Chapter Text
"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same"
-Emily Brontë
Tyler’s POV
I never knew what it meant to be free. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always felt trapped inside a bubble inflated by my father. At first, I could hold up the mask of the perfect son inside that layer of soap, but little by little the oxygen ran out, and the one who burst the bubble was a woman named Marilyn Thornhill.
At the beginning, I would wake up naked, locked in a cave with my hands tied, completely covered in blood. I didn’t remember what had happened or how I got there, but the way that woman looked at me, holding a syringe filled with a liquid I still hadn’t identified, managed to bring my mind back to life. Their desperate screams, their terrified faces, the way their eyes widened in fear, begging me not to hurt them, it made me feel something I had never felt before. I had never felt so powerful, so free to put an end to their miserable lives.
Marilyn was proud of me. Every time I came back to the cave after a mission, she would caress my cheek and tell me how lucky she was to be my mother. I was six years old when my first mom died. She was the one who raised me, who taught me, who helped me understand the values of kindness. But those values slowly began to fade when I became part of the world of outcasts. Stupid, slimy creatures who turned me and my mother into monsters. That is how ordinary people and those who were not like us used to call us.
I will never forget the way my father looked at me. It was a mix of fear and disgust. He will never understand how he made me feel for twenty years of my life, drowning himself in alcohol and ignoring me, convinced that this way he could calm the monster inside me. Imagine my surprise when I found out that, while I was locked up in Willow Hill, he was investigating the outcasts to stop them from performing experiments on me, the same way they were doing to my mother at the same time.
It took me a couple of months locked in a cell to realize that the real monster here was that bitch who pretended to be my mother. Her hatred for outcasts manipulated me and pushed me to do her dirty work. If she hated outcasts, then she hated me too, because I was and still am one of them, and I am no longer ashamed of it.
As soon as I got the chance, the roles between me and Thornhill were reversed. Before, I had been the one on the ground, scared, constantly stabbed with needles while she stood there laughing. Then it was my turn. Instead of stabbing her with thin syringes, I did it with my claws. But then, after just a few moments, I found myself facing my greatest, most hateful weakness.
The way she stood there by that window, looking at me without fear like no one ever had before, made me feel so small and fragile. I had stopped with weaknesses. I had stopped bowing to others and giving in to my feelings. I had the instinct to rip open her chest and end her arrogance and my desperate need for her, but as soon as we were just a few inches apart and her big eyes looked at me with such fascination, I almost gave in. So I pushed her away.
The sound of breaking glass still haunts me, as does her small body on the ground and the pool of blood spreading beneath her. When I found out she was still alive, I felt anger, disappointment, and a huge, fucking relief. But she repaid me by breaking my restraints with a damn axe, while my mother and that bastard of an uncle were trying to take away my power, the only thing that made me feel free, confident, and strong.
She broke my restraints and in that precise moment all my devotion shifted to her, the greatest condemnation of my life. “Kill me,” I had told her, destroyed by the pain caused by Pugsley’s electricity and the exhaustion of living. When she raised the axe I thought it was my time. I closed my eyes, preparing for the blade to plunge into my throat, but then something in her gaze changed, as if it had softened, and she struck my restraints.
It was in that instant that I understood. She has a good soul and even though she sent me straight to a psychiatric hospital for months, she wanted to do the right thing. She confessed her feelings for me that night of Dia De Los Muertos, so I can die in peace.
It is time to let her go. I do not want to be her condemnation, nor make her regret saving me. Despite that, sometimes I like to imagine her in a pine coffin, to get her out of the way. But then I think I would be screwed without those braids that flutter from one side to the other, and maybe it is better to forget her and nothing more, without constantly throwing her against a wall.