Enigmatic
People were enigmas.
Mysterious, puzzling, difficult to understand. But sitting there on the ground Gray thought he knew them very well indeed. The thoughts which morphed like fire, ate and engulfed and burned and how cold he felt compared to this passion. The passion to learn to fight to grow. Oh, he fought. But he had stopped caring long ago.
He didn't fight to gain.
He fought to make it all stop.
Yet the bruises kept coming no matter how many he returned, and he was too many years too young to have skin as black as his hair and he knew it wasn't right. That this was no life for one so young but it was his life and it hurt like hell.
He liked to think that he knew the people that threw the punches; though he didn't care for names, they were just faceless boys in a charcoal cloud that called themselves better than he. But they were wrong. No one was better.
Just bitter.
Like chocolate, dark with the hurt in his heart and the names that were tattooed onto his flesh in black blotches, which were so very invisible to everyone who were just choosing not to see. After all, the boys, the bullies, they did not stop with a kick to the rib and they did not walk away after filling Gray's mouth with dirt. Or something equally brown and a whole lot worse.
"Hey shit face!"
"'Sup little orphan freak!
Scum, fucker, fag, shit-head. And somehow the worst was the simplest.
"Hey stupid."
But what was in a name, right? That little rhyme every adult told had to be true, right? Adults didn't lie...
Right?
Wrong.
Broken bones can mend, but words dig deep. Burrowing into the soul and sitting and breeding until there was nothing left but the influence of insults and Gray had grown up into a young man pulling himself through high school with scars in all the places that people couldn't see willing the pain to stop!
But it didn't stop and never would, not with the cuts or psychical manifestation of pain that distracted his mind for seconds and it reeled trying to recover. The only way to end it was to eviscerate the damaged part of him, his soul. To die
He didn't want to die. Instead he sat on the ground cold and hurting and wondering where his fire was, and looking out at the people who had not stopped punching or stopped kicking or stopped calling him names and Gray found that he doesn't want it to stop. He doesn't know why but he believes that he wouldn't know how to live without them. The constant distraction of new pain to help with forget the aged disease of past offences left alone and untreated that was festering inside of him.
"Hey stupid."
He had convinced himself that he understood people. They were an enigma but an enigma that he had riddle out and rendered moot.
Gray was the only person he didn't understand.
And, just maybe, he didn't want to. He could let someone else do that. Let someone else riddle him out. Someone else with a light that could pierce the inky black of bruises and tattoos and all of that pain.
A/N: Still one of my favourite stories I've written. Though a little convoluted at times I love the writing I applied. Very influenced by Shane Koyczan's To This Day. This isn't a new story and has been completed for a while. I still haven't written fanfiction and still have no plans to despite loving and respecting the medium. However, I'm still writing stories and would always love any feedback given. :)