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They save you, and for that you can't forgive them.
When you open your eyes, you're surrounded by gold. It takes you a moment to realize it; your mind is fuzzy, causing the edges of the world to blur, but gradually you're able to piece together the fact that you're lying in a field of flowers. Yellow like the ones back home, yet strange and misshapen, a kind you'd never seen before. Somewhere far, far above you, a shaft of sunlight pours in through an unseen crack of sky. The air smells faintly of honey, sweet and wet, and you try to remember how you came to be here.
When you do, it hits you with the force of a bullet.
You aren't supposed to be waking up right now. You came to Mt. Ebott to vanish.
Your head is throbbing. You feel like an enormous bruise. Somehow you manage to pull yourself upright and take a step forward, casting an uneasy gaze at your surroundings. A trickle of blood seeps into your eyes and you wipe it away irritably. You must have fallen, you decide, thinking of the sunlight shafting in from above. There's no other explanation.
How stupid.
You'd climbed Mt. Ebott with the intention of sitting and waiting and letting it claim you, thinking of the legend that said no travellers had ever returned from there. It had seemed easy. It had seemed painless. You certainly hadn't intended to throw yourself off of or down anything. Yet here you are, seemingly at the bottom of a pit, hurt and disoriented and very much alive.
You need to find a way out, you think. Vanishing on a mountain had seemed almost romantic, and in your head you'd built up this image of you peacefully slipping away with a smile on your face. When you died, the last thing you'd see would be those golden flowers. Starving to death in a pit was basically the exact opposite of that.
Every step you take requires considerably more effort than it probably should, but you refuse to give up, dragging yourself forward one step at a time. Your movements are little more than awkward lurches, your hands fumbling blindly in search of a wall. If you can find one, then maybe you can climb.
But the throbbing never ceases, and gradually the pain becomes unbearable. You have to stop moving, and then you're falling forward, and suddenly the world goes black.
The second time you awaken, you're face down in dirt. This time, you can't stand up, no matter how hard you try. You can only lay there.
"Help," you manage to croak. The word feels like gravel in your throat. It comes out as little more than a whisper, barely audible, but you try again anyway. "Somebody, please."
Nobody comes.
Of course they don't; nobody's out there. No one is coming, you think. Nobody ever came and nobody ever will. You think of all those nights spent huddled in the corner of your bedroom, knees pulled to your chest as you try to make yourself as small as possible. I'm sorry, you think. I'm sorry. Please don't -
But then there's a voice.
A boy calls out, "Are you all right?"
You know how all the stories go. A child finds their way into a strange land through the surface of a lake, or a wardrobe, or something like that, finding a magical kingdom and having grand adventures before returning home better and wiser than before. The exact details of the stories may vary, but the pattern was always the same. The one thing they all had in common was that they were stories.
It had never occurred to you that the stories about Mt. Ebott might not have just been stories after all.
The boy is stronger than he looks, you think, as he half-carries you down the path. By then, you're too out of it to really question the fact that he looks like a goat. A part of you just assumes that you're hallucinating, possibly from blood loss. You can feel it trickling steadily from your forehead. Still, at least you seem to be getting somewhere, and so you let this mysterious boy lead you further and further underground.
He seems to be a very kind hallucination, at least. His voice is soothing, even if he's speaking nonsense. Nonsense about taking you home and fixing you up, letting you rest and getting you fed. Nonsense about hoping you're all right. All kinds of anxious babbling. You know by now that people will say anything when they're worried. You won't hold him to it. You try to tell him this - you can feel the bitterness forming on the tip of your tongue - but the words don't come, and so you remain silent.
At some point he asks you your name. You think you might have answered him. You're not sure.
Eventually you reach the place that he calls home. You see towers of cool white stone rising from the darkness amid a city of buildings that looked as though they grew from rock.
It's horrible. You hate it. You hate this. You hate that a magical underground goat prince is taking you to his castle for healing. You hate that this is somehow what has become of your Plan. Only you could botch something as simple as your own death so magnificently.
He carries - drags - you over the threshold, calling out a name you cannot hear, and already your consciousness is fading yet again, draining away along with the blood from your forehead.
The king sits at your bedside and offers you tea. The queen brings you fragrant bowls of soup, as though soup is a panacea that will heal all your wounds. The prince crawls into bed with you, gazing at you wide-eyed and asking endless questions about the surface.
You don't answer. You don't eat. The untouched soup is taken away by the sad-looking queen time and time again. It's almost enough to make you feel guilty, but you refuse to break; you don't need their hospitality. You don't need a debt that you can never repay.
They won't let you leave. They say it's because you're injured. They say it's because you're exhausted, dehydrated, malnourished; such long words. You don't hear any of them, only that they won't let you go and die. You lay in the bed they've given you and dream of digging your nails into crumbling stone and clawing your way back to the surface.
The one time you speak, it's to ask them how to leave.
The prince falls silent.
The queen looks pained.
It is the king who answers.
He says, "I'm sorry, my child."
He tells you about the barrier.
You don't know what happens next, only that you become very, very angry. Suddenly you're screaming; a bowl shatters, a chair hits the wall, and then you're being enveloped in something soft as you howl.
"I want to go home!" you're saying in a voice you cannot recognize as your own. "I want to go home!"
But that's a lie. You don't have a home to go back to. Nobody is missing you. You think of sharp, angry words, of palms that strike like knives, of long, lonely nights spent waiting for the worst to come. You're trembling. You don't want to go home; you want to leave this place so that you can bury yourself and forget everything you've ever been.
"Oh, child," the queen tells you. She is holding you tighter than you've ever been held before. Someone strokes your hair. Their touch is gentle. "I know. We're sorry. We're so sorry. We will do our best."
The next day, you tell them that you're fine. You're calm now. Your tantrum from before was just a childish mistake, nothing to be upset about. You even smile to prove it. See? You're smiling. If you can smile, then everything's fine. Nothing to worry about.
They don't fall for it. They smile back at you, but they don't leave you alone. The king continues to hover, asking if you need anything, offering tea as though he can think of nothing else to give. The queen comes to check on your bandages far more than probably necessary. The prince tells you all the games he hopes the two of you can play together.
They don't trust you, you think. You are a prisoner here.
You wonder if they're scared of you now. It wouldn't surprise you if they were.
You refuse to eat. You wonder how long it takes for a person to starve to death. You hadn't wanted it to be painful, but by now you're getting desperate. You'll settle for pain if you must; maybe pain is what you deserve. The queen looks more and more worried and the king begins to frown a lot. It's not an angry frown, though, but a sad one, and the realization jars you. The king is so very, very big. You'd expect him to get angry sometimes. You think of how his voice could shake the walls if he were to ever raise it.
The prince is the only one who never seems particularly concerned. He looks apologetic, sometimes, but never nervous. For the most part he just seems intrigued by your presence. You wonder how old he is; maybe he's too young to understand what's wrong with you. He's about your height, but who knows how monsters age?
One day, he comes to visit you with a small plastic bag in his hands.
"I saw a vendor the other day and bought some snacks. You can have some too if you want," he says, climbing onto the bed with you. He shows you the bag. Inside are chips, candy, chocolate bars. They're trying to tempt you with junk food; a laughably obvious ploy to get you to eat.
Your mouth waters at the sight of chocolate. Your stomach clenches painfully. You are very, very hungry.
"I don't want any," you say.
"Suit yourself," he says, and he pulls out a candy bar, peeling back the wrapper.
He sits beside you almost companionably, leaning with you against your mountain of pillows. He doesn't look afraid.
"You hate me, don't you?" you ask. He does. He does. You can tell.
"Huh?" the prince says through mouth full of chocolate.
"I'm ungrateful even though you saved me. I'm taking up all your parents attention. I won't accept your help. I get angry sometimes. I get scary." You're careful to keep your expression neutral as you recite your list. It's one you've gone over in your head many, many times since the day you first arrived here; all the reasons they won't keep you, all the reasons they will let you go.
But the prince just looks confused. "What are you talking about?" he says.
"I'm not a nice person," you say. "I'm bad. I'll hurt you."
"You're just sad," he says. "I get sad sometimes too."
He breaks off a square of chocolate and holds it out to you.
You hesitate for a moment. Then you take it.
The next day, the queen brings you a slice of chocolate pie.
It's good.
As you gradually begin to eat again, you begin to recover your strength. Your injuries have mostly healed by then, and so eventually you're able to leave your room.
No, not your room. Wrong.
The room they're letting you use.
Better.
There are few places to go. You remember the castle seeming grander in your memory of first arriving, but now that you can freely walk about it, you realize that it's little more than a house, just like the ones on the surface. There's a kitchen, a dining room, several bedrooms, and not much more.
There's also a garden. This is what the prince is most excited about in his initial tour. He practically drags you there by the hand and chattering about all the flowers they've managed to grow without sunlight and how he can't wait for you to start working in it with him.
"Do you like flowers?" he asks you.
"Yes," you reply, thinking of golden flowers. The last thing you were going to see.
There are golden flowers here, too, you notice; the same as the ones you'd landed on in the beginning. Buttercups, maybe, you think. Malformed from their strange environment, yet still familiar, still the same flower.
Seeing them makes you feel unspeakably strange.
And so you change the subject, interrupting the prince's talk of flowers.
"What's that symbol?" you say, pointing to a banner hanging from the castle wall near a small grove of trees. "I keep seeing it everywhere."
"Huh?" and he stops, turning to look. He is still holding your hand. It feels small in yours, like you could break it if you squeezed hard enough. "That's the Delta Rune."
He says this as though that in itself is enough of an explanation, and you feel a surge of exasperation. But it's a soft aggravation, tempered by something like fondness, quickly replaced by the alarm you feel at the revelation.
The prince doesn't notice. Instead he says, "Oh, you probably don't have this on the surface, huh? It's our family crest. It comes from this story we have. Someday an angel's gonna come down from the surface and free us all. Isn't that great?"
He smiles at you, and suddenly a lot of things make sense.
That night, you don't sleep. Instead, you think of the story the prince told you.
This is why they saved you, you tell yourself. They want you to be their angel. They want you to save them.
But you can't save anybody; you can't even save yourself. The closest you ever came was trying to die, but even that failed in the end. And now here you are, the one anomaly in this bizarre fairyland of talking goats and chocolate pies and families who try to make you one of their own. If you belong here at all, surely it's as a beast, a demon to be slain by the true hero when they finally come.
You are not the child who leads the monsters to sunlight. You are not the angel they seek. You do not belong here. This world is too kind and comfortable, the people too warm and good. Not even once have you heard the king raise his voice. Not even once has the queen looked at you with disdain. And the prince seems so happy around you.
You can't understand it. You don't want to understand it.
You're starting to feel safe here, and that's a dangerous, dangerous thing.
Your skin begins to itch, and you fidget. You're beginning to feel restless, as though you don't quite fit in your own body. The feeling is red-hot and it pulses through your body, pushing at the edges, ready to burst your seams.
It's a feeling you've had many times before, but you can't deal with it the way you usually do. You have no scissors. You have no knives.
You have nails.
You push up your sleeves and drag them down your arms, digging into your own pale flesh as deeply as you can. The marks sting, but you don't feel any pain, only relief. The stinging itself is relief. It's like you're letting go a little bit of the pressure built up inside of you, just enough to let yourself grow calm again.
Your arms grow raw. You don't know why you're doing this, but still you claw at your own skin. You want to tear yourself apart.
You realize you are crying.
They're not the silent tears you're used to. They're gasping, shuddering sobs. You tell yourself to stop, that crying out loud is dangerous, that someone might hear, that someone might get mad. If you have to cry at all, hide it.
You tell yourself this, but you don't listen.
You're beginning to gulp for air and it hurts, it hurts. You bury your face in the pillow, trying to muffle it, and your throat burns with the effort of trying to force yourself to stop. It's choking you.
"Are you okay?"
You fly upright with one final, hiccuping sob, tears forgotten in your sudden terror, but the figure standing in your doorway is a small, friendly-looking one. Not a monster. Your terror gives way to relief.
"I heard you crying," the prince says softly. "Did you have a bad dream?"
Your arms are still raw. The pain is real to you now; any relief the scratching may have brought is gone. It never hurts at the time, but it always does eventually. You have to try and remember that.
"You can come to my room, if you want," he offers.
You are silent. But then you nod.
The next morning, the prince approaches you with a shy expression on his face. "Do you want to stay in my room from now on?" he asks, not meeting your eyes.
"Okay," you agree.
That evening, your bed is moved to his room.
Time passes.
One day, the queen comes to you with ointment and gently asks you to roll up your sleeves. She doesn't scold; she simply applies a cream that cools your scars before wrapping your arms in bandages and bidding you goodnight. Before she leaves, she presses a kiss to your forehead and smooths back your unbrushed hair with something dangerously close to fondness.
It's the first restful sleep you've had in a long, long time.
Time continues to pass.
You begin to forget that you don't want to be there. You begin to forget that you don't want to be alive. You're too busy.
You begin to work in the garden with the king. There's something soothing about the act of cutting vines and digging up weeds. You're clearing out the bad and giving the good room grow.
You're doing something good. You're helping something.
The moment the thought occurs to you, you need to stop.
The king asks if you're all right. When you don't answer, he places an enormous hand on your back and rubs gentle circles. He could kill you and he doesn't. You don't flinch away from his touch. You are very, very still (trying to be small trying to be quiet they won't find you if) and he lets you be still until you're ready to return to the present.
When you do, he greets you with a smile and asks you what kind of flower you like best.
And still time goes on.
The prince is the worst of all. He seeks you out every minute of every day. He clamours for your attention, and when you give it, he lights up like the sun. It makes you feel strange; very, very strange.
It makes you want to hurt him. You want to crush him. You want to tell him to stop being so nice, tell him that somebody's going to hurt him someday. You want to devour him. You want to rip out his heart and swallow it. You want to let it settle in the hollow in your chest where your own should be and feel it beating there forever. Maybe then you could take on a little of his innocence for your own; maybe then you could feel a little of his love.
But then he looks at you with shining eyes and you wonder if maybe you already do.
Somewhere along the line, you begin to think of this place as yours. Your bed; your place at the table; your home. You begin to smile genuinely, not simply to appease someone. There's an awful lot to smile about these days.
You begin to forget how you came to be here in the first place. You forget and you forget and you forget. You could lose yourself in your forgetting.
Yet in your dreams, you see yourself smothering them all in golden flowers. Your skin blisters and peels away as they fall from your hands, revealing the poison deep inside of you.
And yet still you have the audacity to wonder if maybe this is 'happiness.'
Then there is the buttercup pie.
You laugh when it happens. You're smiling. If you can smile, then everything's fine. Nothing to worry about.
The queen becomes angry for the first time since you've met her. The king lies weak in his bed, no longer the intimidating beast you had seen him as before. He looks frail, like he might slip away at any moment.
You are the one who did this. You are the one who made her angry. You are the one who made him weak. You are the one who damaged them.
She demands to know what you were thinking. The prince tells her that the two of you were trying to surprise him with his favourite pie, that you'd misunderstood the recipe, that it was an accident, a harmless accident. You just laugh. Tears are running down your face.
Your feet begin to move before you really know what's happening, and the next thing you know, you are running, leaving the prince alone to apologize.
It's funny, really. This is the proof you've been waiting for, the proof you've forgotten that you even wanted. The proof that you don't belong here and never did. You'd always known as much, and yet somehow you'd allowed yourself to forget, distracted by the sheer brightness of this life underground.
They'd saved you, and for that you'd begun to love them, even if you couldn't forgive them. But it's become warped, like everything that belongs to you, and now it's a hard, heavy love, like a stone lodged in your chest.
You want to rip it out. It's killing you. The grief you feel now that you've ruined everything is a noose, growing tighter and tighter by the second, and you wonder; what use is it to love someone if you can only hurt them?
They'd wanted to take care of you. You, the strange, unwanted child who'd been tossed down here by the world like garbage, rejected by the humans and yourself alike. You could never understand it. It was too much; it wasn't right. You'd tried, through one small token of appreciation, to repay them, and your actions had nearly destroyed them. Kindness wasn't worth this pain. Love wasn't worth this guilt.
Without realizing it, you've wandered down the hall past your bedroom, down to where the old mirror hangs. You catch sight of your reflection, and you stop.
You see a face, thin and wan, with hollow cheeks and dark circles under their eyes. You see a mouth that can never smile correctly and eyes devoid of any light. You do not see a human being. You do not see a monster. You see a demon who belongs nowhere.
No matter how warmly they'd welcomed you, you’re still exactly as awful as you always were. Despite everything, it's still you.
You're laughing again, so hard that tears are streaming down your cheeks. It's funny. It's so funny.
They tell you it's okay. You know that it isn't.
They tell you that they love you. You know that they don't.
You have disappointed them. They do not say this, but you hear it in every word, in every sideways glance.
And so, you find yourself thinking of the story the prince told you back when you'd first arrived. You think of how much you owe them, of how much they must have been expecting from you, of how much you must have disappointed them, and you make a promise to yourself.
You will give these monsters their freedom. They never really wanted you anyway; they only kept you here because they expected you to save them. And so, save them you will. You will be their angel. You can do that much for them, at least.
You will make things right. You will give them what they want.
When you die, the last thing you see will be those golden flowers. The thought of it almost makes you want to laugh.