Drowning

Pairings: none

Quatre's POV

Warnings: mental suffering for Quatre, child experimentation

Disclaimer: I don't think I own them…one sec…no? oh ok then. No I don't own them.

Have I ever floated over the world, drifting, randomly stretching languid tendrils of the mind trying to fathom the thoughts of a generation? Sometimes it feels like I've been there forever. Endless nights burning into bright cold days filled with wanton lustful hate and placid dreams of innocence. I think I can hear space sing…I think it sings to me in the farthest background of my mind and when I sleep in comes into me in a heady rush of plastic lights and kaleidoscope melodies. There's a rumbling sound to it, like the Earth grinding against itself, gnashing dried lava teeth. And then there's space all around it that hums with crystalline clarity. It's so pure and infinite it makes me want to cry and be sick all at the same time.

I think the desert is like space sometimes. There's a constant shusch shusch of sliding sands and an inferno of howling winds. There are winds in space. Stellar winds. They make the shusch shusch sound too. Only in space it comes like an echo. There's a lot of space for sliding sand sounds to echo around in.

I used to think others could listen to the universe like I do. I'm not so silly anymore. Once, when I was small, I asked my father if he could hear the soundless voices. I wasn't allowed to leave my home after that. Perhaps it was because if other people knew about me they would take me away, and Father would have been very sad. He used to look at me with the pain feeling in his heart and despair in his eyes. I didn't understand that look until the soldiers came for me.

I am unique, they said. I am a special little boy, they whispered. Now I'll be able to share that with everyone, they smirked, as they filled my blood up with ice blue chemicals and let the pain come into my body.

There were long days of staring at six white walls while waiting for blue pain to creep into every inch of my still body. There were long days too of being strapped to cold steel and having the needles come into my body. There were long days too when I knew nothing of what went on. These were the days I floated. I touched them, those bright pained souls and made them better. I shared myself with them. Some I couldn't help. Better to feel the pain of the world than my own. Better to be alive through the dying than be dead while still alive.

Then just as suddenly as fate or Allah or both had thrown me into void I was sucked back out, ready to resume the life of a normal not-normal boy child.

Oh, little desert child. Oh, little child of space. Little child of burning sands and freezing oblivion can you hear them whispering? Can you hear the toneless voices as you float? Do you feel their pain? Do you? Yes, yes…please…no more…please…no…no please…yes please…

It doesn't stop. The voices filled with nothing more or less than pure emotion. Do you hear it? Does it scream in your head in the restless depths of night? Yes, or course. How could I not help? How could I be still while the restless murders of countless people passed through my brain in agitated flashes of brilliant agony? I left behind my morals and beliefs with the warmth of a loving and misunderstanding family. "Once more unto the breach, dear friends…" 1

If I thought that feeling pain from afar was terrible, it was nothing to the shredding anguish of blinking out fragile sparks of life with my own hands. There were others like me; made strong with resolve and tempered with the impetuosity and ignorance of youth. They were my comrades, my brothers-in-arms-and-legs-and-blood stained hands and wild minds and righteous souls…they were mine and I was theirs.

Now I am returned to the cold concreted rebreathed airless space that is space and is my home. And I find that I am alone. Alone with blue chemical dreams and motionless floating and the condemnation of Allah where there is no god, or he is hiding, or he is lost. Or I am lost.

I have reached out to soothe and reached out to kill and either way it is power. Perhaps the men who thought nothing of destroying the mind of a pale faced Arab child were right. I share myself with everyone whether it is my pale hand brimming with love and sincerity or the hand extended with blood dripping from long digits and bleak death flooding the veins in my wrists. "It's nice to make someone alive and it's nice to make someone dead. Either way. That power is what I like best in the world. The struggle is every day not to use it." 2

Not a day goes by that I forget the time I spent in white-walled hell. It burns me like dry ice. Something inevitably reminds me of it. A man wearing glasses, a sterile hallway, a fist clenched so tightly that the blood has run back up the arm to suffocate the brain… And everyday my empathy expands, taking me over little by little. It's like being in the tub when my father used to wash me, after the chemicals had destroyed my muscles and I could only lie and dream of souls. My father used to hold my head up out of the water so it wouldn't rush with warm soap filled gulps into my mouth. Now my father isn't here. The tub keeps expanding and nothing I can do will stop it. What was once a thin trickle of water is now a gushing faucet's worth. There's no one here to hold my head above the flood now.

I'm afraid like I haven't been since the war with mortar shells blowing above my head. I'm afraid with child-fear. The kind that makes me wish for the strong arms of my father and his comforting smell of laundry detergent and Turkish cigars. Only he's not here. And my brothers -in-arms and legs and hands and minds and souls aren't here.

I feel like I'm drowning.
What did people think? Good, bad? Should I keep going with this or just quit now before I forever more mar the name of fanfiction? A review or two would be greatly appreciated!

-NostalgieMalaak

1 From Shakespeare's The Life of King Henry the Fifth

2 From Caryl Churchill's A Mouthful of Birds