I Am the Reaper

                                                                        One                                                                            

~I Am the Reaper~

There's nothing here. Nothing except the dark. Nothing except the echo of screams coming from me that makes me think I'm dying.

Maybe I am.

  I doubt that, though, because every once in awhile, the blackness in my vision clears and I can make out a room of stone. My cell. My prison. It doesn't last long, though, and soon  something picks my neck and I'm tossed back into a world where I am both predator and prey, killer and victim. 

    Two parts of me clash against each other, folding into the other like breaking waves. Instinct and humanity, and I'm caught between their rage of war. One side tells me to give up. To embrace this hunger and let it consume me. To deprive me whatever remnant of a soul I have left. But the other begs me not to. Because if I do, there will be no forgiveness for me here.

 It's maddening, so to keep my sanity, I repeat what I know of myself, in my head like a prayer.

  My name is Bellamy Blake, I tell myself. Brother to Octavia Blake, Son of Aurora Blake. I was born on the Ark, but came to the ground to protect my sister....

    I say it over and over. Drill it into every part of my head. Flip it again and again like a coin. In addition, I struggle to get some grip on my surroundings. I become painfully aware of the hard table beneath me, bleeding cold into my body. I am hypersensitive to the sweat chilling my forehead and spine, that causes goosebumps to jump up over my exposed torso. 

I look over at my hands, strapped to my sides. They are dirty and encrusted in blood, but they don't feel like mine. They belong to someone else, to the thing inside me that's lying in wait for the door to open. 

I already know what will happen before it does; a man dressed in a pressed suit and tie will walk in. The  heels of his black shoes will click softly in his wake as he guides across the floor towards the table.  He will stop in front of me, and peer over me as if I am a trophy of his. A pawn on his chess board. I don't know his name, but you don't have to know something personal of someone to want them dead.

  And most of all, I know what will be clutched in his hand. It'll be a syringe, filled with scarlet liquid that my entire body would willingly die for. Yet I will tell myself that I won't want it. That I'll be calm and I won't give in to the hunger. 

   I tell myself every time.

   But I never listen.

    And as the events play out exactly as I knew they would before my eyes, I tell myself again. The last time was enough,  I think. I won't want it again.

But then I see the syringe, and my vision goes as red as the liquid inside it.

   The binds on my ankles and wrists dig into my skin as my body convulses and I try to hold on to my earlier words. Of who I am and why I'm here, but they are lost to the hunger. I need the syringe. I need it as much as the air in my lungs.

 I must have it. Right now. Right now.

    There's a loud roar in the room and only dimly do I acknowledge that It's coming from me. 

    The man in the suit smiles, revealing a row of pearly-white teeth that seem to glow unnaturally in the low light. He teases the syringe above me and I claw for it in vain, feeling as my chafed skin breaks and a different kind of red spills from me. It doesn't matter, though. Nothing matters except that syringe. It's the only thing that will end the hunger.