Chapter Text
“Some wounds are too deep to heal. Some lives are too broken to fix."
Patroclus had never known the taste of escape. There was no window in his life wide enough to let him slip away, no door strong enough to hold open for him. His existence was a small room, a corner, a cage. And yet, somewhere in the quiet of his days, he had learned to find comfort in the walls that locked him, because after all, they were all he had ever known.
His father was a ghost, a figure who came and went like the weather. Sometimes Patroclus would find him at the kitchen table, hunched over a paper, his brow furrowed in the intensity of something that didn’t concern Patroclus. And other times, his father was just… gone. Not dead. He just wasn’t there, did not speak much to him. When he did speak, it was always about things Patroclus didn’t care about. Work. Bills. The car.
And his mother? She used to be a mother. She used to cradle him to sleep with soft lullabies. But the woman who had once stroked his hair and whispered “I love you” in the quiet hours of the night had long since vanished. Now, she spent most of her days locked away in her room, muttering about things Patroclus didn’t understand, her eyes wide and empty. Sometimes she would appear in the hallway, face pale, hands shaking, and Patroclus would pretend not to notice the tremor in her voice when she called his name.
He had learned to avoid her then. To walk on tiptoes through the house, not wanting to disturb her fragile balance. Every day was an exercise in navigating the wreckage of their home, in choosing the safest path through the shards of glass no one had bothered to sweep up.
School wasn’t much better. He didn’t have friends. He didn’t need friends, he had told himself. It was easier this way. The less he expected from people, the less they could disappoint him. And still, there were the whispers. The sideways glances. The way the other kids, those lucky enough to have normal, functioning families, looked at him like he was a puzzle they couldn’t solve, a secret they couldn’t fathom. Patroclus had learned early on how to make himself invisible. To blend into the background, to walk quietly, to avoid their eyes.
It didn’t take long for him to realize that in a world full of noise, silence was a kind of a power. The less anyone saw him, the less anyone cared. And that was the only way to survive.
There were nights, though, when the silence felt suffocating. When the weight of it pressed down on him so heavily that it was hard to breathe. When his mother’s laughter, a thing long lost to him, ringed in his brain like a cruel joke. Those were the nights he found himself standing in front of the bathroom mirror, looking at the face of a boy he didn’t know. A face that seemed so far from who he had once been.
Sometimes, he would leave the house, just to get away from it all. He didn’t go far. Just to the park, or the small store at the end of the block, where the fluorescent lights talked in flashes and made him feel less alone. But he didn’t speak to anyone. Not even the people who knew his name. Because that was the thing about small towns, everyone knew everyone’s business, but nobody ever really saw you. Not unless you were the loudest, or the brightest, or the most broken.
It wasn’t that he wanted to die. He didn’t even know what dying would feel like, whether it would be an end or just another kind of silence. It was just that the idea of living, of staying in this house, in this body, in this broken skin, seemed like an impossibility. He didn’t know how to keep going, how to keep pretending.
And so, he kept breathing. Slowly. Quietly. Like a ghost.
And maybe that was all there was to it. Maybe this was his life now, a series of rooms and hallways, broken doors, and voices that did not speak anymore. The boy who had once believed in the possibility of escape had long since forgotten what it felt like to hope.
But hope, like everything else, was just another type of quietness. One that had long since died.
He was still there. A boy who had learned how to disappear. A boy who had never really been seen.