Alone, a Drabble

Coiled and cold. Nestled in the corner clutches of what had become home. A dim, sad space. But a space where the rain could not touch him. It raged outside. Half as fierce as the storm within. 

Alone and unobserved, he broke from the chrysalis of fiction. Crumbling to his true nature. A broken Padawan in the dark. Tangled in himself, pushing away everything else. Muscles weak and worn. Fortitude thin. Hard to hold the world at bay. Lost in the web of his mind. Suffocating. Ripping apart senses which returned the favor. A weeping wound widening against his heart. Dark and consuming. Infected. A nightmare to corrupt meditation. Unrelenting and haunting.  

Faded alloy flashed, catching the jagged flare of lightning. Bright enough to draw his gaze. Red eyes stung, lingering upon a cylindrical shell of the past--harboring Master’s echo. What he’d kept was not what he wanted it to be. Still, he reached. Blistered flesh on metal, longing again for connection. For a glimpse of everything he’d lost. For a moment’s reprieve. The memories were there, but buried. He saw instead the screaming imprint of his greatest torment. The downfall of it all.

Everything else--everything he wanted--was overshadowed by that treachery. This was but a new, vain attempt to pierce pain and find who he had been. A boy, eager to grow under Master’s guidance. He longed for a second to live again in that skin. Not the husk he now bore. The skin of a failure, cowardly hidden. Stagnant with fear. Too weak to change. 

Betrayal was a poison. He recoiled from the tainted hilt. Once an elegant weapon. Now a frayed and broken thing. Half of a whole. Like him. A biting viper he ought not turn to. Yet again and again he would. A desperate wretch looking to the past, unable to accept reality. But forced to. Forced to be less. To live while others decayed. A cruel joke. One final insult. 

He curled into himself. Tighter. Shaking. Unyielding sheets of rain flooded the world. Bracca perpetually drowned itself. The boy wept with equal accord.  

Every breath was defiance. His secret disobedience. They wanted him dead. Thought him dead. But still he breathed. Raggedly. Weakly. Alone. But as more than a mere bruised scrap rat. An unwitting threat, anxious only to endure what his Master died for. Life. His life. It was all he could do to breathe. But he had to survive.