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You have a tender heart my love, I'd hate to see it broken.
***
Svlad Cjelli is deceptively shy. Upon first meeting he is wide eyed and chronically anxious, the kind of boy who hides behind his mother’s legs from strangers long past a time he should be doing so; but always eager to pet a dog, or a cat, or indeed a lizard if he happens upon one. It never really lasts long though, sooner or later he’ll get swept up in something and chatter away or wander off, following a thread only he can pull on and ending up at the strangest conclusions. He’s clever, bright, and imaginative, sometimes to the point where his teachers and parents are concerned, because Svlad Cjelli knows things he shouldn’t.
If you ask his mother, Svlad’s favourite word is “why?” He’ll question everything from the height of a nearby tree to why he doesn’t get dizzy if the world is spinning all the time. Why the sky is blue, why do cats meow, why does he have to go to bed right now and can’t he stay up a little longer? When he’s finally wrestled into bed he can’t sleep, tossing and turning and eventually getting up to creep out of the house and follow the tug in his gut that is always familiar but never this strong.
When he comes home in the morning his parents sweep him into a hug, but it’s not long before they start shouting at him. The police are there and he doesn’t understand why they’ve gone to all this fuss over nothing, he was fine. Look, he shows them, a line of cats sat outside the front door, every missing cat from the neighbourhood in fact. Their tears of anger and relief fall silent; nobody congratulates him on his findings.
The cats are returned to their owners, and everyone forgets about it. Or at least they don’t talk about it, not in front of Svlad. He starts to walk in on whispered arguments that close up as soon as he walks into the room. His mother looks at him with worry, his father with a wariness that wasn’t there before. Sometimes, he thinks, their smiles don’t quite reach their eyes.
He still asks, question after question and seeking clarification every now and then, but it isn’t encouraged anymore. The questions are met with sighs rather than answers, ‘I don’t know’ more often than ‘let’s find out’. It feels like something has been taken away.
The older boys at school like to taunt him, ask him why’s in return. Why he’s so weird, why he wants to know so many things, why he can’t shut up, why he’s crying so much over a bird with a broken wing they found in the playground. When he tells them it’s because it’s hurt they sneer, one of them throws a rock at it. The bird stops moving and they tell him it doesn’t hurt anymore so he can stop crying. Later on when he asks his mother why they did that, she tells him that most people aren’t as soft as he is, and he finds himself wishing he hadn’t asked at all.
One day Svlad Cjelli tells a girl in his class that he’s sorry about her grandfather's death.
He’s pulled out of school two days later when the man passes away without warning.
***
There’s a man that comes to talk to him not long after that. He’s nice and brings him sweets, asks him questions about himself while his parents watch from the other side of the room, faces drawn in trepidation. Svlad is excited by the curiosity, so used to being dismissed or scoffed at in recent weeks that he embraces the questions readily and tells him everything he asks about, even some things he doesn’t. The man asks him how he feels about learning more about himself and Svlad’s reply is instantly enthusiastic. Learning is his favourite thing to do. When he leaves, the man shakes his hand like he’s a proper adult and Svlad feels better than he has in a long time.
It doesn’t last.
The whispered conversations keep happening; they turn into snippy arguments and then full on fights with no regard for whether or not he overhears. The phone rings several times a day. When it’s picked up his parents speak in rushed whispers, glancing over at him with something that looks like guilt. One time he catches his father slamming the door in the face of the man who came to talk to him. He doesn’t understand what’s going on, and he doesn't get any answers when he asks.
When it happens, Svlad Cjelli remembers it like this.
As soon as he goes to bed there’s a bad feeling in his stomach. It’s like the pull towards finding the cats but much stronger, more tumultuous, like he’s on a beach watching the tide recede and waiting for the tsunami to come rushing back in to land. He can’t stay still, the same thing all over again, tossing and turning and feeling an itching in his palms that demand he do something. He remembers what happened last time he followed that pull, pushes it away as best he can, grits his teeth and closes his eyes...
...and wakes up to the loudest sound he’s ever heard. It’s disorienting, the splintering of wood as the door is ripped off its frame and he only really catches on to the danger when the screaming starts. Something happens, it sounds like fireworks being shot off one after the other and it’s enough to make him crawl up under his bed, dragging his blanket with him and watching the door with wide eyes from his hiding place.
There’s more screaming, and then laughter, and then he hears his father asking please over and over and Svlad knows, he knows before they both fall silent that it’s the last time he’ll hear their voices. He wants to run but there’s nowhere to go and he’s crying before he realises, pressing his hand over his mouth to keep himself quiet.
It doesn’t matter. There are footsteps coming down the hall and they echo in the silence like gunfire, which is what he knows the firework sound was now, which is what he already knew but was pretending not to if he’s honest. The door creaks open and he sees a pair of boots, that’s all. It’s just one man. But it can’t be one man, surely? One man couldn’t have made that much noise, it sounded like an army. Ultimately it could be one man or one hundred, it makes no difference. The man stood in his doorway takes a few steps forwards, careful, measured, and then he waits.
Svlad stares, caught up in trying so hard to keep quiet he’s almost unable to stop his breath coming in faster. The room goes so still he starts to wonder if it’s even real. He knows the man is there, the man knows he’s there. It’s a standoff.
He breaks first.
As soon as the whimper is out of his mouth he’s being dragged out from under the bed, kicking and screaming as he goes but it gets him nowhere. He’s not strong enough or big enough to put up any kind of fight and the grip on his arm is so tight he wonders if it won’t break. When the man finally gets him upright he’s smiling, wide in a way that meets his eyes but there’s no warmth there. Cold and bottomless in a way that will haunt him long after this moment is over.
“Under the bed. Of course. Where else would you find the monster?” his laugh is back, holding the eye contact for long enough to make him squirm, but he doesn’t say anything else as he marches downstairs. He’s pulling Svlad along at a pace he can’t quite keep up with, stumbling over his own feet as he tries to stop himself from being outright dragged through the house, something which ultimately fails as soon as they reach the living room and his knees immediately give out beneath him.
There’s blood, a lot of it. That’s the first thing that hits him. It’s red and sticky and still oozing its way across the carpet from where his mother is lying across the floor, glassy eyes forever frozen in an expression of horror which appears to cut right through him. His father is a few feet away by the window, reaching out towards her but Svlad doesn’t get to see the expression on his face because it’s not there anymore. There’s nothing. Just blood and bone rearranged into a mess of nothing where his face should be, and Svlad starts screaming.
He screams and screams and screams. The man dragging him doesn’t seem to be at all bothered by this, pulling him through the house and past his parents’ bodies, tossing him into a van with no real care and laughing that same sick laugh as they take off, but still he screams. On and on until his throat is raw with it and it turns into sobs, a deep river of confusion and loss welling up inside of him and he can’t begin to understand what’s happening to him only that he’s never going to know his life before it again. There’s fear there, terror really, but it’s almost eclipsed by the crushing weight of how much he’s failing to comprehend his situation. It’s a small mercy that by the time his breath is coming in too fast for him to keep up with he’s already exhausted himself and passes out not long after.
***
When he wakes up, he’s in an unfamiliar room. It’s sterile, a bed, a side table, and a big mirror wall that he feels like he’s being watched through but doesn’t know enough to know for sure yet. His throat is raw and dry and he stares at the ceiling for a long time, unblinking and hollow. There’s panic, the fear is nearly all consuming but it barely makes a dent in his inability to move, it feels like someone has filled him up with cement and dropped him into the ocean to drown. He couldn’t swim to the surface if he tried, dragged down by the weight of it.
He has no idea how much time has passed by the time someone enters the room, he screws his eyes shut and turns away from the door, curling in on himself and clutching at the blanket under him that feels nothing like anything he knows.
The voice is familiar. It’s the man, the nice man, the one with the questions. He’s soft when he speaks, soothing, trying to explain something. Svlad lets the cadence of his voice carry but he blocks out the words. The man is there for a long time, but eventually he leaves. Food comes a period of time later, but he doesn’t touch it. They leave him water and he doesn’t touch that either. At one point they play music, something soft that he recognises immediately, making him curl in tighter on himself and press his hands over his ears. The familiar sound turns his stomach but he can’t block it out when it’s all around him. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s just given them something valuable.
It continues on like this for a number of days. The man comes in to talk to him, he doesn’t respond. Food is left, it isn’t eaten. Water is left, he drinks only once because he feels like his next breath will shred his throat if he doesn’t, but that’s it. They don’t try any more music and he exists in silence save for the opening and closing of the door and the hitching of his own breath.
That is until the fifth day when they blare an alarm so loud it feels like it rattles his teeth in his head. He reacts to that one, startled into action but there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go, it’s ringing in his ears, echoing around in his skull and despite the way he screams for them to turn it off all he can do is sink into the corner and try to block it out. This is the day he’s taken for testing for the first time.
They run medical tests, he’s prodded and poked and injected. They take blood and shine light into his eyes, take his heartrate once, twice, three times. Weigh him and measure him and say things about him to strangers that he doesn’t understand. This time when they give him food he eats, but he throws it back up not long after, his stomach rejecting how quickly he’d tried to fill it up. They make him try again, slower, and this one he keeps down. He gets a smile for all his efforts, and watches the doctor tick a box marked “permissible.”
The next tests are stranger. People asking him to predict things, asking him about his ‘powers,’ where he got them and what they can do. He tells them he doesn’t know, because he doesn’t and perhaps when they realise that they’ve made a mistake they’ll let him go, but if anything it seems to infuriate them. It gets worse and worse, the questions get harder, the games more outlandish and confusing and impossible, and when it’s enough that he breaks down crying they strap something up to his arm and run the tests again. This time every wrong answer is accompanied by a sharp shock of pain, enough to steal his breath from him and only getting stronger. He still can’t tell them what they want to hear.
It goes on forever, or so it feels like. Pain and exhaustion and hunger and tears. Over and over again and never, never right. It’s too much, everything is too much and it’s all he can do to pull himself together enough at the end of the day to get through the next.
Svlad Cjelli is terrified. He’s traumatised and confused, scared and weak and still, still soft. Too soft. He will still cry over birds with broken wings, he will still trust someone if they show him kindness no matter how small the act, he will still smile at the sun when it reappears from behind the clouds. Svlad Cjelli is gentle and kind and he will not survive this.
And so when he finally tells them something they want to hear and they look at him like he’s the answer to all of their problems, Project Icarus puts Svlad Cjelli to bed and locks him away at the back of his mind, hoping this time it will be enough to keep the darkness from his door.