Het: The Monarch Fae Prince

Part One of The Thorned Court Series

Volume I: The Secret Lives of Rain Dappled Butterflies

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Chapter One

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“Het”

I wandered the grounds in my sleep.

Extending my spirit beyond the fetal curl of my slim body, nestled into the scratchy, grey blanket and starchy, white pillows of my cot, I kept my physical eyes closed as my inner eye traveled deep into the drizzling realm of night.

That’s how I knew it before she was coming.

That’s how I knew it was all going wrong.

Well, even more wrong.

(They were planning on transferring me from the Boy’s Ranks into the Men’s today. Before anyone else was awake, so that no one could protest my leaving.)

I’d heard Dr. Doht, known amongst the Patients as “Dr. Don’t”, talking with a Tech Aide as they stepped out of his Office a few minutes before our biweekly sessions, yesterday.

He’d said something about someone not being ready for Transfer—and, you bet, I’d confirmed it was me when he’d told me, dismally, at the beginning of our session, that he would be handing me over to the care of a recently hired Nurse.

“Eventually”, he’d said, “Don’t worry about it too much.”, he’d also added, patronizingly.

He’d refused to tell me the name of the new Nurse. Point blank. With that same exasperated and yet, somehow, unspeakably bored look on his bespeckled face that he had worn only everyday that we met.

Had met...

I’d been under the care of Dr. Don’t since I’d first come to, well, under anyone’s care at all it felt like.

It was him, if I remembered correctly, who had been the one to release me from what still quite honestly, felt like ages of solitary confinement. I kid you not.

As soon as he’d been hired, he’d taken me under his wing, becoming my own personal psychologist as well as the only true father figure that I’d ever known…

The fact that he, for all intents and purposes, seemed to find me only as revoltingly lucky as he found me exasperating was of little consequence to me. I loved him. In a completely non homo-erotic way, of course!

I say this because, yes, in fact, I do know what homo-erotic feelings feel like. As, I am something or other of a sexual… Was there a word for how I felt about my own sexuality?

I knew I was gay. A lot of us, the boys in Ward I, happened to swing that way. But, it didn’t take away from my appreciation of everything to do with women. I just had never really gotten the opportunity to do anything remotely sexual with a female.

So, I guess that meant that I was straight, too? I didn’t really know, and, to be honest, I didn’t really care. Up until this point the majority of the sexual experience I’d managed to accrue had been unplanned and, if I was being perfectly and painfully honest, somewhat confusing, and even, maybe, just a little unwanted…

There. I’ve said it.

I’ve admitted it to myself, again, for what? Maybe only the first time tonight, or this soon to be morning? That wasn’t so bad. Not so bad for dwelling...

I’ve been sexually assaulted pretty much on the daily, week after week, month after month, and year after fucking year by a man who…

By a man whose job it was to not only enforce his authority over me, but to, at the heart of his occupation--It was his duty to protect me, and every Patient under his jurisdiction.

He was supposed to be protecting me. Keeping me in line, yes, but…

This is Security Officer Tierney Shelbie, otherwise known as Officer “Tyranny” amongst the Patients, and even some of the staff, here, I’m talking about.

Who else?

The blonde-haired, blue-eyed man who hailed (loudly and proudly) from “the Norse gods Thor and Odin, himself”. Who, many a time after… after a--

--I don’t even know what to call it, those helpless hours which, behind the flutter of my darkling eyes, only seem to pool together, skipping from frame to frame like a spinning reel of nightmarish contortionment and sweaty squirming, cringing and shaking beneath those dry, smooth hands of his.

Those hands that rubbed and prodded and clawed, that scraped and pet me almost in the same moment they shredded my golden, sparsely freckled skin to bloody caprices.

Bruises. Bites. Scrapes and sometimes even--

--“Lovemarks”, he called them, but these were the times when he left peeling, itchy scabs.

Never anything anywhere visible or even very deep. But, there’d only been a handful of times when Officer Tyranny had used more than his hands on me. I felt a little queasy just thinking about it...

And, but oh! Oh, the fucking bruises…

I still felt them, pulsing with each strained and battered quake spill rush that was the pumping of my alien blood through the tiny network of capillaries connecting my veins beneath my chafed and throbbing skin.

It was almost too much to bear thinking about.

It was, altogether… something or other, that… It made me feel so much that…

It felt like nothing at all in the way only every single thing seemed to and to not matter--but, only ever to me, only ever sometimes, even then--It felt closer and closer to the absent gaping maw where a heart towards me should be, wherever a care should’ve been tenderly placed, but yet, in its stead, there was simply nothing…

Nothing and nothing and nothing at all. He didn’t care that it hurt me. He liked that it hurt me and, the way it hurt me when he so much as told me this was… It was like I was nothing.

Always, back to nothing. Cut down. Stripped down. Forced. Held. Ravaged with eyes as much as with hands or teeth or tongue...

I was nothing. I was nothing, over and over again, no matter what I told myself--till I felt like breaking. All at once.

Simply for the return of sensation, it would be such a thrill just to…

To find some place far up in the sky, where it would be all but inevitable to fashion the pull in one’s stomach as you imagined what it would be like to leap from the edge and--secret of all guiltiest, pervasively childish, little dreams--

That I wanted to fly away like Peter Pan did with his fairy friend, Tink; to make like the wind and get up hide, swinging wild and unhindered by absolutely any and everything--Straight up in spirals--Up, up, up through the land’s smothering garments of mist and fog, higher now, pumping, pulling myself barreling up through the clouds; perpendicular to the stars of an infinite and teeming sea, far, far, away from everything I’ve ever known and chose to, in some roundabout way or fashion, consign myself to create…

I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t want to die.

I didn’t want my life to be one great ode to pain.

I wanted to grow wings and fly far away from all my troubles and my torment, here. No, I didn’t just want to--Iwas going to make it happen because I--I needed to.

There was literally nothing else for it. I wanted to grow wings and jump from those tapered pinnacle Spires, from one of the steepling Towers. And, fly away.

But, then again--now, that I’d gotten my wish…

Now, that I was actually growing the very wings I’d so silently and naively and spiritedly and fervently wished to myself, night after endless night, and blaring, unapologetic day after suffering day--

I just wanted someone to hold me.

I wanted Nail to hold me down, like he liked to do sometimes when I startled him awake with desperate and needy touches along his chest and the tops of his thighs when we lay there, nestled together in my lower bunk like two birds in a filmy nest. As we so often liked to spend our nights.

But, we were fighting tonight.

I needed to sleep alone tonight… There had been the most indescribable sensation--

A pinching and an itching, a crunching and a grinding of bones lengthening and budding new growth from between my shoulder blades--It had taken me hours before I’d really noticed it.

It’d been hard to notice anything but the feelings of my first penetrative rape at the hands of Security Officer Tyranny…

Why he’d waited till last night, after years of molesting and tormenting me with his sick and perverse little “games” in which he’d bargained, bullied, and… when it came right down to it: coerced me into… crumpled me into… Again and again and again— After so many years…

Ha. I had actually come to believe that it would never happen. That he would always be content with stripping and touching me.

That he wouldn’t need to move on to penetration…

I mean, I’d been held back from graduating into the Men’s Ranks three times now. That was three years past some indefinable point, upon which, I guess the Board had (without my knowing it) seemingly decided that I was, all of a sudden, to be regarded as twenty-one years of age.

I had fooled myself. I’d been naive. Childish…

Officer Tyranny had just been biding his time. Waiting till I was “legally” considered an “adult” before… before he’d…

I thought about Dr. Don’t.

Thought about how, never, not once in all my years had it ever occurred to me to tell him about the sexual abuse.

How, for years, I’d even thought it was normal to have to hold inside me such a corrosive and ever-deepening secret.

The shame of even thinking about it was intensely personal to me…

I didn’t want anyone to know.

Of course… I knew, already. People knew. Or at least suspected—It was already sort of a rumor amongst the other Patients of the Boy’s Ranks.

Officer Tyranny wasn’t exactly as discreet as he might’ve imagined himself to be… No, it wasn’t that nobody knew.

It’s just that no one who could do anything about it actually cared. At all.

Or maybe they thought that I wanted it…

I ran my black tongue along the inside of my teeth, focusing on the slightly jagged pain of my inhumanly sharp incisors grazing the forked tip.

It grounded me when there was the faintest tinge of metallic blood taste spurting into my closed mouth…

I thought about how, now that he was going to be giving me up to some… some new Nurse’s care--it must mean that what I dreaded the most was surely coming.

Today.

I was being transferred to the Men’s Ranks. Within a handful of hours.

My body would be roused, manhandled, stripped and sprayed with scalding hot water at what could only be a dispiriting and downright humiliating velocity, poked and prodded and made notes of.

And, then I would be introduced into the General Populace. And, because of who I was--what I was rumored to have done--I would then be, summarily and decisively…

Murdered.

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