Note: Contains mentions of child abuse.
Nida, age six, shivers under the lifeless, empty stares of his mother's dolls. The largest among them, swathed in ruby velvet and yellowed Trabian lace, holds a place of honor in the center, her sisters lined up in neat rows all around her.
Mother likes to call them his sisters, and she names them all, but he can't tell Lyra from Luanne or Natalie from Petra. Sometimes, he thinks she loves the dolls more than she loves him.
She straightens his bow-tie and smooths the shoulders of his suit jacket with a frown and heaves a sigh.
It's Nida's first day of school, where he will play with other children, real children, ones that are not made of porcelain. His belly is full of butterflies. Mother has told him other children are unclean and full of disease. They have no manners and they're little better than a pack of grendels.
But Nida's seen them at the park and on the playground of the school down the block. He envies them their fun. Nida's sickly and weak and mother says he'll fall ill if he exerts himself or exposes himself to their filth. Nida hopes she's wrong.
It's only because his father insists that Nida is going to school at all.
"Be sure to wash your hands often," Mother says. "And don't touch things the other children have touched. And don't let them touch you."
"Yes, Mother," Nida says. "Can we go now?"
His eagerness hurts her feelings and Nida forces himself not to show it.
"Say goodbye to your sisters," Mother says. "Then we'll go."
To Nida, speaking to a bunch of dolls in frilly dresses with fake pink cheeks seems dumb, but he waves to the crowd of lifeless faces and asks them to wish him luck.
On the walk to school, his mother is full of warnings of the dangers he's about to face. Stay out of the sandbox. Don't get on the swings. Absolutely no climbing. Don't roughhouse with the other boys. Wash your hands. Try not to touch anything in the bathroom.
Don't do this. Don't do that. Until his ears ring with it.
She leaves him, tears on her cheeks, in the classroom where all the other children stare at him. He stands out in his little three piece suit and spit-shined shoes. Not one of them is dressed the way he is.
A pair of girls giggle behind their hands. A big boy points and laughs.
Nida wishes he was invisible.
His father leaves them when Nida is eight. His mother tells him Papa died, but Nida knows better. He watched from his bedroom window as his father loaded his bags into the car. He heard his father's shouts and his mother's shrieks of rage as things downstairs crashed against walls and shattered against the floor. He saw the dolls with cracked faces and severed hands on the floor in the morning, his mother surrounded by the carnage, shell-shocked as she cradled the largest of them in her arms, only one spared.
One by one, Mother puts them back together with glue and now their perfect faces are a horror of jagged lines and off-kilter and missing eyes and matted curls.
"My poor babies," she tells them. "I still love you."
Nida hates them.
She still makes him dress up to go to school, and as much as he stands out, as much as the other children laugh, it's better than being at home, where his mother slowly unravels. His grades are good and he loves to learn and he always knows the answer when the teacher calls on him.
"Dork."
"Know it all."
"Nerd-a"
Their teasing is relentless. He stops answering questions correctly, and they tease him for that, too. He ditches his tie and jacket, rolls up the sleeves of his dress shirt to come a little closer to fitting in, but they just laugh.
Nida wishes the floor would swallow him whole, he wishes to disappear, to be invisible.
Mother's convinced every cough or sneeze is the end of him. She inspects lumps and bumps with undue scrutiny, certain that he's developed cancer. She still insists on bathing him, though he's capable of doing it himself and would prefer to, and frets over the strands of hair that come away on her hands when she shampoos his hair.
Sometimes, he gets sick to his stomach hours after dinner and is forced to stay home from school the next day. It's only when he catches her dropping squares of chocolate laxatives into his hot cocoa does he understand why.
"To keep you regular," she promises. "The body needs to be purged every now and then."
Nida's not stupid. She wants him home, and she cries when he refuses the mugs of hot chocolate from then on.
He's not allowed to participate in sports for fear of scraped knees and broken bones. Any speck of dust or dirt on his clothing at the end of the day is a sure sign the other children have contaminated him, and she forces him into the bath and scrubs his skin until it turns red. She calls the teacher to inform her the homework is too advanced and too strenuous for poor, frail little Nida, that he's sick with anxiety.
She's smothering him. Some days, he feels like he can't breathe. Other days, she sits in her room and holds her dolls one by one, her daughters, and ignores the real, live boy who just wants to be like everyone else.
He's ten when Mother pushes him down the stairs. The fall breaks his leg and gives him a concussion. Mother tells the doctors he tripped, and Nida doesn't tell them otherwise, though he distinctly recalls her hands at his back and her bloated moon-face above when he hit the bottom.
For a month, he's laid up at home, posted up in her bed while the dolls stare at him from their shelves.
Mother dotes on him. She buys him the comic books she usually claims are full of sin and evil, and bakes him cakes that he refuses outright for fear of getting sick.
When he's alone, he stares back at the dolls and becomes convinced that every now and then, one of them moves. A blink. A twitch of an arm. A slight tilt of the head. He's going as mad as she is, all cooped up without anything to do.
"Your sisters are so happy you're home, sweetie," Mother tells him. "Why don't you let Celeste keep you company?"
Nida doesn't know which one Celeste is until she takes the one in red velvet down from her throne and tucks her into bed beside him. He shifts away and his skin prickles but Mother doesn't notice.
She takes a picture of the two of them, as if the doll is really his sister, and Nida knows his mother has really and truly lost her mind.
At age 11, Nida is still an outcast. He does his best to fit in, does his best to stay under the radar, but he stands out like a chocobo among chickens. He considers shoplifting clothes from the thrift store down the road, but he's never out of Mother's sight long enough to pull it off. She waits for him on the school steps every afternoon, and if he's a minute late, she goes off in search of him and often meets him at his classroom door, terrified he's been kidnapped.
This only exacerbates the teasing, and he's humiliated and angry and he thinks dark and ugly thoughts of smothering her in her sleep.
The day she shows up at school with Celeste and stands outside his classroom door five minutes before the bell is the final straw. He seethes as she walks him home, a cold stone of hatred growing larger and larger the closer they get to the house.
When he refuses to speak to her, she cries and cradles Celeste in her arms.
"Your brother doesn't love us anymore," she says.
It's not a lack of love, in Nida's opinion. It's too much love, and he aims to do something about it.
In his room, he packs a bag and sneaks it down to the laundry room. Then, he waits until after midnight to creep down the hall to Mother's room. She's sound asleep, Celeste clutched in her arms. Nida whispers his goodbyes, lights a candle and touches the flame to the curtains.
Nida is eighteen and has just passed his SeeD field exam. He looks at himself in the mirror, proud of the way the SeeD uniform fits and the fact that it's uniform. He is one of many and he doesn't stand out one way or another.
Here, he's nearly invisible, and that's just how he likes it.
Behind him, Celeste watches from the shelf next to the bed, a smudge of soot still staining her otherwise perfect face.
Notes:
I've been struggling to write lately, but I really wanted to post something for both Halloween and Nida and this is an idea/headcanon I've been toying with for a while. Didn't quite turn out as creepy as I wanted but I did the thing, so here you go.