Page 36 of Ruby
Those memories never lead anywhere good, so I snap myself back to the present. Back to Szhe’ka and his intense eyes and harmonics with their consistent positivity and care.
He can’t act this good and patient and not be a kidnapper. Can he? God, this is fucking confusing. No one is truly this patient. This willing to help.
Isn’t that the way kidnappers act when they intend to kidnap someone? I don’t know. You’d think I would be an expert after as many threats there have been, but the motivation is clear for a human, even if sickening.
Although my mother used to swear that I would get taken away by strange men because of how much of my legs I showed, maybe that’s why? I chuckle dryly. She was always so full of contradictions, since she was perfectly willing for me to show my legs if there was profit involved. But not if it was my own choice.
I wonder how she would feel knowing that I was taken from my home in the middle of the night and now I don’t know who I can trust.
I don’t know whether the way I have been behaving toward Szhe’ka is deserved or if I am just being the Bitch for no reason.
Or maybe he is trying to trick me? It has to be that; there has to be some ulterior motive for a gentle giant such as this one to meet someone like me and still stay completely sane and patient.
After all, my mother said that almost forty years of being around me made her want to kill herself, and she never took the full brunt of the Bitch like he has. People aren’t this nice.
What does he stand to gain from getting me to them… whoever they are?
Maybe Ree is holding his family, his freedom, or something of his captive, and I am the equivalent. Although, with his size and what I recall of her, it seems unlikely.
I pinch my nose. I’m smarter than this. I have a mask for every occasion. I know exactly how to give people what they want and what makes them tick, but it didn’t prepare me for this moment.
I want to shake the thought from my brain but I cannot help but hear my mother’s voice telling me that he wants something from me. There is no way he is “watching over” and “protecting me” if there is nothing in it for him.
Everyone always wants something.
“I… I no good...” his song stutters, coming to an uncertain ending tone.
He sounds miserable, and I know I’m the cause. The harmonics betray my emotions as they actually are, so logic says his song does the same. That his misery is real. That his eagerness to help is real.
Fuck. I might have met an actual real “person” for the first time in my fucked up life and I am being terrible to him.
I can’t continue being a burden. There has to be more to this relationship than this back and forth, which mostly transpires in my mind.
“All well,” I reassure him. “Not you. Me.”
A classic but it’s all I can manage, the regret in my harmonics doing more to communicate my intent than my words.
An expression of ease finds its way to his eyes and he moves forward. However, I’m stuck in my tracks because it’s hard to move on from that. My throat suddenly feels parched, so I move back to the stream, whose bank we are still walking along. I catch a glimpse of myself again, the novelty of my newly young face not interesting me, though my mother would be thrilled.
My eyes. My reflection. Bright red, like that time that guy hit me and part of my eye was red for weeks. Except it’s covering everything. Just a dark pupil in the middle. Demon eyes I’ll never get used to, no matter how many times I see them.
I feel like I’ve been stolen. My scars, my body, what should be my identity. All of it, gone.
Except there is no answering rush of horror or anger at the thought.
My identity was stolen years ago. How is this different? Is it worse?
My face has more movement than it’s had in years. They simultaneously restored something I thought was lost forever, while altering something I thought even the Witch would never be able to take from me.
Those blue eyes that should have been the constant of my life. Gone.
No. It’s not worse. But it’s also not better.
There has to be something I could have done by this point to get people to stop doing things to me without my consent. Being passive didn’t help. Being the Bitch didn’t help. Is there a way to figure out what would?
I don’t know how far those fuckers went with the alterations to my body and I don’t know whether I am the only one they have done this to, but I want to hurt them in ways they have never experienced before.
15
