#vash.odt

You wake, often stirred from sleep by the rustling of curtains and sheets or a sharp yelp of surprise from Felicia tripping over her own feet, and it takes a few moments to deal with the crippling phantom pain that waking always brings.

It’s easy to brush off. Sit up, smile, ask if Felicia’s all right or what are the plans for today, but it’s undeniable that waking up aches in a way that can’t be described in just one term or two, but needs a paragraph to maybe scrape the surface on. By the time you can scavenge up the words, the feeling’s gone, and you’re left clutching bedsheets in strained cold fingers, staring at the muted blues and fraying edges.

Felicia leaves you eventually to dress, and you always feel a weak stab in your heart at the memory of her awkwardly fumbling your arms through your sleeves, gently brushing your hair or clapping her hands together and joyfully announcing you were ready. You remember why she no longer does - you had made the mistake of taking your complex frustration out on her and she had quietly bowed out, but never taken up the task again. Some days the pain is so muted you can ignore, basking in your independence instead, but this isn’t one of those mornings.

You stare at your wardrobe, at the ornate tunic and trousers laid out for you the night before on the nightstand, and you continue staring, boring your eyes into them until they blur and your eyes well up from the strain.

(The strain and that alone, you tell yourself, not the lingering phantom pain rattling about your chest.)

----

Mornings are fine at first. It’s long been established that you abandon the formal dining room at any opportunity you get to steal away in the kitchens with the servants, and no one objects. Jakob fusses over you gently and Felicia harshly, and Felicia takes his words to heart and warms yours with the casual way she shares things with you. More often than not, their company is a light. Something to look forward to as you apathetically change into your day wear, but the few times it doesn’t lay in the back of your mind, constant reminders. The two of them battle without weapons over you, dividing tasks among themselves without an unspoken word until you’re reduced to a motionless doll and the uselessness overwhelms you. You either shut down, let them pose you around your meal and walk you through it as if you’re an invalid, or you refuse them.

You have only ever refused them once, but the option is now always present, and you squeeze your eyes shut over Felicia and Jakob’s quiet bickering over how you like your toast, trying to also block out the ancient reminders of your unexplained wrath, of your tear-choked yells and shattered china. You hated yourself for that, and you hate yourself for it now, but the thought crosses your mind anyway, another damning constant in your life.

(“But Kamui,” the voice says. “When else have you ever felt so alive?”)

---

After breakfast, the true despair creeps in, darker than the sky outside. The servants all go about their daily tasks and you’re tasked with amusing yourself until lunch. Each day you wake is another day with this same empty stretch of time, except there are less things to fill it with, and the cold, unexplainable emotions dripping down your spine become ever colder.

You sound dramatic, sure, but you’ve tried everything. Outside is off-limits to you now, thanks to past events. You’ve worked your way through one wall of the library and into the other three once, and it’s a daunting, dull task to attempt it again. You have slid down freshly waxed halls barefoot. Stair rails as well. Stairs. You have used the fortress’s spare linen as a makeshift battle tent. You have learned the ins-and-outs and secrets of chess, of cards. You have walked on the walls of the battlements with your arms outstretched for balance, you have made a thousand origami cranes, you have watched a candle flicker and sink into a pool of wax, you have smeared that wax on a canvas with no regards to the redness of your hands, you have watched a grandfather clock tick, you wish desperately for sleep you know will never come.

You are too awake to sleep, so the seconds drag by like hours and like a candle, you wait for your inevitable, final burnout.

Today proves no different. You settle for dunking your hands in ink and stamping your prints over parchment and canvas, but soon you’re instead staring at the wall, listening to the heavy ticks of the clock nearly and shredding that parchment to bits with shaking, black hands.

(You want to open a window, feel the sunlight on your face, but then you remember that sunlight only exists in the fairytales buried in the library depths and you find that there’s just not much point in anything.)

---

Lunch is a breather. Felicia and Jakob aren’t nearly as competitive. Sometimes, one of your siblings comes to spend time with you. You’re able to laugh, smile, live - the dreary, war-stained walls are suddenly filled with that mythical sunlight. If they don’t, Gunther usually takes up their empty spot.

Lunch is such a warm time the cold almost, almost vanishes - but you know. You know the moment Gunther returns to his duties, and Felicia and Jakob to theirs, the cold will slide right back up into your ribs and thread icy needles through your heart and you’ll hate yourself, hate yourself for not knowing why you so desperately cling to every shred of human contact you receive and burst with emotions you have no names for constantly and how nothing ever changes, day by day by day, the only thing that ever changes is the depths of this pitch-black abyss and your decreasing ability to handle it and --

You can never finish this thought. It gets longer and longer as time passes, but you become too weary to let it continue. You crawl back into your bed, with its muted blue sheets, and stare at nothing.

(You’re so tired. You’re not sure why.)

----

Sometimes, fate grants you mercy and you drift off into an empty sleep.

Sometimes, you stare at the wall and memorize every discoloration and bump until you are baffled by the presence of other walls, wondering why this patch isn’t lighter here where it’s supposed to be. You used to think about things, how Silas was doing, how your siblings were doing, but the anger would always flair up if you did too hot and too intense for you to deal with. There are still teeth marks and water stains from last time, and if your thoughts lapse you can simply crane your neck back and remember - ah yes, thinking is dangerous.

Sometimes you stay in your room, catatonic and always cold, mind blank and run out of things to do. Sometimes you pace and fill your head with your footfalls. There isn’t a room you haven’t walked circles in, again and again and again until your legs burn and your feet ache. Thrice, you abandoned walking for running, without a purpose, throughout the entire fortress from battlement to dungeons until your legs simply collapsed. You are told, by a concerned and subdued Felicia and frantic Jakob to never do that again, and like the option to snap at them, you bury it in the back of your mind.

But it’s there, in case you need the release.

(You feel as if you always need it, however.)

---

Dinner is either your favorite or your least.

When company comes, it’s your least, because dinner is always served in the too-large dining hall, with massive tables and echoing voices when someone speaks. Four courses that you always take slowly, to keep them around longer. Everything is formal and everything holds none of its casual joviality and it feels like a slow dance, a constant game of where to put your hands and how to keep your mask on. Your stomach churns - you don’t want them to go - and the most delicious things turn to ash in your mouth as the clock ticks and time moves. It’s a desperate struggle not to burst out, grab them and beg them to make everything less exhausting, and your mask always cracks once the heavy wooden doors slam shut behind them. You used to cry, but now the tears only make your eyes burn, never well up, never spill.

Or, it’s your favorite, a raucous gathering at the rickety corner table in the kitchen listening to a bevy of conversation and letting your mind rest - you’re not alone, so no longer do you have to stir yourself into a frenzy to feel something.

But just like breakfast, just like lunch - it never lasts and you know this.

The only lasting thing is the long cycle of waking, aching, and sleeping, of battling waves and waves of emotions - or maybe just one emotion manifested in multiple waves - that batter you down. Keeping chaos at bay because chaos is ugly, always resulting in broken china, broken spirits, broken sores on tired feet and broken bedposts and water-soaked floors.

You settle into your bed, oddly early like always but the more sleep you get, the less time you spend awake. You stare at the wall, knees tucked to your chest as your arms encase them, wondering if this experience or this feeling has a name. A name would be nice, better than a long string of close but not quite descriptors that never truly explain anything, just waste words.

(You want a name for why water makes you scared of yourself, for why you feel like you’re a monster and this is your cage, for why you’re here in the first place and Nohr has never felt like a home but a prison, but a feeling is easy, and the answer won’t hurt.)

---

The next day, clad in what used to your favorite of the tunics before you tired of it, you find a book buried behind another on your fourth attempt to take on the library again.

The book is a tale about a girl, locked in a tower for most of her childhood. She does everything she can to stave off the feelings you possess, but it’s there. She calls the feeling “loneliness”.

A year’s worth of tears finally spill from your eyes and oh, does it hurt to know the phantom pains felt upon your waking has a name.