Ramblings of a Villain

Damage

I woke up missing somebody, like I never had before.

You know this pain, stranger. This aching without wound, a bloodless bleeding of sorts. Different as you and I might be, this longing, you and I felt the same. It's part of what makes us what we are.

The common pitfall is thinking that the mistake was to love to begin with. No, that's just a trope in girly novels for byronic heroes and their edgy bad boy that they want to teach to love again. That's the fantasy. No, we will fall for it over and over again, and we will be blessed if we managed to learn anything at all.

Truth is, we, idiot creatures that we are, will tear ourselves apart over these phantom cuts that we can't bandage. We will lie, we will distort reality, we will adopt the strangest of dogmas because we don't know how to fix the damage. We will make things worse.

And we will hurt the people that we love, because that's what happens when you thrash blindly.

Are you flawed, stranger? Of course you are. Nobody in this inane world is born perfect, nobody will die perfect. You need to be - these distinctions set you apart, they alter the symmetry of your being to distinct you, make you alluring. In a way, you are like a broken mirror, and the angles of your shards will coincide with another, searching for a very specific type of reflection - one that shows them rare colors and hues, in them, in themselves.

You might think a monster like me unable to love, incapable of feeling these things like you do, with the same purity, with the same intensity, but this wasn't always the case.

Before this, I was a radiant hero, wholesome and joyful, and I lived a simple life, until a monster stumbled into it. A ruinous creature that made no attempt to disguise its scorn, its cynicism, its misanthropy, its damage. I thought it pitable, I thought it misguided, I thought it many things that you might think of me now - and yet, as I approached them with my know-it-all, have-it-all-figured-it-out, know-better-than-thou mindset, with the idea to set them straight, show them how so much better I was, and then move on with my simple life, I found them more nuanced, more complex than something I could just chalk as black and white. They evaded classification, they refused simplicity.

They could not be labelled. My initial perception of them? Missed the mark so hard it backfired entirely from my initial purpose.

I was baffled, surprised, and entirely charmed.

For years I enjoyed the company of this tainted being. Distinctly dark in nature, vindictive, just and ruthless, sometimes even mischievous, and yet capable of a kindness, a warmth and love that I hadn't seen before. A being born from the flames, igniting every moment of their existence with sheer passion, alighting everything around them, and lacking any semblance of restraints, of filters, of intent to play the social games of fake politeness and deceit.

It was truly refreshing.

A being of deep flaws, yes, haunted by both memories and their own thoughts. Strong on the outside, a radiant pillar of fire, but on the inside, soot had settled in. A poorly tended mechanism, damaged by the passage of time without maintenance. They presented an unfair challenge that all moronic would-be-heroes were too tempted to take. They were the dragon to slay, and one that relished in the challenge, no matter how many spears they had lodged on their back already. No matter the pain that it would bring them nonetheless.

The dragon does not survive the story. Aligned by either light or dark, their place is to fall to a larger force, or to serve as the final barrier for the riding prince, and yet, given the choice, they would choose to be the one to spread the wings of night every time. Perhaps not without some consideration, not without some passing longing for the alternatives, but always certain that this was the choice they would take again.

For years, I still thought myself the better creature. Uninteresting, perhaps, but the sane of the two, the more stable, the more approachable, the more diplomatic. I served as knight, vizier and shadow all the same, and I thought my place would remain unchanging - even as I slowly learned to appreciate some finer aspects of the darkness that was now an invaluable part of my life. I thought many things would never change.

I thought I was safe and beyond the necessity of change.

I was young. I was even more of an imbecile than I am now. You have to understand that.

It took me many years to realize that of the two, I was no less flawed. I wasn't better. I wasn't sane or stable - I was merely educated to keep up appearances, to play the social game with grace and flick the pinky out and teatime.

Here's something I learned - a bad habit of mine - looking at the problems in other people is far easier than looking into your own, and trying to fix them without cleaning up your own house first, a recipe for disaster. No, more than that - it's the serrated blade that will cut you in places that you can't see, that you can't bandage. This is the true evil - not the haunted house, but the termites in the walls, eating the structure, weakening the foundation with every passing day.

We are never beyond change. We are never done patching ourselves. We can't help anybody, when we ourselves are reeling in pain, running in circles set ablaze. We can only make things worse.

I still regret not learning fast enough. I regret many things.

But never will I regret having known the flames, and the dark shadows they cast.

Even if this armor is without shine anymore, at least now I know the extent of my damage, and I can do something about it. Perhaps, I will one day learn how to treat these injuries, in myself, and in others. Perhaps, I will meet them again, without the cloaks and labels that others have put onto us, but simply as we are, fractured mirrors, looking into each other.

You are free to go, stranger. I will not bother you further, today.