Secrets (a MPHFPC Fanfic)

Understanding: Euphora

I had lost count of the days that I was sure had turned into weeks, possibly months. Every day was continuously dreadful.

Each day they experimented on me, exploring my curiously powerful peculiarity. I'd always been told that it was like my great-great-grandmother's. Each experiment was different, one day we would see how many batteries I could re-power, how many bullets I could manufacture, How long I could keep a generator going. Each day we had no choice but to help my uncles take over peculiardom.

It was a funny thing, really. Just not the kind of funny you would laugh at, the kind of funny someone said when they meant to say 'well, that was weird'. Each day, I would learn to get more powerful, and yet I only got more helpless.

The wights kept my mother in a different cell than me, keeping her in a constant state of weakness. Each day, they would bring her out along with me and Caul would play his sick game. 'Alma's giving us trouble? No problem, just threaten to shoot Euphora. Euphora's refusing to help? No problem, just threaten to shoot Alma. Maybe smack her a couple times too, just for the satisfaction.'

Maybe, if we didn't care for each other, we would both be willing sacrifices so Caul and Bentham would not succeed. But we both couldn't bear to have the other one die, and so we both caved in. One of the only comforts was when Caul and Bentham had their backs turned so we could share a look in which my mother seemed to be telling me to be strong and brave. In these looks only did I find comfort, because if my mother could be strong, so could I.

Occasionally Caul would take my mother into a separate room. I could only imagine what happens in there when he does it. I didn't get it. My uncle seemed so obsessed with my mother. It was like he existed purely to torment her, sometimes me as well. He didn't seem all that nice to Bentham, either. In fact, I suspected Bentham was being forced sometimes. Something had surely happened before I was born, something that made Caul crazy, angry at his family, something that made him crack. Something, but what?

Even if I could ask my mother (which I couldn't), I was sure she wouldn't tell me. She had always been strangely private about her past, even more private than any other peculiar I had ever met. I understood, though, as my friend, Allison, had explained.

We were younger, playing together in my room, when we ran out of things to do. I asked her about her mother, and why I had never met her. Even though we were only around the age of seven, I saw her cringe and regretted asking. Even so, she told me her story. She had been accused of being a witch around the age of four, when her mother noticed Allison morphing into a dog. That was her peculiarity, and while I never held it against her, her mother did. Allison had been beaten by her family, both through verbal and physical abuse, then sold to a circus, where she had been rescued by a bunch of peculiars who were then taken in by another Ymbryne. Everything had ended up well, but it was scary to know that she shared similar stories with too many other peculiars who were unfortunate enough to be born into an unpeculiar or unloving family.

Before this, I used to feel like no one else understood my pain, losing my father before I was even born. But after, I was never the same. I suddenly understood I was lucky to have a loving, peculiar mother who would sacrifice everything for me, unlike so many peculiars who had been persecuted by their own families.

But my mother had somehow worse a story, I concluded. Her parents dead, with this new revelation that her brothers had killed them. Then the brothers themselves, consumed with anger that was directed toward her, only her. And while my grief had been great, learning my father died, it must have been nothing compared to my mother's pain. Losing the only man who had understood her and loved her without fail, so that she might never gaze upon him, feel his touch, or hear his voice again.

It was this that made me realize why my mother was sometimes so distant on her visits, staring at nothing and sitting perfectly still, like she was alone, adrift in a one-person boat bobbing in the middle of an ocean