Prompt: 001. The Vacuum of Time
Rating: K+
Fandom: Changeling: The Lost
Characters: William Blake
Word Count: 523
Warnings: N/A
Author's Note: This is actually an excerpt from a longer fic I wrote, which will NEVER be posted because it is horrible and should never see the light of day. It's not REALLY cheating because I re-wrote this so extensively, it's almost unrecognisable from the original.
This IS rather cliched, as I know almost every changeling would have to deal with this, but I hope this is still entertaining.
William hated calendars. He had torn up every one in Brian's house when he moved in and stuffed them all in the garbage bin, out of sight and out of mind. Part of him knew that it was incredibly rude and immature of him, but he simply could not stand the sight of those innocuous pieces of paper, constantly reminding him, reminding him of those twenty years.
It was simultaneous too long and too short a time.
On the one hand, he had been certain that he had been stuck there, stuck in the desperate escape for his life and the endless punishments, for centuries. To come back and see that things had hardly changed, that life still went on and people had the same petty worries and familiar buildings still stood tall…knowing that what had changed him beyond recognition, what had robbed him of his humanity, had nary an impact on the world - that was what broke him.
The world hadn't changed at all.
He had.
And even though he knew the way, he could never get back to where he was again, because he could no longer fit into that space.
A small part of him, a rather foolish part, wished that he had indeed returned centuries later and found the world a strange, unfamiliar place. Then, perhaps, he could focus on the startling changes all around him and ignore what lurked within himself.
On the other hand, twenty years had passed. From thirteen to thirty-three, his life had been a blur of terror, fear, and pain. One second, he was still the naïve school-boy, so convinced that he was invincible and that the world was his for the taking, and in the next, he had been reduced to…to this, a grotesque distortion of a man. He had been transported past adolescence and early adulthood, and thrust into the body and life of middle-age. He hadn't ever been through high school, he'd never dated, never had a job…it scared him, sometimes, how much he was still a child on the inside.
But he couldn't afford to think like that, because he wasn't a child now. He was an adult, and he was to live like an adult, take on responsibility, contribute to society…and never, ever break down and let the scared little boy he was show.
Twenty years…
It was long enough for a clone of himself, constructed out of twigs and mud, to take over his life. It was enough for his classmates to marry and have children and do something with their lives. It was enough that his own parents did not recognise him at all. It was enough that he terrified himself when he looked into mirrors.
It was enough to wipe him of his humanity.
William hated calendars, just as he hated dogs, and bushes, and basements, and a myriad other innocuous objects that drove him into throes of debilitating fear.
But most of all, he hated what he had become, what he had been robbed of, and what he would never, ever gain back again.
He hated himself.
And he is never going to stop.
