To Love A Villain

The Time That Made Him What He Is : The Isolation

>>Hael (Childhood)

My eyes fluttered open the same as the tears rolled down my face.

I was still on the floor, right where I had lost consciousness, "Mom?" And I still called out to her, because she was all I had, I had known only one other person and he was already long gone, "Mom?" But like usual I received no reply.

I couldn't move my body, it was hot and heavy. It felt like I weighed a thousand tons and at the same time it felt like I had no strength.

"I'm sick," I said, "I think..." My voice seemed to echo or maybe that was just me because I felt delirious. I waited for her reply but received none, which was expected. I had never been sick before, or I had been and I don't remember because I was far too young.

I'm sure I'm running a fever though, I read about it. But where is mom?

Is she still writing her letter? Can't she hear me? But, that's impossible. My voice should have traveled to her... She's just choosing not to listen to anything. She's that lost in her own mind.

I turned my head to look at my bed. The floor was hard, at the very least I wanted to have something soft under me, but the thing was, I couldn't stand up. I tried but my legs had no energy. So in a very desperate attempt, I rolled my body over with a lot of effort, then crawled towards the bed. Luckily, it wasn't far, but it was very difficult to climb it.

I held the sheets, and the mattress with all my might that I could muster up in that condition and tried to put some weight on my feet to get to the bed.

Something so small made me sweat a bucket, but I was able to get to bed. It felt a little nicer, the mattress was soft and cool but my mind was on fire and I couldn't bring myself to focus on anything.

Time became a fractured blur as I drifted in and out of consciousness, lost in a fevered dreamscape of fragmented memories and disjointed thoughts. Each fleeting moment felt like an eternity, but then it was passing by without me even realizing it.

Loneliness washed over me time and again. Tears welled in my eyes as I struggled to comprehend the emptiness that surrounded me. Where was my mother? How did she become like this? She wasn't like this in the start.

I want her with me, I want her to hold me. I'm getting scared.

A hollow ache gnawed at my chest, a raw and primal yearning for the comfort of her embrace. But she was nowhere to be found, lost to the vast expanse of the night like a distant memory fading into oblivion.

With a trembling sigh, I closed my eyes and surrendered to the darkness, my heart heavy with the weight of unspoken longing, who would I even say these things to when the only person I have isn't coming to me. The first day blurred into the next in a haze of fevered delirium.

The hours crept by like a sluggish river, each moment stretching into an eternity of solitude and longing whenever I was up. The sun rose and set in a ceaseless cycle, casting its golden rays upon the world outside while I lay there sick. I kept coughing, I wanted water, but my bones left massless.

"MOM!" I tried to yell her name but my voice came out hoarse, and after that came a coughing fit. It lasted a few seconds but even after I was done I got no reply.

Throughout it all, the silence of the cottage weighed heavy upon me, a suffocating blanket that smothered the flickering flame of hope within my heart. There was no sound but the rhythmic ticking of the old grandfather clock in the lounge.

I tried to distract myself from the emptiness that engulfed me, tracing patterns in the peeling paint on the walls or counting the cracks in the ceiling above. But no matter how hard I tried to escape, the specter of my mother's absence loomed large, like a gaping void.