Chapter Text
It wasn't always like this. I was actually normal, and life was, for the most part, uneventful. I mostly stood by myself when it came to school and general friend groups, but that wasn't irregular for most people.
Everything changed when my sister, Maria, took her final breath. Neuro-Immune Deficiency Syndrome. A fatal condition she was woefully diagnosed with at birth. She ended up living longer than expected. Twenty years exactly. Her doctors predicted that her symptoms would worsen by the age of 16, leaving her unable to walk and speak, ultimately leading to her passing. But she somehow overturned all expectations, granting everyone a tinge of hope of something good, especially with how lively she had been acting...
We should've known better than to hold on to longing. Because of it, I managed to isolate myself more after it happened. I would spend night after night in the garage, working on a motorcycle that she had gifted me. I promised I would drive her around on it one day after I fixed it.
Gerald, Maria's grandfather whom I consider a parent, certainly hadn't taken it lightly at all. He was a man with high ambitions, and much like myself, he began to linger in the lab he constructed in the basement for days on end. Though he is a remarkable scientist, I believe he figured he could create some sort of cure for such illnesses. A field he didn't exactly participate or belong in. He prohibited me from entering the basement from the moment the lab was made, so my theories remained uncertain.
After a year since her passing, he started to come up more often, and it was nice to actually see him for more than four hours a day. But I spotted his attempts to appear as if he had come to terms with it all. His broken smile betrayed him every time. I don't believe I gave as much effort to seem alright.
When my seventeenth birthday came along, everything seemed to decline all over again. At first we thought it was an issue with my eyes. A simple case of glaucoma, or even cataracts despite the young age.
What I would've given for that.
After the eye appointments, Gerald had made me promise, that if I felt a specific list of symptoms that unsurprisingly matched all of Maria's, to notify him immediately. I believe he was afraid I might have been foundering to match her demise, despite being aware it was a syndrome solely pronounced at delivery. He was scared, clearly. But I promised.
At first, I heard things. Shuddering whispers, questions unintelligible at the time. I imagined that it was me simply being hit with the lack of sleep and food for specific reasons.
But then came the things I saw. The light that hit the walls would form odd shapes, along with the shadows. It was subtle at first, the main reason why I had gotten the appointments in the first place. I became easily distracted at objects in places I never noticed before, sometimes objects that I never even knew existed. It was too confusing at the time for me to comprehend it all, I ended up ignoring my promise to Gerald in response.
It was nearing the end of the second quarter of my senior year. I was walking through the halls with my closest friend at the time, or as close as I granted, Espio. He was a purple chameleon who was much like me with his solitude and silence, but significantly more known and kinder than I was, admittedly. He was telling me about some sort of house party a student was throwing and how he and I were invited. We weren't keen on the idea, yet he continued to speak of it.
I'm not exactly sure when I stopped paying attention. Or maybe I do.
Our school was diverse with humans and mobians, but when my eyes landed on a student I had never seen before, my footsteps slowed. It was impossible to ignore her uncanny resemblance to my sister.
The girl danced between the passing students, each one paying no mind to her. It was odd. She maneuvered through them all, her smile warm and soft as her yellow hair bounced on her shoulders with each step and twirl.
"Who is that girl...?" I suddenly asked as Espio was speaking, my eyes glued on the doppelganger.
He turned around, giving me an unsure look. "...Wave? She's the purple sparrow in our history class. She's the one I said invited us." He repeated a sentence I didn't recall.
I briefly met his gaze. "Right." I muttered, as if I understood. I don't think he noticed I was asking about someone else.
Espio shook his head as if to dismiss the exchange, slowing his pace to walk beside me as he jawed on about the party. He said something about it being good for me to get a night out.
I attempted to maintain all the focus I had onto his voice, but my eyes quickly darted behind me to find the girl again. But she was gone. I took a quick gander at the sea of students, a part of me hoping to see her for whatever reason. She was no one important to me, but the eccentricity and familiarity of her character piqued my interest more than I'd like to admit.
The school day was nearly done, and I was in my final period- the desolate classroom of chemistry. Espio and I stood at a lab station, carefully measuring a clear viscous liquid into a beaker. He took notes meticulously with his brows furrowed in concentration. The project of the class was simple. Titration. Find the equivalence point. Do not spill the sodium hydroxide. Living with a scientist who was well acquainted with the periodic elements made tasks like this seem almost kindergarten. I was used to it. I was more accustomed to a world of definable rules, where I was in control.
It was not out of the ordinary, but my mind continued to wander back to the girl, unable to focus on what mattered.
"Got it measured?" Espio asked, his focus remained in the notebook.
I nodded. "Yeah." I set the breaker down, keeping my hand wrapped around it, and rested my elbows onto the counter. I stared ahead at nothing in particular as I waited for Espio.
That's when the hum of a vent from above caught my attention. It seemed louder than it should've been, it was irrefutable. I didn't recall any vents in the school ever malfunctioning like that, so I let my ears guide my eyes.
Shadow.
A voice, deep and mocking, had uttered my name. The buzzing deepened when my sight landed on a large vent just above my head, its vibrations grew and I could feel it in my body, in my teeth.
Suddenly, every light that hung in the room had started to convulse rapidly like the world itself was shaking, their bulbs blinking in and out of radiance. My breathing became apprehensive as I glanced at everyone's faces. Espio was still writing. Practically everyone in the room remained focused on their labs. Was this a drill I was not warned about?
"Okay, I think we're about ready to put the indicator in..." I barely heard Espio speak, his voice distant.
My quills raised in alarm when I noticed the door to the teachers backroom had creaked open, the room inside nothing but a void of black. My grip on the breaker tightened when some sort of smoke curled out from it, items from every possible surface slowly rising as the shuddering of the area worsened.
"Shadow." My head jolted to the sound of my name, the dancing girl staring directly at me with a dismaying appearance. She stood in the middle of the room. "You need to leave."
I felt my lungs tighten and the beat of my heart became rabid. The air in the room felt heavy and suffocating when another plume of smoke quickly poured in. It rushed past me in a flurry, carrying pencils and other chemistry supplies. It caused me to stumble backward, an attempt to dodge the flying components, as I felt the smoke physically shove me.
I registered a crash through it all. When I looked over, Espio's eyes and mouth were wide, his screams a swallowed sound through the cacophony of chaos. He clutched his arm where the skin seemed to boil and redden. I saw glass from the beaker that I was holding now splattered on the ground near his feet.
My reaction to the damage was absent, none of what transpired connected. When I looked back up, with my chest heaving, the room was fully engulfed with those twisting vines of darkness. The real world began to bleed through, and I could vaguely see the faces of students who stared in shock and fear. The teacher rushed over as he yelled out something, grabbing on to Espio when he arrived.
My body trembled through each attempt to dodge whatever it was after me. I staggered toward the door to escape, my mind rushing as to why nobody else aimed to do so. I stopped when a tall figure stood in front of me.
"We'll handle this." He said, clutching the bat in his hand as he rushed behind me to knock away anything coming toward me.
I watched in utter horror as each item he whacked shattered from impact, no matter the material.
Abruptly, I felt a pair of arms grab a hold of me. My knees gave in and I thrashed against him as the batting man now balanced on a table, for better reach I assumed. I felt myself sinking closer to the ground, and I squeezed my eyes shut, failing to toss away the hold on me.
"Settle down, son. You're okay, it's okay." A deep voice, one urgent and serious, quickly spoke in my ear as he settled me on the floor. I gripped his arms that slung around my chest, my claws digging into his skin in fear and want of security.
I opened my eyes, and I saw nothing but bright florescent lights glowing down on everyone. The smoke was gone, and so were the only people who seemed to understand what I was seeing.
I was a spectacle. A freak-show in the middle of chemistry class. All eyes were glued to me as I gasped for air, their whispers now clearly audible in my ears. Some watched Espio, who was being guided out of the room. He had given me a look I'd never seen before; a look of pure terror, and I don't think I'll ever forget it.
He and I were rushed to the hospital immediately. For separate reasons, evidently. The burns on his skin proved to be so incredibly severe, surgeons had to repair it with skin from his rear. Or... so I heard. He unsurprisingly stayed out of touch with me from then on, only sparing me a small awkward expression whenever we managed to interact.
That was the day my life was redefined in a single word.
Schizophrenia. A chronic mental disorder that affects a person's ability to think, feel, and behave clearly. It results in a mix of both auditory and visible hallucinations, leaving one to lose touch with reality. Which spells out pretty clearly what had occurred.
Gerald was devastated, to say the least. Especially when the school had expelled me for student endangerment after some consideration. Everyone at the school practically despised me. He blamed himself for not seeing it sooner, apologizing for not looking into it more when my symptoms first began. I'm not sure why he felt the need to hold such a large grudge against himself, when I myself didn't know.
He began a hopeless quest for a cure, a word distasteful among individuals like me, having the two of us sit in endless waiting rooms just to test another drug that would cease to function.
Thorazine, Haldol, Saphris, Clozaril. If you can name it, there's the chance that I've had the prestige of experiencing trial-and-error with it. This condition is incurable, after all, and can only be repressed.
And there wasn't much luck with searching for a school within our district that would accept me. The reasons were all the same. It was too dangerous, there was insufficient staff training for psychosis, and the worry for disruptive behavior during classes. I wasn't upset at the fact, not exactly. Mainly due to the fact that my area wasn't pleasant. If the schools refusal of my presence didn't already prove that. I never wanted to attend them to begin with.
This search would certainly consume me in a way I thought I wouldn't feel again. It cut deeper than any fear to know that nothing would ever be the same again. Maria's death already made a difference. And now, I'll be stuck in an endless cycle of unwanted delusions, and the search for a remedy that would allow me a chance to be like everyone else. To live a life the way I'd dream of.