Burned » Kai Parker

3

Kai's POV

One might say that eighteen years of solitary confinement would strip someone of all potential leadership and socialization skills, to the point where they're only a hollowed-out shell of a real person, at best, or a psychopathic murderer who regularly engages their hallucinations, at worst.

Are those valid hypotheses to make? Sure. I'd even once suspected that would be my lot in life, when it had reached about year three in the prison world and the vengeance that had initially kept me fired up had started to elude me. It seemed a little delusional to keep fending off the possibility that eventually, the remaining bits of my sanity and motivation would crumble into nothingness.

Call it a sixth sense, or maybe just the height of my hatred for Joshua Parker, but as the unchanging days of my May 10th purgatory went on, I never allowed myself to reach the ultimate snap. The moment that would affirm that, yeah, I had fully fucking succumbed to madness and chances of return were bleak. I'd gone off the rails the day that I'd put the pieces together and figured out what my father planned to do with Olivia and Lucas, using the toddlers as a failsafe for the merge that was meant to be mine. But when my impulsive episode of ruthless violence had caught up to me and I was spelled into a Gemini prison cell, I began to regroup.

That was what I'd always done, even before the fateful night that I'd inflicted my rage on my family. If I found myself backed into a corner, usually by the man that was supposed to raise me? I'd stew in anger, for a little, then would gather my bearings, because life in the Parker family for a budding sociopath slash siphon-witch meant needing to be on edge and on guard, at all times.

The prison world had been a variation of that same ability, just stretched over a ridiculous amount of time. Enough to test my patience occasionally and yeah, okay, I'd committed suicide more times than I could bother to count. But it was mostly out of boredom and curiosity, once I figured out it wouldn't actually work.

A part of me had always had a strange feeling that eternity wouldn't be spent in that world, population of one. So, I'd keep pushing, with sporadic breakdowns (I was only human, at the end of the day), and wait for the occurrence that would justify that sense.

Then, justification did come, in the form of a spunky Bennett witch and her big-mouthed vampire companion, and it was so damn sweet.

It hadn't been smooth sailing, once they figured out that the prison was built for the very purpose of keeping me away from civilization, but I was nothing if not persistent.

Long story short, Bonnie killed me, I came back to life and thwarted her escape which unfortunately sent Damon on a portal-jump solo, we went to Portland to hash it out over dinner. When she was still hellbent on not taking me with her, I did what any sane prisoner would do and knocked her out with painkillers that I'd snuck in her wine glass.

She was peacefully passed out, I stole some of her blood for the spell, then carried her unconscious form with me to the cave where I performed the spell with Jo's knife.

I thought about leaving her there out of pure vindictiveness, but I'd gathered enough from spying on her for four months to figure that the crowd she and the vampire ran in would be hot on my heels if I tried that. Not that I was afraid of a couple of bloodsuckers, but I really didn't need any loose ends haunting me from that damned prison world.

Fast forward to the merge which Lucas, in an unexpected turn of events, had completed in place of Josette, and I had molded into a version of myself that miraculously had a grasp on the term, empathy. Though it was a little shaky, at times, but I was learning.

Empathy came with a re-evaluation of the plans I'd made for my big return to the real world, which, in base terms, were to murder my coven, preferably leaving my father for last. Then, I started to wonder what the point was. Fighting so hard to merge and earn my Gemini stripes, just to what, eradicate the people that I was supposed to lead? It didn't make sense anymore, didn't sit right with my mind, which had been fucking annoying at first, but I eventually scrapped the plan and built a new one from scratch.