terrence vivuus / twelve. fin

Here's the thing: they say your heart is made from rot.

There's nothing left in your chest except the tatters left behind, a scabbed over and worm-eaten thing with no space left in it to feel, well. Anything. Sometimes you like to blame it on the life that you were born to, like to blame who you are on the life that you've been made to lead. Maybe you wouldn't be like this if it wasn't your job to dig the graves that you knew you'd be robbing later. Maybe you wouldn't be like this if you hadn't spent the last ten years listening to Sigrid prattle of information about words you don't care to use in the first place, fiddling with the ruby ring on her pristine fingers while you got covered in dirt. 

Maybe you wouldn't be like this if you hadn't been seven years old with your hands in a dead guy's pockets, pulling the pretty handkerchief out of his breast pocket.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. 

But, you see, there’s this: you cannot remember the last time that you were kind.

And that's what really matters.

You aren’t always cruel, you don’t think. But, you aren’t really even sure anymore what’s cruel and what’s not, can’t remember where the line is and if you’ve stepped over it, if you’re so far down the rabbit hole that there are only shadows left and you’ve damned yourself to a life living among them, stepping from one darkness to the next. You remember one time, standing at the edge of a casket, rummaging around the girl’s body and plucking valuables from her. The ring around her middle finger on her right hand, probably just gold-plated but shiny and therefore worth something. The headband off her head that had little gems stitched into it. You remember kissing her brother in the woods past curfew three hours after you raided her body, him desperate and breathing so hard you just knew he was trying his hardest not to cry. You remember not letting him, not wanting to deal with that. You remember telling yourself that if he needed to cry, he would have sought out someone else. 

You don’t know if that’s cruelty, though you know it’s not kindness.

Lines like that. That's what trips you up the most. The knowledge, or lack thereof, of what is cruel and what is kind. You don’t know what is and what isn’t, can’t figure out if you letting him get his grief out that way was healthy for him, can’t figure out if you should have let him cry, given him an opening. Or maybe it was cruel simply for the fact that you kissed him knowing you still had his dead sisters shiny earrings sitting at the bottom of your jeans pocket.

Who, really, is to say?

You're not the authority on the matter, that much is for certain, and while you're being honest, you have no real interest in finding out what's kind and what's not. If you know, then you'll have to choose, you'll have to know that something is cruel and you know that you'll choose to do it anyway and then you're really well and truly going to have fucked your soul right over and, well.

You don't think you much like the sound of that.

You're really good at blaming everyone else around you for the way that you turned out, all rotten inside and with all the wrong instincts. And, you're learning as you get older, that people aren't unwilling to just believe you. You bounce around any bed that you can work your way into, let people sweep your hair out of your eyes and listen to nonsensical philosophical rambling to tell them in some roundabout way that you hate your dad as much as you love him, that you're crippled by how much you want to live up to this job he's given you, about how he's giving you more and more responsibility and you're only seventeen years old and you're not old enough to deal with this and you just want to have not grown up with death literally caked under your nails and—

And nothing. You say it roundabout and then you never talk to them again and when dad wakes you up at 4am to dig another grave before going to school, you do it. And when he tucks Old Man Jeffries watch into your jacket and tells you to drop it at Wrinkly Sal's, you do it.

Mom used to say that you had cheekbones sharp enough to cut out a girls heart, which you think is a horrible fucking cliché, but it's things like that that really did shape you, turned you into fox-hearted boy who would never be able to get up to anything other than trouble. You know what people say in school about you; and sure, you know what they say about the family, too, but it's always been yourself that you're more concerned with. Terrence and his sticky fingers, always looting things that he shouldn't. Terrence and his all-seeing eyes. Terrence and his shit eating grin. 

Terrence and his complete inability to be fucking wrong.

You don't mind that one so much since it never happens anyway. What's there to worry about regarding your reaction to being wrong when you aren't ever wrong, right?

You don't have time to consider whether or not you are who you're supposed to be, don't have time to consider whether or not you are who you want to be. If you could be someone else. Someone better. Not when it's your job to help make sure that the shit you nick from the bodies gets sold to the right person for the right price, not when you have to worry about scrubbing the dirt and grime out from under your nails every time you go to school so that the other kids will forget exactly the death shit hole you're growing up in.

You know the shit people say about you, and you like your reputation exactly as terrible as it is.

And that's really all there is to it.