Submerge| ✓

{07} T R U T H

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{07} T R U T H

"It happened when you were two," her mom started as she peered at her hands, twirling them together as though she could calm down her nerves that were threatening to escape and wreak havoc into the conversation. She flickered her hazel eyes towards her daughter, noting that she nodded her head to continue. The bright blue eyes that reminded her of her first and only love were enough of a motivation for her to swallow the rest of her fear into the depths of herself once more.

"Your aunt, Aunt Melody, came along with the both of us. She had recently gotten out of a bad relationship and wanted to get away from the city for a week. Since she knew I loved the beach and we would often go boating a few miles into the deep waters she asked me and you to come along and I said yes. I thought nothing more of it, other than a vacation and for you to enjoy the beach for the first time.

"Melody got the hotel reservations and everything was fine. We got to the hotel and we spent the first two days of the week doing normal touring around the little beach town and sitting out on the beach tanning. Everything was perfectly fine, but then on the third day Melody rented a boat for us to go and hang out in the waters for a few hours. I was eager since it had been a while since I had been in a boat.

"And so on the morning of, we went early in the morning to get the boat. Once we were on it and Melody was boating as far as she could—since we could only go so far, you tried to keep on climbing on the seats and trying to look over the edge. You were so curious, this was the first time that you were on a boat and you wanted nothing more than to see if you could play with the water.

"Melody was boating too fast, the boat was going faster than I was accustomed to. It was apparent that she wanted to keep her mind off of the relationship that she had just gotten out of, since it was the longest one she had and was keeping her emotions bottled up inside of her instead of letting them out to me or to her therapist...."

Quinn's mom paused where she was, as though she was remembering the scene as though it was yesterday. Her hands began to shake and Quinn knew that she was still tormented with what had happened sixteen years ago.

To hear that it was Aunt Melody, the only aunt that Quinn had, that had been partly responsible of the reason for her growing scales—it was a whirlwind of emotions, ones that she couldn't place. The woman had been known to have many relationships with men, and they were always the horrible types. She had gotten out of relationships within a whisk of her life being taken away—and even little Quinn could tell that her aunt was being mistreated by the men that she was with from the yellowed and blackened blue bruises that were present on her neck and on her arms.

It also didn't help that the woman was an alcoholic. It was originally starting out as just casual sips of wine every night in her living room, one glass of wine a night, but then it turned into a way for her to not feel any pain when she was hit by her boyfriends. She would sometimes come over when Quinn was asleep or on the verge of slumber with drunken slurred words and fear that her boyfriend had followed her.

None the less, Quinn felt no anger when hearing that it was Aunt Melody who was at the hand of the boat—part of the reason why Quinn was apparently not human anymore. All she felt was pity for the woman, because she was escaping anything she could that would make her feel as though she was weak and pathetic.

It made her sad, because when she was thirteen and her aunt was killed in a car wreck Quinn knew that she was trying to escape the hands of another one of her boyfriends. She was found with old yellowed bruises and broken ribs that were in the middle of being healed. She was on her way to Quinn and her mom's house to take refuge from her abuser, but it only resulted in her losing her life that night.