A Spam Book

From Disappointment to Home (DC Taurus)

"You've failed again."

"You disappoint me. You have no right to call yourself our son if you're going to be such a failure."

"I've given you so many chances... do you even care?"

In truth, Taurus did not care. It was hard to care, anymore, when home was the biting chill of his parents' voices every single time. They never hit him; but their voices were icy enough, cold enough, that his nerves had become frostbitten and numb and had snapped off and then he just couldn't care anymore.

He hadn't been like that once. Taurus knew it; from the scattered textbooks across his desk and the scrawled, barely legible notes, he had tried. He really did. He had put his heart and soul into them, but one look at the scribbled handwriting imprinted into the page in dark ink and they had torn them up.

"Start over."

"It's not good enough."

Taurus didn't know when he had stopped caring. When he had stopped coming back from the school where the other kids would laugh and steal his notes, stomping them into the ground, their impish voices harsh, razor sharp. Lessons would tick by, ever too slowly, but information would just fly by and he could never write fast enough, never think fast enough, to be like the other kids.

Then one day, he had snapped and shoved one of them into the dirt with much more force than he had anticipated after they tore up his notebook right in front of him during lunch. They'd gotten a bloody nose, muddied pants and wounded pride; but that was it. The principal sat him down – how young was he, when that had happened? – scolded him, then scolded him again when he tried to tell him "They started it, they ripped up my notebook" – and then he had been sent home for an earful from his mother and father.

All of that had been a whirl of voices. He'd cowered as the sharpness of their tones drilled into him, tried to speak up, tried to – they never lay a hand on him, but every inch of his skin felt like it had been dipped into fire and ice and then fire again when he curled up in bed and cried himself to sleep.

After that, the kids stopped bothering him. Taurus sat alone at his desk at lunchtimes, staring down at his textbook, words blurring into the next. The children whispered behind his back, pointed and laughed. But they never bothered him anymore.

(Is there something wrong with me? Why can't I be like them? Why can't I be normal?)

Every time he came home, he was met with the screaming. Fear turned to anguish turned to acceptance, then eventually, indifference. He'd tried; he really had. But words on paper had never caught his attention, never embedded themselves in his head, no matter how much he looked at them. But nobody had ever listened to him –

– so he never listened to anyone else.

One night, he came back home (another F, another detention) with his scrap of paper. He didn't even need to prepare himself for the vocal beating he'd get again.

But it never quite came. At least, not in the way he had thought it would.

"We're expecting another child in several months." The chill in his mother's voice had warmed when breaking the news, almost – just barely. But that warmth was not directed to him. "I'm sure they'll do much better than you – our failure of a son."

"You're so lazy. You don't ever try with your studies."

(I did, but you never listened. You never wanted to hear me, you never –)

"We'll make sure our dearest child will grow up to never be like you."

"You might as well just leave the house. You're a waste of money and time. You don't deserve to call yourself our son – you don't deserve to hold the Venhaus name."