Quote:
CW: childhood illness, past child abuse (physical violence, denial of medication to a sick kid, ableism, victim-blaming), religious trauma (specifically performing a Catholic take on Christianity, but grossly misusing both scripture and Catholic spiritual writings).
Strength, Cryptomelane reasoned, was what he needed to develop in himself. If he were to properly serve the Negaverse and Metallia—if he were to reward General Amazonite’s choice to put her faith in him and grant him the power of a Negaverse officer—then he needed to be stronger. All the appalling failures on his increasingly lengthy list thereof said so quite clearly.
That was nothing new. Truly, his weakness and insufficiency had defined much of his early life.
He remembered losing his breath more easily than other children when he’d tried to play with them. Prescriptions for inhalers sometimes got filled, but as far as Preston had known, that had only happened sometimes. For quite some time, Brother Horace had cited concerns about money while justifying an ostensible choice not to pick up the medication. After all, he did have the entire flock to care for, all of those mouths to feed. How could he ask everyone else in their “parish” to sacrifice their own health, entirely for the sake of one wayward lamb whose physical weakness reflected the weakness of his spirit.
“I am not undertaking this arduous task of correcting your existence out of any desire to harm you, little brother,” Brother Horace would tell him, when Preston tried to ask if he’d shown his strength and his commitment enough yet, if he could keep the inhaler with him and decide for himself when to use it. “Truly, I take no pleasure in seeing you suffer. Although you may long to walk down the road of virtue, you consistently refuse any invitations into the dark night that may allow you to deepen your faith and your devotion. I offer you this instruction not to cause you pain, but in the hopes that you will accept this gift. Not everyone has such an opportunity as you have been given, to reach a higher state of communion with our God. Stop refusing the call if you ever wish to heal.”
Eventually, Preston had noticed that there always seemed to be an inhaler on-hand when any of his asthma attacks. He never received an answer when he asked why that was—not directly, at any rate. After that, though, more often than not, Brother Horace claimed that Preston would need to endure any asthma attacks that might come for him alone, as part of some lesson that he’d needed to learn. So often, the explanation boiled down to how Preston’s alleged behavior of late hadn’t merited such reward as medicine to help him breathe, to free up his airways from the noose that they had created for themselves so that Preston could more easily stay alive.
“The Lord rewards us for our loyalty and for our faithfulness, little brother,” Brother Horace had so often told him, voice angora smooth and so calm—so pointedly unruffled—that he almost hadn’t sounded human. “You and I both know how you have thought to defy me and to defy our Lord’s will. There is nothing done under any of our roofs that can escape my notice. By the grace of God, I know all and see all that is done within the walls of our home. If you want to have your inhaler so badly, after everything you’ve done, then I will need to see contrition.”
Struggling through his afternoon seminar course this afternoon, practically leaking mucus as his body fought against invaders that did not exist, Preston remembered that spring always made the childhood issues with his breathing worse.
Back then, when he had lived at the mercy of his so-called Brother, his allergies had sometimes gotten so bad that Preston had felt as though he might die. Especially when they and the asthma worked in tandem to wreak havoc on his entire life, Preston had wished more than once that he might be released from the suffering already, if he could never be good enough to make it stop. The antihistamines he used now as an adult had consistently been denied to him in his youth, leaving Preston to sneeze at the slightest provocation, to sniffle desperately as he tried to keep all his insides (or so it had sometimes felt) from leaking out his nose, and to know, all the while, that he might end up helplessly gasping for breath at any moment.
All too clearly, he recalled Brother Horace keeping him separate from the other children of their “parish,” citing as his reason assorted physical ailments of which, for the life of him, Preston couldn’t recall the true severity, or even the veracity. Trying to remember that much over lunch mostly led to Preston staring long into a void of memories clearer than cloudless sunshine with no ability to discern if he could trust them—not to mention barely eating anything.
Had he truly been quite as ill as Brother Horace and his inner circle had insisted? Certainly, Preston hadn’t been well. The asthma, the allergies, the high susceptibility to infections of all colors, the headaches whenever the air pressure changed too much—Preston remembered those. His health had often seen him leaving the compound, always in his so-called “Brother”’s company, and traveling into Destiny City proper—at least a half-hour drive in Brother Horace’s pristine white Bentley R-type Continental (a vintage luxury coupe from 1962, long-nosed and sleek and entirely anomalous)—to visit one doctor or another.
Preston remembered all of that as clearly as he remembered the time when he’d only been fifteen years old, and Brother Horace had grabbed him by the wrist, fingertips clamping down on the underside while the thumb, with a vise-grip, kept Preston in place. Brother Horace’s other hand had caressed Preston’s own hand—his dominant hand—resting atop his fingers and knuckles while Brother Horace stared Preston dead in the eyes.
“‘Have you not brought all this upon yourself,’” Brother Horace had said, quoting scripture out of Jeremiah, “‘by forsaking the Lord, your God, when he guided you along the way?… Your wickedness will bring about your punishment, and your apostate’s infidelity will condemn you. Therefore, concentrate your thoughts and know that it is evil and bitter to forsake the Lord, your God, and to have no fear of me.’”
In a brief moment of clarity, Preston nearly brought himself to ask how Brother Horace could emphasize the final pronoun like that, to make the verse about crimes allegedly committed against himself and not against his so-called God.
Next thing he’d known, a sickening crack! had echoed through the compound’s library. Preston had collapsed onto the desk, trying to choke back any sounds of pain so he wouldn’t give Brother Horace that satisfaction. He didn’t succeed. Brother Horace had forced his hand back so far, the knuckles grazed the back of Preston’s forearm. The break took over three months to heal, and even now, too much strain made that wrist ache.
Just like that, the memories of being sick stayed razor-sharp in his mind, lurking ever below the surface. But had Preston really been so sick that he couldn’t have played with the other children? So ill that Brother Horace had been right to keep him away from them for his own good? Or had Brother Horace made that up in a bid to alienate him from people and keep him dependent on Brother Horace alone?
Preston didn’t know. He couldn’t say.
Even maintaining an awareness of his own defects, he didn’t know that he could ever be certain of their true severity and what limitations he’d really had.
Those defects justified Brother Horace’s personal interest in him, the way he’d scooped young Preston up, claimed him before the congregation as a brother rather than simply a member of the flock, and “mentored” him. They’d justified the way that Brother Horace had degraded him and taken such special pains to remind Preston of how insufficient he would always be.
According to Brother Horace, those defects on Preston’s part had justified the isolation. They had justified the control, and the refusal to allow Preston to work harder so that he could grow stronger. They had justified leaving a child alone for three days and three nights with the writings of San Juan de la Cruz, telling him to learn something from one of their forebears if he would not listen to Brother Horace. They had justified the hours upon countless hours spent kneeling in prayer, not even knowing what to pray for, only that Brother Horace had told him to pray. They had justified the days of hunger.
All these things had been inflicted on Preston because Brother Horace’s God had created mankind with inherent weakness. Any infirmity of the flesh that might have easily plagued all humanity did so even more notably for Preston. Because he was by nature weaker than others, he had a greater opportunity to know Brother Horace’s God in suffering and overcoming his weaknesses. Preston’s myriad of defects had justified the way that Brother Horace had called it “love” to make him hurt.
Or so Brother Horace had claimed.
Maybe he’d been in the wrong, blaming Preston for Brother Horace’s own choices to harm him. The judge who’d issued the original order of protection had certainly believed so. Not that Preston had spoken much of Brother Horace with either Jupiter Butterfly or Dr. Rokugin, but he liked to hope that they would have agreed with the judge, that they would have agreed that Preston hadn’t deserved what Brother Horace had done to him. Certainly Jupiter Butterfly had always given him the impression that she didn’t believe anybody deserved to hurt like that.
But Brother Horace had proven right about one thing after all: Preston was weak. For all he didn’t enjoy admitting it, his recent performance in his Negaverse duties had proven it quite sufficiently. No, he hadn’t missed any of his energy quotas. Yes, he had managed to snatch a fair few starseeds without getting interrupted in his work by some White Moon ne’er-do-well, and not all of them had come from civilians. By all rights, on paper, he nominally hadn’t failed in anything, but simply had bad encounters with agents of the White Moon.
Yet, every fight that he lost still stung him deeply. Resentment over the shame those losses left him with roiled in his veins and slithered through his skull. Even when he powered down and went about his day, doing normal people activities like going to class, marking up classmates’ essays as part of a peer-review assignment, and picking up a few books from the library, still, Preston couldn’t shake the sense that he had failed lately. The feeling that he was, as yet, a failure until proven otherwise. The conviction that he needed to get more serious than he already tried to be about getting and staying strong.
Making use of the university’s campus gym after classes was essential to that plan. In the short term, though, it did little to dull the shame and humiliation that had so dogged his work as Cryptomelane of late. Preston had done it anyway. Routines kept him organized, routines kept him grounded, routines kept him certain that this was his life, his own, and that he alone determined the course of it. Wrapping his trick wrist to keep it reinforced, he had gone through his warm-ups (admittedly somewhat cursory; Preston hated being patient with either himself or his body). In short order, he’d hit the weights and the machines designed to aid in strength-resistance training.
Cardio—ever a necessary evil to help manage his ability to breathe properly (easier than ever; turned out that actually being allowed to take the meds that doctors said would help)—could wait until Preston needed to cool down. He would never dismiss its usefulness, not when he knew what it had done for his own health. But it wasn’t the most important thing before him right now.
Arguably, even his strength-training wasn’t the most important thing. The agitated buzzing beneath his skin, though—the throbbing heartbeat need to silence any thoughts of his own failure by putting in the hard work to course-correct and make himself do. better.—through everything else he did, Preston felt that driving him on. When the timer went off on his watch, he studiously pressed ahead as though he hadn’t heard it.
Not for too much longer, granted. Working himself into exhaustion and uselessness would help nobody, least of all Preston himself. An awareness of his limits meant that he could work to exceed them in an intelligent and circumspect way, and burning himself out on one workout didn’t count. Still, he went long enough to really feel the effort that he’d put into the session. To get himself a nice, warm, floaty feeling of accomplishment.
It didn’t last very long after he’d showered and left the gym.
Rounding one of the corners he could use to get back to his apartment, backpack and gym bag feeling lighter than they had any right to feel at the moment, Preston stopped dead in his tracks. Frozen in place, he stared at one of the parking spaces on the other side of the street. A pristine, long-nosed white coupe stared back at him, and suddenly, he could hear his heartbeat in his ears.
He could feel the ghost of Brother Horace’s hands on his own, and hear the specter of his voice whispering words stolen from San Juan de la Cruz: “‘The endurance of darkness is the preparation for great light.’ You ought to be thanking me, little brother.”
Jaw set and grip tightening around the strap of his gym bag, Preston ducked into an alley. He powered up into Cryptomelane, and held fast to the handle of his pumpkin bucket instead.… This way. He could get back to his place like this. With adequate power to protect himself.
Throwing himself into a run before he could go back—before he could indulge the thought that he ought to go check because maybe, that coupe wasn’t actually Brother Horace’s Bentley—Cryptomelane hoped that some idiot Page or senshi crossed his path tonight. They didn’t need their starseeds as much as he did anyway.
That was nothing new. Truly, his weakness and insufficiency had defined much of his early life.
He remembered losing his breath more easily than other children when he’d tried to play with them. Prescriptions for inhalers sometimes got filled, but as far as Preston had known, that had only happened sometimes. For quite some time, Brother Horace had cited concerns about money while justifying an ostensible choice not to pick up the medication. After all, he did have the entire flock to care for, all of those mouths to feed. How could he ask everyone else in their “parish” to sacrifice their own health, entirely for the sake of one wayward lamb whose physical weakness reflected the weakness of his spirit.
“I am not undertaking this arduous task of correcting your existence out of any desire to harm you, little brother,” Brother Horace would tell him, when Preston tried to ask if he’d shown his strength and his commitment enough yet, if he could keep the inhaler with him and decide for himself when to use it. “Truly, I take no pleasure in seeing you suffer. Although you may long to walk down the road of virtue, you consistently refuse any invitations into the dark night that may allow you to deepen your faith and your devotion. I offer you this instruction not to cause you pain, but in the hopes that you will accept this gift. Not everyone has such an opportunity as you have been given, to reach a higher state of communion with our God. Stop refusing the call if you ever wish to heal.”
Eventually, Preston had noticed that there always seemed to be an inhaler on-hand when any of his asthma attacks. He never received an answer when he asked why that was—not directly, at any rate. After that, though, more often than not, Brother Horace claimed that Preston would need to endure any asthma attacks that might come for him alone, as part of some lesson that he’d needed to learn. So often, the explanation boiled down to how Preston’s alleged behavior of late hadn’t merited such reward as medicine to help him breathe, to free up his airways from the noose that they had created for themselves so that Preston could more easily stay alive.
“The Lord rewards us for our loyalty and for our faithfulness, little brother,” Brother Horace had so often told him, voice angora smooth and so calm—so pointedly unruffled—that he almost hadn’t sounded human. “You and I both know how you have thought to defy me and to defy our Lord’s will. There is nothing done under any of our roofs that can escape my notice. By the grace of God, I know all and see all that is done within the walls of our home. If you want to have your inhaler so badly, after everything you’ve done, then I will need to see contrition.”
Struggling through his afternoon seminar course this afternoon, practically leaking mucus as his body fought against invaders that did not exist, Preston remembered that spring always made the childhood issues with his breathing worse.
Back then, when he had lived at the mercy of his so-called Brother, his allergies had sometimes gotten so bad that Preston had felt as though he might die. Especially when they and the asthma worked in tandem to wreak havoc on his entire life, Preston had wished more than once that he might be released from the suffering already, if he could never be good enough to make it stop. The antihistamines he used now as an adult had consistently been denied to him in his youth, leaving Preston to sneeze at the slightest provocation, to sniffle desperately as he tried to keep all his insides (or so it had sometimes felt) from leaking out his nose, and to know, all the while, that he might end up helplessly gasping for breath at any moment.
All too clearly, he recalled Brother Horace keeping him separate from the other children of their “parish,” citing as his reason assorted physical ailments of which, for the life of him, Preston couldn’t recall the true severity, or even the veracity. Trying to remember that much over lunch mostly led to Preston staring long into a void of memories clearer than cloudless sunshine with no ability to discern if he could trust them—not to mention barely eating anything.
Had he truly been quite as ill as Brother Horace and his inner circle had insisted? Certainly, Preston hadn’t been well. The asthma, the allergies, the high susceptibility to infections of all colors, the headaches whenever the air pressure changed too much—Preston remembered those. His health had often seen him leaving the compound, always in his so-called “Brother”’s company, and traveling into Destiny City proper—at least a half-hour drive in Brother Horace’s pristine white Bentley R-type Continental (a vintage luxury coupe from 1962, long-nosed and sleek and entirely anomalous)—to visit one doctor or another.
Preston remembered all of that as clearly as he remembered the time when he’d only been fifteen years old, and Brother Horace had grabbed him by the wrist, fingertips clamping down on the underside while the thumb, with a vise-grip, kept Preston in place. Brother Horace’s other hand had caressed Preston’s own hand—his dominant hand—resting atop his fingers and knuckles while Brother Horace stared Preston dead in the eyes.
“‘Have you not brought all this upon yourself,’” Brother Horace had said, quoting scripture out of Jeremiah, “‘by forsaking the Lord, your God, when he guided you along the way?… Your wickedness will bring about your punishment, and your apostate’s infidelity will condemn you. Therefore, concentrate your thoughts and know that it is evil and bitter to forsake the Lord, your God, and to have no fear of me.’”
In a brief moment of clarity, Preston nearly brought himself to ask how Brother Horace could emphasize the final pronoun like that, to make the verse about crimes allegedly committed against himself and not against his so-called God.
Next thing he’d known, a sickening crack! had echoed through the compound’s library. Preston had collapsed onto the desk, trying to choke back any sounds of pain so he wouldn’t give Brother Horace that satisfaction. He didn’t succeed. Brother Horace had forced his hand back so far, the knuckles grazed the back of Preston’s forearm. The break took over three months to heal, and even now, too much strain made that wrist ache.
Just like that, the memories of being sick stayed razor-sharp in his mind, lurking ever below the surface. But had Preston really been so sick that he couldn’t have played with the other children? So ill that Brother Horace had been right to keep him away from them for his own good? Or had Brother Horace made that up in a bid to alienate him from people and keep him dependent on Brother Horace alone?
Preston didn’t know. He couldn’t say.
Even maintaining an awareness of his own defects, he didn’t know that he could ever be certain of their true severity and what limitations he’d really had.
Those defects justified Brother Horace’s personal interest in him, the way he’d scooped young Preston up, claimed him before the congregation as a brother rather than simply a member of the flock, and “mentored” him. They’d justified the way that Brother Horace had degraded him and taken such special pains to remind Preston of how insufficient he would always be.
According to Brother Horace, those defects on Preston’s part had justified the isolation. They had justified the control, and the refusal to allow Preston to work harder so that he could grow stronger. They had justified leaving a child alone for three days and three nights with the writings of San Juan de la Cruz, telling him to learn something from one of their forebears if he would not listen to Brother Horace. They had justified the hours upon countless hours spent kneeling in prayer, not even knowing what to pray for, only that Brother Horace had told him to pray. They had justified the days of hunger.
All these things had been inflicted on Preston because Brother Horace’s God had created mankind with inherent weakness. Any infirmity of the flesh that might have easily plagued all humanity did so even more notably for Preston. Because he was by nature weaker than others, he had a greater opportunity to know Brother Horace’s God in suffering and overcoming his weaknesses. Preston’s myriad of defects had justified the way that Brother Horace had called it “love” to make him hurt.
Or so Brother Horace had claimed.
Maybe he’d been in the wrong, blaming Preston for Brother Horace’s own choices to harm him. The judge who’d issued the original order of protection had certainly believed so. Not that Preston had spoken much of Brother Horace with either Jupiter Butterfly or Dr. Rokugin, but he liked to hope that they would have agreed with the judge, that they would have agreed that Preston hadn’t deserved what Brother Horace had done to him. Certainly Jupiter Butterfly had always given him the impression that she didn’t believe anybody deserved to hurt like that.
But Brother Horace had proven right about one thing after all: Preston was weak. For all he didn’t enjoy admitting it, his recent performance in his Negaverse duties had proven it quite sufficiently. No, he hadn’t missed any of his energy quotas. Yes, he had managed to snatch a fair few starseeds without getting interrupted in his work by some White Moon ne’er-do-well, and not all of them had come from civilians. By all rights, on paper, he nominally hadn’t failed in anything, but simply had bad encounters with agents of the White Moon.
Yet, every fight that he lost still stung him deeply. Resentment over the shame those losses left him with roiled in his veins and slithered through his skull. Even when he powered down and went about his day, doing normal people activities like going to class, marking up classmates’ essays as part of a peer-review assignment, and picking up a few books from the library, still, Preston couldn’t shake the sense that he had failed lately. The feeling that he was, as yet, a failure until proven otherwise. The conviction that he needed to get more serious than he already tried to be about getting and staying strong.
Making use of the university’s campus gym after classes was essential to that plan. In the short term, though, it did little to dull the shame and humiliation that had so dogged his work as Cryptomelane of late. Preston had done it anyway. Routines kept him organized, routines kept him grounded, routines kept him certain that this was his life, his own, and that he alone determined the course of it. Wrapping his trick wrist to keep it reinforced, he had gone through his warm-ups (admittedly somewhat cursory; Preston hated being patient with either himself or his body). In short order, he’d hit the weights and the machines designed to aid in strength-resistance training.
Cardio—ever a necessary evil to help manage his ability to breathe properly (easier than ever; turned out that actually being allowed to take the meds that doctors said would help)—could wait until Preston needed to cool down. He would never dismiss its usefulness, not when he knew what it had done for his own health. But it wasn’t the most important thing before him right now.
Arguably, even his strength-training wasn’t the most important thing. The agitated buzzing beneath his skin, though—the throbbing heartbeat need to silence any thoughts of his own failure by putting in the hard work to course-correct and make himself do. better.—through everything else he did, Preston felt that driving him on. When the timer went off on his watch, he studiously pressed ahead as though he hadn’t heard it.
Not for too much longer, granted. Working himself into exhaustion and uselessness would help nobody, least of all Preston himself. An awareness of his limits meant that he could work to exceed them in an intelligent and circumspect way, and burning himself out on one workout didn’t count. Still, he went long enough to really feel the effort that he’d put into the session. To get himself a nice, warm, floaty feeling of accomplishment.
It didn’t last very long after he’d showered and left the gym.
Rounding one of the corners he could use to get back to his apartment, backpack and gym bag feeling lighter than they had any right to feel at the moment, Preston stopped dead in his tracks. Frozen in place, he stared at one of the parking spaces on the other side of the street. A pristine, long-nosed white coupe stared back at him, and suddenly, he could hear his heartbeat in his ears.
He could feel the ghost of Brother Horace’s hands on his own, and hear the specter of his voice whispering words stolen from San Juan de la Cruz: “‘The endurance of darkness is the preparation for great light.’ You ought to be thanking me, little brother.”
Jaw set and grip tightening around the strap of his gym bag, Preston ducked into an alley. He powered up into Cryptomelane, and held fast to the handle of his pumpkin bucket instead.… This way. He could get back to his place like this. With adequate power to protect himself.
Throwing himself into a run before he could go back—before he could indulge the thought that he ought to go check because maybe, that coupe wasn’t actually Brother Horace’s Bentley—Cryptomelane hoped that some idiot Page or senshi crossed his path tonight. They didn’t need their starseeds as much as he did anyway.
wc: 2,350.
