For now.
I could feel it building though. Every glance that lingered, every step that followed just a little too close, it wasn’t going away, it was getting closer.
And you know what the worst part was?
Not the threats, not the way they looked at me, hell, not even the way the guards watched and did nothing unless they absolutely had to. It was the familiarity. The way it all settled into something I already knew how to survive.
Tell me, little Ghost.
How many times do you think a person can be put back into the same kind of place before they stop trying to get out of it?
Because I didn’t try, not really, I just adjusted. And maybe that says more about me than anything they ever did. Of course it didn’t stay at words, stuff like that never does. An elbow that didn’t move out of the way, a shove that came just a little too hard to be accidental. The kind of contact that doesn’t leave marks you can point to, doesn’t give anyone a reason to intervene.
With time though, it started leaving marks. Bruises first, faint. Spreading under the skin in colors that shifted over days, blue, then yellow, then something dull and ugly before fading into nothing. I watched them sometimes in the dim light of the cell, pressing my thumb into them just to feel the ache bloom again, just to confirm it was still there.
Then came the first real hit.
Fast, blunt, enough to knock the air out of me before I even registered what had happened. My back hit the wall, breath gone, vision pulling tight at the edges for a second. I didn’t fight back, you’d think that would invite more of it, and it did, just notin the way you might expect. They didn’t all come at me at once, it was slower, like they were testing how far they could go before someone stopped them.
No one did.
The guards saw, of course they did. You don’t miss things like that in a place where everything echoes, where every movement carries. They saw the way bodies shifted, the way someone stepped in too close, the way I folded and they looked away, like it had already been decided between them that whatever happened between us didn’t matter. That’s when it really changed, because once something is allowed, it becomes possible again, and once it becomes possible, it becomes routine. It happened again, and again. A fist driving into my ribs hard enough to make something inside me tighten and lock. A hand at the back of my neck forcing me forward just so another hit could land cleaner. The blunt crack of bone against bone, the taste of iron blooming at the back of my mouth before I even realized I’d been split open somewhere.
And the truth?
I didn’t resist.
That’s the fucked up part, little Ghost. I didn’t hate it.
There was something in it, something I don’t even know how to name properly, that felt familiar, nostalgic. My body knew this, the rhythm of it. The anticipation right before it landed, the way your muscles tighten without you telling them to, the way your mind goes somewhere else just a second before impact because it already knows what’s coming. I’d been there before. Back in the house, back in rooms that smelled wrong, where walls felt too close, where footsteps meant something was about to happen and there was nothing you could do except wait for it to reach you.
Back at the orphanage, where silence didn’t protect you, it just made you easier to overlook. Easier to ignore until someonedecided you were something to take out their frustration on. It all came back. In the way my body reacted before my mind could catch up. In the way I didn’t panic, didn’t fight, didn’t even flinch the way someone else might have. I just took it, and somewhere in that, there was relief.
Fuck, that sounds wrong when I say it out loud, but it’s true.
Because for those moments, those short, violent, brutal moments, something inside me shifted. The noise stopped. Everything that had been building, all that pressure, all that endless, suffocating silence I’d been trapped in for months, it broke apart. Pain has a way of doing that. It drags you back into your body whether you want it to or not. And after it was over, after they stepped back, after the air settled again and I was left there with whatever they had done to me, I could feel myself.
My pulse, the way my lungs pulled air in like it mattered again. It was the closest thing to being alive I had felt in a long time. I found comfort in it. Not in them, but in the contact. In the fact that something, anything, was touching me, leaving an imprint, proving that I wasn't just fading into nothing inside those walls.
You don’t understand what that kind of isolation does to a person, little Ghost. You might think you do, but you don’t. Not fully. When no one sees you, no one speaks to you, no one reaches for you, not even in anger, not even in violence, you start to disappear. And those moments, those hits, those hands, those impacts that should have meant nothing but pain, they pulled me back just enough to remind me I was still there.
I actually think I got under their skin, because it changed again. Like they were trying to push me somewhere they couldn’t quite reach and I let them, every single time. Because it was easier than going back to that empty, suffocating quiet where nothing had touched me at all. All of that was something. And maybe that actually says everything it needs to about what I had become by then, or what I had always been.
Little Ghost, answer this. If pain is the only thing that reminds you you’re alive, what do you think happens when even that stops being enough?
The Berserker
Chapter 44
After long enough inside a place like that, your body starts noticing things before your head does. There were parts of the day where something ugly settled over the block, and everyone felt it. You walked differently during those hours. Spoke less. Kept your eyes on the right people and away from the wrong ones. The tension in there had its own pulse, and eventually your body learned how to hear it before anything actually started. My shoulders would tighten, breath changing, pulse picking up like something inside me had already decided what was coming. And it always did. Different hands, same outcome.
Fists.
The kind of hits that keep living in your body long after they happen, buried deep enough that you still felt them when you moved the wrong way days later. I learned how to take them without folding, how to move just enough that nothing vital took the full force unless I wanted it to. And yeah, sometimes I did, because I wanted to feel something that wasn’t that endless, suffocating quiet inside my own head.
You don’t understand that silence until it crawls into you and stays there, little Ghost. Not the absence of sound, no, this place was never quiet, but the absence of anything that connects you to the world around you. So when they hit, I felt it.
I stopped going to the infirmary unless I physically couldn’t stand, they didn’t care either way. The guards had dropped the act completely by then, no turning their heads anymore or pretending it wasn’t happening. They’d stand there, arms folded, watching like it was just another part of the routine, because it was. And me? I was fine with it, actually, more than fine. I preferred it.
