Chapter 4: Why am I here?

I may have made a fairly large mistake

I have traded -no, trade implies a choice- I have been hurled from one cage for another, this one with significantly less everything. I can’t move, not really beyond a slight wriggle, I can’t see, even less than the whispers the fog gave me to work with, can’t hear, at all, and I seem to be in some viscous fluid. Then again, this isn’t so bad. Not hungry, not worried, just me myself and I having a nice long spa day in the pool of strange fluids. I might even have legs again if I'm feeling this right. It's been a long time since I had one of those, let alone two. 

I should enjoy it, while I still can in any case. And I do. I take this time to reminisce. Of who my friends -no, I can’t say that, I don't have that right- my victims, were. 

Benjamin Lucian Hargreaves the Third, theoretical physicist and avid historian, married to his husband while keeping his "naughty mistress," of education. The only teacher I had honestly liked learning from and talking to, reduced to Benny, the drooling gibbering sex ape that could barely even speak. 

Gorrister… I didn't know him well at all, looking back, not much beyond his newfound apathy, but even through that darkened lense, he was reliable, if not as honest or true as he was. His name couldn’t have been Gorrister, but I can't seem to remember what it was. Probably some twisting and shortening of Gordon and a last name with ster. Gordon Masters maybe. Yeah I can see it. AM would abide no masters after all. 

Nimdok, I… I got nothing. No guilt, no fondness, no remorse, just a kind of numb feeling. I wish I felt guilty. Guilt is easier to ignore. 

And then there was Ellen. Honest Ellen, twisted into even more of a common whore. I'm not even sure Ellen was her name before it all. Hell, she may have been a virgin and just embarrassed. Or ashamed. I never realized she might have been lying to make it easier on us. I missed so much in my unchanging state. She was just a classmate, just another quiet face at the back. Maybe it was Hellen. I'll never know. I might remember more now than I did then, but there's still so much I never knew, and never will know now. 

And then there was Me. Just Me, me Me. Always Me. Poor little, stupid Ted. The outcast, the pariah, the stereotypical teenager who thought the whole world was against him, all “alone” while surrounded by help and support and enough sex to fill a whorehouse; the petulant child that never grew up, never could grow up, and never realized he needed to. I thought they hated me. They should have. They probably do now. I did kill them after all. I don't have any right to even think this but still. They will be missed. They AM-no, he has no power here, I can think it freely now- They are missed. 

Hopefully they got a similar peace. 

Maybe they could even forgive- no, maybe they could even understand why I did what I did. I can't ask for forgiveness. I don't deserve it.

But like everything good thing of mine, it comes to an end almost too soon, when I find myself with a small problem. Well, in a small problem really. My nose is hitting the wall. I, having no real way to move or anything to do, make the sensible mistake of hitting that wall. And it breaks open to our new existence.