Page 13 of Heartless Heathens

In the darkness I heard muffled cries and gasps of breaths. I searched for a tether to pull me back into the present but I couldn’t. It was usually one of my brother’s voices but all I could hear were the sounds of her pain morphing inside my head.

Black again.

Always black.

“What is that noise?” I heard Felix far off in the darkness.

“Please!” A feminine voice scratched out but it was unfamiliar and I couldn’t cling to it to bring myself out.

A flash.

The piercing blue of her eyes.

Red.

Pools of tears gathering on her lashes before each stream fell down her cheeks.

Black.

“Felix!” I yelled, but I wasn’t sure if it actually made it out of my mouth.

Every sound muted.

Black.

Like the swallowing chasm of the universe folding in on itself

“Fuckinghell,”Ishoutedat the scene I walked into, my brother holding some girl up by the throat while her face turned a shade of purple I hadn’t seen before on someone whose heart was still beating. I tugged on his shoulder pulling him back until I could get a good look at his face. His eyes rolled all the way back and all you could see was the white.

Fuck.

He was blacked out.

Our mom was one of the last doctors in the country to provide abortions to her patients. Frollo made sure she got the electric chair for it. Corvin was there, at her last moments. I wasn’t, because I was a fucking coward. We were fifteen at the time. Ever since then, he had these blackout episodes.

He has a relatively mild form of epilepsy, and the doctors say it's related. That the trauma exacerbated it. Corvin told us it had gotten better, he spent all summer convincing us he hadn’t had a single one.

He fucking promised.

Either he was lying, or the stress of being out here was making him have an episode. I knew my brother better than I knew myself, these episodes almost always happened in situations where he felt like he was being stripped of control, of choices.

A coping mechanism.

A dangerous one.

I pulled him off the girl. The tears cascaded down her golden skin, already bruising red from the force of his hand. She sobbed an almost feral sound that came straight from the depths of her chest, reverberating through the walls of Corvin’s bedroom before she collapsed into my arms in defeat.

She was fucking mesmerizing.

I’d never seen anyone like her. An array of silver hair with some onyx streaks running through it. Her eyes were a shade of blue even the clearest ocean couldn’t compete against. I frowned examining her neck, the damage was already painted onto her, but Corvin wasn’t to blame either. He laid on the floor, eyes rolling back, while his breathing turned short and erratic, his chest rising and falling in quick, out of sync spurts.

He would likely stay this way for a bit before he would crash for twelve or so hours. Whatever happened to his body during these episodes really took it out of him, not to mention the concussion he likely had from crashing onto the floor.

A couple years ago Arlan threw him into a psych ward for an entire month for an observed ‘sleep’ study. It was the longest we’d ever been apart. And all they could really tell us was that he was more violent during these episodes. There was no method to the madness inside him, and the month away from us just made him have more episodes.

So I did my best to keep him calm. Because being physically apart was painful.

But now we were just a couple days into the term, and he’d choked a girl out. And not in the sexy way either. I didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with a cleanup like this. This was the kind of shit Sonny dealt with, not me.