Saving Me (A SHATTER ME FANFIC)

G E N E S I S

BREATHE.

Is the most common word you hear around yourself when you panic.

When the walls feel like they're caving in.

Your skin prickles with sweat and tears burn your eyes.

All you have to do is breathe.

Calm yourself. Assess your surrounding and regain your upper hand on the situation.

But I learned really quickly that, in some situations, in particular my current one, it is absolutely useless.

You can't breathe when you're gagged.

I try to inhale through my nose, but the acute smell of spoiled beer nearly suffocates me. 

My hands and feet restricted in bond cuffs. And despite my feeble attempts at trying to break free, the damned things don't budge. I can't even see where we are going, the rough pull of the blindfold makes it nearly impossible.

My heart stutters.

I wonder if this is how my sister felt in her last moments before she was permanently thrown to an asylum.

Utterly helpless and scared out of her mind.

Juliette. My heart aches.

She was taken almost a year ago.

It would be a miracle if she's survived the asylum, they took her to. Dragged like an animal, her tear-streaked face was pale and her frame weak with tremors. The men were ruthless as they pushed my sister in to the back of the van.

A sister who knew nothing of my existence.

Even before, she was very petite. Always eating less, making less noise as she moved, spoke when she was spoken to. Making her presence less known to people around her.

A good child.

A golden child.

The best child any parents could ever ask for.

They didn't deserve her.

She didn't fight back against them, the tyrants ruling over her life. I had been watching from the window of my room when the men took her. The room closed off by a heavy lock, hidden in the sliding doors of our parent's room where she was forbidden to wander. They had told me initially it was to make sure she didn't harm me. Letting out a shrill scream, I had smashed my fists against the windowpane. My parents had locked the door of my room, knowing that I would try to fight back with everything I had to stop them.

She always listened to our parent's demands, no questions or suspicions raised. It had annoyed me before when she didn't even try to find out about me. She didn't spend much time at the house, always at a library, tucked away in the shadows, her nose buried in a book. Never a nuisance to anyone.

Yet everyone resented her for breathing. Just because she was different.

But I know now that she could never really call that prison her home. Where her parents were the wardens. Evil, twisted ones that hated to see her breathe and tried everything they could to take it away.

Her breathing.

I shake my head, trying to move the blindfold off my eyes so that I can try to see where we are. Weirdly, I'm not panicking. I am afraid but an alien peace is settling into my heart. I should cry, at least. But I don't.