Squee liked to think, that amongst all of the vile and atrocious things in his world, he was the one untouched variable. That all the world's troubles and woes could horrify or sadden him, but even in all their persistence, they could never alter him.
Squee liked to think that he was a sort of bolt in the middle of the system, around which spun hatred, human vice, and agony. Because, y'know, if he was the bolt, that meant all those terrible things around him could never actually change his purpose. They could circle around and around him without ever making him like them.
Maybe in his younger years this was wholly true. But over time… over time, Squee needed a little more convincing. Year by year people seems to scrape away at his defenses; they got beneath his skin with their ceaseless cruelty and their blatant disregard for him.
Routinely now, he pulled out old Shmee from his box and scolded the flea-bitten teddy bear.
"You shouldn't say such bad things," he'd reprimand. "No, you're wrong, Shmee. They love me. People care about me, they really do. And the world has good in it. I'm happy. I'm happy, Shmee."
It had been a long time since he'd believed those words.
"I'm happy," he promised the stitched teddy bear. "I'm really happy."
Shmee told him he wasn't. But that was okay, Shmee said. Because if he listened real good, Shmee could make it better, Shmee could make him happy.
Squee didn't think that was okay because most people's stuffed animals had stopped talking to them a long time ago.
That's why he shut Shmee up in a cardboard box and shoved him under his bed – but that made it somehow worse.
"Why'd you shut me up?" Shmee crooned brokenly. "Why'd you lock me away? I've been with you through everything, Todd. Everyone else will abandon and hate you, but I'll always be at your side. I'm your one friend, Todd. Do you hear me, Todd? I care about you. I just want you to be happy Todd. I want to fix things. Together. With you. Come on, Todd. Let's fix things. Let's make those people stop hurting you."
Squee didn't want to fix things the way Shmee did. People weren't unrepentantly evil. There was always hope, right? Maybe his parents actually did care about it, they just had strange ways of showing it. They did usually keep food in the house, after all, so he wouldn't starve. And that time his mom put pills in the cereal box wasn't because she was trying to hurt him, she just wasn't thinking straight. His teacher didn't lock him outside the school building in the middle of winter intentionally, she simply had a lot of students to look after and… and locked the door when the school wasn't supposed to be locked, knowing he was late because his dad…
Squee shuddered.
Delusions can keep you sane only so long. By nature, if you convince yourself of a different reality just to keep yourself sane… well, the very process of convincing yourself makes you insane. You live in a realm totally different than the one everyone else functions in. In that situation, how can you ever be sane?
Every day on his way to school and on his way back, Squee passed the house of Nny. The house stood as a skeleton of a reminder, quiet, hollow, the outer shell of a mine's worth of empty hallowed halls. Halls devoted to human suffering, halls dedicated with religious fervor to the infliction of revenge and torture.
Eight years had gone by while that house stood alone, uninhabited. Eight years since Nny had killed himself and, in this final act, finally made himself known to the public. The public that carelessly published his death in the papers with an obituary that did him no more justice than the extent of people's love for him. That is, none.
When Squee reflected about his own delusions, he inevitably reflected on Nny's. Nny used to hurt him, but not because he wanted to, not exactly. Nny would hurt him because he was victim to some sort of delusion of his own. He wouldn't know that Squee was Squee.
Sometimes, it would take him a very long time to realize it. Squee still bore the jagged white-pink scars over his arms and back to prove it.
Nny had really cared about him, though. Where everyone else was negligent and treacherous and cruel, Nny could be attentive, truthful, and kind. Nny listened. Nny talked. Nny got this look in his eye sometimes, something close to affection, and it occurred to Squee – that was caring. That was caring. Love.
Nny was dead, though.
But his house was still alive. Still waiting. Endless halls with instruments neglected for eight years, instruments begging for use, rusted and stained with brownish flaked blood. His house, now lonesome, promised a security, an ever-enveloping love whose effects could be felt long after Nny's death – just like the little scars that decorated his skin. Each little scar was a living memory of Nny, a promise that somewhere out there in that world someone had once cared and bothered to show it and left himself after death in the memories of a small boy.
Squee wanted to show other people that he cared. He wanted to be there for them. He wanted to talk with them like Nny did, and share with them stories and his knowledge and all these little facts he'd gathered about life from Nny.
He had hardly the eloquence and hardly the same depth of feeling, but he was something; he was a ghost resurrected eight years after Nny's death, created to serve a higher purpose and carry on the kindness Nny had shown him. To deny this calling would be to leave so many people without an extended hand of friendship. It would be to deny Nny's own lessons and benevolent teaching.
He spent more time in Nny's house, less in his house. The people he dragged there he very carefully selected as special people; those that needed it most, those abused and neglected and unmissed. Those were the people that Squee had to show love to, because they had no one else. They needed him.
"I care about you," Squee would tell them with absolute conviction. "I care about you so much. Why are you screaming?"
Every time, they broke his heart. He got to care about something so much and all they did was tell him how much they hated him, how much he hurt them.
But that was people for you. You show them how much you love them and all they do is fight it. They would understand in time. Just like him.