Videotape (REWRITTEN)

The story

Chapter 1

Angel's shadow cast wings on the blank, white wall. Like everything else, he grew into them. As each day passed in the sterile expanse of the compound, they fit him a little better, their outline a bit more precise against the starkness. He was twelve years old, but his place in this fractured world had been claimed and abandoned long before his birth. The life that grew around him was rigid and uncompromising, etched into the patterns of hospital-like routines. They called him an angel, and he understood nothing else.

The boy had no childhood to lose. He never tasted it, never felt its warmth in the hollow spaces of his days. All the stories, the scraps of knowledge inscribed in his mind, spoke of chaos and hatred that lived outside the pristine walls of his confinement. Here, within this underground sanctum, life was determined and absolute. He was a seed planted in this concrete earth, expected to bloom where there was no light, only the white-hot burn of fluorescent bulbs. It was all he knew.

Angel's existence was a refrain of waking and sleeping, with careful rhythms between. His measured life ebbed and flowed like a quiet, forgotten song, each verse painfully familiar. In his isolation, he thrived. Predictable monotony was the only tune he could hum. It took the shape of practicing his abilities under the watchful, unblinking eyes of those who called themselves caregivers, testing his spiritual devotion with grueling frequency, then releasing him back to his solitude.

The days fell away with a tireless sameness, but Angel had no longing for change. What the outside might offer, the risks it contained, were unknown and therefore monstrous. If others, those who dared escape the compound's all-encompassing hold, perished, Angel believed their fates were written in the careless handwriting of the world beyond. Each breath inside the clinical embrace of the Shelter was a mark of survival. His conviction, though not his own, was absolute. Life outside these walls was life outside of salvation.

His isolation did not spare him the necessity of proving his worth. He had to demonstrate himself, to shape his fragile body and spirit into the mold that Gabriel held so high. He could not fathom any other way, so when affection came in the form of austerity, Angel bowed his head and embraced it. Not knowing his parents was the norm, and what he lacked in their love, Gabriel attempted to replace. It was all he could expect. It was all he deserved.

"Your strength must match your faith," Gabriel's voice had once dripped from the intercom, soft but merciless. "Do not let your gift become your weakness."

Gabriel was his primary caretaker, a father figure in design more than practice. His affection was measured, reserved for rare moments when Angel pleased him most. The neglect was another verse in Angel's discordant lullaby, something to be absorbed until it became indistinguishable from the rest. It wore the name of love, even if it meant more as cruelty.

Angel's failures spelled abuse, but he saw the pain as lessons, necessary to mold him into the image they revered. It was not punishment but preparation. His body carried marks of it, and so did his mind. His obedience was a gift and a burden; they praised it when convenient, twisted it when not.

To be an angel, they told him, was an honor beyond anything he could imagine. It was the highest state of being, even when being meant nothing more than surviving. The word branded him with a bitter sweetness. It was how they saw him and how they insisted he must see himself. They built him up to tear him down. But Angel only saw the building, never the breaking.

Inside the underground compound, the shadow of his designated name loomed large. Life was stark and brutal, reflected in the white, industrial walls that echoed the emptiness of everything beyond them. The echoes were what Angel clung to, their reverb a reminder of what he must become. Though the sound carried a perpetual chill, it never made him shiver.