Beauty and the Beasts

Chapter Three

I woke to the sound of a knock at my door and hushed chatter.

I sprang up when my bedroom door swung open and I blinked warily at the intruder before I gave up and rubbed my eyes and yawned as per my morning routine. I hadn't gotten a good look at who was by my door because they all looked more or less the same to me...and my hair was in my face.

"Angel? Who was that?" I asked groggily and she sighed inside my mirror and looked at me with mirth in her eyes.

"That was Jellal, who has been waiting for you for almost an hour at the breakfast table." She said and laughed joyously. I gaped at her in horror.

"Why did you just let him in? I know I locked the door last night before I went to sleep. I told you I feel uncomfortable with people I don't trust being near me when I'm asleep." I complained, my betrayal leaking through my voice. She looked regretful.

"It was that or fixing the door again. I figured he would leave once he saw that you were actually asleep. Of course, that is when you decided to finally awaken. Because the banging on the door and the yelling just didn't do it for you." She said sarcastically.

My cheeks stung. No, it wouldn't. Living where we did in the bad part of town, things were always noisy. Sex, music, gunshots, sports, fighting, and couple spats to name a few. Normally Wendy would wake me up by jumping on my bed and beg me to braid her hair for her like I used to wear mine when I was younger.

I didn't explain my sudden grim mood, and she didn't ask.

Last night after Meredy had rubbed ointment on my cuts and bruises and bandaged me up she had told me to go to the infirmary after breakfast so she could check my injuries for me.

Unlike the others who didn't care about their appearances, Meredy was very self-conscious and wore a mask over her face and gloves over her hands, the only places that showed her flesh through her clothes. She didn't make me feel scared at all. If I didn't assume to know what lay under her mask, I would have thought she was just a normal girl like any other.

It occurred to me that she was a girl like any other. A girl just like me in fact. Seeing her like that made me put the others into perspective. Around each other they still seemed to act like their old selves, like nothing was wrong with them...because nothing was wrong with them. They looked different because they were cursed, but honestly, they behaved just like any other group of friends...like my group of friends...like family.

I still couldn't help the fear and nausea I felt around them, but I was trying to tell myself it wasn't so bad. I just needed to try and see them beyond what the surface showed.

And while I did that, I had to remind myself not to sympathise with them too much. No one deserved to suffer like this, but then again no one deserved to have their lives ruined or stolen away either. They were people. Bad people.

They sold drugs for money and watched with glee as the poor victims came back to them again and again, giving them everything they had, selling themselves or their friends and family. Trafficking people like animals, distributing weapons to people with bad intentions and killing innocent people and their families over petty matters, to name a few of their crimes.

Angel had told me before I went to bed about their childhood. How Jellal had saved them when they were all little kids on the street, orphaned or abandoned. She even expressed what drove Jellal into the business of lies and deception, ultimately their downfall.

They had lost many friends along the way, Millianna, Wally, Sho, Simon, Kagura and even her own little sister Yukino who had been stolen and trafficked into the exotic child sex industry, because they were murdered or got sick and couldn't recover. Jellal knew there wasn't a place for them in the world of men who had never seen what they had and formed their family business by strategically getting the gangs to kill each other off until they needed someone with enough skill and intelligence to keep their underground businesses working, and that is how Jellal became the leader of their generation of the yakuza.