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Isaac Lahey was a very small child. He barely reached the other boys elbows in his class. He could barely see over the top of a counter and he had to go on his very tippy toes when reaching for anything in his kitchen shelves. He was a very small child indeed and a smart one also. He read faster than most children in his class, he consumed a page of literature as though a hungry monster searching for the blood of children. He was smart as he knew how to hide his bruises and to jump away from the questions that were directed his way. He could easily fib to the other children that he was only rough housing with his brother. He didn’t have a brother anymore. The teachers tried, once, to get him to tell them the honest truth but they didn’t know that he was smart. He was smarter than they even knew. He mightn’t know how to solve maths equations like Lydia or to quote endless streams of information like Stiles but he knew how to survive. He survived for sixteen years without any help from anybody. He couldn’t be free. He often felt like a small pigeon trapped within a wooden cage being feed, only to stop the questioning or the abuse that would follow. He felt suffocated and he couldn’t leap without his wings as they felt broken.
Broken; a long time ago, just like his father did to his arms and soul.
Isaac’s father wasn’t always that way, he wasn’t always stumbling, cursing and hitting. He used to hug him, he used to tell him he loved him, he used to be able to smile at him but then his mother ran away and everything wasn’t like it used to be. He was seven years old when he first was hit. It was his own fault he knew it. He was playing in the kitchen with some oil paints that he found in the basement, his father didn’t know he brought them up and dusted them off and began to use them. Isaac’s father came back from ‘church’ reeking of the nasty kind of medicine and a bottle of sloshing amber liquid in his hand. Isaac made a mess with the paints, he accidentally got some on the tiles and it was all over his t-shirt and little palms. He grinned when he saw his father and raised his picture for it to be seen but he didn’t notice the trained graze his father shot at him or the snarl beginning to grow at his lips.
He learned that day that if he screamed his father would hit harder. He learned that day if he tried to run, he would get dragged back by his ankles, and he would get rope burn on his oil painted palms and a chipped tooth from the head bang against the tiles. He learned a lot that day, many of the things that helped him survive for the next nine years. He survived on hope alone.
There was one time when he was ten years old and he was asked over to another boy’s house for the day. The other boy mother didn’t think it was a problem and supposedly spoke to his father. He spent the day playing in the back garden pretending to be a space alien, a ghost or a cowboy. They drank fresh lemonade and they played so many games inside and out till it got dark and the boy’s mother bundled them up into the car. Isaac was delighted to have a friend and they grasped hands the whole way home. The mother smiling at them in the car mirror, it had been such a long time since anybody had smiled so lovingly at him. He felt warmth spread from his hairline to pulsing fingers that wrapped around the other boys. When he was dropped off and goodbyes were said and promises for the next time, he turned to the house that looked pristine as always but held so many markings and scars that hardened the walls and held Isaac a prisoner within it, he felt a shiver crawl up his spine.
He met his father in the hallway, he didn’t hear him or even see him but he felt the punch that landed against his stomach and the harsh breathing that ran like spiders down his neck. He learned that his father didn’t remember being told that his son was in another boys home, that others must of thought as him as the drunkard and Isaac as the pathetic boy without a ‘real’ father and a runaway mother. He learned that his father hated lies above anything that night. He learned what it felt like to be trapped within a small closed area with chains wrapped around his wrists, squeezing the blood till his skin turned purple. He felt true terror that night. He didn’t see the sun till he woke the next morning and saw it with a blaring screech and the punishment for falling asleep and not learning his true lesson.
Isaac learned so many things but that deep below everything, deep below all the pain and anger and cruelty he still was his father. Isaac’s father brought him up to the kitchen table and sat him down, he then kneeled beside him and made him look into his bloodshot eyes and promise him he would never lie again or be bold again. Isaac nodded so hard he got a crick in his neck but his father slapped him and told him to speak when being spoken to. He promised with a breathy sigh and his father patched him up with a kiss placed upon his head and told to run along. He never did get to play, or hold hands with, the boy again. At sixteen, he still sometimes wonders if he had been his friend maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t have been so bad.
Isaac was smart but he was young. He never did learn what it was to hate his father, he always loved him. He made a promise to him. He doesn’t break promises.