Summary: Before Earth, before his change of heart and before his family, there had been a son he'd never wanted, made from Frieza's seed and born from his body. Then he was dead, and Vegeta made sure to forget he had ever been there at all. Only, he isn't dead. He is alive. Tormented and abused, but alive, and now Vegeta will do what he couldn't have done the first time. He will save him.
Warnings: Rated M for language, abuse, sexual violence, depictions of rape, mpreg, etc.
*This chapter includes graphic depictions of violence and non-graphic RAPE of a child.*
Every Eye Will See
Chapter Nineteen: The Monster
The Past:
He shivered and turned away as Frieza's blood red eyes stared back at him.
The child's eyes were the same as his, and Vegeta did not know why he expected anything different. Of course Frieza's spawn would have his demon eyes, that pierced through him like his body was paper and the gaze a scorching knife. The same cold stare, the same malicious shade, the same damning red as Frieza's.
Disgust roiled through Vegeta, absolute revolution nearly consumed him. I made this, went his thoughts like whirlwinds through the clouds of loathing and rage in his mind, my blood flows through this abomination's veins.
End it, he thought, and he nearly did. It would be easy enough. The creature was so small and frail, all he would need to do was push the cradle until it tipped, add enough force that the impact would be fatal...
He took a breath. He took another and let as much of the rage and disgust flow along the river of air slipping past his lips as he could. Then, when something almost resembling calm had outweighed everything else, he looked again.
The creature's eyes were closed momentarily while it wailed, but they eventually open once more. The color was red, there was no doubt, two red spheres nearly glowing where the light from the ceiling had caught onto the wetness of his tears. They were the exact same shade as well; he was certain of that also. Vegeta had never thought he was so intimately aware of just what Frieza's eyes looked like, but when met with their twins he could not deny they were a mirror image.
And yet, they were different.
Where he once thought there was a cold gaze, was instead a mildly unhappy one. Where once was a malicious shade, was instead an almost gentle hue. Where once was a damning color, was instead simply... red.
Of course, Vegeta acknowledged, the thing was still an infant—the eyes were certainly subject to change. For now, though, these were not the eyes of a tyrant. There was nothing at all unsettling about the eyes before him, and he immediately felt ridiculous for reacting so violently. Had Frieza conditioned his fear so well that he would cower from an infant's eyes? Never in his life did he expect himself to be so pathetic.
Not at all interested in the shame that began to rise inside of him, he banished the thought. Instead, he leaned further over the cradle. All this time, the infant was still crying, the choked off wails growing to an intensity that had long surpassed the threshold his sensitive ears could withstand.
"Quiet," he snarled at it.
The response was more wailing.
Initially, he planned to wait. Surely a doctor would have noticed he was awake by now and come to take the thing away. Yet several moments passed and no one came. Vegeta was not a patient man, and neither, it seemed, was this creature.
Before he could think to do otherwise, Vegeta leaned over the cradle and stuck his hands in. He fit them around its tiny body—off-handedly remembering to put one underneath its head—and lifted it out of the cradle. It was so light he nearly could not feel it. The blanket slipped and he could see that it was male.
The crying dimmed somewhat. The creature's eyes fixed on him, though Vegeta was sure that its sight was too underdeveloped to actually see anything. Still the message was clear—you have my attention, and you better figure out how to keep it.
Vegeta's response to that was to frown.
So. This was the parasite that had been fermenting inside him all those months.
Vegeta tried to think back to everything he knew about infants. He could not remember the last time he had even seen an infant; he had never even held one until this moment. The baby did not smell particularly bad, so it probably had not soiled itself (not that he even knew what to do about it if it had), and the room was neither hot nor cold so general discomfort was unlikely.
The only, and most obvious explanation was that the thing must be hungry. There was only one way to feed it and the idea was so appalling he nearly dropped the thing back in the cradle.
The revival of the infernal crying had him ripping his flimsy shirt open. Before he could be properly repulsed by his actions, he brought the infant up towards his exposed, swollen nipple.
The creature sucked so hard it nearly hurt, gnawing with all the strength his little gums possessed, trying its best to get the food it had clearly been denied for too long. Vegeta grit his teeth around the strange and unnatural sensation but did not pull it away. Instead, he watched it.
It was a bit difficult to wrap his mind around the fact that this was the thing that had been inside of him. He did not think he had ever, in all that time, thought of it as not a parasite. Logically, he knew that that was not true—the creature inside of him was not actually a leech, not something cancerous and verminous no matter how much it was not a part of him—but he did not see it that way until now.
Perhaps he refused to see it as anything other than a parasite because he figured it would be dead by now.
But it was not dead, and it was undeniably a baby that he was looking at. Not just any baby, he realizes with growing horror, one that looked like him.
There was no point in trying to tell himself otherwise. It was not Frieza who gave the infant its wild spikes of dark hair, or the flesh tone of his skin, or the point of his tiny nose, or even the sharpness of his eyebrows. The nails and the eyes and perhaps the strange lines on its cheeks were from Frieza, but everything else...
Everything else was him. Everything else was him because it was his.
Vegeta had a child.
That thought... he did not know what to do with that thought.
A child that only exists because Frieza violated you in the most humiliating, debasing ways. A child that shares his blood just as much as he shares yours.
He knew exactly how that thought made him feel, and he pushed it away. For now.
When the creature eventually stopped suckling, he pulled it back to stare at it once more. It stared back at him—or more accurately, looked in his general direction with its tiny red eyes. Everything about it was tiny; its body was barely larger than his two hands put together. Vegeta wondered if it was normal for infants to be this small.
He didn't know a lot of things about children. He never bothered to ask, never even considered that he might ever have one. What did people even do with these things?
He tried to think back on his own childhood. His mother—a true warrior queen through and through—had died before he ever had a chance to know her, and Tarble's mother—a pathetically weak concubine with the defining quality of a pretty face—had never bothered to fill the void. He thought of his father, who had been a surprisingly familiar face given his role as a planetary king, but after nearly four decades, most of Vegeta's memories consisted of little more than stoic eyes and the sound of a deep, stern voice.
Feed them, he supposed. Train them so they didn't get themselves killed. He could not imagine much beyond that.
Not that he needed to know either way, he thought, as he kicked the cradle aside and out of his way. He holds his arms out, raising the baby up and away from him like an offering. It would not be so simple as letting his grip go slack; its body was pathetically small but there was still saiyan blood inside of it, after all. No, he would need to use force. He would need to ensure that it hit the ground hard enough that it would not come back from the blow.
He would do it because Vegeta had no need for it. To keep it had never been an option, and it would not become one now even if he wanted too. And he didn't. Vegeta was a warrior, a conqueror, perhaps even the future emperor of the universe if he wished. He was not a broodmare. He would not play mother to the spawn of the bastard he had sworn to annihilate.
He would do it and be done with it.
He would.
He would.
He would.
Minutes passed, and he did not.
After a while, he pulled his arms back in.
Vegeta wondered if he struggled because he had never truly killed an infant. He was sure that he had probably killed hundreds indirectly, but never purposely. He was simply never presented with the opportunity to do so. He had cut down more than enough women who clutched their squalling babes in their arms as if he had come all the way across the galaxy solely to snatch away their child from them. Once the women were dead, though, he had never seen a reason to bother with infants that would undoubtedly die on their own.
Were these... morals? How utterly nonsensical it would be if it were. After all, he had no issues slaying children. Where exactly was the line drawn by that logic? If it could not speak in complete sentences it was off-limits?
Ridiculous.
Ridiculous as it was, Vegeta was still no more eager to end the pitiable thing's life.
What other options were there? Let it live? And what would he do then: wipe its ass and feed it from his teats like a cow? Spend his nights and days tending to it when he could be training and getting stronger?
It would be just as much a parasite outside his body as it had been within it.
And all of this was based on the assumption that he even could keep it on the ship, a ship full of soldiers who would mock him and jeer at just how far the saiyan race had fallen that their prince was now bearing sons for Frieza—
Vegeta did not want that.
He also did not want it to die by his hand.
The only other option was to send it away, but it was not an option at all. Where would he send it? Was he supposed to just sneak off to the nearest planet—all of which, if he remembered their coordinates correctly, were travel ports and thrill-seeking hubs—drop it somewhere in the streets, and consider it a job well done? Acknowledging the possibility of it being picked up by someone set on making its life one so awful it was not worth living, how was that any better than just killing it here and now?
What to do. What to do...
He held it for now. When it started to fuss again, he scratched lightly behind its ear. Distantly, he remembered his father doing this to him. It was so long ago he did not even remember what it felt like. The creature seemed contented by it, though. Its furless tail wiggled in the air for a moment before it wrapped tightly around Vegeta's wrist.
By now, word would have reached Frieza. What would that bastard do? Kill it, probably. He had no more use for the thing than Vegeta did. Perhaps that was the best option. There was no life for the creature either with him or away from him. At least then, it would find peace in death and Vegeta would not have to add filicide to his record of dastardly misdeeds.
He wondered, oddly enough, what his own father would think. He would probably be so utterly disgusted, might even try to slay Vegeta himself to cleanse the dishonor. Not that he had ever thought his father's love for him to be a fickle thing, but the King had always held the air of a man invariably prepared to do what needed to be done, and having the crown prince be made into their enslaver's bitch simply would not stand.
Still, some deep, childish part of him wished the man were here. He wished that anyone was here. There were very few times when he desired Nappa's company—and where was that oaf?—but he could use his overwhelmingly loyal presence right now. He would even take Raditz, who was perhaps the closest thing he had to a friend, even if the thought of explaining just why he was here in the first place made him want to curl up and never unravel.
But there was no one. He was alone.
Not quite alone, he supposed. He had this creature that he did not want. He wondered what it would be like if he did want it, if he could allow himself to even consider such a desire. He wondered what it would be like if there were no mocking faces waiting for him beyond this room, if there were no protocols about room capacities and the types of persons allowed to live on Frieza's bases, if there was no one waiting to snatch the thing away from him.
It might have been interesting, raising a son. Perhaps it would have been just enough his own that Vegeta could forget it was Frieza's as well. He could have raised it in his likelihood, until everything that was Frieza was gone and all that remained was what Vegeta's blood had brought into the world.
He stroked a thumb across one of the baby's cheeks. It was smooth and soft, even where the dark line stained the pale color. It would have been nice to find out, he thought.
"I truly have never seen a more beautiful sight."
Vegeta's eyes fell closed. He had not realized just how light he had felt inside until the emotion suddenly soured like curdled milk.
"Vegeta," he said as the door slid closed with a whoosh, the tone sweet and ugly all at once. "You, sly, sneaky dog. How did you ever manage to hide this from me?"
The sound of footsteps came next, drawing ever closer with each tap on the floor. Vegeta wondered if it meant something that he came on foot instead of in that levitating chair of his.
"Well, let me see it then."
Vegeta did not move, but the bastard seemed to get an eyeful anyway.
"He is quite the monkey looking thing, isn't he?" Frieza said, tsk tsking.
Vegeta's eyes were still closed, but he could sense the arms suddenly reaching towards him. His body jerked back before he could tell it not too.
"My, my, Vegeta," he chastised, having the gall to sound amused. "Don't you think a father has a right to hold his own child?"
He felt Frieza's hands creeping forward again.
Suddenly, surely out of nowhere, he thought, No. Get away, and he does it himself, leaping up from the bed and breaking into a sprint.
The door was ahead of him, right in front of him when Frieza appeared and blocked the path, materializing before him like a demon summoned from Hell.
"Going somewhere?" he thought he heard but Vegeta was already skidding to a halt and spinning on his heel to run the other way.
Get away, he thought, even though there was nothing but grey walls in front of him. Get away, he thought even though every part of him knew it was futile.
Get away, he thought, but he abruptly could not, because a searing pain at the base of his spine brought him to his knees. He had long since trained the hypersensitivity out of his tail, but the nerve endings would always be just the slightest bit more tender than anywhere else.
Not that it mattered. Frieza did not need to exploit such a weakness to take him down.
"Oh, look, now he's crying," Frieza said. Vegeta could hear it, the wailing coming from the baby still tucked in his arms. The noise of it seems to come from somewhere off in the distance, drowned out by the snapping of his tail's bones underneath Frieza's boot. "A mother shouldn't make her children cry, Vegeta."
Frieza leaned forward—Vegeta could feel it in the way his weight shifted on his broken tail bones. He could feel the bastard, the complete and utter monster growing nearer, and he could not protect it, not when his limbs had already begun to go numb.
The baby was taken from his arms, and they do not even feel the loss.
Vegeta could feel it though, like something deep in his chest was suddenly ripped away. He tried to follow after them, he truly did, but the pain had spread throughout his whole body and the weight of it was nearly too much to bear. Inches were suddenly miles and he couldn't do it.
"No!" he heard himself say. "No!"
Why was this happening? He had enough sense inside of him to wonder. Why had he felt the need to fight against what was already inevitable? Why did the emptiness of his arms feel so wrong? Why was this hurting him so badly?
He did not know. He did know that the sight of his baby in Frieza's arms was wrong. Every second that the distance between them grew was wrong. All of this was wrong.
Yet, he could do nothing. The baby continued to cry, but not even the awful sound of it was enough to fix his paralyzed muscles or bring life back into his bones. Black crept along the edges of his vision, and it took everything in him to fight against the darkness that threatened to drag him under.
"Please!" he begged, when Frieza nearly crossed over the threshold of the door.
He's mine... He's mine...
The bastard only laughed, a few short twitters that go almost unheard against the piercing wails and the ringing in Vegeta's ears.
"You fret so needlessly, Vegeta. Surely you haven't gotten attached that quickly." He looked back with a sly smile, his red eyes sparkling with amusement. "I'll be taking this one. If it means that much to you, though, I'd be glad to put another in you."
Then he was gone. They both were gone.
And that was all that love ever did. It came and it went and made you wonder why it ever bothered to come in the first place. He never should have forgotten that.
Never again, he thought. Never again.
Despite his resolve, the pain had already come. It had sunk down deep, so far down he could not claw it out without tearing something within himself, something vital to the man that he was, something he could never repair.
Above him, the ceiling faded away to nothing. The faint scent of antiseptic cleared from his nose until there was nothing to smell. His skin, his muscles, everything that should feel suddenly didn't. Every sound faded away until all he could hear was the color white.
Yet, his emotions still raged. He wanted to scream. He wanted to tear his hair from his scalp. He wanted to rage until everything around him had succumbed to his wrath. He wanted to cry and beg and possibly even die. He wanted the pain to end.
Forget it all. He told himself. It can't hurt if it never happened.
He told himself that over and over and soon he knew it would be real. Now though, he stayed stuck, submerged in the sea that had taken over his mind. His body was light enough that it floated, but the tension was strong and refused to break the final barrier. He stayed there, light but so heavy, beating against the surface but not moving a muscle, drowning but not dying.
They'll die, he thought, even as soft coos and a tiny face sunk deeper and deeper in the water, crushed by the pressure until they were nearly unrecognizable, buried in the sand until they could no longer be seen.
"He's mine," fell from his lips as little red eyes were buried deep in the ocean floor, covered all over with thick sand until they were nearly no more.
"They'll die..."
The Present:
Time passed.
He was calmer now, enough so that his tears had no other choice but to dissipate, and his inner pleas had no other choice but to cease. Over time, the pain he had felt had changed. No longer was it a suffocating agony that poisoned his body. Now, he was simply numb.
He could not quite say which was worst. Did it matter?
He had not moved, of course; even through his calm he stayed. The boulders beneath him were still, but he knew that far beneath them the ground was shaking. The air around him buzzed with an otherworldly energy. It tempted the strands of his hair until nearly all of it reached towards the sky and stung his skin when it zapped too closely.
It was as if he were in the middle of a battlefield; the planet's last desperate fight before it was reduced to nothing. And it would be, he knew. He could not say he understood what was happening, but he knew that his planet was dying.
He did not care.
No, that was a lie; he did care. He cared, because how else could he explain the hope he felt that the planet would lose the battle faster?
When the world finally succumbed to its demise, then he would as well. He would die. Finally, right here, holding the hand of the one he cherished above all else, he would die.
Suddenly—like all bad things were—his attention was captured. His ears caught the sound of crunching rocks as they were stepped upon behind him, and the groaning of a pained body moving when it should not be. He was surprised to hear it. Part of him must have believed he was the only survivor left.
The person, a man, kept coming. He realized eventually that the man was coming for him.
Once that realization struck, he did not bother to insult his own intelligence by wondering who it was. When had it ever been anyone else?
"You..."
Never has the sound of that voice terrified him so.
"Did you think—" the voice cuts off around a ragged cough. "Did you think you were going to leave me?"
Run, a voice that almost sounds like his own says, run! He can hear it, understands what the word means and understands the urgency, but he does not. He cannot. His body stays rooted to the spot, pinned there by a great number of things. He can imagine each one in his mind. His injuries: a set of cuffs around his hands. His exhaustion: a chain around his waist. His promise to her: a weight on his legs.
His lack of will: a stake through his heart.
"Where did you think you would go?" the voice asks him, growing closer. Every scrap of his boots against the stones passes through Chill's ears like an assault. The steps are slow, not in any sort of hurry and why would he be? What threat is there from prey that had already given up hope? There is none—not for the hunter.
Like prey, Chill feels something like fear. He feels fear because he is not like other hunters. His victory did not mean death for the prey.
Chills hand squeezes around the lifeless one in his grip. He squeezes so tightly that his hand pangs from the effort of it, but he does not let go. Comfort from a corpse was better than no comfort at all.
"Did you think that your cunt-less mother was going to save you?" the voice says again, his tone nasty and disgusting.
He had not thought that that man would save him, but the words don't come and either way, that's not what he wants to hear.
"You belong to me!"
A tight grip closes around his ankle, and yanks at him. He tries to fight it, he truly does. He tries to hold onto her hand with everything he has, tries his best to keep the life in her, but he is weak. Always so weak.
"Who said you could leave me?!"
Another pull and he is torn away from her. His body flies from the rock pile onto the ground. His right shoulder takes the full force of the impact.
"Who said it? Who told you, you could leave me?" the voice demands, so loud that the sound echoes throughout the canyon of decimated rocks. "I didn't say it!"
Then he hears the jingle of a belt buckle being unhooked, the zip of a zipper coming undone. The sounds are familiar to him. He knows how this game is played.
It is not truly a game, he knows. In truth it is something quite awful, something taboo, something so dishonorable that both offender and victim feel the stain of it. This is why degenerates were feared. This is how innocents are disgraced and enemies degraded. This is what victors do to their spoils. This is what monsters with power do to those without.
He never understood what was so terrible about it. Maybe because by the time he knew it was wrong, it had already been right for so long. No matter how right it had seemed, though, he had never enjoyed it. He never liked the unease and uncertainty that would grow stronger each and every time he was in the Master's bed. He never liked not knowing if it would be the Warden or the Master that would torment him that day.
He had never liked it, but this is the first time he ever thinks, No.
Chill bats at the hands that grab at him. He earns a slap so hard his skin breaks, splits open like the stone hand was a knife. Nonetheless, even though his face still burns from the punishment, he thinks, No. No. No. No.
It does not matter. All his struggle earns him is a tighter hold on his hair, several strands coming loose from the strain. His rough fingers pry his mouth open, and the worst part of him forces itself inside.
The flesh is almost as tight as the rocks it is designed after, and it plunders past his teeth with no regard for their sharpness. His throat spasms, gags, and his eyes sting with tears.
It is awful. It is so, so awful.
"I've been good to you," he hears him say, his words made of anger, but his grunts made from pleasure. "I saved your life. They all wanted to see your little body burn on a pillar three times the size of you, but I saved you. I brought you to my home, gave you life, and this is how you repay me? By trying to leave me?"
Chill has no idea what he is talking about. He cannot breathe, not when his mouth is full, not when his nose is beating against a sharp pelvis faster than he can draw breath.
"I bet you wished that blast had killed me. Bet you'd go running after him like the whore you are."
Who? Who? Who? He cannot breathe. He cannot breathe. He cannot breathe.
"He doesn't want you. He never wanted you, and you would dare choose him over me?"
He cannot breathe...
Then it was over. He pushes him back so roughly his face finds the dirt again. He gasps for air, coughing around saliva and the burning in his throat.
"No one wants you. Not Frieza. Not Vegeta. Not anyone. Only me. You're mine and you aren't going anywhere!"
He knows that is true. Frieza had condemned him, and Vegeta had abandoned him. He was the only one who gave him purpose, made him feel needed, gave him the chance to make up for all the wrongs his father and forefathers had done.
Neeila wanted me.
The thought makes the fight in him burn anew. He kicks and scratches, such weak, useless attacks, but he does them. It makes him angry. He rants and raves more angry words that Chill cannot hear over the sound of his own growling and shouting.
Chill holds no illusions that his resistance makes any difference, but the hands lift off him all the same. He has been granted reprieve, but only that. He is not done with him, far from it he knows. He just wants more, Chill knows as well, can feel it build in the air between them.
"Look at me! Look at what you've done to me!" And then for the third time that day, his blindfold is lifted off of his eyes.
Chill had seen the Warden's face only once before. It had been the first day that Chill was taken from the grand building. He did not remember much of what had happened before then. He could not say what it was that had prompted the Warden to show his face to him then. He could not say why the Warden felt it safe for the red of his eyes to see the light of the world.
He remembered his face though. He remembered the sharp jaw and cracked skin. He remembered the color of his brush backed hair that Neeila told him was called brown, and the eyes Neeila told him were called navy. He remembered the soft promise of danger in those eyes, the way they made his hairs rise and his spine shudder, the way they pierced him down deep, like there was nowhere within himself that he could escape them.
The Warden does not look like that way now. His once finely brushed hair is now a ragged whirlwind. His face is nearly destroyed by deep gashes and wounds and dripping with blood. His eyes are shot with red, and the danger is no longer an undercurrent. The danger screams at him now, as does the anger, the rage, and the promise of pain.
He quickly closes his eyes, but it is too late. The image still glows brightly in his mind; every detail etched perfectly in what should have been the darkness behind his eyelids. Chill hates it. He hates that when he tries to see Neeila, what he had wanted to be the last thing he ever saw, all that comes to mind is bloody stone and the darkness of hate.
He does not want to see it. He had not wanted to see the Warden this way at all. He did not look like the Warden Chill has always known. He looks like a creature from a nightmare. He looks like the thing that strikes fear into one's heart.
He looks like a monster.
"Damn you," he says. His voice sounds different, then. Softer, almost wistful. "You're perfect for me, you know that? You always have been. My Angel. Damn you, damn you."
Chill thinks he might feel something like guilt. No matter the pain he caused him, the torment he put him through, the Warden had been good to him. No one else would have allowed him constant access to healers to keep him alive. No one else would have given him the opportunity to experience the gift of life. No one else would have taught him so fervently just what exactly he was so that he would never forget.
But then the Warden—no, the Master, he thinks—starts pulling him back by his hips, lifting them off the ground, settling him on his knees, and still he thinks, No. He thinks no and reaches out at anything to make it stop. He finds a stone and makes it float. Then it flies and smashes into the Master's face.
The Master lets him go, but before Chill can make his legs work, he is grabbing him again. He tries again, reaches out desperately for anything. He reaches for the Master, feels where his mind and thoughts emanate from and locks onto it. He squeezes and the Master screams, clawing at his own temple as if he could ever hope to fight a pain from within.
He squeezes until the Master gives up on attacking himself, and instead smashes a fist against his face, then another against his unprotected tail.
"You dare!" he hears the Master snarl, somewhere distant, so hard to hear when a rock fist was shattering his most sensitive bones. "You dare! You dare!"
The Warden, the Master, the Monster stops when the ringing starts. If he says more words, Chill does not hear them. He does not hear anything. He does not see anything. He feels blood warm on his face and his legs being lifted into the air but not much more than that. There is a point where pain becomes too much. The body simply will not take what it cannot endure.
He feels nothing, and it is the same as feeling everything.
He has felt agony, he has felt it all his life. He has felt it ever since he left the grand building. Probably even before.
That is what it is, this pain that hurts so much that he can't feel it. It is the pain of the burns of his back pressed flat against the ground. It is the pain of the small cuts dotting around his body. It is the pain of the shattered bones in his feet. It is the pain of his hungry stomach and his thirsty throat. It is the pain of hot tears stuck in his eyes.
It is the pain of his empty dreams at night. Where there should be fantasies and nightmares, there was nothing, the space so clearly voided that he missed even what he had hardly ever known.
It is the pain of lies. The pain of pretty ones, like the smile in Neeila's voice when she spoke to him, like how she made him feel that he was worthy of that smile. The pain of ugly ones, like the thought that there had once ever been someone who held him in their arms and cherished what he was, what he could be.
It is the pain of grief. Even now, where there should be fear and the urge to fight there is only the desire for a hand that should be holding his, a voice that should be chiming in his ear, a sweet laugh that he had never understood and will never get the chance too. There is grief even beyond that, a hurt so early that he does not think he has ever been without it.
It is the pain of abandonment, because that is what it was, when it was all said and done. He was not the atonement. He was not the blood price of the wrongs done before him. He might not have ever been those things. He was the spawn that was useless to the one that sired him, and unwanted even to the one that bore him in his own body.
It is the pain of being beaten and burned and fucked. It is the pain of being sick with no medicine, of breathing in air that hurt the whole way down to his lungs. It is the pain of fear, the pain of hopelessness, the pain of praying and the pain of never having an answer.
Yet, he does have an answer, really. That is the pain of truth. He has looked back on his life, looked back on all that he has been told, been shown, been subjected to, and told himself he had accepted it. He knows now that he had not, not really. Deep down, he hid from it, denied it. He told himself those pretty and ugly lies. He told himself that he was not truly what he was, that he was more than what this world told him, that he was whatever kind of person Neeila saw when she looked at him.
But he has never needed eyes to see what is right in front of him.
He cannot beg the agony to stop. How can you stop what simply is? You cannot ask the sun to burn any less hot, cannot ask the sky to bleed any other color but red. You cannot change what is and what always will be, and if you cannot escape it, then what else is there to do but to accept it?
The pain is awful, unbearable, agonizing, but it does not have to be. Is that not what the Warden, The Master, The Monster had always been trying to tell him? Pain hurt because it is resistance—the body doing its utmost to cease what it considers to be wrong. But what if he just... stops?
There is a ledge, so real that he can almost see it. He can feel it too, feel where he holds it. He is barely holding on, now. What had once been both hands planted firm like the tether of a rope is now scarcely more than a finger, a strand of hair holding all of his weight, dangling him teasingly over what lies beneath.
What if he just... let go? Let the last of his grip fade, let everything inside of him fall away like the last leaf of a branch, the last petal of a flower, the last light against the dark.
He can end all of it: the fighting, the struggling, the hurting. He can empty his mind of his memories, his emotions, his thoughts. He can go down where it is too quiet to hear, too dark to see, too empty to feel. He can go where all the pain stops. He can go down where it is too deep to come back from.
He can let it go.
He can...
He can...
He can see a light, glowing so bright it stings his sensitive eyes, unaware that he had even had them open. The light grows brighter as it moves closer, but he does not look away. He does not look away and he sees the light shift into the shape of a figure.
The figure is a man, blond of hair and enraged of eyes, encased in the glow like the sun lives within him.
The man did not have wings or robes, but Chill is certain he is an angel. Not the kind of angel the Master had made him, but a true one—a servant of the gods above.
It seems even a tyrant's spawn, a demon, a monster deserves the beauty of something holy to carry him off in death.
TBC