Quincy Rathbone [D2] ~FIN~

If there was one thing I could shatter on a whim permanently, it would be my own reflection.

Moments have long since quickly blurred into years of averting my gaze from myself when walking past the bathroom, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on edge whenever I approach a river or my breath catching in the back of my throat when I hold a sword and catch a glimpse of the blade. When a pair of dark brown eyes stare back, I swear, there's the nozzle of a gun pressed against the back of my skull and a finger stroking the soft trigger. I think it would be fair to call my aversion to a broken image of myself an irrational fear, but would be a false diagnosis to say it is fear that quickens my heart before it turns to lead in my chest at the threat of a metaphorical bullet between my eyes.

I am a dreamer without the hope to dream big and a brute without the heart of stone and ice to kill his mind. I'm a grown man who is still to busy worrying about finger guns pressed against his chest and inhaling imaginary gunpowder.

There is ash in my hair, I used to dream it was stardust.

(when I dreamed, and dreamed, and dreamed again)

Jet black, like soot from a chimney but I've never had a hard day's of honest, money earning labor in my life. There was just never the parts, never the need to work, or sweep, or dream of a career. But there was always the need to learn to throw knives and hit targets and imagine that they're people, the need to kick someone's teeth in for not paying for their damn hit, the need to press a blade into someone's jugular vein and watch them piss their pants at the idea of a single jerk motion opening red smiles across their neck. Knuckles swollen, palms bruised; this is just how I'm supposed to move and I never have to see myself doing it either.

I'm a man, I'm a grown man who still never so much as thought of doing a single hour of honest work, who still punches people when they get in his way, who still throws tantrums and hurricanes when he doesn't get his way in the training center - who still believes his own reflection can hurt him. But I'm a grown man; I don't hold superstition in my hands, there's just no space when I have a bag of white powder in one hand and a loaded pistol in the other. I don't hold superstition but I still do a quick hop and keep my gaze to the floor when I see a glass plane.

And the full body ones are the worst - where I can see myself from head to toe. From unruly jet black hair that mirrors the complexion of soot from a smoking chimney to the best clothes money can buy more often than not torn from some kind of fight with a junkie in debt and a small scrap with my demons themselves. It doesn't matter, Mother and Father always get us new clothes anyway with not a thought in mind from the cost just because they can. When I've forced into the position of looking at my dark brown wide eyes and yellow-tinted porcelain skin, examining the body hairs prickling the surface and running my hands through the stardust. The full body mirrors that capture my whole six foot frame lean frame are the ones I would shatter first without question if I had my way.

(but I don't have my way)

Reflections and broken truths - I'd rather face tall tales. I don't have the right to complain, the richest family who just happened to be at the orphanage didn't have to take me in at six years old, nor did they have to give me shelter and roof over my head and -

(a gun, a knife, a purpose)

- an easy life.

We just throw our cares into the wind, all of us. No thought for honest labor, no thought for the future past one week and bags and bags of chems, liquor and blood. I've seen what happens to the careers from other family; their bodies become cages to themselves. Forced to eat this way, forced to sleep that time, never allowed to drink this drink or that drink, forced to wear a veil of deceit in front of their families and sneak from their houses just so they can make a house party. When I examine the focal points of their days, from the endpoints to the start points I want to laugh.

Fuck that.

We have fun and let leave any anxieties at the door and watch our worries drown in smoke and nothing can pry what we have away from us. Not even the Salvatores, who would watch us burn in flames and dare to find positive image in the smoke. Too stuck-up for my liking, I should be thankful one of them didn't pick me up from that orphanage at age six, although they would never go anywhere near an orphanage. Something about bloodline and pride; I suppose blood is thicker than water after all.

But what if they were share blood with origins similar to mine? I wonder if that statement were to still hold true.

They didn't start out at the top, the Rathbones that is, it came from rags to riches. Testing fate and making money come from cunning and just nothing. It's not being a street rat, it's having fucking talent.

(I must be so proud, aren't I?)

I'm an incomplete puzzle, pieces scattered along with the people I know. I am a grown man but I scream the textbook definition of immaturity. With bruised knuckles at my side, weapons in my drawer and a heart of fire, people have described being around me like treading on a minefield. I once broke someone's nose for stepping on my new shoes - I am simply a complex hurricane of flames and there's nothing that can extinguish the forest fire than emerges when someone dares take a wrong step along the minefield.

When I could still dream, and dream and dream again I imagined I would someday burn so bright I would melt every mirror and glass plane in existence and turn all the bodies of water into steam. Then I could just burn, and burn, and burn again.

I am an incomplete puzzle piece, scattering fragments of myself with the people I know. Not even the mother and father who took me in can form a coherent picture anymore. Dodging tall fibs, avoiding hollow truths and wearing watching white lies, I've kept my origins a mystery to outsiders. After all, when the inner workings of a monster is revealed he tends to suddenly become a lot less frightening. No one will ever know who I was, what I was - except for the people who extracted me from the tall, deepening crevasse of poverty.

(but my last name was King, I remember)

I was on the other side of the spectrum of royalty.

When I look into glass planes and unbroken rivers, I swear Quincy King is lurking beneath the surface. Where his first memory of his mother is her with a needle clutched in her hands and dirt tracks along her veins. And his father was never all that different. They were just junkies. But I saw them, I remember and they're there. In my dreams, in the glass planes. Breaking tall waves, shattering hollow illusions of what could have been, what was.

Naive to the inevitable, when death's skeleton hand passed over our family I wasn't quite blind to the tragedy or grateful for the luck that I had been left behind. Wood splintered with a footprint against a fragile door, the dysfunctional family unit didn't just splinter, it shattered under the rain of gun fire, bullet holes and daggers lifting and falling. 'Don't fucking steal our shit.'

I will never understand why they left me alive in a pool of their blood.

(because who would put a bullet through a six year old's skull?)

The reaper's hand missed me, just that once. Everything else became a blur, being found, the orphanage, peacekeepers -

(it was a drug related incident,' 'they were found to have stolen heroin,' 'poor kid,')

Long after the Rathbones took me in, they appeared in my sleep. Apparitions, phantoms of the past. And they're still there to this day, long after I said I wanted to become a career and learn to throw knives and dodge swords, long after I learned to stop dreaming again and again and again. The one thing I would shatter after mirrors is the concept of sleep, just so I never have to see apparitions of the past ever again.

When I dare look into a glass plane or a surface of water unbroken, I swear, my eyes begin to glaze over with red. I started getting involved in the family business soon after I was seventeen, I suppose having anger issues and a hard fist is good for intimidating junkies who think they can hide between tall rifts and layers of dishonesty. I've never killed a man, but I've made them wish I had.

(I just want them to be proud)

But when I wrap fingers around a porcelain throat and cast a stern look into desperate eyes the common junkie, the dead eyes of the Kings stare back. Still, sleepless nights and nonexistent sobs are easy to endure the hundredth time round, tragedy tends to shatter against a hardened mind that hides from glass planes and unbroken surfaces of water. It's far too easy to bury a battlefield torn in two beneath new family values.

I'll never be comfortable in a mind that sees bullet holes in place of his own reflection.