A new story, probably one that won't really go anywhere. I'm just in the writing mood. It's from an unnamed character's perspective...but I'm basing her off myself so...yeah.

I was not kind to myself as a child.
Learned behavior.
No one had ever taught me how to love myself. No one. Oh, sure, there were those inspirational quotes and all, but who really believed them? I mean, what was the point, right? And the motivational stories, well, they were just stories. Nice that little babies could believe them, but the rest of us, you know...
Well, especially someone who had been born like me. Someone like me would know. Life is life. And that's all. Some people coast. Others struggle to breathe. Still others wallowed in sweet, sweet oblivion, right? And that wasn't bad, because they didn't even know that life could hurt so very badly, right? They could actually believe that cheesy crap and maybe put the shit behind them.
But me, I fell somewhere in between all three categories, not close enough, but that's just what happened. A mistake, I guess. And I knew it. Oops. A cosmic mistake. So I ducked my head in the halls to block out the staring. I knew. i knew. A cosmic mistake.
Except, whenever I said that, Rena would punch me in the shoulder and demand that I shut up.
She wasn't above punching, by the way, or kicking or biting.
It was always her and me and Samiel as kids. We were a team. She was two years younger than we were, but her radiant confidence made up for it and then some. She was a beautiful child, and she knew it. She had dark curls, porcelain skin, and deep, expressive dark blue-green eyes. It was easy for her to say that, I decided. She wasn't a mistake. She was talented in the ways that everyone loves. She was conventionally cute, a child to ooh and ahh over, but with just the right touch of defiance. She was, simultaneously, a sweet little China doll and a comical firebrand. She knew just the right things to say. Inspiration came easily. Words lined up and rolled from her mouth in perfect explanation. She knew things. She knew...
I tried to explain, but how can you explain things that you don't even know? The best I could do was say, "There are certain things that you always knew that i don't know and never will." Always, looking down at the ground. Always, always with the flush of shame heat creeping up from my limbs into my face and head, choking off whatever further words I might say. I was supposed to be the strong, beautiful, perfect smart one! I thought...I was supposed to be...lies. all they said, I was lies. A mistake. It was never meant to happen like this...a child like this...my memories were lies, lies and nothing. i had to rethink them all...I'm "different", floating around this Earth while they...
that would be as far as I got before she'd slap me in the face or kick me in the shin.
"Shut up! Shut up right now. You are a strong girl! So how could you let anyone change the way you see yourself? You are way beyond anything they could understand!"
Her eyes were bright, intense, flashing fury and pain. I could believe that she meant it, maybe. Or maybe she really was just trying to protect the weak girl from her own self--
"Samiel, she won't believe me! Tell her!"
"Rena's right. You've just got a lot of strong emotions inside you. They could never even begin to understand! They're scared of it so they try to shut you up. Don't you dare let them! Then, it's like..." He looked down at his toes, his dark mop of hair falling over his face.
"It's like another part of Evil wins. I couldn't stand it if that happened with you. You've always been so strong."
Part of me wanted to let stinging tears fall. But the bigger part of me mocked how melodramatic he was being. Life, I told myself, was not a story. And who was a little ten-year-old girl to defeat Evil?
"Hey! I just got an idea. You know the Base One museum?"
"Um, yeah..." I said slowly, wondering what was with her sudden switch in topic and emotion. We all knew the Base One museum. We'd all lived at least part of our childhood in Base One. Rena's family had moved there for safety before her mother had been murdered. The newspapers didn't openly say murder. But among the inhabitants of Base One, the word flew from angry mouths and accompanied low, shaking voices and flashing eyes. Eleiya had been pregnant then, which was why her murder had evoked such fury. the baby was a boy. They had already named him. I remember. They were calling him Little Ren, after his maternal grandfather, Reynold.
So much for safety.
Samiel had been rescued in infancy. Ironically, he'd been kidnapped from the hospital to protect him from being kidnapped. His rescuers arrived there just in time. they later returned him to his confused, distraught parents to explain the full extent of the situation.
And my story, well, mine was a little more complicated.
"You're like a butterfly," Rena said And now I was confused even more, but I'd learned not to interrupt her during the peak of her inspiration. When she got going like this, there was no stopping her.
"You're like some random mutant butterfly, right? But you're still a butterfly just like all the other ones. And you're still pretty, you just...have a brighter, more complicated wing pattern than the other ones, right? But they need to understand why. So what they wanna do is catch you, kill you, and preserve you like they do in the museum--pick you apart and study you and pin your body to a board, covered in labels. But it wouldn't be the same cause you'd just be a body. they'd have taken away the real beauty--the life! Do not let it happen!" She finished.
Excellent. Now she was being overly dramatic too.
But I did see her point.
And at least someone really cared. At least someone really tried to see something good and right in me.
So I nodded. "Okay."
Samiel and I were ten then,. and Rena was eight.
Within two weeks of that day, she was dead.
Again, the word "murder" flew in growls throughout Base One.
Murder.
We were there, Samiel and I. We didn't understand why at first.
The unseen killer used poison as a way of getting revenge on her father. It was a truly despicable and low thing to do.
We watched those bright, lively eyes of hers grow dimmer and dimmer. We watched her strong, beautiful body tremble its way toward death. We watched as her vibrant energy faded away. We held her hands as it happened. We tried to will her to live, to pump our own life and strength into her failing body, to no avail. She became still, a shell, right as we watched. Her eyes stared eternally into the night sky.
That night Samiel and I stayed, kept vigil, by her body. Slept huddled together on the ground, waking in fits and sobbing and remembering her. Every so often one of us would reach over and touch her hand. It was still warm at first, still felt lifelike, like a living hand. She would never have lain so limp and unresponsive to us--not someone as loving and exuberant as her. Yet at first we pretended she was just sleeping next to us, that soon she would wake and her hand would once again clasp ours.
But her burning heat, the bright star inside of her, kept inexorably dimming until her hand was a cold, stiff piece of wax. It didn't really feel like a hand anymore, and there was no more pretending. It was like being woken with a slap into a broken world. The thing that lay next to us wasn't...wasn't really Rena anymore. Our vigil was for respect, but nothing more, and so worthless. She wasn't coming back.
Come morning, they found us and took her body away. And we held onto each other, Samiel and I, held onto all we had left. All we had left of her. The next night, though she was gone, we fell asleep in the same place. Holding onto each other, mourning and trying to will time back into better days, to make everything the same.
When I awoke the next morning from dreams I could not remember, dreams that hovered tantalizingly on the edge of my mind, the sun brought something bright and delicate into view.
Inches from my face was a butterfly, but not like any butterfly I'd ever seen. It was lovely but strange, its wings patterned in a way my eye couldn't quite make sense of. And as I further opened my eyes, it fluttered away, high, high into a cornflower sky, drifting on the wind that rustled the trees. Samiel pointed up at it, then looked at me with a serious expression. He knew and I knew. I knew what she was trying to tell me to remember. I knew what she was trying to tell me to do.
And I knew that already I had failed her.
I couldn't do it. I couldn't see it the way she wanted me to, no matter how hard I wished I could. I couldn't even try.
She was dead. Gone.
And the part of me that had been alive so very long ago was dead too.

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