Grey II - Ghosts

Chapter 9 - Madness

How do you drown out the voices when you're all alone?
They pry at the walls you built inside your mind so long ago.

Like Moths to Flames - My Own Personal Hell

By the third time Chi and her brothers shared blood with me I no longer fought it. They had doubled the cords tying me and I hated the feeling of them biting into my skin when I would struggle. The fog in my mind continued to dissipate, becoming less dense with each passing day. Soon it was hardly there at all.  I still felt my loyalty to Jevin, the need to escape and return to him, but I also could feel my hate for him growing, burning deep in my stomach and running through my veins. The rest of my emotions were slower to come, but when they did they tore at me just as I knew they would, just like they had the night I was deserted, or the days Jevin had refused me his blood.

The Clan thought my withdrawals were the sole cause of my pain, that I was somehow still feeling the full force despite the bloodletting and sharing. I didn't tell them otherwise. I was too ashamed of my weakness to tell them the real reason. That it was me, my own mind, my own past, not just my addiction that was making me wake with gasps of pain, cringe each time an unwanted memory slunk through my mind, dig my nails into my palms until they bled, just to try to control what I felt. The suffering of my emotions aside, my actual withdrawals didn't seem as bad as the first time, probably from all Chi's Clan had done, but I could sense something coming, a final attack of Jevin's blood on my mine.

After the ninth day they thought the worst was over and untied me from the chair, letting me stand, walk around, lie down. They kept my hands tied together though, just to be safe, just to keep the electrum on me and my powers dormant. After the eleventh day I thought I was just paranoid, I thought Jevin's poison was out of my system completely, but then the madness came. I hoped it would be lessened because of their blood sharing, but it was as if Jevin's knew what I was doing, knew I was straining his poison from myself for the last time.

The attack on my mind wasn't just from Jevin's blood though, I knew that much. My mind was already vulnerable because I was alone, because I was broken and bitter and betrayed. It was a terrible mixture of my already damaged mind, plus the added injury of the addiction. I felt more hopeless some nights than I had in the cemetery when I first learned what I was, what he was. I was pathetic and that only added to my hatred of my past, my so called 'family' and my twisted, lying, heartless excuse for a pair. I hoped the anger would help, but it didn't, nothing did. And the realization that it would always be like this, that it would never get better, that I would always be what I was, that he would always be gone, that my family would always be gone, was enough to make me wish for death.

I cried out some nights, feeling a cold, hollowness inside me, convinced it was going to swallow me up and I wouldn't exist anymore. I felt a fiery self-loathing other times, either from my own emotions or the madness, I couldn't tell. Sometimes I screamed at the pain in my mind, begging it to leave me. Sometimes I couldn't even remember what happened the night before, or the entire day before. That was when I was at my worst, my fear of going insane only fueled my need for Jevin, my drug. I would have given anything to taste his cold, sick medicine again.

Syn rarely left my prison, but sometimes he would, when I would get bad enough, when I would beg him to kill me or at least untie my hands and let me do it myself. He never said anything but I saw softness in his eyes when he would look at me, a deep sadness that made me wish he wouldn't ever have to see me again. I wished none of them saw me like that, screaming at people that weren't really there, memories from my past, swearing at Heaven, Hell, anything and anyone to kill me, to take me out of my misery. I hated them for making me live.