corvus raines ; d4 cb

(And even with that silver spoon stuck beneath your tongue, you still ended up here.)

It's an intrusive loathing, sticky thoughts that settle between his ears like a lantern oil. Corvus cannot help but linger in all his maladies, for most days they're his only company.

The longest he's ever gone without speaking is two months. He was eleven, then, and his big sister had just run away. She was tired of being their mother's punching bag and had assumed that Corvus' position as the favored child would offer some grace. She was wrong, of course, turns out their mother was more than willing to make due in her absence.

God, this story's such a cliche. He detests he's even a part of it. Corvus learned to work well with his wrists bound by barbed wire - the agony of high expectations and all that. If he feels any sort of way about it, he's no idea what. There's a lock box at the base of his skull, shoved full to burst with such trivial things.

If he's being honest, the night it all happened is probably somewhere in there too. It's fuzzy at best. He was walking along the docks at midnight, a bottle of whiskey sloshing over onto his fingers 'cause his steps had gone unsteady. There were voices behind him and he remembers that he wasn't really afraid - just annoyed by the interruption.

His next in tact memory is the feeling of his mother's fingers digging into his shoulders, shaking him and demanding to know what he'd done. And all he could choke out was -

"I don't know." Because he didn't. No one believed him though.

They gave him a choice - the detention center or some last chance correctional academy for established careers and Corvus didn't want to get fucking avoxed so it was an easy decision.

Maybe not the right one.