* Very Mature Content Warning - Seriously. Depictions of child abuse, violence and suicide.
AC: Please skip after this warning if you don't wish to read this. The mature themes end after the * in the text and I'll add a summary in the author comment so you won't miss any context to Rami's backstory. *
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Rameses POV
Rameses Hadiyyah knew he was different the day that he turned five years old.
His older sister Nour, placed her hand behind the small flame of the single, half burned candle as they crouched inside of the dark closet and whispered to him gently:
"Won't you smile for me, Ram? You should smile and make a wish."
But Rameses didn't understand what a smile was, let alone a wish.
He studied the flickering flame for a moment and blew it out before the wax could drip onto her fingers and stayed silent.
It had always been this way. He just hadn't held an awareness of it until now.
He heard words from his sister, who would try to patiently teach him through her own expressions. Words like: frowning, crying, shaking and smiling. And then others to pair with them: angry, sad, afraid - happy.
One day she pointed to his chest, in a very specific spot and launched into a new explanation, her voice ever steady and filled with patience for him:
"That's where your heart is, Ram. It's very important. When you die your heart stops beating and when you find someone you love it will race in your chest and you'll feel warm and tingly all over. It isn't fear, it's a nice feeling."
But what was love? What was afraid? What did happy feel like?
Something that came as naturally as breathing to everyone else around him, felt like a strange, foreign language. A language that he and he alone was entirely excluded from.
His father in particular, hated him for it. Ignoring his existence entirely like he was an uninvited guest in their dank, dirty home.
Even his mother would sneer at him in displeasure.
"That kid gives me the creeps." She would hiss, kicking him away from her like a persistent pest when he attempted to follow behind her.
His sister pulled him away at those times and admonished him quietly, "Just stay with me little brother. We don't need them. You have me and I have you."
Rameses wasn't sure what she meant by those words.
He didn't understand what his father's slurred and angry words meant either when he ranted to them at the dinner table about his views on their 'racial superiority', as he had called it.
His tone bitter and cold towards their poverty stricken surroundings.
They were words that Rameses had no comprehension of, but when he was older he understood that his father had been referring to their status as pure blooded Zenians, native to the planet from long before the other humans arrived. They were meant to be stronger and faster, naturally taller with better senses. But the humans had come with weapons and numbers that swarmed their small, impoverished country like a plague and families such as his, were pushed into the slums.
It had happened generations before their own. But his parents still hated them all. Almost as much as they hated the two children that plunged them even further into debt as the time passed.
And then came the day, when Rameses was six years old. He had reached across the table to pass his sister a plate of meagre food that was far too heavy for him to lift.
He had done so because she was sitting beside him and he had seen her reach for it, her arm curiously wrapped in a flimsy bandage. She must have hurt it somewhere, he'd thought.
But his hand had slipped, dropping it onto the table and he'd jumped back in surprise, his elbow knocking a glass of water onto the floor.
It had shattered across the mouldy wooden planks and his father's face had contorted into strange shapes that he didn't understand, so Rameses had tried to mirror it. He pulled his brows together and his lip had curled over his teeth into an ugly sneer.
His sister had dived across him then, knocking him from his chair and turning her back to their father, kneeling in the glass as she shielded his small body from every blow of their father's fists.
Rameses buried his face in her clothes and gripped onto her dark hair that had fallen in front of his face like a second shield and for the first time he felt his heart hammering in his chest and an icy cold creeping through his veins.
What was this one? He'd wondered. Was it happy or afraid?
From that day, every misstep, every misinterpreted emotion and poorly constructed expression that Rameses had tried to force himself to recreate only caused more pain. But not for himself.
Nour was always there, shielding him with her body, pushing him into dark spaces and locking the door behind her so that he could only slap weakly against it, calling out her name above the muffled cries and bangs from the outside.
And as the years continued to pass, Rameses finally came to understand.
She was hurt.
The bruises meant something and it wasn't happy.
Her lips no longer curled up at the corners and the light in her eyes began to fade.
Until, one day Nour had crept into his room at night and roused him from his sleep.
Rameses blinked himself awake and sat up straight when she had wrapped her arms around him and whispered in his ear:
"I need to leave now, little brother. It isn't your fault, no matter what anyone else might say. I loved you so much and I know you loved me too. Never let anybody tell you that you're wrong inside, you're just a little different. Different can be special too, Ram."
Rameses felt that icy cold running through his body again and bit into his lower lip, "Where are you going? Are you coming back?" He'd asked.
But his sister didn't answer him, instead she leant back and brushed the black curls away from his eyes.
And for the last time, her lips pulled up into a wide smile.
The next morning, he'd woken to the sound of his mother screaming and with his heart hammering in his chest, he'd raced towards the sound.
Neither of his parents made any move to block his view. No one was there to shield his eyes or turn him away from the sight.
He remembered red. A lot of red.
And empty, brown eyes staring at him from the bathtub.
Nour's eyes.
The next few days passed in strange ways.
He couldn't recall a single word that had been spoken or any particular sensation in his body. He wasn't even entirely sure if it was days or weeks.
Time rushed past him like a fractured nightmare with only glimpses of small events, tiny moments of focus in the din.
Some people he didn't know walked into their house and took away a body wrapped in a black sheet.
His father slumped in a chair, just as he always had before, a bottle of empty wine in his hand as he barked at someone to bring him another.
His mother's eyes had water running from them as she sat slumped at the kitchen table. Crying, he remembered. That was crying - it meant sad.
So what was smiling?
His sister had smiled at him before she died. He knew that was what it was. Dead.
If someone bled that much and didn't wake up, if strange people came to take them away. That was what dead meant.
But he'd thought that smiling was happy and how could she be happy before she died?
'Maybe she mixed the words. Smiling must be pain instead.'
That had to be it. Pain. His sister had been in pain.
She had told him that it wasn't his fault, but she was still gone. And Rameses was alone.
But not completely. Not yet.
If it wasn't his fault then it was theirs.
Those people who beat her, who made bruises appear on her skin and sneered at Rameses like a virus in their home.
And as soon as that realisation settled inside his mind - something snapped.
But it wasn't a sudden, vicious snap of madness. Instead it was a cold, detached nothing accompanied by a single thought:
'If Nour is dead then they should be too.'
Rameses was ten years old on the night that he crept into the dingy kitchen as his father lay slumped over, passed out on the broken couch.
He pulled a knife from the drawer and walked over to stand in front of him.
He had never really looked at him before, but he could see some of his own features in the shape of his eyes, the curly black hair, and his straight nose.
A hollow empty void crept into his stomach, twisting and pulling with insistence.
What was this one? Maybe anger?
Rameses didn't care.
He positioned the tip of the blade above the space where his sister used to point to when she described love to him.
'That's where your heart is...when you die your heart stops beating...'
Evil people who hurt his sister shouldn't get to have nice feelings, he wanted it to stop beating like hers did.
He only stabbed twice. Once for each of them.
First his father, who had woken only for a moment, his eyes wide and his mouth slack. But whether it was the sudden, brutal edge of the sharp blade, or the remnants of wine in his system, he hadn't made a single sound except for a quiet, wet gasp, and then - nothing.
His mother had been easier.
She was asleep in her bed, lying on her front, her face already pressed into a pillow.
Rameses had stopped her heart swiftly and without a single moment of contemplation.
But when it was done, the house fell silent.
He looked down at his hands and against his will they began to shake, a strange unfamiliar sound escaping his lips when he saw the red covering them both.
A single, quiet whimper that nobody heard.
Almost immediately, his body reacted in an odd way that Rameses had never felt before.
That icy cold rushed through his veins and paralysed him, falling to the floor and gasping for breath.
His stomach twisted with nausea and he vomited onto the ground until his insides burned and his throat was raw.
'What's happening to me? I don't understand. I did good, right?'
He curled up onto the floor and lay awake, staring into the dark alone, waiting for the strangers to come and take the red away again.
'Not wrong…I'm not wrong, I'm not wrong...not wrong.'
*
Three months later
Rameses sat by the fountain in the middle of Nasiru market. He had left his house three days after his parents had died.
He was sure that nobody had truly taken notice of his existence or that anyone would search for him when they found two more bodies inside of their home, they were only native Zenians after all. But Rameses didn't want to be there when they came anymore.
He didn't want them to take him away, but more than that, he didn't want them to leave him there, alone in the dark with that strange smell and the buzzing flies that wouldn't leave him alone.
At least during the past few months he had spent on the streets of the market town, there was life everywhere. Even at night, Rameses would follow the kimaries back to their dens in the dark alleyways and watch them as they fought for food, curled up beside each other and licked at their rough hides.
Their presence was welcome in the moments before he allowed himself to fall into an uneasy and uncomfortable sleep, the icy cold creeping through his body as persistent hunger and an empty void that he couldn't name seeped inside of him.
Rameses had attempted to copy the way that they stole from the market during his first week, when the hunger escalated to something he could no longer ignore.
But he was caught immediately, kicked away like the kimarie pests themselves with a quiet mutter filled with vitriol, "Fucking natives."
He recalled the way his father would blame their poverty on these - others. The ones that hated them for what they were. They were unsightly and unwelcome to them.
Rameses shrank back and avoided their eyes.
Instead, he had decided to watch for the moment that the kimaries stole the food themselves, chasing them down through the twisting alleyways and snatching it from their teeth with little regard for the litany of bites and scratches he received in response.
It was after one such encounter, as Rameses washed the new cuts in the water of the fountain that he decided to try to replicate a new expression he had seen that morning.
He had seen it on the face of an older boy that had walked past him in the street, an odd crooked grin that made a girl beside him giggle behind her hand and touch his chest.
Rameses touched his hand to his own chest and wondered what she had been doing.
Did it feel good if someone touched you there?
He shook his head clear and stared at his reflection in the water with a fierce determination.
But the intensity only turned his attempts at that crooked smile into a leering smirk, his dark eyes flashing coldly.
On his fifth attempt of this, a beautiful lilting voice came from behind him and the quiet sound of a child's laughter brushed by his ear.
"What did that fountain do to you?"
Rameses span on his heel and stumbled back in shock when his eyes met a pair of wide hazel irises set into a pretty face with sun-kissed skin and straight hair of a warm, golden blonde.
But as he'd spun to face him, his bare foot slipped on the ground and he began to tumble backwards into the fountain.
Before he could, the boy cried out and grabbed his arm, pulling him back from the edge and laughing brightly, "Oh no! I'm sorry! I didn't mean to scare you, are you alright?" He continued to laugh, gold flecks in his hazel eyes flashing under the sun.
'He looks like sunlight.' Rameses thought, blankly.
And then he felt it.
The boy's hand was still wrapped gently around his wrist and from his touch a deep, soothing warmth ran through his body, his heart racing in his chest and his cheeks warming underneath his skin.
"Oh..." Rameses gasped.
'I know this one...'
**