I never meant you any harm

All creatures are monsters—abominations—in your wondering eyes; this is what you’re taught from the first day you can recognize shapes. This part of you is steadfast and strong; this is what you’ve been trained for since tender childhood years. Knowing the responsibility of sacrificing your life for the lives of many, who know nothing of your true purpose. “You are silent hero,” your Russian father will praise you with this mantra day after day. You eagerly promise him that you’ll uphold these responsibilities. You’re young—naïve. You see the glamour of protecting others, yet you let the shadows conveniently swallow the darker reality of this life.

You seldom see your father and mother. Any time you get to see them—maybe if you’re lucky on a birthday or holiday—it’s always a reminder to be responsible, to understand the creed of the Absit Metum, to respect and listen to the warriors who were in the line of protection longer than you. Your parents are kind, but distant; hesitantly so. You wonder why their smiles seem to be grimaces, but you don’t speak out of line and you keep these thoughts to yourself. A few miles beyond your home lies a quiet, pitch black woodland. On a starless night, you find yourself lost and you remain still. You begin to cry, and then you begin to sob. Quick as the morning fog rests at your feet, an unknown warmth kindly touching your skin in shades of saffron, you hear footsteps hurry over dried leaves. You come to a stand and you begin to panic, trying to mend together fruitless lies that can excuse yourself from your parents’ disappointment. But it’s not your parents. It’s the maid, and you’re thankful for this much.

She’s beautiful, and you care deeply for her; even more than your own mother. You’re thirteen; you begin to spend your time out here in this empty forest, practicing your aim until your muscles quiver and twitch. You move boundlessly through the untouched trails without much thought, shooting arrows left and right only for the self-gratification of hearing the arrowhead crack into the soft underbelly of the pine trees. This time, there is no echoing thunk. There is a blood-curdling snarl that renders your blood frozen, your movements heavy and stiff as you lay beneath a root you’d tripped over. You hear the beast snarl, you feel its radiating heat press up into your esophagus as it inches closer. Eyes shut, you quickly burrow through the racing thoughts for what you’d learned.

Lycanthrope. You lack silver to shoot it with. You begin to panic as you try to remember what else renders them mortal. Thump. You feel the earth shake right to your left as a massive paw lands against the brush. You can’t hear anything above your fierce heartbeat, but your hand involuntarily moves to a small ziploc bag with what appeared to be a handful of soot nestled into a corner. Mountain ash. You take an arrow from your quiver as slowly as possible and you grip the arrowhead and fiercely as you can. Blood pouring from your palm now, you scoop up a handful of mountain ash and smear the bloody paste all over the arrowhead and you adjust the arrow and aim. But nothing is there. You begin to panic, and hyperventilate. Your lips quiver as you come to a slow stand, using your heel as a pivot point. A vicious, sable snout suddenly rips the air in front of your face and you release your arrow, out of fear and not discipline. You watch the massive beast crumple to the earth as the mountain ash reduces it to a twitching pile of flesh. You step back and swivel around, colliding into the chest of your father. Wide-eyed, you stumble back in horror as your father shakes his head once. Kill him, he commands, his eyes now wandering over the body of the omega. You hesitate and he repeats his order, but he also shoves you in the direction of the seething animal. Kill him, or I kill you. Stunned, you feel your blood coagulate into cement as you prepare another arrow and aim for its eye.

The quick whistle of the arrow is accompanied by a hand now rested on your shoulder.

Close my eyes for a while

All creatures are monsters—abominations—in your heartless eyes. This is what you’ve experienced since the night you killed that Omega. Your hand still has the scars that never grow warm; that hand, your left hand, is always cold. It’s ironically the hand you use most. It’s the hand you write with, and the hand you kill with. You’re back home in the warm comfort of the Gerhardt Manor, fourteen years of age. Your mother, having heard of your dangerous achievement rushes home to see to your physical—and emotional health. She nurses you with kindness, she looks at you with tenderness, and she embraces you with benevolence.

You never second-guess her change of heart, and your mother is home much more often, as well. You treasure the time you spend with her. You learn about her—what her favorite flowers are, why she always smiles, and why she isolated herself from you for thirteen years. You were to grow up independent from her. She didn’t want you to endure the pain of loss if she’d died somewhere along the lines. But the night she’d heard how you’d injured yourself to survive, that resolve withered away and she vowed to be the mother she’d always wanted to be. The mother you deserved since the first day you opened your eyes. You love her. You laugh with her. I love you, she says as she softly strokes your cheek.

You’re fifteen and you hear arguments grow colder and more frequent behind closed doors. You hear glass shatter and the Manor suddenly becomes bigger, and emptier. Your mother hasn’t changed a bit, and you worry. But you remain quiet. You no longer sleep, and instead spend day and night studying up on human and bestial anatomy. You nod off every so often, but you continue to understand how awful lycanthropes are; with the uncontrolled, savage ways. Shifters with their quicksilver tongues and chameleon skins. Faeries with their enchanted smiles, feigning goodness in their wake; an easy tale to be spun. Your heart grows stonier as you accompany your coven to Venice, to Tokyo, to Madrid. Your lifestyle becomes circadian and you’ll never mention it, but an insidious craving overcomes your senses as that monstrosity’s warm blood drenches your hands.

Force from the world a patient smile

You’re seventeen, and your mother is dead. Your father reminds you it was a murder; it was a pack of wolves that’d gotten to her while she was out in Paris. He lets that skin in. He watches the murderous resolve fester and gnaw through your glassy eyes. He leaves you to your studies and you stand where he left you for hours, your thoughts eating away at your humanity much like acid. The maid, you remember her name to be Gale, slips a worn, folded letter beneath the slit of your door, and you take it up into your hands. It’s your mother’s handwriting and nothing but an address is neatly written, followed by what appears to be an I’m sorry, the ink splotchy from what appeared to be tears.

Blood pools across your feet in rivulets as you remain very still, grinning. Your father took what you loved most, what made you weak. You thanked him by doing the same. Kneeling beside the lifeless body of your father, watching a pair of deadened, carmine eyes gazing into nothingness, you laugh—the sound mocking and twisted. His dead eyes looked no different than the eyes of a dead beast. You roll the corpse into the river and begin to wash your hands of the blood that nothing had marred him with. But your eyes, bright and knowing, widen in horror as you realize this truth. You will never amount to anything, because you will always have the blood of a nothing inside you. You remember what your father’s putrid blood smells like as you go to sleep every night, and bitterly remind yourself that you share this with him. Until your dying breath.

As you sell and destroy every tangible trace of your family’s existence, you leave for yourself a fortune and a burned down home; nothing to look back to. Boarding a train at dawn, the morning mist seeping over the cement of your hometown, that melancholic saffron warmth touching your skin, you take your seat and clutch a frayed parchment close to your chest, hoping the address your mother had written for you would save you.

Somehow.

PLACE OF BIRTH, Novosibirsk, Russia.

FACE CLAIM, DURARARA!!, orihara izaya — elijah gerhardt

SCHEDULE, Biology, Physical Training, Psychology, and Music.

INVENTORY, A thin, black leather wallet, carrying his student identification, as well as some currency. A white smartphone, and an archery shooting glove that snaps around his wrist and covers his index, middle, and ring finger.

WEAPON, A Gerhardt family heirloom passed down from generation to generation, Elijah's weapon of choice when dealing with supernaturals, both for the Absit Metum creed, as well as his own personal agenda, is a quiver of carbon fiber arrows with regular, silver, and iron arrowheads, accompanied by a black-on-black folding bow. Taking great care to keep them sterile and sharp, he uses his self-taught knowledge and practice to take down creatures twice his size—not only with little to no effort, but damn near impeccable precision. Still an apprentice, however, Elijah has a hard time using wind currents and air pressure to his shooting advantages.