"dream me the world" | darren's victor aus

Victory tasted of rust and desperation, teeth bared, the only hand he had left stained with blood. Entaelia. Opal. Locust. Xanthus. Three of the lives he'd taken were the ones he'd once sworn to protect and he had only learned the name of the fourth when it showed up in the sky later that night; he'd always been a good liar and he'd never been a particularly good person.

Maybe that was why all those bad things happened to everyone who dared to get close to him. The burns may have been on the hand he no longer had but the memories were still scars against him, the drum of his father's fists slamming against the door pounded in rhythm with Drace's heart. The sound of his mother's screams were the whispers in the wind.

Entaelia. Opal. Locust. Xanthus.

They all must have known, somewhere within, that he'd kill them if it came to it. Pokerface. Maybe he'd gotten so good at hiding his cards that he'd forgotten, if only for a moment, what they were.

His return home was, as it turned out, not a good one. Valencia was the love of his life, and at one point she'd been the most dangerous game Drace dared to play. But he'd lost that time. Two months, he'd been gone, and in that time she'd disappeared with Dexter, Drace's very best friend.

He wanted to say he was the better person, that he hadn't hunted them down and confronted them. He wanted to say he had good intentions, that he only wanted answers, but it wasn't true, and a two-week stay in the Detention Center was evidence enough. He wanted blood. He wanted payment, and he'd gotten it in the form of kneeing Dexter in the jaw so hard he'd broken it.

That wasn't the last of the trouble, nor the last of Drace's attempts to distance himself from the actions that plagued him. It was a vicious circle of self-hatred. He remembered how easily he'd killed, so he numbed himself with whatever he could get his hands on. He became an addict so he turned to violence. And the violence would make him think of those who'd died, and so on.

In and out of the Detention Center for the next several years, Damea was a preschooler and Drace's cheeks were sunken in and his eyes were hollow before he decided to make a change.

There was no making up for lost time, he realized. There was no getting that door open to save his parents. There was no taking back what he'd done to survive. There was no hiding from the pain with drugs. There was only facing it, and that was the choice he decided to make, rocking back and forth on the porch of his mansion with Damea in his arms.

"Just you and me," he said, leaning down to kiss her on the back of her head, "From now til forever."