All that is dark | ✓

15| before

SOMETIMES, WHEN THE NIGHT was all-consuming enough, she happened upon a dream. It was a rare occasion in the forest of nightmares crowding her mind, but the rarest thing of all was that she was happy. She wasn't a bruised girl desperate for anyone to look her way anymore, striving for a perfection which broke her down. No, instead she was rosy-cheeked and smiling. When she allowed herself to, she even laughed.

Carelessness was a strange feeling, certainly when she didn't have to feel guilty for it. Her every movement had to be thought out, her every word a chess move to climb further to be someone no one could touch. She had to be. If she wasn't who everyone else thought she should be, she was no one at all. That, more than her insomnia, more than her body breaking down, that scared her most of all.

Here she had no fear. Instead she was a little girl, with a mother who baked for her and a father who only raised his hand to ruffle it through her hair. In the morning her mother gently pulled her hair back with butterfly clips and her teeth were crooked, but no one commented on them. She didn't have braces put in as soon as possible so she'd be pretty. It didn't matter what she looked like for her to be loved.

At midday, she was older, her hair in a ponytail now as she walked towards work. She greeted her colleagues and then walked in the classroom, to begin teaching. All her students' eyes didn't pry for any flaws. No, they loved her, the children running around her as she taught them the way the world spun in a language they understood. She listened to them all. When they were finished, she ruffled her hands through their hair.

When the sky soaked navy blue, her hair turned grey. She was sitting in a rocking chair on a porch, a book in her hand even though she was losing her sight. The house behind her was warm and filled with light, the sound of laughter dancing around her. She was called inside and even though she didn't know who was shouting her name, the only thing that mattered was that it was someone who loved her. There were no demons haunting her now.

And like always, as soon as the clock struck midnight, she woke up. At times she had found herself cruel for even dreaming it, especially when she knew it would never come true. Other times she lost herself so much in the fantasy that she was fine with living a lie. Today, as she had opened her eyes and had seen Nathan beside her, she didn't know why she had felt relieved. She didn't know why that thought had made her feel warm in her heart and sick to her stomach at the same time.

In the end, she had never been fated for anything but a tragedy. Strangely, the thought didn't break her heart anymore. She supposed the fragments were scattered in the hands of a woman gone crazy and a man with bruised knuckles. Surprisingly, her mother and father reminded her of them.

He had told her about his sister, but she hadn't spoken about her parents much yet. It wasn't that she didn't want to per se, but she didn't have much to tell. What he knew, he had learned from the information he had gathered. That was all the knowledge she had as well. Her father had abandoned them one day and her mother had spiraled into a breakdown she had never recovered from. When she had left too, she had jarringly seen her father's eyes in the mirror. If she hadn't, she would've seen her mother's smile.

Either way, she was cursed. Even leaving hadn't made them disappear, but she had learned to live with them now. She wondered if she stabbed her mother's ghost one more time whether she would stick the knife right in her own heart. They had always resembled each other so much it was eery after all. Her mother had lost her mind in the pursuit of beauty and she had let herself go a while back too, in the pursuit of love.

"Do you know some people are proclaiming me the voice of justice?"

She glanced at Nathan, his hands on both sides of his desk as he looked at the documents. He was searching for new victims, the dim light of the candles casting an eery sheen on him. Most days he spent in this room, trying to find people who made his words taste like iron in anger. Whether he truly did it to avenge his sister or simply because it was fun didn't matter. The end didn't justify the means. It was fine. She wouldn't leave him, not as long as he loved her.