A Bastard:::
His mother use to tell him stories about a pirate. At night before tucking him in, or in the early morning light as they ate pancakes and he practically drowned his breakfast in syrup. All the time, his mothers voice filled the silence with words crafting amazing tales of a man living freer than any other, out on the sea.
They were stories about a man with red hair named Shanks and how he saved people. About how Shanks never wanted to be called a hero, only humbly wanted to be known as a pirate. He could make evil bad guys pass out with one look in his eyes, and he could dodge a bullet before the shot was even fired.
Spade's mom would tell him stories about Shanks and how she loved him and that Shanks, his father, loved Spade too. So much. Spade always recalls the look in his mother eyes when she said she loved Shanks almost as much as she loved him. Almost. She always said "almost" right after, and that her little man right here was the person she loved the most. Of course, Spade did not really understand, but he liked the thought of being her favorite. So he did the chores when she asked him to and one day when he was five, he came home to late only to find her crying on the floor and he entered a mode he did not know he had. Protectiveness. A sense of protectiveness with his mother that has never truly left him. Whoever harmed his mother he would forever hate, and the person who made her cry when he was five was no exception. Only, there was no one to blame. Years passed before his mother told him outright, after all his persistent questionings, that no, she would not let him blame anyone and that he should drop it. Which he did with time.
He was only eight years old when he forgot all about that blaming business from the time when he was five. It's strange to think that he was also eight years old when he almost killed someone for the first time, too.
...
School is so lame, Spade feels like he's going to die and no one will even notice. He could keel over right in the middle of class and the teacher would continue trying to teach how to multiply two digit numbers. Spade cradles his chin in his hand and slowly lets his worn hat fall on to the desk as he tilts his head to face the window. That is the only good part about his school. The view, and the huge windows that let him see it. This view is his classroom, he decides. That's the only reason he bothers to come anymore. That, and it would break his mom's heart should he drop out when he was only in the third grade.
In front of his purple eyes Spade sees a sparkling sea. An image so vivid on a spring day that he can practically hear the scenery in front of him. Spade can hear the waves crashing on the cliff this school resides. The seagulls are cawing for food, and he can hear the way the wind bends around those amazingly white and taunting wings. The eight-year-old can hear the sea speaking to him sometimes, too. Spade has never told anyone that before, not even his mom. Well, it's not like he would really have anyone to tell besides her, anyway.
His mother tells him, every time he leaves to their shore to read without her, that "sea" was one of his first words. He wonders how he learned it, and so does his mom. But right now he is in class, hearing things that aren't there, and the recess bell has just rung.
There is a loud sound of shuffling shoes: students rising and kids running out into the gated playground, fenced away and safe- far from the sea, in the opposite direction of this breathtaking view. Since no child is allowed to stay in class without a teacher present, Spade gets up to join them after they have all cleared out.
Walking through the halls alone, Spade thinks he is one of the only kids in this school that actually notices the size of things. The high ceilings lined with small windows. The narrow hallway leading to the gated playground, in the opposite direction of the sea. Yeah, Spade is one of the only kids that ever sees anything.
He makes a complete u-turn in the empty hall, deciding that he would much rather unlatch and hop through the window in class to watch the waves, risk getting caught and punished, than go to the playground and hover around kids who don't want him there anyway. And they don't want him there- they all made that abundantly clear a long time ago. His battered and bruised body three years ago is proof of that. At least now they are wary of him- especially when he started to fight back. With his words, and his fists. That is also one of the reasons he has no friends, though.
However, this train of thought stops as Spade runs into a belly. He bounces back like a rubber ball off a wall, his butt and palms landing on the cold ground of the narrow hall.
The first thing Spade sees is sneakers.
Hastily laced, and dirty from running through mud. They are green and brown, and he instantly curses them because he recognizes them.
Kave has to be the tallest, fattest, and ugliest 3rd grader ever born to walk this planet. He has nose hair at the age of eight and a half, and some say Kave fights for fun with the adults, but Spade feels like he is the only kid around to ever truly feel them. Kave reminds Spade distinctively of a sad pig. Kave is almost as tall as their teacher and he has the biggest belly ever, but Spade still thinks that Kave is quite small in reality. It is for that reason that Spade usually tries his best to avoid him.
"You gunna' apologize for that, Spade-kun?" He practically squeals out, a teasing air in his voice. Let it be noted that Kave's voice is like nails on a chalkboard to Spade, and Spade's flinch is out of disgust, not fear. Spade rises from the icy ground and dusts his jean shorts off before reaching to secure his hat on his head, only realizing then that he left it in the classroom on his desk. He is about to brush past Kave to retrieve it, and escape from the hallway to look at the sea, when Kave shoves him down with his huge pudgy, and sausage-like fingers.
"You have to apologize when you've done something wrong, rat!" Kave practically sings. Spade has never been called a rat before. An "idiot", sure, a "useless kid" every Monday, but a "rat"? That is new. And why? Why a rat? Spade figures that Kave has just run out of names to call him. But still, Spade has become a person who can never take an insult without a fight.
"What did you call me?" He asks, his bright purple eyes flashing irritatingly.
"You can't hear now, Spade-kun? I called you a rat, because that's what you are. You, and your mother-"
"What!?" Spade yells, garnering attention from the playground outside due to his volume. His booming voice creates a crowd of children and adults around the doorway.
"I-I-, you and your mommy are rats! Dirty, stupid, gutter rats! And so is your bastard of a father! And if your dad's a bastard, you know what you are?" At first Kave had lost steam, as Spade's tone scared him too. But then he gained speed and began puffing like one those special trains the government is rumored to have on the ocean. Spade looks about ready to explode. Mentioning his mother is a bad idea, and talking blatantly about his absent father, whom Spade slightly idolizes, isn't very smart either. A strange essence seems to surround him, but no detects this strange surge of power emanating from Spade. His purple eyes narrow, and somehow, when the swinging light in the hallway catches them just right two children in the back of the crowd pass out suddenly, unnoticed.
" A bastard, too."
People could practically hear Spade snap.
No one really saw it coming. Especially, and most of all, Kave. Later, kids say that Spade grew fangs and claws to rip Kave's face and body up the way he did. A terrifying image, really: a monster being born in a narrow hallway at school. However, the adults present knew better. Spade did not grow claws, nor did he sprout fangs. He did that scarring damage to young Kave all with his bare hands. With nails clipped to the quick by his doting mother, and with diligently flossed 8-year-old teeth. He beat a child to near death, only stopping because he was forcefully pulled off by three strong teachers.
That was the reason the adults froze for almost two minutes before stopping Spade, because this was no monster in their halls, this was a human boy.
People don not talk about the incident much after. Though the long gashes that cover Kave's body will never leave, the doctors say. The doctors also say that it is lucky the teachers stopped Spade when they did, or else Kave could have potentially died. Oh, and the emotional trauma will most likely never leave either. As such, whenever Kave stammers now, everyone excuses it.
It is funny, in a strange sort of way, that the last completely clear sentence Kave ever uttered was an insult. An insult that people, kids and adults alike, began to say behind Spade's back a few weeks later. Of course, like most unflattering nick-names, Spade did not learn about it until a few days after it was already circulated around school twice. It became a nick-name that did not go away with the changing of seasons, and in fact, became more memorable than his own name, in his own home town. It made the seasons longer, and much, much lonelier for Spade: The Bastard Boy.
...
Spade wonders if it will always be this way. If he will always sport cuts and bruises on his heart and body from bigger kids and adult's worried and spiteful lingering gazes. Ever since he beat up Kave, no kid ever talks to him anymore. They either steer clear of him, or glare at him from afar.
He never thought you could feel hatred so vividly until kids starting burning holes with their eyes on the back his head as he walked through the halls of school. As such, he begins to sit in the back to avoid the stares of others, but then there are the teachers. They hover around him as he works, corrects him over every mistake, and generally attempt to make an example out of the Bastard boy, the most difficult child in class- in school. What Spade does not understand is that his teachers will bug the hell out of him one minute, and then turn a blind eye, or deaf ear, as students whisper evil rumors about him loudly enough for him to hear. His mother tells him to ignore them, but sometimes, when he catches kids speaking about him with malice, he catches their eye and glares for all he's worth- that shuts them up. But only sometimes.
When they called his mother about Kave, she looked furious. Spade thought she was going to smack somebody, which seems out of place given the fact that his mother has a calm sort of strongness to her, not a blatant display of defiant strength in her eyes, as she has that day. She asked why her son hit the boy in the first place, and it was then that it became known of how Kave was bullying him, and was likely doing so at the time of the incident. Needless to say, she nearly blew a gasket.
As they were walking home that day, his small bloodied hands clutched tightly in his mothers, as she practically pulled him along, she asked him if he wanted to stop going to school. If Spade wanted to have a tutor hired to teach him general mathematics and such at the back of the bar instead. Spade's mother looked so exhausted as she offered him this alternative that he could not help but deny her.
So now he is stuck here.
In this hell, with all these kid's eyes burning his body with a fire he thought they lacked.
Looks like all they needed was to find something, or someone, to hate in order to ignite that flame in themselves.
In that regard, Spade is also different from the other kids. Because while he is short tempered, Spade does not hate easily. He doesn't even hate Kave who set this all off. In fact, in a really twisted way, Spade likes Kave. If it were not for Kave, he would not be able to escape from recess without argument now. Spade would not be able to have a front row seat to the best view of all, in the back row of his class because no kid wanted to sit next to him, and the front row was reserved for those with potential his teachers though he severely lacked. So in that aspect, Spade is thankful to Kave.
However, it is because of Kave as well that he can't help but hear the evolved whispers of what was once "the Bastard boy", to now "the bleeding Bastard". Which makes him fill silently with rage. Spade does not really understand it, but whenever people call him a bastard, he becoem furious. Maybe it's because he is no bastard! But he also think he gets agitated by the word for reasons he does not understand just yet.
It's around the end of third grade when Spade begins to thinks of his father who, logically, must have had red hair.
Then Spade starts thinks of pirates, and tangible freedom out on the sea. This is when a fire, so bright and so hot, begins to burn in him.
You could see it in his eyes as he watches the waves overlap each other below his classroom during the day.
To be quite fair, this flame can also be seen as slightly bitter, as it was fanned by his isolation form his peers. But he is not like his classmates or the villigers in this town: so normal and so easily scared by what they don't understand or wish to know, so comfortable in their ordinary lives that when something out-of the ordinary happens, they are put out.
Before Spade went in to the fourth grade, he had already come to a decision:
He'll get away from all these stares, so pungent and so full of hate.
Spade will save people, because he could never be entirely saved himself. But he won't be hero.
No, Spade will be a pirate.
Through all this beautiful dreaming however, Spade forgot his promise. And he will realize later, that most people in his family tend to do that: forget their most important promises of all. The red-headed "bleeding Bastard" forgot that he swore never to leave his mother alone.
...
Makino knew that Spade would one day leave. Because he knew the word "sea" when no one ever taught him it, and he learned how to swim so quickly, and his father is who he is and yes. Yes. Makino knew Spade would one day leave. His purple determined eyes, so hauntingly bright and his echoing voice, that on a random summer day, said to her: "I'm gunna' be the best pirate in the world!", just reminded her of that fact.
A/N::: Hello one an all! I'm sorry, once again, that I did not update for so long. If it counts, I have the next few chapters planned out pretty well and I am HOPING that you all will get chapter (what is it?) 9 sometime next week. I actually know a guy named Kave who is very much like the character in this story. The ass. Anyways! Reviews would be nice, but I understand how hard it is to click a button and quickly write out your thoughts on a chapter. That wasn't sarcasm either. I get it; Places to go, people to see.
Like is said, look out for the next chapter and I am sorry I took soooooo long!