I’d learn it for anyone in this world it would be for you. But before I do that, before I tell you those things, all the things that I haven’t been able to say, I have to tell you everything else. I have to tell you the truth. The truth about me. About the kind of man I am. The kind of man I… was.”
My heart is twisting and twisting in my chest and I shake my head. “Alaric, you don’t —”
But he doesn’t listen.
He speaks over me.
And he speaks in a thready whisper, a whisper that chokes me with pain.
“In life, I’ve always struggled,” he begins. “I’ve always struggled with… everything. First when I was born, I struggled to breathe. My lungs were weak. I struggled to eat. I struggled to regulate my body temperature. To grow. To gain weight. To be healthy. I struggled with that. When I somehow survived that, those early months of my life, I struggled to fit in. I struggled to… connect with people. To make friends. To be a part of something. To belong somewhere. At school, in classes, in study groups. But mostly at home.
“Yeah, I struggled a lot at home. I struggled with feeling safe. I struggled with feeling warm, with feeling… loved. And that’s because I wasn’t. I wasn’t loved. I never was. And I deserved it, you understand? I deserved not being loved for killing my mother. I killed my mother. I was responsible for her death. I was responsible for all the blood that she’d lost. During my birth. How she looked like death before death came for her. My father used to tell me that. That she looked like death before death actually came for her. And I did that. Me. So yeah, I deserved his hatred. But that’s not all. That wasn’t my only crime, killing my mother. On top of that, being a murderer, I was so different. I was so… strange to him. So weak and sickly and pale. Like I was death itself. Again, something my father would tell me, that I was death. That I was born to kill. To kill my mother. To kill any hopes my father had for his legacy. And so I always thought that that was my due, you realize. That struggling, being hated, being hit and punched by the man who brought me into this world was my due.
“And when something is your due, you take it, don’t you? You take it standing up. You take it with all the courage and bravery and dignity you can muster. I didn’t, though. I couldn’t. Because I was so afraid. I was always so afraid of my father. So I ran from him. I hid. I ducked for cover. I cowered. I crouched. I crawled. Every time my father came home, I’d hide under the bed. I’d hide in the closet. I’d hide up on the roof, in the woods. I’d hide. I’d just… hide, trying to disappear. And God, I hated that. I hated that so much. I hated myself for being so pathetic, so weak, so small. I wanted to be strong, you know. I wanted to be someone who could take it. Who could take all the beatings, all the curses, all the abuse and still stand strong. I wanted…” He chuckles harshly. “To be someone else. Someone different than who I was. So later, years later, when they came for me, my classmates, and beat me and broke me, I thought that was my chance. To die.”
“What?”
“To kill myself,” he says, his eyes far away now. “I wanted to die, you understand? I wanted them to kill me. I wanted them to fucking end my pathetic life. And when they didn’t, when they couldn’t do the job right and all I got at the end of it was a month-long hospital stay, I was so angry. At them. At myself. At everything. So much so that years later I punished you for it. I punished you for the things that others did to me but not well. Not in a way that got the job done. That gave me what I wanted: death.
“But anyway, I thought if they couldn’t do it, then I would. I would kill myself. I would fucking die in this hospital bed myself. And be reborn. As someone else. Someone stronger. Someone people would be afraid of. Someone people respected and looked up to. Someone with no weakness, no softness. Someone who never lost. A Marshall. A true Marshall.