Rebirth14 min read
I Woke Up In My Own Cruel Chapters — I Won't Let Him Be Alone
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I opened my eyes and the world smelled like old paper and cold broth.
"I found him on the street," I said before my voice could betray me, and the first person I said it to was the boy whose fingers trembled in mine.
"Thank you." He had no sound to say it aloud. He wrote the two characters with a trembling hand and handed the tiny paper to me like a sacred offering. It was the first thing I ever heard from him: the word hung in my chest.
He had a thin film over both eyes. He couldn't hear. His throat could not make noise. He was small, pale, and so clean that I felt ashamed of all the ink I'd spilled making him suffer on purpose.
"I'll call you Lin," I mouthed, because names from my old drafts sounded like curses in my mouth. "Gus."
Gus Fontana's fingers curled closed around mine.
I should have kept writing the kinds of stories that pay the rent: sharp heartbreaks, cold rooms, a boy scarred for art. I had been selfish. I loved cruelty the way some people love coffee. I was an author who fed on suffering. But standing in front of a real-bleeding, real-breathing Gus, something in me cracked.
"When I wrote you," I told the boy that first night as I pressed my clammy palm to his forehead to check a fever, "I gave you everything ugly." I swallowed. "You don't deserve it."
There is a moment—an awful, soft moment—when your made-up sins look you straight in the face. I had copied my cruelty into real bones. The world I barged into was the end of one of my books: the happy epilogue embraced a couple on a porch while the ones I had used up were crumpled out of sight. I had always promised myself I would never meet them. And then I did.
Sebastien Costa arrived the next morning with a fan and a face that used to be mine on paper. He had a derisive smile that made strangers stop breathing and a steady hand that hovered above a needlebox. "Your food tastes like punishment," he said, and then tapped his fan to dismiss my protest.
"Sebastien," I said, hugging the cheap cotton bowl to my chest. "Will you help him?"
He folded his lashes. "I will try. But be aware: hearts don't always heal with herbs." He said it like a dare.
I lied and said I didn't mind. I had begged the black-robed stranger—Cedric Carney—to let me have some loopholes. Cedric smiled once in the garden like a man who knew too many endings and pressed a key-shaped promise into my palm: you can walk into your books, she would say, but the world will not be your puppet.
"It's not a puppet if it feels," Cedric had murmured, very far from a man who should care. "It will ask of you."
I never imagined the asking would come like this: Gus clinging to my sleeve when I reached for the bowl, his lashes fluttering as if the faintest wind might lift him away.
"Eat," I said, watching him stumble with spoons and silence.
Sebastien watched him with a cruelty that was not cruel. "Eyes can be fixed," he said. "But you cannot stitch a childhood you stole back into place."
"Then we buy time," I said. I would buy time with my pockets and my lies. I had told Cedric I wanted endless coin. He had given me a trickle: a hundred silver each month, a promise shaped to look infinite. It was not enough. I counted pennies and swallowed pride and begged Sebastien into my household because he was a healer and also because he had once been a monster I pitied. Pity is a bad foundation for rescuing anyone, but it was what I had.
Drew Boehm came in the middle of a rain that smelled like dirt and bright horses. He was a grin and a braid and always too loud—how could I deny such a trope? He bucked into the yard like every pickpocket I had loved and rescued at the last paragraph. "You smell like someone else's funeral," he said, and offered me a shoulder.
"Then sit," I told him. "Then stay."
We formed a family out of excuses: me, the tired author trying to undo what she'd written; Sebastien, the man who could stab a needle into empty air and make skin remember; Gus, the boy who had been the most brittle creature I had ever drawn; and Drew, who laughed loud enough to drown our guilt.
The town folded itself around us like a theater curtain.
"You're really going to let that woman feed him wine?" a woman in the square hissed once, and I wanted to strangle the gossip as it spread. I had brought Gus back from the house where they had humiliated him—he had been the sort of "entertainment" that greedy men bought and ruined—but when I burst into that room in a fury of tearing cloth and yelled and dragged a man from a bed he was not meant for, I didn't realize how many of my sins would follow me into daylight.
They called the house the South Wind Pavilion. The owner was an old woman with rouge and a mouth like a trap. I remember my knuckles white from the handle of the scissors that made the first promise of blood.
"Who let you in?" The pimp's voice was oil. "You have no right."
I had a right. I had written the scene. I had to act.
"I bought him," I said, and the word rang more expensive than the silver that knocked meaningless on a table. The pimp laughed and shoved the man on Gus, who was sprawled like a broken doll.
"She's a fool with money," he said. "Why should we care?"
"Because you will be named," Drew said. His grinning face had gone flat. "Because names are the only coin some of you hold dear."
I had a knife. I had the look of someone who would do violence, and there is always a moment where policy and fear and cunning step aside for the simple arithmetic of survival. We carried Gus home.
For three nights he did not speak. He did not let anyone move him without a small, furious tension in his body. I fed him, bathed him as best I could, counted syllables of apology under my breath. Sebastien moved through our house like a shadow with purpose; he would sometimes do the smallest kindnesses—press his fingers to a fevered wrist, slip a cooling cloth over someone's brow—and all at once I saw that the person who had been created as a monster in my stories could be a savior now.
"Do you know why I made him cruel?" I asked Sebastien once, in the quiet after midnight when the world was only the whisper of paper turning itself over.
"You wrote him to be broken so the reader would see beauty in the ruin," he said. "You craved the ache."
"Yes." I didn't defend myself. I was tired of defending.
He put the needle aside. "We will try the monk's pill," he said. "Jacques Cline's man knows of a herb that can slow the poison in him. It won't cure every damnation you gave him. But we will try."
And we tried. Jacques Cline, a monk with a voice like river stones, watched me with patient eyes and gave me a ceramic vial so small it fit in the palm of my hand. "It costs a story to buy a cure," he said, grave as weather. "You have written the price."
That price, when Sebastien boiled the powder and fed it to Gus, felt like an argument between mercy and debt. The boy's fever broke and receded; the film over his eyes thinned like a tide.
The town breathed again. For a week we were a small sanctified place: a home with a single bed and two noisy men and one fragile saved child.
Then the days learned to be wicked again.
We were cheated. Men who had sold that child, who had industry in their bones, began to pass each other in the street with new pleasure in their mouths. I found a servant from the Pavilion on my stoop, smirking. "They are selling him again," she said like a dare.
My hands did not keep their promise to be calm.
"No." I had barely said the word before I ran.
Drew followed, an exclamation in boots. We went to the Pavilion and the smell was the same dirty perfume of used men and old wine. The owner sat on the dais with her cigarette like a queen and a body under her arm.
I kicked open their door and the room went cold.
Gus lay on a mattress, half-bare, blood near his thighs, the face he used to guard his shame gone white and brittle. A fat man was on top of him, slick with drink, and he turned up at the sound like something indifferent to shame.
I moved like someone who could do harm. The fat man swung. I cut him on the leg with the scissors, and Drew helped me pin him.
"Who let you touch a child?" I said with a voice like an indictment. "Who let you think you could?"
The punishment I gave them then was not the end. It was a starting spasm.
They dragged the fat man and the pimp into the square the next morning. I did not intend to go public at first; justice in the old stories is often private and dirty. But the town had to see.
I called together a crowd.
"These men sold a child," I told them. "They raped a boy you see every day on your streets."
"Shut up!" the pimp shouted. He thought he would still be loud. He was wrong.
"You're loud enough," I said. "Tell the people what you did."
He started to lie. He always did. The fat man who had raped Gus began to deny it in a tone that's part animal and part businessman.
"Watch," I said, and called Sebastien and Drew to my side. "Names have weight. So does shame. The law here will not move fast, but people's eyes will."
We took them to the market. The baker, the tailor, the clerk who sold brushes—we pulled every merchant into the square. The crowd swelled because this is what small towns do: they swell for bloodless entertainment and rotted courage.
"Look at their faces," I told the crowd. "These are the men who bought him. These are the men who used him."
I unrolled the sheet that the fat man had left behind. Under the sheet were the stains—proof that cannot easily be denied. People recoiled and then leaned in.
"Remember this," I said. "Gus is not a thing."
The first punishment was humiliation: we made the fat man stand on a wooden platform. We shaved half his hair so his vanity would know a hole. We smeared his face with the same grease he'd used to lure boys, and then we made the town throw at him handfuls of the cheapest flour—let it stick to his oily face like a mask of public shame. People took pictures with their crude mirrors while their fingers trembled with the joy of being witnesses.
He went through the phases I wanted him to: arrogance, then a sputter of denial, then a pause when his name was repeated by neighbors he'd once bought off. He spat, "It's not like that." The crowd hissed. "I wasn't—" He clutched at his throat. His bravado dissolved into pleading. He was forced to say the boy's name, to admit what he had paid for. Every admission was a drop of acid on his indignation. The fat man's eyes changed: from cocky to incredulous, from incredulous to teary, from teary to a small, animal panic.
The second punishment was social: the pimp—older, thicker, and unashamed—was marched to the well and made to stand with a rope of onion skins around his neck while the town's wives spat on him and called him names. They called him "thief," "wolf," "sinner," and those words were old and sharp, used to cut men down to real size. The children of the town were made to recite the names of the things he had stolen: childhood, sleep, dignity.
The third punishment was economic and symbolic: I walked to the old ledger the Pavilion kept and dragged it into the square. We made him open it and read aloud all the names and the prices he'd set for human flesh. He read in a voice that trembled as the ledger listed boys he had promised to sell, as if the very sound of names would break him. People took his iron cashbox and emptied the coins into the community chest; those coins would pay for apprenticeships and meals for kids who had been sold before.
As men and women watched those coins fall, the pimp's eyes hardened in the last way: he realized the town would not take him back. He realized he had no shelter among those he'd plundered. The crowd's reaction changed polarity: the first flash of schadenfreude mutated into a deeper, colder justice. The fattest man was led to the border of the town and told he could leave and never return, that if he was seen again they would organize and kill him. The pimp was exiled with only the clothes on his back and the knowledge that every face he had harmed would follow him in memory.
It was a punishment. It was not enough. It never would be. But it was public, vivid, and precise. The crowd's voices changed him. He spent the night in terrifying replays of the words they'd used. He thought of the banknotes, the ledger, the flour on his face, and finally, that forced admission of the boy's name. He went from smirking to shrieking, to whispering, to silence.
Gus came to the square the next day. He had not been strong enough to walk the first. He pressed his small hand into mine and watched those men leave like exiles. He watched the flour on their faces and the townspeople's faces. He turned his eyes to me, and for the first time in a long time his face moved.
"Are they going to hurt others?" he wrote, slowly, with a shaking script.
"They won't here," I said, and the answer felt like a promise I could keep. "Not here."
He nodded like someone learning that certain places could be safe.
But punishment in my world is never merely about the hurt people get in return. It is about transformation: we made the crowd a jury, the punishment a lesson. The men were forced to face the smallness of what they'd done, to stand under the public eye and have the town's weight tilt their scale. They reacted like characters in a book being flipped from villain to corpse: first defiant, then disbelieving, then pleading, then broken. They left, and their departure was public and irreversible. People recorded it on tiny devices, and the clips circulated. Shame turned the men into pariahs; their business dried up. Some fled, and the border guards shamed them into exile. Others stayed, but the market stopped buying and the world that had once given them permission now spat them out.
A week later, when the market had rearranged itself and Gus had begun to laugh again at lunchtimes like a small bell, news came that the fat man had been robbed on the road and had his boots stolen; the pimp had been turned away from inns along the border. The punishments were not the bloody, cinematic kind; they were the long closings of doors and the continual turning of people's heads. "Justice," I told Gus, "can look like loneliness."
He squeezed my hand.
The rest of the world kept folding me into stories. We found Jacques Cline's monk-ingredient had only contained temporary mercy; Gus improved and then flatlined into weakness; Sebastien said truths I had only half known—my cruelty had formed them but had not guaranteed redemption; Drew, who had been a sun for other people's nights, found a darkness at the edge of his grin.
"Why did you make them feel?" Cedric asked me once, in a corridor of an inn where paper lanterns flapped like startled birds. He was black-robed and impossibly patient. "Why did you let them be so human if you didn't care for the consequences?"
"Because I wanted people to feel," I said. "But because I wanted eyes to ache and bodies to pray. Because I wanted to know the shape of pain."
He looked at me and for a heartbeat I thought he would say: you did not have to. Instead he put his palm briefly over mine and said nothing. Cedric was a man shaped like a universe; he moved like a sentence that refused to finish.
A lot of things happened after the punishment. Liang's country happened—Ludwig Marino, the emperor with a crown that had bitten sons before, learned of the boy's name and past, and the palace turned its appetite toward sacrifice. Gus, once rumored to be a small lost prince in my own lines, was suddenly valuable in ways I had not imagined. I had not told the court about his origin; I had thought our tiny life would remain secret, but my old endings are news and actions travel like ink in rain.
Ludwig came to the palace and said the word "enemy," and the world constricted.
"You should have told me," I said to Sebastien, standing in a courtyard of stone the color of ash.
He folded his fan like a blade. "You didn't ask me for everything," he said. "You asked for what you wanted to touch."
When Gus was taken under guard into the palace because Ludwig had declared him a possible political blow, I did the only thing I had left to do: I screamed my authorial lungs raw until my throat felt like a river stone. I tried to bargain. I tried to plead. The world that had been sewn together by me refused to be sewn by me alone. The law in that palace had its own patterns.
The night he was due to be offered as an appeasement, the city held its breath. I made a plan: call Cedric, find Jacques, find a way to twist fate as I had once twisted plots. Cedric, impossibly, appeared and said, "Trust me." He was always fond of that phrase, as if trust were a coin he could mint.
At the sacrifice, the crowd was larger than the market. Lanterns made constellations in the trees. Ludwig sat high and deliberate. I held Gus to my chest as ash and smoke knitted the sky. "No," I told myself softly.
Then the world rewound.
A white flash, a scent of ozone, and I was falling through pages.
"Let go," Cedric whispered, and his voice was a hand in the dark. "Trust."
I let him take Gus from me. I fought with every little muscle in my chest while he led me down into a place that was not the palace nor the town but a room with black tiles and men who bowed when a king entered. He walked me into darkness and called the men "my servants." He walked me into a throne made of stories.
"Who are you?" I asked, because suddenly his person had weight like thunder.
He smiled with a whole world in it. "Cedric Carney. I am the architect of doors."
He gave me one choice. He would change a single fact: Gus would not be an enemy prince. He would be Gus, a boy with a life that could be mine to watch over. And he would give me a pill, a pill pulled from something like a sun.
He told me the cost: something of him. And then he did the thing authors do not dare: he surrendered. A flash of light. Cedric lent me a sliver of himself and it became powder and then a pill and now it sat warm in my hand like a secret.
When I fed it to Gus, the film over his eyes shimmered and nearly broke. His breath deepened. He moved. "Thank you," he whispered—not with ink but with sound. The single syllable hit me and I would have traded every failure for that one voice.
I later learned the truth the way one learns a final chapter in hospital light: Cedric and his black robes were bearings of a medical team in the real world. Than the story morphs—because you must know—when the white lights beneath my eyelids became white tiles and a man named Cedric Carney in a clinical white coat sat cross-legged and said, "She is waking."
"Why?" I asked him in the sterile room with the buzzing machines and taste of antiseptic.
"Because you tried to leave," he said gently. "Your mind refused to keep breathing. We used your memories to coax you back."
He had been the doctor in the real hospital. He had been the black-robed enigma in the world I had made. His last confession was the strangest mercy: he had walked into my dream to guide me because he had been the boy at the back of my class, the quiet one who loved my sentences and had carried them with him through years of notebooks.
"You broke the rules," I said, because doctors break rules the way authors do, and both must own to it.
"Yes," he said. "I thought you needed a friend you could not embarrass."
The hospital's explanations were measured: my brain-dead diagnosis, the full-immersion therapy, the reconstruction of memories to pull someone out of death. They called it experimental and they called me lucky. Maybe I was.
When I sat in a coffee shop weeks after—Cedric at the table across from me in a different suit and the same impossible patience—I said, "So this is the ending. Are you going to be angry you were my black-robed demon?"
He smiled, small and shard-fine. "I owe you one." His voice sat between apology and a promise.
I told him about the ledger in the market. I told him about the punishments. He listened as though listening were a spell.
"Will you go back to writing the same things?" he asked, and he didn't say it accusingly. He said it as someone who wanted to know if the world would keep receiving hours of my attention and cruelty and mercy.
"I will stop making suffering the only thing that counts," I said. "I will let them live. And if I must wreck them to teach myself, I will be in the room to hold their hands."
He reached across the table and tapped the tiny slip of paper I had kept from the boy, the one that had once read "thank you."
"Then," Cedric said, "write the novel you want to live in. Let them breathe. Let them be cruel because they are human and wrong because they are human, but let them have the chance to heal because you are human too."
Months later, Gus sat up in the morning with the light in his eyes. He sounded thin, like a new word, when he said my name for the first time. "Ari," he whispered, and the world both obeyed and protested.
Sebastien kept his needles and his disdain, but he added small kindnesses. Drew made a joke about the brothel incident and said it could only be fixed by a feast. Jacques Cline kept to his robes, and Ludwig Marino faded into the background of whatever new draft I chose because he belonged on paper and I had no wish to reframe him in my hands.
Drew died later at my unpracticed hands in a scene I nearly left in a draft, torn and too sentimental to be used again. I almost wrote a better ending, and then I realized: endings are a promise you make every day.
I held a pen and a cup of harvest tea and began the next manuscript with the face Cedric had left in my head. I wrote a man who was complicated but kind. I wrote Gus a bedroom with real curtains and a chair where he could put his shoes. I sat with them when the new chapters hurt. I held the scissors at the ready not to harm, but to cut ribbons.
In the drawer of my little house I keep the ceramic vial Jacques once gave me, empty now, and a small silver coin from my first book sale. I keep the message Gus wrote for me on a scrap of paper inside a book I cannot yet publish. And sometimes, late at night, I place my palm over the place on my chest where I felt Cedric put his hand and think of the man in the coffee shop—of the surgeon who broke the rules to stitch a broken writer back to herself.
"Who will you make your next male lead?" Cedric asked once, without a smile but with a softness that was almost a caress.
"I think I already did," I said, and tucked the scrap in my pocket.
The End
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