Ghost

[Ghost]

all you ever wanted
was someone to truly look up to you
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Hm… Let’s see. I’m writing this down because I’m not sure I’ll remember it forever.

My name is Genevieve Emilee Thomas, except I go by Ghost and not my birth name at all. Well, maybe Emilee. Or Emmee. No, Ghost. Just Ghost.

Even my foster parents called me Ghost sometimes to humor me. That’s pretty cool I guess.

If this little entry thingy ever gets lost, you should know what to look for. I’m not very tall, like 5’5” or something, I’m very skinny and sorta pale, and I have long blonde hair. Not strawberry blonde or dirty blonde or platinum blonde. Just blonde. Also I have gray eyes last time I checked. Hopefully they haven’t changed.

I don’t really know where to begin.

My life has been hard. It started out easy, oh yeah. Everyone’s lives start out easy. Don’t you forget it.

My parents weren’t really rich – yes, my birth parents – but they had plenty enough to support our family: me, my twin sister Axelle, mister Prince Marrok, as well as my mom and dad, who seemed to have an affinity for French names.

And children other than me.

I don’t know why I was chosen. It wasn’t like there was any warning or anything. For, like, the first ten years of my life, everything was fine. Perfect, I guess. We had a T.V. We had running water (hot, too) and electricity and a computer and even pretty speedy internet access. And most importantly, we had a happy family. We’d eat out once in a while, never something as shallow as fast food. We were given nice clothes, clean clothes, always had good hair, always had dentist-cleaned teeth, healthy bones and skin. We had each other, and Axelle and I would even play with little Marrok, who was three years younger than us.

We were pampered, we were perfect. Even as young as our peers were, they saw our beauty. They saw our happiness. They saw and wanted and couldn’t have. Their parents wanted two fair angels like us, two quiet, gentle, delicate little girls, and even the grinning dark-haired boy we toted around obediently.

Then… It changed.

Father took control. After all these years, it’s hard to not refer to him as Master…

It wasn’t drugs. It wasn’t alcohol. It wasn’t because my mother was cheating on him, it wasn’t because we as his kids went bad or whatever. In fact, I might never know why.

But he changed. Everything changed.

It wasn’t subtle. The first time he hit me, I didn’t expect it at all. It was for something stupid, something that didn’t even deserve punishment. If I’m right in remembering, I was eating lunch. Sitting there, minding my own business, eating some stupid cold-cut sandwich.

His words… I can still hear them. They echo in my head. “You lazy little bitch,” he says. It isn’t a yell. It’s quiet, low-toned, almost a whisper. He says it and right after brings his knuckles across my face. I remember falling off of my chair, hitting the ground with a bang. I remember Axelle and my mother coming to investigate, shocked to see Father standing over me, their matching blonde hair swinging around their faces.

Most of all, I remember the intense pain in my face, the blood streaming from my nose, and then the sinking of my heart when Father told them to “stay away”, I was no longer “worth it”.

This is hard. This is hard to remember.

Not hard as in I’m forgetting. Hard as in it hurts. My heart is racing. I can barely see these words because I’m crying. I’m trying to describe to you the fear I’m feeling and the pain and the loss and I can’t even find the words.

Wow. This is kind of stupid. I try so hard to forget and be strong and act normal. Here I am bawling my eyes out. I wish you – sir or ma’am reader – could see. It’s taking forever just to type a letter. I’ve been sitting here for like an hour trying to write this stupid goddamn story.

After that moment everything changed, for everyone to varying degrees. We moved to a new house in a state halfway across the country, from Nebraska to West Virginia. Axelle got her own room instead of sharing with me. I was told not to speak to her unless given permission, either by her or Father. I was told never to speak to Marrok, unless it was a “yes, sir” or “no, sir”. He soon became the prince of the household, treasured even above Axelle.

I want to try and tell you every detail. I can’t. I’ll write what I can. But this is so hard. If you remember anything beyond this, know that this is so close to impossible. It’s hard to even keep writing.

It started out relatively badly. It never got better. I began by being forced to do the chores, everything from getting the mail and vacuuming to scrubbing toilets and cleaning gutters. It wasn’t awful, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that I was the only one doing these things, and I didn’t like it. Unfortunately, Father didn’t like me protesting or stopping. He’d hit me across the face or pull my hair or beat me with his bare hands or whatever happened to be nearby. I remember one of the earliest times he hit me in the back with a frying pan.

After I started doing the chores it became clear to me that I was lower. I was kind of like a servant to my siblings and mother, who incidentally rarely spoke a word. Axelle would try to talk to me. Instead of her taking the blame, I would always be the one to receive punishments. Marrok stayed quiet, mostly, but sometimes he’d follow or watch me. Maybe he wanted to keep me company.

Then came the mental abuse.

Verbally, it wasn’t just swears. Every word out of Father’s mouth was aimed to degrade me, or encourage the rest of my family to do so. Then, my clothes would go unwashed, sometimes for a few weeks at a time. I wasn’t bought new clothing so when I outgrew my old ones, they were still keepers even when my sister and brother were given top brands. Father told me I was too stupid to go to school, and their trying to send me was just a waste of money and effort.

I started being tortured after the first few months. Really heavily abused.

He’d make me stand in our backyard in the pouring rain, without any clothes on. He’d lock the doors so I couldn’t get back in. We had a fence and a gate, but try as I might the latches wouldn’t open, and I couldn’t climb over them. I got sick a lot because of that. I’d be told to “test” the heat of the stove by touching it with my bare skin, usually on my hands but sometimes I had to touch the hot metal with my feet. The burns and blisters lasted for days.

So many other things…

He kept hitting me, but more harmfully now. He aimed to hurt and not to stop. Even when I did as I was told, it wasn’t good enough. The bruises would come to grow larger as I’d be “punished” for nothing. I’d ask him why he did this and be belted across my calves. Axelle would ask why he did this and he would hit me again.

She eventually stopped talking to me, like my mother and Marrok.

Then came downstairs. We had a basement, one with concrete floors and large support beams. After a year or so of chores and punishment, of bruises and scars and dirty clothes and skin, came the basement.

I can see it in my mind’s eye. Door leading from the kitchen. Stairs down to another door, a heavy one with a large lock and a bolt. An empty room past the door, with a single bulb hanging from the ceiling, no windows, cinder block walls. A cell.

He’d drag me down there by my arm or hair, throw me in, slam the door.

Slamming doors. I still can’t bear to hear them. I don’t know if it’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or what, but every time I hear one I flinch, and my vision sees darkness. I’m afraid of the dark, too. I’m claustrophobic. All because of that fucking basement.

He’d throw me to the floor and order me to stand in the corner, facing the wall, breathing in spiders and ants and who knows what else. If he found me sitting or out of the corner, he’d hit me. Hard. I’d pass out sometimes. Wake up with my head bleeding.

He wasn’t a strong man. He wasn’t built or even muscular. He was wiry, tall, with dark, dark hair and dark eyes. I was terrified of him, men who looked like him. I still am, and I don’t even know why. I recently learned that he was Gifted. More about that later.

I don’t know what my mother did through all this time. I suppose she was pampered like Axelle, though probably not to the point that Marrok was. He was practically a prince in Father’s eyes. He was favored above my sister or mother, given anything and everything he wanted… But I do remember one thing…

He was quiet about it. He didn’t seem to like it.

But what do I know? I never even knew the kid.

The last year of my… abuse, I guess you could say, was the absolute worst. I practically lived in the basement. I was given little to eat unless Father ended up remembering at some point to feed me. I wouldn’t be clean for sometimes weeks. I was terrified of the smothering darkness, my only solace being the occasional strip of light under the door. I was terrified at the sound of the door slamming, sick to my stomach when I was filled with fear and anticipation.

Father began using his Gifts on me. I was his guinea pig, tested to my limits so that he could find his. He had Telekinesis, Puppeteering, and Poison Emission. He could hold me still for hours on end until my limbs shook and my extremities went numb. He could hold me in obscene poses for his enjoyment. He could keep me still when he began molesting me. Keep me still while I breathed in the noxious fumes he spilled. I’d try to vomit and choke, which would cause me to retch again, over and over for hours until he released me and stopped the poison.

I honestly don’t know why he didn’t kill me. How he didn’t.

He never gave me an opening. The door was never accidentally left unlocked, the light was always off if there was even a bulb itself. My hair was never long enough to try and strangle myself with. My finger- and toenails were always cut to the quick so I couldn’t try to cut myself and bleed to death.

I feel like the sexual abuse was the worst. It not only hurt physically, but I felt humiliated. The first time he touched me, I felt lower than anything. I felt like I didn’t even… Didn’t even deserve to live. He never raped me. No. Never raped me. I’m still a virgin. But… I won’t even say the things he did. What he made me do against my physical will.

That’s when my own Gifts emerged.

I assume they were born of fear, at least the initial two. The first was that I could turn invisible. I remember this clearly too. I was standing in the corner, cowering, hearing the footsteps approaching and the bolt slowly unlock. I remember his shock and rage and not seeing me. I remember turning around and staring at his eyes and wondering why his gaze was wild and unseeing. I remember him grasping blindly with his hands and Puppeteering Gift. Finding me and beating me unconscious soon after.

But I got better at controlling it. I could soon turn invisible at well, and though it didn’t stop the beatings, I could at least deter Father or confuse him.

Phasing came later, a few weeks before I was, I guess you could say, rescued.

I was practicing being invisible for a bit to pass the time and realized that my hand began to pass through the cinder blocks. Granted, it took me a while to really get the hang of it. And it didn’t stop the blows for some reason. But at that point I began practicing phasing through the door. It took a while.

Then one day I was through. Father wasn’t there. The door was still bolted. No one had let me free but me.

So I escaped up the stairs. I was later told that Father was out with my mother, leaving Axelle and Marrok alone with me. It hurts to think they did nothing to try to help when they could.

But wait… They did. Marrok was the one to call the police when he saw me. There was a look in his quiet eyes that I’ll never forget. It was of intense sorrow, of pain, of remorse. As if he were taking the blame for Father’s actions, him and his cleanliness and princely lifestyle.

I was fourteen. Four years of slavery and pain. I never saw my parents again. After a few days when we were taken from the house and I was treated medically, Marrok was separated from Axelle and I and I haven’t seen him since. A few days after that, I never saw Axelle again.

My mother had Elasticity as a Gift. Maybe Axelle and Marrok will someday come to the Academy like me, with Gifts of their own.

I think I may have wrote that my new caretakers were foster parents. They don’t deserve that title. Those were two amazing people. I don’t think I’ll ever meet a more loving couple. They were so filled with compassion and patience I don’t know how to even begin to express my gratitude to them.

It was easy to run into the open arms of my new mother, Betsy. She’s a beautiful, healthy weight, not underweight at all but not overweight either. Her skin is baby soft and has tons of freckles to compliment her brilliant red hair.

My new father took a long time to get used to, but I love him just as much now. It helps that he has dirty blonde hair and an athletic build, as opposed to Father’s dark hair and skinny frame. He was abundantly patient with me though. When I cowered from him, he never pushed. He didn’t yell at me or try to force me.

Eventually I’ve come to call them Mom and Dad.

They taught me what I’d missed away from school. Accepted my Gifts though they themselves had none. When my third Gift emerged, Gravitational Rejection, Mom once joked I could be like a ghost, and I took the name to heart.

I was given friends. A new life. A new hope.

But my past still haunts me to this day.

So here I am. Still afraid though it’s been three years.

I’m glad I wrote this. I’ve been writing for a while under the eye of Mom and it seems to help me cope and get rid of some stress.

At the same time, this is hard.

I find myself taking rapid showers sometimes, hoping I won’t get yelled at to hurry up, get my fat lazy ass out of there. I force myself to eat all that I’m given, as if I won’t know when my next meal is. As I said, slamming doors scare me. I’m seventeen, it’s been three years, and I’m still afraid of the dark. I get claustrophobic easily and don’t like being in small rooms with closed doors, so if my dorm room door is open, that’s why. Bathrooms are okay. I don’t mind bathrooms. They feel safe.

So long as the lights are on.

I love you – Mom, Dad. You two have helped me more than I can ever think. Every time I apologize on instinct or cower away from a raised hand, you’re there helping me through this.

Even though I have nightmares, even though I’m afraid of other people finding out, even though I can’t even use the name Father gave me, you two have helped me become strong.

Marrok, if you’re out there… I wish I could have known you. I wish I could have heard you say goodbye to me.

Axelle… I miss you.

This is Ghost, signing off.

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User: adder
Other Characters: Harlequin Mannin
Playby: Dakota Fanning
Notes: Axelle and Marrok are available as Gifted (or non-Gifted) characters for other people's use. Message me if you're interested.

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[Kirien Melantha]

This is a masterpiece.

[Ϛ Christopher Nightingale]

I considered taking Gravitational Rejection as Chris' third Gift, just for the ghostly kicks. Thanks for freeing me from that; I can now ponder options that suit his personality better, knowing it's been done

[Ghost]

Kirien: Thanks, lol. I'd been pondering her character for weeks now and I'm glad she's made. =]

Chris: You're welcome... I think?

[҉ Kenneth Lorne]

Wow. What a beautifully written tragic story. I hope it gets a happy ending!

[Ghost]

Thanks. =] I hope so too. Though it pretty much all depends on the roleplay now...