Valor

ONE

"Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that we cannot see,"

Until I was 15 years and two months old, my brother, Jack and I had little knowledge of ourselves. Everyone (my family included) have been shrouding secrets from us for years and have successfully made us come to believe that everything else was also a lie.
Since the past decade, we have been living in a world of indefinable nothingness where you could barely find a place safe enough to call home and not one person you could be sure enough to recognize as friend. Even your own family doesn't feel like family at all. Even they can be killers.

It had been an inescapable normalcy to be reffered as rather lonesome kids who skip school, take drugs and end up getting dumped by their parents. However, it was no big deal. At least not anymore. After all, it is true. Well not entirely, only the worst part.
After consecutive years of growing rift between my parents, our family had finally shattered into pieces leaving us with nothing except the rationale to steal food and clothes, and also some dusty memories that are slowly fading away each day. If it werent for Jack's half-torn photographs and some suprisingly good drawings of our family which he had been keeping for ages, I would have forgotten how mom, dad, and our 16-year old sister, Amber look like by now.

But everything is different now. Ever since we made our greatest escape from JFL Care Centre , which was more of a madhouse than a 'care centre'. Everything except Jack and I, as much as we hate to admit, still live in perpetual fear and anxiety. Haunted by the same nightmares again and again for countless nights and even days. In other words, we are still two paranoids living in an immense world of survival. By survival, I mean holding on to life as we face heartless creatures who would do anything in the name of gaining sheer power, riches and other things that may drop one's sanity. By heartless creatures, I mean humans. Frankly, everyone. However, here at The Masochist, the survival is far more intense and other people's lives mean nothing more than a penny.
I couldnt decide which is better: to be hooligans on the streets or being at The Masochist where hundreds of teenagers are forced to undergo the Vigor Trials to prove loyalty and resilience which sometimes even makes you question your humanity. To who and what for you may ask? Well that's for us to find out.
Jack and I never chose to be a part of The Masochist though. According to Mr. Dumal, we were handpicked by the president of The Masochist himself and saying no would be folly considering our miserable lifestyle. Whoever he was and whatever it was that he saw in both of us, we didnt bother to ask since we were very desperate for a permanent place to live in no matter how difficult it would be. Besides, we couldnt refuse when he said there were food, a room each and enough clothes for both of us.

Even so, there are teenagers who were foolish enough to reckon that joining The Masochist would be the perfect subtitute for their perfectly normal lives just to get far enough from their parents despite the fact that there are zero U-turns after officially becoming a Masochist. But as terrible as The Masochist may seem or sound, it is the only place that we had ever known to be devoid of actual danger. Why? Because in other places, killing is allowed. Here it is not but torturing is as long as the person who's being tortured doesn't die. So it's safer than the world outside by 1% which is good enough. At least for Jack and I. So far.

It all began the way it shouldnt have begun.