Rain swirls in droplets, Callum has noticed.
It cascades down and drips along walls and windows, crashing into the concrete and leaving marks and puddles. It falls onto leaves and rolls off the sides, trickling down until it hits another matter and stops again. It brightens grass and shines leaves and darkens skies and dulls air. It's beautiful yet dreary and gives so much life and receives nothing in return.
It's a poetic way of thinking about it, maybe too poetic; he spends far too much time thinking about a simple thing like a storm when he could be working on an art project he started days ago and set aside. As he grew up, he lost free time to spend thinking about rain, but he still tries to set aside a few minutes to admire its beauty out a window when he should be paying attention to his tutor trying to catch him up on lessons. He can't stare for long anymore; he has step-princely duties to perform, but he still notices how when the sun comes out again, the plants are a little bit greener or the sky is a little bit bluer, and the fact that he ignored something else doesn't matter anymore.
He often imagines clouds in his mind when he's too tired to think straight, when his vision is foggy and his eyes are heavy and don't want to stay open and his movements are sluggish, which happens a lot more than he thinks it should. Sometimes after a long day of studying history he doesn't care about or getting beat by Soren in sword-fighting, once Ezran and Bait have been found in their game of hide-and-seek, once dinner has been served and he gets through the awkward silence with King Harrow, he sits on the floor of his room and imagines clouds rolling in and dreams of nothing but storms and wind and rain that swirls, and then he's at his desk in mathematics again and he doesn't remember what his tutor has been teaching.
Often, the days blur together. When he's not paying attention half the time, he only really lives half the day. He wakes up and checks the date and finds its the 20th when he could've sworn when he last checked only a bit ago it was the 16th. He finds that at 2:00 he'll start a task that will take forever and he looks back at the clock and it's 2:02, or that he checks the time and it's 3:00, and he sits for a few seconds and checks again and it's 7:00. Sometimes when he's laying in bed and reviewing his day, he can't recall whether he had breakfast. Sometimes it's lunch. Sometimes it's dinner. Sometimes he can remember all three and he remembers dinner being chicken but the taste in his mouth is fish and he asks the cook when they had chicken and he'll reply with a week ago.
He believes it happens to everyone. Claudia had told him stories of when professors bored her and she zoned out and Callum thinks of the time he didn't understand mathematics because his mind was too foggy and he blinked and he was in his next lesson. Soren said that sometimes he'll forget to eat a meal and Callum thinks of how he'll tune in to draw but he can't because his hands are too shaky and how often his stomach is in knots. Ezran tells of how he can lay in bed at night and have his mind keep him awake and Callum thinks of how he could stare at a wall and be entertained by visions of storm clouds and raindrops.
It's never been a huge problem; he deals with it on his own. Forgetting meals once in a while and being a bit hungry is fine when he can walk down to the kitchen and find a snack whenever he wants to. He thinks of it as a positive that he's never really bored in his own time because his mind can keep him engaged. His overthinking can be useful in certain situations and it's why he does okay in debate class, even if it does make him indecisive sometimes. He thinks nothing of it.
Then one day, he and Claudia were walking down a hallway in the castle. He had to reach his next lesson, which was sword-fighting with Soren, aka getting his butt kicked and learning nothing for half an hour, and she had to return some papers to the English professor. She wasn't sure where the exact classroom was and to be honest, neither was he because he usually tuned out in the halls and didn't even know the walls were beige, but she knew the general direction and they were headed the same way. The professor was the same one who taught Callum, and when they reached a set of three doors, she said that it was one of them and asked him which one was right.
He genuinely had no idea. Normally, he just zoned out, blinked, and was in the next room without any memory of how he got there. He had been relying on her to know where to go in the halls. Being the dork he is, he stumbled over his words and gave her the honest truth: he had no clue.
Callum liked Claudia's laugh. She didn't hold back, and it was infectious and spread like a happy disease. Whenever she laughed, he found that everyone else around her did too, and he liked that about her laugh. He found it was less fun when it was directed at him, though.
"How do you not know which room it is? You have classes there everyday!" She had said. He awkwardly played along, and although he didn't know why, his stomach sank and he locked away a lesson that day.
Don't tell people about his problems; they won't understand.
He lived by that mentality. He hated being sick because although he got to bundle up and stay in bed and skip lessons for that day, he hated the feeling of being coddled and helpless. He found that he resented that feeling more than anything. Princes were supposed to be strong and dignified, not helpless and reliant on others. He hated the way that some guards spoke to him, patronizing and like he was two years old, but he didn't have the heart to speak out against them because they probably wouldn't get why it bothered him so much.
Internalize his pain. Build his walls up higher and higher until they reach the sky he liked to dream of so much. Sometimes he felt separated from others by a glass wall that he could peer through but they couldn't, and sometimes he thought about how he was the one who put the wall there. Sometimes it bothered him; more than anything, he thinks he really just wanted a family and people to rely on. But then he remembers that relying on others makes him helpless, and he finds that he is his own best friend.
He doesn't say anything. He never does; he scrapes by on skipped meals and forgotten halls and hopes no one can notice. He clings onto the hope that everybody lives like that, how he was living was truly living and that one day he'll touch the sky, but deep down, he thinks he knows that isn't true. He could contemplate it for a bit, and by a bit he means a few days, maybe a week. One time, he thought in vivid detail about what it would be like to be able to teleport, and before he knew it a month went by. Time flies by fast but it's also insufferably slow, and he thinks must have missed out on so much but he can hardly remember what he did 5 seconds ago.
If he had to guess, he would say it started when his mother was killed. He can't recall exactly when he started slipping away, when the days starting blurring together, when the storm started rolling in. He remembers the first year without her being so difficult, so difficult, and he marvels at how he was able to get through it all. He thinks of it like trekking through mud that goes up to his chest and sticks to his boots when he tries to lift them to walk, and so he has to figure out a way to swim.
And he does. It's not smooth sailing like everyone else on their boats, but he manages to work his way through the muck, and by the time he's fourteen, it's down to his feet and he walks on top of it all. He still skips meals sometimes, and he still doesn't know where half the halls in the castle lead, but it's easier, he thinks. It's not perfect, but it's easier.
It comes crashing down soon enough.
Storms swirl in his mind. Lighting strikes and waves rock his boat as he tries to stay afloat. Thunder clouds his brain and blocks out the sun, the happiness, and he repeats 'gone, gone, gone' over and over again until it really sinks in.
He doesn't remember the rest of visit with Lujanne. He hardly remembers his last thought. He doesn't eat while at the Moon Nexus, not just because her food is usually worms, but because his brain is too foggy and his stomach has too many knots and his throat is too closed up and he thinks he can't breathe. The muck builds up.
Claudia and Soren's betrayal only adds to it all.
Next thing he knows, they're on a boat sailing through a storm with a crazy pirate who spews random wisdom that's actually insightful if he thinks about it. The waves push their boat and he wonders if they'll make it to land, he hopes they'll make it to land, and the rain swirls around them in cold droplets like a cold reminder that what is good doesn't last.
He knows he's being an idiot when he goes out in it. But he knows that in order to solve his problems, he must face them, and so he breathes in the electricity in the air and metal in his mouth and sets out with a goal in mind to touch the sky.
But when it comes down to it, he falters. He can't go through with the lighting rod; he knows it might kill him, and that logic is what stops him. The sky slips out of his reach again, he's worked for it for years, dreamed of it for years, but it stays just beyond his grasp where he can't even brush it with his fingertips. He can't face his problems, not alone, not like how he was trying to, and he and Zym return to the boat with lighting in Zym's mouth and Callum with a heavy heart and an empty spirit. Rayla fills it with a hug.
He hates dark magic. He hates the feeling of the grub's blood oozing through his fingertips and how he could feel the energy hum within it and how he channeled it through his throat like he would with wind except it stuck and he couldn't breathe, and then he sees black and a pile of keys. He sees his evil side that tries to pull him into darkness, and he could contemplate about that "him" and it's meaning, and he thinks dark magic would be so much easier, so much easier. But then he remembers the sky and how he's given up years to wonder about flight, and he chooses to reach for that instead.
Then he's on another boat in another storm, and that time it's his boat and him trying to stay afloat. He doesn't know how to work the sail or the wheel and Villads yelling doesn't help, and he scrambles around trying to find some solution, some answer, and the waves crash over the side and then somehow, he's the sail, except he doesn't know where he's going or how to get there. The muck flows over.
Eventually, he drowns. His own mind is too much to handle, and he sinks through the water and breathes out the last of his oxygen. The bubbles rise to the surface, and he wishes he could be like those bubbles and rise against his challenges, but the pull of unconsciousness is too strong and he resigns himself to his fate. He's helpless anyways.
He thinks about the sky again, and he reaches out for it.
Rayla tugs him out of it. His mother fully stops it, and he opens his eyes and finds Rayla sitting in front of him and he knows how to breathe again. He knows how to fight again. He feels the hum of magic in his veins and air in his lungs and he channels it into his hand and pushes it out of his throat. He thinks about the sky and how he's in it, but it's also within himself, and he's spent so long chasing after something that was in his heart the whole time.
He still feels clogged sometimes when he casts Aspiro, and his breath catches while he's walking. He stills remembers the blood seep through his hand and he imagines his fingers sticking together with green glue. He still feels the muck build up and his legs burn as he walks through it, and he feels like he's drowning sometimes. The effect of dark magic never leaves.
He doesn't want it to. It's a reminder of what he's overcome.
It's really a wake-up call. He's missed out on so much of his life, spent so much of it caught in his own mind, and he wonders if it was worth it. If sitting on the carpet in his bedroom staring at a window and thinking about small things like grass or rain was more important than going outside and seeing it. He thinks it wasn't.
Rayla and him are huddled together one night. They're staying at an inn, so there's no point, but they're so used to keeping close they hardly think about it anymore. Zym curls up at their feet and Rayla rests her head on his shoulder and he wraps his arm around hers, and he looks out the window and sees rain pitter-patter against the glass and he wonders how much time he's spent thinking about storms when he could've been living, and he thinks about whether he's been living or surviving.
She asks him one day, while they're sat staring at a sunset in Xadia, legs dangling off the edge of a cliff, why his hands are so shaky all the time and why his eyes sometimes look far away. His first thought is to say nothing, ignore the issue, build his walls higher, pretend it doesn't exist. Trudge through the muck on his own rather than bring someone else into it and keep on surviving.
But then he thinks about her and her touch and her taste and he thinks he'd rather live than survive.
"Rain swirls in droplets," he says, and he sees her raise an eyebrow and he explains his cryptic message.
Confronting his problems is hard. But it's easier with her at his side.
They work through it together. She taps his shoulder when he spaces out and makes sure he gets his share of food and the shakiness dies down and the knots in his stomach untie, and he's scared at first. He doesn't want to let go at first. But she tells him he's doing great, and he learns that in order to reach for the sky, he must let go of the other threads he's holding.
He gets a name at a Xadia town. Dissociative disorder.
He can tackle it now. He knows what it is now. He thinks it'll be difficult, maybe the most difficult thing he's ever done. He'll be back in the mud and dragging his feet through muck, and the threat of drowning becomes more and more real now that he knows the consequences. He knows what actions others have taken, what actions he could take, and it shakes him to his core. He could give in. It would be so much easier to fall rather than fly, to let go and succumb. He could trade his suffering for nothingness.
He chooses not to. The sky is so near, he gets closer everyday, and he thinks he'd rather walk with knifes in his heart than die with the sky right out of his reach.
It doesn't get any easier. He fights every day, and sometimes it's tiring, sometimes it's annoying and infuriating, and sometimes he wants to give up. But Rayla will smile at him or Ezran will make a joke or Soren will compliment his technique or Claudia will show him a new spell she learned and he thinks it worth it. It's not perfect, it might never be, but it feels right, and he knows he's right where he's supposed to be.
He won't ever forget that rain swirls in droplets. But he can move on, and in the end, that's what matters most.