Chapter 4: Of Emotional Detachment
//////////////
His head was swimming and pounding at the same time as he opened the door to his now permanent residence. Try as he might, Ayden couldn't get that guy out of his mind. He'd been mumbling to himself throughout his whole walk home about just how ungrateful that bastard had been. Of course this wasn't true, his mind had countered; he still believed that in some respect he'd earned the treatment he got. Clearly the man had been attacked because the creature mistook the stranger for Ayden. Maybe if he changed his face..
"Ayden what's going on? Johnny called me he sounded concerned and since that's cause enough for panic I came over. You weren't here, where have you been?" the young brunette asked with genuine concern and sweetness. Her pale face was sprinkled with freckles which gave her the air of innocence he never had.
He blinked against the soft light of the living room to make out the female; registering slowly in his brain he remembered she was Terra. She was his friend but he hated her sometimes just because she was such a humanist. She had that annoying belief that all people were inherently good and needed nurturing and positive reinforcement. He'd met her in high school and somehow managed to keep her since then. She was built like a goddess or at least he thought so though his judgment was likely to be distorted. The more he looked at her the more he realized she was just his type but the skinny classically curved women were never busty enough for 'real' men. In fact she was just average, he liked average.
He tipped his head looking into her pale face her brown hazel eyes regarding him with worry. She was touching his shoulders trying to hold him up like he was about to fall over. He wanted her to let go, she always worried and always thought he was in some near-death battle with evil. When in reality he'd thrown a few back at the bar and had walked five miles home in the rain. Real heroic.
"You've been drinking again..." She frowned and he shot her a grin, he'd been waiting for her to put that puzzle together.
He gave her a smirk and she released his shoulders. Disappointment flooded her features and she wrinkled her nose. He knew she was annoyed to find that he fell short of her expectations. She tried so hard to believe that he could do better and he would do better. Instead he was out, again, at a bar drowning his sorrows and everything else.
She turned on her heel and walked over to the couch she'd been waiting on. Sitting down she crossed her legs and glared at him, her foot shaking with her nerves. She was fumbling through her purse trying to put her phone back in it with shaking hands; she was trying to articulate without words that she was ready to leave.
"Oh I see what this, you come over to my place and expect me to apologize?" he blurted rather annoyed with her behavior. What right did anyone have to dictate his life? They may have been friends since high school but that didn't give her any leverage, he deserved respect from everyone no matter how they knew him.
"Yes you've been a complete jack ass for long enough," she said in a matter-of-fact way while raising her eyebrows. "You owe me."
He clenched his fists at his side and felt his eyes flash. "Excuse me? This is my house and you don't get to come here and change me."
She stood up fists at her side to mirror his stance. Did he really look that angry? "You're destroying yourself and I tried to understand but now I don't even know you anymore. Why can't you just admit what happened to your dad hurts you? Why do you think for a minute that what you're doing is healthy behavior? Why do you push everyone away? Why can't you tell people you love them?"
The endless litany of snarled questions struck him, strangely, off guard. Somehow he managed to keep his composure but each word was another blow to his ego. He was grinding his teeth to dust while his eyes went darting sporadically, selling him out for being a coward.
"I don't have to justify myself to you. I don't owe you a thing Terra," Ayden responded coldly his insides crumbling while his hard outer shell seemed to be glazed over with another layer of tarnish. "I don't care about anything or anyone so why won't you just leave me the hell alone?"
Her eyes switched immediately from narrow to glassy. He'd done it again another companionship, one that had actually brought him joy, was destroyed. Ayden was well aware of his annoying tendency to throw everything away, even the things he wanted to keep.
"Who are you Ayden Fenton?" she choked as she made a quick exit out the door.
"Yeah real dramatic Terra!" he yelled after her just as she slammed the door.
He should have stopped her and said something to make her stay. He could've maybe apologized and asked her to help him, because he knew deep down he needed her help. Instead he let her go with nothing even close to sympathy and not a single reason that she should come back. Having dealt her nothing but cruelty he accepted the fact that she may never return to him or even call to see how he was doing. Something inside him cringed with a different sort of pain. Longing, rejection, loss all was swirling around his mind as he watched her car pull out of his driveway.
"Well fuck." He loved her. That stupid feeling he'd been trying to avoid because it was so disgustingly clichéd, because it was exactly like his father, had finally grasped him. He was, against his better judgment, falling for that girl. Meaning it was time to repress another feeling that would become just another blur amongst the millions of other memories and emotions he'd hatefully banished to the back of his mind.
The phone rang and he ignored it as it obnoxiously echoed through the corridors of his skull.
His Aunt Jazz kept calling him insisting he was severely depressed and begged him to come over for tea; which meant in a nutshell that she would poke and prod each and every insecurity he had until he broke down. Until everything he'd craftily sewn up and hidden away was open and exposed for her to pick at. Booze was so much better than 'letting it all out.' That logic didn't stop the phone from ringing in the empty corridors of the large home doubled as a scientific research base.
He knew she was trying to reach him again. The message machine picked it up telling the caller that Danny and Ayden weren't here right now.
Footsteps sounded and Ayden looked to see his largely built friend wiping a wrench with an oil stained cloth. "So uh... how'd talking to Terra go?" he asked in his throaty way which was always a slow and cautious way of asking, as though he wanted to be as neutral as possible even though he was a naturally aggressive man.
"Why the hell would you go and do something like that?" the black haired man seethed. He wondered how he was ever going to fair with Johnny as his roommate if the guy was going to pull things like this. Right then and there he began to seriously debate his decision on having him move in, maybe he was better off alone. Did his friends try to make him miserable? Some days, his more misanthropic days, he believed that more than others.
"So instead of telling her that you care for her you yelled at her till she cried. Am I getting this right?" Johnny returned with a shrug.
Ayden slumped into his chair and meet eyes with his old friend. "How'd you guess?"
"I don't know you've just got this habit of being really predictable," he stated lightly. "'Surprised you haven't been killed by one of your enemies yet."
Ayden forced a small laugh. "You and me both buddy," he agreed monotonously. "But I guess I have my dad to thank for that..." he added distantly.
Johnny looked at the black haired blue eyed man and saw the tired look he gave off. Life had not been good to him despite the fact he was endowed with inhuman abilities. Powers, Johnny theorized, were something that one should only gain by choice never by force. Force was a rather harsh word but Ayden had not been given the choice to be born let alone born with ghost powers. When they were younger Ayden used to make off handed remarks on how terrible it felt to use them.
Of course it never really crossed anyone's mind on just how a person must utilize ghost powers. It was a process; Ayden had explained once, one that involved letting the body die and disappear for the time the ghost half took control. He'd also mention that it didn't happen as quickly inwardly as it appeared it did outwardly. The teen's father had always relented that it would take some 'getting used to' but he never adjusted. He was partially dead from the beginning, never once getting a taste of the full potential of life. Perhaps that was the cause for his maladjustment.
"What's the matter with me?" the raven haired mess questioned weakly after much silence between them.
Johnny inwardly winced having known Ayden's past and patterns well. Anyone else might've told him to lighten up or that he was a dreadful human being who took pleasure in complaining. "Nothing, you're just different from the others."
The others, Ayden pensively turned this over in his mind; it wasn't the first time he'd heard this line, in fact he'd spoken it years ago. The others had a life before half-life, it had been a shift; a moment of full life and everything that it had to offer before half of it was stripped away with the change. Even Dani, in her creator's attempt to make a stable clone, had been created fully human first before she was given ghost powers. Her powers of course were unstable since the introduction was done in a slow synthetic way but still, she too had been a fully formed human once. Only Ayden bypassed the privileged every other human being was granted at birth.
There never was anyone like him and he knew it. Perhaps that was why he was accustomed to periods of sulking and self-loathing. Ayden was born clinically depressed it seemed, immediately aware that his life was only a half of what life really had to offer. Strangely enough he always had a sense that he was missing something. Some argued he had no right to feel so disjointed since he never knew what he was missing out on but it seemed Ayden knew exactly what he didn't and could never have. Johnny's frown increased as the thoughts lumbered through his mind. Even more so when it struck him that this depression was different. A fear was beginning to grow and it told him of how Ayden may not be pulled from this; he might be finally destroyed, the second inheritance of his birthright.
"You're looking at me strange," Ayden pointed out, still dripping from his seat like a limp rag doll. Johnny hadn't meant to stare or gawk or any of the things he was sure he was doing that was disturbing his friend. But he kept getting flashes of a second funeral, the leftovers from a suicide.
He shook his head trying to expel the thought through his ears. "I was just thinking..." he answered blinking in shock unaware of how long he might have been standing and thinking.
Ayden nodded, his insightful eyes glazing over. There was something else that was a consequence of being born directly into a schism of the natural and paranormal. He had almost a third eye, it only sensed miserable things and only let him see all the slime that coated the world, even the lovely things. He knew there was also a way of seeing with a third eye that showed all the beauty of everything but he could see only the filth and only the unsightliness of every one and every thing in every situation. He saw what people thought of him, he could see their minds working, the cogs turning the rust over. He knew what they expected from him and from everyone else, and it seemed that all thoughts involving him turned without hesitation to the worst.
"You're thinking that I'm going to kill myself," he said his voice eerie and unnatural as it seemed to tangibly hang in the air. Johnny could almost see himself reaching out to touch the fragile crystalline words but knew they would shatter and fall out of thin air. "I don't know yet myself if that will be the option I take. But it is there, so you are right my friend. Everyone is always right about me."
He got up and walked away exiting through the door without another word, knowingly leaving his closest friend in frozen shock. When he thawed he would come for him and would confront him about the previous conversation. But for now Ayden had some time to kill. He would wander the three hundred acres of the compound, his childhood home and inherited property.
It was a three part area. The first and largest building was the home section. In which the strange structured two story house was built and attached to the garage that doubled as an aircraft hangar. The hangar led directly into an underground scientific research facility that had doubled as his father's lab. The layout of the three buildings flowed together so well that it seemed they were all one entity. The house was actually a larger "improved" version of the original home that had burnt down nearly a decade ago. The old home didn't fit nearly as well as the new one.
A few yards behind the house was a small but looming Military Base. There volunteer scientists and Dash Baxter's militia would meet and discuss new invasions and ghost related matters. Diplomats would visit with concerns for any impending attacks and would purchase weaponry and ask for aid against the paranormal. And just behind there, attached by a glass hallway was a one floored building that served as the emergency care center for any on site injuries due to ghost attacks or lab accidents. There was the work place for a handful of on-call doctors that had treated Ayden more than he cared to acknowledge.
Ayden sighed as he made his path away from these facilities. He walked out into the empty field that led to a small creek separating the grassy area from a dark patch of woods. His family owned three hundred acres, the compound took up only about one hundred acres, and the rest was nature. He briefly recalled his father saying that was how his mother wanted it; they essentially kept a nature reserve on their property. The young man, in all his years, had never seen it all, though he tried. Solemnly he sat on a rock beside the babbling creek; the air was gray with the light mist of rainfall. His shivered being without a jacket but refused to seek shelter.
He wondered while picking up a stick and absently tracing strange figures into the damp dirt what he should do with himself. It wasn't the first time in his life he'd contemplated suicide. In fact it was a common thought in the back of his mind that usually was trumped out by other factors. Not so much things or people to live for but more along the lines of what happens next. Knowing, with his luck, that he'd probably be stuck in the Ghost Zone for eternity being harassed endlessly had usually deterred his suicidal actions. This usually was accompanied by the terrifying notion that his disgruntled father would look for him and probably give him hell. Now, with his father gone, it was just a matter of the unhappy thought of being stuck as a miserable ghost forever.
Still the idea lingered with him since adolescence, ever since a certain incident that occurred when he was only fourteen. Nearly dying hadn't been all bad, it had only hurt for a while then everything was black and he was fine; that is until his father pulled him out of it. He couldn't shake the seemingly endless memories of the times he woke up with his father. It was the look in his eyes that never left Ayden's mind. The justification Ayden had for hating his dad so much was lost when he remembered how much the man had cared. How empty, how desperate, how wounded and stricken he had been when his only son was too close to death. That was something that no one could fake, it was genuine; Danny Fenton loved his son.
Ayden Fenton didn't know how he felt, wasn't sure if he could feel. Even when he told people he'd loved his mother he wasn't sure that was legitimate. The only thing he had to go off of was the guilt he felt because she had died for him. That was all he understood and so he began acting under the assumption that because she had so loved him that he too loved her. But he really couldn't remember much of her except that she stood on a pedestal he'd put her on and that she was dead, the sacrificial lamb. He'd been told they'd been close once but she was just a distant memory borrowed from photographs. He had known a lot about his dad but never fully understood the man or his own role as his son.
In fact Ayden was pretty sure his disconnection stemmed, not from his parents, but from himself.
After all it had always been him. All the trouble he ran into as a rebellious teen had not been a factor of running with a rotten crowd; he'd done it alone, repeatedly. People never could understand how a world renowned hero's son had been so unfavorable. Even more confusing to them was that Ayden, even with his record, still protected the town with his life. The only logical thing for them would've been if he had turned into a villain or to the dark side or something clichéd like that. They knew they hated him for his uncouth decorum but couldn't justify it completely. Even Ayden didn't know why he did what he did.
There was something very wrong with him, something that kept him from connecting to the world around him and from having any strong feelings about anyone. He blamed his ghost side, he had after all, been born only half human. He didn't always understand people's fears or involvements; their emotions were so fickle and confusing. He couldn't imagine throwing himself deeply into any emotion; he never could lose himself to any feeling. Whenever he looked around and saw the way people orchestrated their lives he always had to ask why but never received an answer. His only answer could be that there was nothing wrong with them but everything wrong with him.
In exhaustion he looked at the shapes he'd been absentmindedly tracing in the sand, they looked alien but familiar. They were figures that had always been with him for as long as he could form thought. Every time he drew them it always had to be in a certain pattern, in a specific sequence, and in a mind numbing combination.
His most lucid memories of his mother were those when she would encourage him to thrive on creating. She immediately took these little obsessions as his hidden talent; she imagined he'd be an artist. In fact the woman had encouraged the boy to feed his creativity and never forget it. He remembered as a youth he'd occupy her art studio and paint silly child-like things beside her easel. She'd smile down at him and compliment his masterpieces, even if said masterpieces consisted of simplicity and a very base representation of perspective. Of course this was excluding the alien figures, they were always complex, always perfect. People who witnessed them would scoff at the idea of a young child who was so able to create something so original and intricate.
Ayden shook his head, even when he told the truth people thought he was lying. He just wasn't sure what brought his first stake in such a position but he knew he was hated; it couldn't have just been from the accident at the Nasty Burger. The creeping suspicion against his character stemmed back to the night his mother was murdered. For some reason there was always low whisperings over why he had been the sole survivor of the attack. His family explained that it was because his mother had protected him that he was kept safe and he believed them, mostly because he couldn't remember a thing. The entire night was a blur of horror and pain and his young mind had locked the details far away from his grasp. The public continued to scoff his name but at the first sign of danger they called it as their last hope for salvation.
He sighed again having brought himself back to loss after loss. He couldn't be an artist like he'd wanted, he didn't have any parents left, he was the only halfa in existence from here to eternity; the list went on in such a way that it made him sick. Violently he scuffed the alien figures into the dirt with a frustrated yell. Nothing ever made sense to him, not even his own creations. He was lost and confused and left with no options or answers.
Deep down he knew he should talk to his aunt Jazz or his uncle Tuck but he couldn't imagine what they'd have to say to him. He acted like he didn't feel any shame for his actions but that wasn't true. He felt like an idiot and he knew he couldn't look any of them in the eye just yet without a steady help from alcohol. He had a lot to answer to and that didn't just mean his responsibilities with the family company. Vaguely Ayden wondered if it were too late for him to go missing. Unfortunately a part of him just wouldn't let him run away from anything, meaning he'd have to face everything.
"Ayden," the voice echoed somberly against the chilling late afternoon.
Ayden slouched his shoulders as if that would hide him but Johnny would always know where to look. Having a childhood friend meant not having any secrets from said friend. The man with the shaggy blond hair sat beside his raven haired counter. "Look Johnny I-"
"No," Johnny interjected putting his hands up to keep his friend silent. "I have some things to tell you and you're going to listen. No excuses Ayden Fenton. I don't care what you might think about all this because you've had too much to drink anyway."
"Fair enough."
"You do realize that running away all the time won't make anything any better?" He eyed Ayden who turned his face away in quiet resistance. "There's so much life you're missing out on because you just don't believe in yourself. You're so much better than all of this and you have so much to give, but you're so afraid; I don't understand it Ayden. You hate yourself so much for all the things you can't change but you're a good soul and I just wish you could see how great you are. Until you love yourself things will never change and you'll never be happy."
Ayden sat for a moment, chin in hand, contemplating the words. He swished them around on his tongue and would occasionally poke them against his cheek. "I see your points but what the hell makes you the all knowing master?"
"I don't claim to know much, but I do know you."
Ayden twiddled his thumbs anxiously trying to shrug off Johnny's stare; it wasn't working. Shame wasn't the right word for what he was feeling it was in fact something to be placed between inferiority and regret wherein; he regretted that he demonstrated openly just how inferior he was. If only his father could see him now, if only his mother knew what he would become. The two should have been so good to stop this train wreck long ago but instead they wasted their precious time and energy on a lying trying waste of space; hardly a son and more of a disappointment.
Johnny cleared his throat and when Ayden got a good look at him he could see the tears brimming. "Can you promise me that you won't do something stupid?" He then slapped him on the back forcing a hearty laugh. "I mean, after all, it's my job to guard your body, even from you."
Weakly, Ayden smiled and gave his friend a pat on the knee. "I won't do anything stupid Johnny," he assured faintly.
His knees cracked into place as he stood up and straightened his back. Just as he turned to go he heard the blond call after him. "Try not to drink so much, alright buddy?"
Ayden nodded weakly but he wasn't very good at keeping promises.
I like writing all this. I do not like that fanfiction won't let me put in my dotted line breakers, the big ol' broad line interrupts the story too much, now I gotta find a new way to break up the story if I need to, good thing I didn't need to this time. How do you feel about the dashes?
