#// bc they've been wrapped up in abuse and pain ever since he was born it's impossible to tease the positive feelings away from the neg one

[twistedisciple]

13. A memory of a friend

Memories | not accepting

𝟦 Griss doesn’t remember much of him. Not his hair, his face, or even what his voice had sounded like. He knows that he was a few years older, or at least acted like it, and had scalloped fingernails. He knows that he had a brother who had lived at the monastery at some point, too. That’s what the others said, anyway.

“Your parents just gave up, huh?”

He remembers how he would ask everyone that, and stare at them and wait.

“Do you remember anything about your normal life?”

Griss had been on the other side of that probing stare once - the eyes of which could have been green, or maybe blue, or even red - but it was the dark splotch on his left cheek, like a forgotten smear of blood, that had sustained the years in his memory. He probably hadn’t given an answer. He probably hadn’t needed to. Those eyes could read words no one else knew, even the ones that had long-since faded beneath the surface of his skin. And yet every time he asked his questions, searching for something only he knew the shape of, he wouldn’t find it, and some deep, dark fissure inside of him grew longer and wider. He’d been punched in the mouth once, and Griss remembers wishing that he had been the one to do it.

He knows that he never talked about his past

(“What about your parents?”

“Remember what Father Laurel read at supper last night?”

“Something about the way trees grow.”

“Yeah. Many of them kill each other.”

“Oh, right.”

“I’ll never look at a tree the same way again.”)

because he had a way of slipping out of questions,

and he remembers how they used to argue

(“My hand hurts”

“That’s the point, right?”

“No, the point is learning to copy Gradlon’s manuscripts. Not write until our hands fall off.”)

even though he was always wrong.

He had liked him.

(an open copybook, the last 5 pages filled in by an inexperienced hand burgundy blooms in the margins)

Or maybe he had hated him.

(“Why did you tell?”

“...”)

But he had learned from him that the price of a bond is blood. And although he doesn’t remember the color of his eyes, the style of his hair, or where he had come from, he remembers his name, Lyco, because it had been etched across his back, stroke-by-stroke.