Chapter 4: pain
I didn't understand the feelings that assaulted my very being. As I turned away from the scene and tried to walk away I found myself in a white space.
The feelings lingered in my heart. The scenes I had seen had burned themselves into my brain. It felt like there was an entire person assimilating themselves into my very core.
It felt foreign to me. Alien.
I knew that I had never felt such anger before, nor grief.
They weren't mine.
Intellectually I know I felt sorry for the boy, sad even. But this grief wasn't mine. It was his.
This anger was his.
This emptiness was his.
The discomfort grew and grew. Before I realised what was happening I fell to the ground in pain.
When my illness took me, it was gradual. My body that turned against itself, that weaponised its own cells against other cells, has experienced excruciating pain before.
It was nothing like this. It pales in comparison to what I experience now.
I am drowning.
Every cell in my body is being cut open.
Someone is using a hammer to bash in my head. They must be because what else could possibly cause this much excruciating pain.
It wouldn't stop no matter how much I begged for mercy, for help.
pleasepleasepleasesomeonehelpme
I don't know how long I screamed for. When the pain seemed to lessen and when I finally felt as though I could breathe again I opened my eyes.
I could taste the salt on my lips from the tears I had shed. I could see whatever semblance of clothing I had worn in shreds on the ground. I must have torn them as I begged for the pain to stop.
I still trembled as I got myself into a seated position. The tremors didn't stop as I tried to wipe away my tears.
The boy's name was Drake.
Whether it was a few seconds, minutes, hours, days, months or even years that had passed just now... it was enough for me to live a life.
I could no longer treat the boy as a stranger because everything he had gone through I went through just now.
The pain bound us together.
I still don't understand what's happened. But, from what I can tell I lived his life as though it were my own.
Both him and I aren't as different as I thought at first. His mother loved him, even if that love was not enough in the end. He was happy once. Before the world turned its back on him.
He understood people better than I first gave him credit for. He had learned quickly what it took to survive in that household. It seemed like not only did his supposed family neglect them, they actively abused them. They never laid a hand on them but both he and his mother were tortured nonetheless.
Their cries for help ignored.
So much so that while one took her own life, the other took their tormentors'.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
kp_khera
kp_khera sorry about that
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