tired of takin' history on the chin // [elegant]

It had been a couple of weeks after I'd first spoken that my father had discovered that I was speaking again. I guess someone had heard me at some point or another, talking to Ari quietly behind my paper walls instead of just screaming myself hoarse in my sleep. Maybe it was the fact that speaking to Ari somehow helped this. I don't shout as much and wake everyone up in the middle of the night but I still often wake up with my pillow wet from tears and the bed beside me empty because I held off from sleeping for too long the night before and slept in instead. Sometimes I'll wake up and he's gone for breakfast but sometimes I'll wake up and he's just sitting there, watching me.

I used to find it odd, the way he watched but I'm like that myself. I like to reassure myself often that what I have to hold onto is real too. I stared a lot because I had no other way of communicating the amount of horror I'd feel in the wake of losing the person I loved than a look. My mother had never told me that she loved me, she hadn't held me much. I just knew that she'd loved me by the way that she'd looked at me and it was all I'd needed to love her back.

So although I've been speaking again, sometimes with Ari I still don't need to say a word to get my point across.

Still, my father has noticed and despite myself, my stubborn feeling towards anything to do with this new life, I cannot stop myself from crawling back into life, into the flow of things. My lessons begun a couple months back, everything from business to history to maths and literature. All the things I thought I knew were not good enough, all the lessons I thought I'd learned before could only be applied in most cases.

I'd gone to public school like the rest of the kids in my neighborhood but my school was a dump of a place that I'd skipped out on too often because I figured I knew everything already. I had better things to do than sit in a poorly lit classroom for over eight hours a day listening to kids with the intelligence quotient equivalent to a potato struggle to spell 'Capitol'. I had my mother to think about after all.

However I've always been clever. It's why Otari picked me up in the first place, I guess he knew I'd be a quick learner, that my cold features would put many people off. I've already been included in a couple of business deals in my short time as his successor. He says I'm a real asset because I don't fold very easily and I'm good at reading people. It must be all the practice I put in with Ari, trying to figure out what the hell he's trying to tell me with his odd looks and shy movements.

He's gotten less shy, less furtive, less breakable in his time with me I'd like to think. He looks me more in the eye now, smiles more. I remember the first time he really smiled, how I'd just managed to dump an entire egg into my lap and it had broken all over my new pants. I couldn't even get annoyed at it, I swear he'd almost laughed then. I liked to see his smile. It made things better somehow, as if for once I wasn't ruining something but fixing it instead. I was taking care of him.

With the return of my voice and a healthier look to me, Mr. Otari, my father has decided to reopen his house to business dinners. This is fair enough, it's his house and he has made it into a sanctuary for me but it was always meant to impress. The house was always meant to show just how traditional, just how imposing Otari is. To host a business dinner over a merger at the house does not only make sense, it seems necessary. I just wish I didn't have to be included.

"You're going to need practice with this my son," he'd said before sending out the official invitation and I had ground my heel into the wooden flooring and gone off to find Ari, withholding speech from my adopted father as my own brand of punishment. I was and still am a petulant child in most instances.

Now we sit in a private room. away from our servants as we draw up the deal for the merger. It requires not only the signatures of the adults but the signatures of their successors as well in order to ensure a healthy merger. I can't focus on the conversation, I'm listening instead, ears straining to hear anything from the other room where I have just left Ari alone with three other men. I don't trust the Ugawas in the slightest. My mother would often whisper that it was rude to judge a person based on looks.

I don't plan on fucking the Ugawas though, the plan is to incorporate their tiny little company into our own before they can become big enough to become an actual competitor. This whole night was fabricated to make the Ugawas feel more important than the shitty little ants that they are. I don't trust them. Their brows are too heavy and it seems to me that they're more used to scowling than anything else.

My real problem is the thugs that they've brought with them and the fact that Ari is alone with them right now, probably scared. I told him that he didn't have to be scared anymore, I promised him that I wasn't going to let anyone hurt him. He's my friend and I meant it when I said it. Me requesting that I bring my Avox into the room with us when not even Mr. Ugawa's department heads were allowed to accompany us would not only be a sign of disrespect but ridiculous according to most Capitolites.

However, according to most Capitolites, Avoxes are not people.

As time stretches on, my discomfort grows and I find myself glancing towards the old wooden grandfather clock that stands against the wall. Only minutes have passed. Mere minutes, but he's alone with three men even uglier than the Ugawas who weren't slowing their drinking when they left. If there is anything that I know well it's that drug and drink make a man capable of anything.

I mutter an excuse and push myself up from the chair I had been sitting in. I don't know now what I said to escape the smaller room. Probably something about needing to use the bathroom or some air or something equally irrelevant. Things get hazy here.

I remember speeding up as I made my way along the outside of the veranda, floorboards chirping loudly as I made no effort to avoid the spots that set of the Nightingale floor. I skid to a stop outside of the sitting room that we had left them all in and something in me tightened, something knew that something was wrong just by how quiet it was. When we'd left the room, there had been loud talking, laughter. It was too quiet and I had failed. Again.

I slide the door open with a bang, eyes taking the situation in too quickly, narrowing as they realize what it is I'm seeing.

It used to be like that with my mom. Once I had a bad dream and I knocked on her door all night, crying, nose running as I screamed for her because the monsters were going to get me. I went in instead of waiting outside and caught her with her mouth around his private parts.

My voice is soft at first, "....what are you doing?" but it is deadly in it's silence. My hands shake as I fly across the room, not taking the time to even touch down on solid floor, seeing the man's lip's against Ari's and seeing red all at once, finally learning what the term 'seeing red' even means. Nothing was red in particular except for the blood that I could already imagine spurting out of the asshole's nose.

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?"

This time it's a shout and it's coming out of my lips and my voice is not even as angry as I am. My first fist finds the back of the guy's head who's holding Ari in place, in order for him to be kissed by the first asshole. I watch as it connects and unregistered pain explodes in my knuckle but I focus on the way that Ari's shirt is pushed off of his shoulders, exposing bare skin that I was working so hard to keep healthy and anger flows through me fresh. I don't have time for pain.

The man I've hit stumbles forward, letting go of Ari and finding himself hitting the wall. My next target is the man with the wet lips and the grabby hands. My fist connects with his nose and there's an audible crack as his head is forced back. Blood hits my fists and streams out fast, like a river and I realize that for the first time in my life I'm actually able to fight for someone and I sort of forget, I lose myself.

I kick the man when he's down, my foot finding his stomach easily, taking his wind from him, making him choke on air and blood all at once. The man on the couch doesn't get off either. I've been training hard this past year and fighting is one thing I've always been good at. He doesn't stand a chance when I press my hands against his throat, holding him down into the couch, taking that shit-eating grin off of his face. I'm going to make it so that he can't hurt anyone ever again.

My hands tighten and I'm breathing hard, my suit is rumpled, my hair out of place. I've got my knee on his groin and I'm pressing down in the most unrelenting of ways and it takes a moment to realize that the screams of anger I'm hearing are my own because my ears are ringing.

"Sin."

I ignore the voice, enjoying the way the guy's face is going red from lack of air, the way his eyes are bugging out.

"That's enough."

Arms wrap themselves around me, forcing me to let go and I shout, kicking outwards as my father's Avox picks me up by force, dragging me off the pervert. My foot connects with the chest of the guy but that's all the damage I can get in before I'm being brought outside and dropped onto the veranda, before Rex gives me an apologetic look and slides the sitting room door shut with a bang behind him.

There's shouting going on inside, a lot of it but I'm breathing hard and beating my fists against the veranda floor, cursing as I wipe blood off of my cheek.

Ari's a few feet away but I don't know how to look at him because I've failed him. I know he's there and he knows I'm here, and I know that the shouting going on inside is about us. Me in particular.

But I've failed him.

e v e r y
heartbeat was a
s c r e a m