The Body Tempest

Tempest In The Mind

He embraced the mid-afternoon breeze as he got onto Wellston's roof. The staff didn't bother locking the door anymore despite it being part of the rules for this school. They just knew that some enterprising young students would just figure out the lock anyway. Either that, or they'd get someone with the right power to just blow it up for them. It'd quickly become a safe haven for academic vagrants, ne'er-do-wells, and those running for oppression or those plotting to oppress.

In all those regards, John Doe had been every one of those persons these past few years of school.

School; listen to him talk. It was more like a kennel of lost, battered dogs establishing a pecking order. A veritable daily death-match where children fought to find out who was the fittest, the most powerful person, the person with the chops and the powers to be on top. A viper pit for this uncivilized society's pretension at education born by blood as well as books, hierarchy through beatings and bruises.

John knew from experience what it was like to be on the outside and on the inside of this system. It tore at him every day, ripping just a bit more at the fabric of his consciousness. Whether you try to fake it, run from it, hide from it, none of that mattered. Even if you were completely innocent, the system would find you and make an example of you. And if you tried to rebel, to revolt against such a vile oppression, you'd find that its poison had long since already seeped into your veins. Even your best intentions couldn't be so. After all, what good intentions could be born from someone born within this bonfire?

Some people still believed in him capable of being good, of doing the right thing. He almost threw it all away because of the machinations of others, something that neither him, nor his loved ones, nor the perpetrators had truly come to grips with. Now that he was back, he still wore the crown of being Wellston's King, but he shunned his kingdom. He was feared by those that were supposed to be his 'subjects', yet he didn't want them to fear him anymore. It was as if the world have been placed in stasis while he was away, for better or worse. It gave him newfound guilt, but also relief— he could grow without worry of those merely tip-toeing around him. It wasn't an idle quest; he truly wanted to cast out that bloody crown that he bore and turn a new leaf. To prove his intentions good, to show that those who believed in him were right.

Above all, he just wanted to justify all the trust that Seraphina had placed in him.

She went to hell and back, from the pits of despair and powerlessness to stop him when he was truly at his most brutal and paranoid.

In his darkest moments, she was his light.

When the world no longer made sense, when the contradictions of his horrendous actions and his good nature— his true nature, he hopes— Seraphina was there to hold him. Until it made sense, until he calmed down, until he could admit that he'd long since destroyed himself.

A hug was all it took to drag him back from the brink of the abyss. A simple act of friendship, a warm embrace to brace him against the cold of his waking horror. Even now the feeling of her holding him as he cried did more than the springtime sun and the warm tiles of the roof ever could. It was simply because without her, this school was dead to him. Hallways of violence that was the veins of a giant cruel beast that stalked him; when she was sent away, it was like someone had brought the sun low and laid bitter gloom upon his life. Without her, none of it was worth it at all. He wouldn't have blamed her to walk away and stay away from him now; Sera saw firsthand what he was capable of. The damage he was dealt by the government, by the system they lived in he could dealt back onto others tenfold with all the same cruelty. And he did.

But she didn't care about any of that. Through the violence he dealt in that one final fight she broke through and told him everything would be all right.