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save-the-spiral · 6 months

Text

Ouroboros

Content Warnings for child abuse, cycles of abuse, child neglect, manipulation, possession, blood, grief, implied (magical) ableism, implied suicide.

General Maliswap moments. This is not kind to Malistaire or Sylvia. The narrator(s) are not the most reliable sort, you understand, but they aren't pulling it from nothing in this AU.

It's very... ruminating on your shitty childhood kinda thing. I really advise that if you have shit parents and stuff that you take this slow and check in with yourself. It's a long one and a doozy. Ended up just kinda Writing it and not stopping after the first line.

(buy me coffee?) (Maliswap AU Masterpost))

You don't know when you stopped being your mother's child.

There has to have been a tipping point, somewhere between your birth and now. Something you did wrong that evicted you from your place in your mother's heart.

It's a lie you tell yourself, to give undeserved logic to your parents' neglect.

Your father is not innocent in this. But you don't speak ill of the dead. Only think it.

You can't even remember when they truly stopped seeing a child when they looked at you. You've given away so much that your perception of time is warped, without memories to anchor itself to.

It had to have been something you did. Parents don't wake up one day and decide to stop loving their children, you tell yourself.

When you were so very small, the kind of small where you still clung to your uncle's leg as he stomped around, making you giggle madly and cling harder, one of the petnames your parents used was 'little wizard'.

After you woke in your mother's infirmary, after coughing up blood and choking on smoke from casting a firecat under your godmother's instruction, your parents only called you by name.

Weeks later, after the confirmation that you would never cast magic without causing harm to yourself, they never looked you in the eye.

Sometimes you would overhear them talking to each other. Never arguing, they were the kind of couple that never really argued. But they would talk for hours, trying to make sense of what each of them thought, why they thought that way, and how to compromise.

Whenever they spoke of you it was always 'your child' this, 'the child' that. Never even your name. You couldn't even pretend it didn't hurt.

Even in those long conversations, there was no solution to the problem you were. Even if they spoke for hours about magical theory and whatever else, it didn't change that they saw you as a problem to fix instead of the child they birthed and were supposed to raise.

It was when you were becoming a teenager that you started acting out. Door slamming, mug throwing, screaming arguments. You were so angry at the world, at everything, but especially at the two people who dared to act like your existence was your own fault, like they didn't create you and then leave you to rot the moment you weren't what they wanted.

One of the memories you still cling to, one of the few you have left, is the end of a tense family dinner. You can't remember what pushed you to do it, but you had stabbed your steak knife into the kitchen table and stood up, chair falling back with a clatter onto the tile floor.

Your father's face had reverted into the stoic mien he maintained with his students, then quickly morphed to show his resignation, as if he knew you could do nothing but disappoint.

Your mother stared down at her meal, shoulders tense, knuckles white as she gripped her fork and knife.

Fucking look at me, you had screamed. Look me in the fucking eye and tell me you give a damn about my future.

After that you never really went back to living in that house. You were an unwanted guest in your own home. Even though they had given you no reason to, you jumped at every loud noise, at approaching footsteps.

That's the only thing you'll grant them. They never laid a hand on you. Sometimes you wish they had. Then you could've given a name to this. You would've known it was wrong long, long before that psychology class you took in university.

Some part of you misses them still. Or the idea of them. The concept of them.

They could've been such good parents. You know this. You've seen your mother in her infirmary, how deeply she can care for someone she's never met. A kind of genuine love for someone purely because they are a person and deserve it.

Maybe she thinks she loves you, but it's not... it just isn't love. It's something else rebranded, something where she sees the idea of a child she could love, instead of you. She acts like a mother, only because that is what she should do. She doesn't mother you, though. Merely is the adult woman in the house, and you the child. Surely that means she is your mother.

And your father, well he would've never been the traditional idea of a father. Stern, maybe, but not a disciplinarian. He was always awkward, disconnected from emotion because of his own upbringing. Something he could've changed. A cycle he could have broken and yet failed to, not even recognizing his own childhood as bad, let alone seeing the similarities to your own. That kind of realization would have hurt him deeply. He never realized. He never looked at you and saw more than the facts. He knew you weren't the child he wanted. You weren't going to become his protege, nor your mother's.

Both of your parents' lives were just so deeply infused with magic there was little they knew besides that. What could a person do without it? All they had known was magic and academia, and encouraging a child to study what they could never truly know seemed cruel.

Forcing a child to live their life around what they can never have seemed so cruel. Even without a better option, the guilt ate at both of them, and they pushed off conversations with their child, explanations to make sense of their distance.

They fail utterly at being parents. They are good people. They are great professors. But the failure to care for and raise their child forever stains their legacy, and the person who was supposed to be that legacy.

You are little more than a human-shaped husk that carries all of the worst of your parents. Your mother's temper. Your father's disconnection with emotion. You can't look people in the eye and tell them the truth, just like they did to you.

Cycles unbroken, and all that.

You are the sum of their union given form, and the world, the Spiral, is all the worst for it. You are just another catastrophe, little more than a natural disaster given sentience, and even then you played the coward and ran away to a place where your parents' names meant nothing.

You were nothing, there. Not the disappointment, not the professors' child, not even the strange freak who nearly blew up their hand casting simple children's magic. You were just a random young adult in a city that was uncaring, its stars so distant above the towering skyscrapers.

It felt like home, more than that house your father died in ever did.

Anonymity is the only true balm to the raw wound of being so utterly ignored from those who were supposed to love you.

Being no one in a city of unimportant people. Being nothing and only becoming something through your own hard work, that was where you found your passion. It took years, maybe. You can't remember how long you spent in that cityworld. It felt like the best time of your life. It is where the memories you had cherished most had resided.

Before you forfeited them all to me, of course. Now there is precious little of that world you remember. The feeling of stepping in an oily puddle remains. The soft slap of a rogue newspaper hitting you in the face after it had flown on the breeze, causing you to splutter and laugh. The bone deep cold of winter as you shivered alone in your tiny flat, bundled in extra blankets that a friend (you can't remember their face, their name, not anymore.) had taught you how to knit.

I let you keep those memories. They are not happy ones, but at least content. Sometimes I pity you, really, for such simple things to give you such feelings.

Sometimes I resent you for it. Don't worry though, darling. That's merely a result of one of our many trades. Your temper is short, but vast in potential. I gave you so much power in trade for it, and I cherish it, even if at times it turns inwards towards its original owner.

Sometimes I do pause and wonder at the memories you gave to me. I examine every little interaction with your parents and try to find the thing that could've been fixed. Something that you could've done to make them love you.

I'm so sorry dear, but even I, in all my eons of wisdom and expertise, cannot find such a thing.

Their problem was with the fundamental aspects of your being.

You could not handle magic the same way one cannot ingest poison. The nature of it broke down your body. There is no pool of magic inside you to draw from, and so it pulled at your muscles, your bones. It thinned the walls of organs and caused vital processes to stutter and choke on themselves.

This is just who and how you are. It isn't a problem to be fixed. And yet your parents begged to differ, and that is when they lost their only child.

I almost wish I could twist the knife. I almost wish I could tell you that you did something out of selfishness, that somewhere along the way you were a bad child, and deserved it.

Instead I must rub salt into the wound and tell you that there is nothing that you could've done except ruin yourself further, martyr yourself upon the altar of their stubbornness. Bleed out under their feet so they can mourn you and say there was nothing they could have done to fix you.

I don't want to lie to you. If you had died young, casting magic and trying to be what they wanted, they would've loved you. They would've wept at your grave. They would've torn the Spiral asunder for you, remake the universe to ensure you could live still.

You stopped being your mother's child when you listened to their warnings, I suppose. When you didn't slaughter yourself, bleating your last words when you were so young you didn't understand death.

I can't be your parent. I... am little more than a parasite. In my youth, if you could call the beginning of my existence such a thing, I was many things, as one is when they can shift their very nature as they breathe.

I was monster, beast, thing. I am not what one could call a parent. All understanding of such bonds are stolen from my previous victims and hosts, until the final one locked me in that damned book.

Until you freed me, gave me such hospitality, of course. I understand it now more than ever, and can say with certainty I am not your parent. I am a protector, of this body and what little of your consciousness is left in it. I am a creature of spite, if only from the circumstance of our meeting, and your mother's 'ignorance' of it.

But I also know, that in no world are those two deserving of calling you their child.

You were so much better than that. You had such potential. I suppose I was given that potential as well in our exchanges. But still, it came from you. It was something created and carried by you, and I cherish it.

I suppose I cherish you as well. It's long since been past the time where I could have shed your body, rebirthed myself and wreaked havoc, cause a cacophony to over take the Song Of Creation if I felt like it.

I suppose I have grown sentimental. I'll stay here a while yet.

I won't let you go like they did.

#writing #wizard101 #wizzy101 #w101 #maliswap #malistaire drake #sylvia drake #malistaire drake wizard101 #sylvia drake wizard101 #if you see DID parallels its only kinda intentional but only as much as a parasite/possession type situation is?? i guess??#i have Thoughts on the relationship between the shadow entity & the child but its very. hand waves. vague.

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