Padriac, My Prince

I remembered something today. Something from the dark abyss of my memories. It was something I should have forgotten long ago, but couldn't manage to; instead, I had to drown it in the dark waters of days gone by. It would not stop struggling, though, and I had to let go, which resulted in it rising back to the surface.

I called him Padriac. My brother, that is. I never knew him well, but I loved him, of course. He was my little brother, and I was supposed to protect him. I failed.

It causes me to be sick, those memories. I was walking down the street today when the memories resurfaced, and they caused me to fall to the ground. I was choking in coughs for a second...I remembered the water. I remember seeing my mother standing over the bathtub.

I tried to push the memories away, tried to fool my mind. I continued walking, despite the persistent ache in my throat and lungs. It's gonna be alright, it's gonna be alright, it's gonna be alright...

But then I saw my brother across the street so coldsocold and the memories...they were real...they happened. The snow begins to fall, and I fall to the street along with the snowflakes. The pain of my face colliding with the street barely compares to the feeling in my lungs.

The little boy starts to approach me, walking across the street, and the closer he is, the more I recognize that he wasn't really my brother; he wasn't even close to being my little brother. He wore some sailor suit, and had blonde hair...and his face.

He had no face. Or at least, his face was blurred to the point that my eyes could not identify a face on him.

The memories tore away at reality as this happened, and I heard the most terrible sound in the entire world; my mother screaming after realizing what she had done.

She had held my little brother underwater in the bathtub. She had killed my little brother. And the most tragic part of all this, was that it had to be done....she was no psychopath. Her own job forced her into killing my little brother for the greater good.

The sailor boy looks down upon me, and the snow stops. He speaks, but I do not listen. The little boy chuckles about something as I recall that this wasn't happening; I was staring into a mirror. 

I saw eyes rimmed with red and a face pale of a stupor. Whoever this was, he was drunk. I look down, and see the sink, filled with tiny shards of broken glass and blood. My fist is cold and shaking, and I realize that I had broken the mirror; but what had I been staring into?

I look back, and see that there is only the medicine cabinet. Inside, I see the familiar pills the agency in charge of moving me had given me. A second later, I'm gulping a bit too much down, and staggering out of the bathroom. What had happened? Had I morphed back into the city again?

Every so often, I am dragged into the Emptiest of Cities. It's a place where no one can save me from the monsters that hunt me, in reality, and in my nightmares...

That monster, the one who had pretended to be Padriac, was one of those monsters....and one of the most stubborn of them, at that. This particular monster was extremely close to capturing me, actually.

I tried sleeping, could not. I keep thinking back to last year. I can't stop thinking about...her...and how she had changed me. I want to see her again...

But with these beasts pursuing me, and this Agency watching over me...I'm stuck here.