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Eustace didn’t realize when he had started hyperventilating. Was it during the walk home? Was it when he stumbled up halfway up the steps, too anxious to watch his footing and bumped into the pinned butterflies on the wall? Was it when he turned the barely-functioning lock in his door to maybe try and deter his father for a few minutes longer?
He wouldn’t learn for a good few years that this… game his father played was genuinely bad. To Eustace, it was just what Excelsius called discipline. Helping him be truly perfect. He was a Winner, screwing up meant his father sweeping it under the rug, fixing it up, and sending him home.
He hated going home, he hated his room and his bed, he hated how his spine tingled with nauseating anticipation. He hated that he missed the sensation when Excelsius had to leave.
It hurt, yes, his joints always ached like an old doll left to dust, his voice was hoarse enough that his coworkers asked if he was sick, and he acted just off sometimes.
Clearly his peculiarities weren’t enough to draw too much attention, as nobody bothered to ask anything. No, ‘Hey Eustace, are you alright?’ Or ‘Is it your dad? He kinda sucks’.
Eustace didn’t think his dad sucked. It was normal, right? Excelsius was just like that, touchy past the point of ‘average’, but hey, Eustace didn’t see anything wrong with it. He had read some books in the library once, stupid rom coms about small town love and a super dramatic breakdown in the rain. But what he really didn’t get was why.
Love was confusing. He didn’t particularly need love, especially not from some girl in a book. He had his father, who promised he loved him with a pat on the cheek after causing him to nearly choke on his fingers to teach some stupid obedience (which was totally normal, ew) before pulling a full one-eighty and calling him useless and whiny in front of all of his colleagues at the prosecutors office.
Eustace didn’t understand how Excelsius thought. Didn’t get the point behind anything he did or said to him. Excelsius was just like that, ever since his mother went missing. Eustace had given up on crying over her years ago, if his father said to not whine, he wouldn’t.
But it was the cruel, confusing way Excelsius looked at him through goggles that were still damp from crying. He always felt pinned in place, like the butterflies in the hallway.
In the dim light of his room, late at night, while biting at his hand hard enough to break skin that was ALREADY burnt and scarred, the only thing he could look at without feeling ill was the case on his wall, a beautiful, fragile butterfly pinned there. It had been there since he was a kid, and he doubted his father even remembered it existed. The case was dusty, dustier than the vase on his side table filled with wilted roses.
Eustace walked over to that vase, refusing to even glance at his bed. He picked up one of the flowers, a dried up petal drifting to the ground. Every single stem was fully stripped of its leaves. The flowers were exposed, just like the butterfly, just like how he felt whenever his father’s eyes were locked fully on him.
His hand was a mess of scars, mostly burns, with a few ugly bite marks from every night he convinced himself he had to be quiet. Excelsius never got upset if he wasn’t, but being quiet was easier for him, put up a barrier between the events. It was just discipline. Discipline that left him shaking and depersonalizing with mottled bruising on his thighs. It would happen again, probably that night, the next week maybe. Never too often.
The last time it had happened too many times in the same week he slept for twenty four hours straight and missed work.
That got extra critique from everyone who saw him the next day.
He was tired.
As he laid back on his bed, staring up at the glue residue from old posters that had long since been torn down, he heard the key turn in the lock of the back door. Never the front, it was too nice to get muddy boots tracked near it.
He came back to reality some odd hours later, staring into the smudged, steamed up mirror, he had the distinct feeling of pins digging into his joints and skin, his hair was damp and sticking to his neck, and his eyes were glossed over.
It was normal. And fine. Why would anyone ever need to worry? He didn’t remember. If he didn’t remember, nothing was wrong. Blissful ignorance was better than the feeling of being on display whenever someone (rarely) asked if he was alright.
On display. Like those butterflies pinned in the hall and in his room. Put on the spot. Unable to come up with any kind of coherent explanation for what had happened.
Remembering was useless.
He still had work to do, investigations to run, conclusions to fumble and cases to prosecute. Despite how he felt, life had to go on. He wasn’t dead, no matter how much he wished and prayed to not come back to consciousness.
He couldn’t be pinned and pretty like the butterflies.
Upon another hazy glance, the butterfly case had more secrets to tell. Crimson pins held the wings up in place, and a signature was scrawled in the bottom corner.
E. Winner.
Of course, he had been the one to pin the butterflies himself. It was almost funny to think of Excelsius taking the time to do that. Maybe it was gift to his mother, years ago, before she suddenly disappeared and there was a patch of fresh dirt in the yard.
Maybe his mother liked butterflies.
But would she even like him, the way he was now?
Would she be disappointed? Would she even recognize him with the bruises and burns? Would she see right through that overconfidence straight to the pinned butterfly, terrified of disappointing the only family he had left?