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In his more intellectual moments, there were times that he really really envied normal people. He had realized, sometime during his teenage years, that most people didn’t think like he did. The idea that there was something truly wrong with him, truly broken in his brain, still haunted--no, taunted--him. The idea that he would never be acceptable, never be okay, that everyone would be looking at him with those frightened, contemptuous eyes for the rest of his life…
...it made him want to punch people. Until that look slid out of their eyes and their mouths fell silent and nobody looked at him like that anymore.
But it had been a blow, really, like the world-shattering impact of a punch to the skull, to realize that most people didn’t live with their emotions screaming at them from behind their eyes. To realize that somewhere along the line, the “volume control” on his thoughts had gotten shattered into tiny pieces, that most people didn’t struggle not to let their thoughts get tossed about like leaves in a storm.
He wondered how quiet it must be, behind their eyes, without random thoughts and impulses to fill all the empty space and make it loud and stormy.
Back before, before--it had been good. Things had been simple. He’d had his brothers--brother now, fuck that goddamn fucking sonofabitch--he’d had a purpose, something that gave meaning to the storm. Their enemies had been his enemies, their fights his fights, and in return they’d protected him, guarded him, fought his enemies and destroyed anyone who tried to score some cheap points off the freak, the lunatic… He might be a wild animal, half-feral, lashing out in wounded pain, but he was their animal, their lunatic, and for two whole years the world had been oh so good.
He should have known. Nothing that good lasted. No one was ever really safe. That one--nameless now, even in his own head, because that name still stank of love, of brotherhood, he didn’t deserve that name--had betrayed them all, to be a dog with a gilded collar and a fancy cage. He’d betrayed his brothers to lick the boots of the same asshole they’d fought a thousand times, and for what?
And now he was alone again. In the cold again. No purpose now but the fight, or to offer what little he could to the brother he had left. Nothing to do now but bleed his heart’s blood out over the ground, ripping himself to shreds for just one scrap of vengeance, any chance to try and give back to that bastard the pain he’d given them.
Nothing to do but fight, because at least the fight was good. The fight was simple, clean--hurt them, get hurt, pain his old friend because at least you could fight the pain of the body. You could strike back, lash out, rail and struggle against it until they gave out or you did.
While he was fighting, he was alive, and of one mind, and they feared him. Sometimes he lost, sometimes he won, but always they feared him, because he never gave up, never gave in, and like the wounded wolf he was, he’d eat your hand even as you stabbed him in the heart…
Someday. Someday he’d show them. He would not be ignored. Because the secret was...the secret was, he might well be the goddamn “Lunatic Fringe” but it had made him strong. He had survived betrayal. He had survived defeat. He had survived his own fucked up life, his own fucked up head. And there was nothing that anyone could do to him anymore, worse than what he’d lived through and come out the other side.
Nobody would ever take his heart from him again.
And in this world of monsters and demons, of fighters and betrayers, maybe what it took to win against them all...was to be just a little...crazy.