The Mystery That is Mute

**This story is based upon the manga story Geek Bait, written by Megan Hebert and her friends Sarah, Dillon, Sebring and the rest, but I don’t own any of it! NONE! It’s all theirs! The characters, the stories, they are theirs! Don’t hurt me! Please! I just want to write my story! No Copyright police…I don’t think its mine, I swear it! NOOOO!!!! Not the burning and the pain and the anguish of taking away my writing! NO (Author smashes little sister). That’s better. Sorry, I had to take care of that. Anyway, no I don’t own Geek Bait, Megan is a cool friend of mine, wouldn’t want to take credit for her work. Beware…there might be some OOC, or out of character description, here… so if this doesn’t sound like some of the characters… I’m sorry, haven’t had chances to read the whole series through.


A dark night was passing slowly in Pembroke and the crew was dubbing off on the streets, Blank getting restless and heading back to the house early. Zero wandered off by himself and the others shrugged and followed Blank back. Zero was starting to get lost when suddenly he came upon a silent shadow, a slowly moving body enwreathed in black. Zero grabbed onto the shadow and pulled him by the arm, watching with surprise as it turned and a small silver cross swung on a chain before Zero’s eyes, almost making him bat at it. He looked up into the face of the shadow and saw a serious piercing pair of eyes surrounded by a mass of long semi-spiky black hair. Zero grinned and laughed, grabbing the arm of the shadow and leading it back at a furious pace to the house, almost knocking the door off its hinges coming in.

“Blank! Blank! Look what I found! Can we keep him? Huh, huh? Please!!!!”

Blank swiveled in his spot on the couch and looked over at Zero with an exasperated look set on his face. “Zero, you know we said no… pets?”

The person attached to Zero’s hand blinked slowly in the light of the living room, then looked at each person sitting in turn. He focused for a moment on Blank, his steel gray eyes staring longer than usual at him then moving on. He said nothing and simply stared around the room, absorbing everything around him. His eyes half closed and took on an apathetic look, gazing at Zero’s hand still gripping his arm tightly. Blank stood up and disengaged Zero from the stranger, then apologized to him.

“Zero, I don’t think we can keep him, maybe we should ask his owner first. He might miss him, and we could get in trouble.”

Zero looked totally forlorn and distraught, when the still silent black clothed man shrugged and started to walk away. Zero latched onto his leg, and the quiet semi-Goth stared down at him, then shrugged again and turned around and walked to the couch, sitting without so much as a word. They began to question him, but getting no answers they started to call him Mute, just for the hell of it. He left after a few hours and returned the next day, as though knowing that otherwise Zero would find him again, no matter what. He comes day after day and participates in the crew’s lives, just being a person there that never talks. Everyone secretly wonders why he never talks, but won’t actually say anything to him. Here is the real reason he never talks…

Fifteen years ago Damien Stormwind was a 5-year-old boy growing up in a rich home, the Stormwind mansion. He had everything he could ever want, except happiness, all he could see was anger. His father had left them; divorcing when he was only three years old, but the agreement had given him and his mother this mansion and three million dollars. Now Damien spent his days alone, playing with toys as his mother went about her daily meetings and such and his brother hunted him around the manor, boredom his instinctive way of finding poor Damien, keeping life in the house running smoothly her constant job. He would find the darkest places where no one would bother him, just trying to find a place where he could be alone, never having any peace from the people that seemed to hunt him.

He knew why his father left; that there was another woman and he saw how hard his mother took this news. She tried to ease Damien’s life with toys and presents but Damien frequently gave them away, finding no real pleasure in such gifts. His older brother Darien was not eased by anything, his heart full of anger, so he took that anger out of Damien, hunting his slipping through the blackness after his brother in the shadows and beating him until Damien cried. Damien began to not feel that anger; his brother’s abuse only another book in his library of pains. After several months of being in the dark hidden spots, he began to relish being alone, the silence of the shadows he was always disappearing in. The days passing slowly, anger and grief filling him at his father, who now that he had left was never around. Instead of showing his pain to people like most children his age would, he put it away, hid it within himself and began to withdraw from the world.

Divorce made him grow up fast, making him realize that no one really wanted to hear about his troubles, they just wanted to make themselves feel better, so he stopped helping them feel better, he stopped caring. School started for young Damien, and he went off, finding himself in a world of people that were always happy, always smiling. Damien was not a strong kid and spent most of his time using his black clothes to hide in shadowed areas of recess, behind trees and in bushes. He was one of the hunted ones, the people outside the realm of “cool”. No matter what happened, he distanced himself, never allowed anyone to see into his pain or anger at his situation. He began to push down his emotion after a bully hit him and he exploded, attacking so viciously that the bully was sent to the hospital with a broken nose and a cracked rib when Damien had grabbed a rock and beaten his face and chest with it.

Damien was taken home by his mother and screamed at, she couldn’t understand why her son would do such a thing to someone, why he wasn’t popular. She hit him across the face with her open palm, then sighed softly, walking away with tears in her eyes. Damien glared at her retreating form, then felt the anger on his face recede, so he turned and walked away. He went to his room and glared at his walls, seeing words appear across his vision, the pain he felt inside showing up in hallucinations. Grabbing his head with his hands, he shook it furiously, trying to clear his mind. He got into bed and threw off his clothes, falling asleep into disturbed dreams of anger and flashes of blood. He awoke the next morning with pain in his eyes and a heavy heart, then went to school like any other day. He took a quick shower and dressed himself, quite a feat for most 6 year olds, but Damien had to take care of himself, everyone else was too busy to care about him.

He got to school and people shied away from him, not wanting to be near the violent kid that had hurt one of the popular people. He smiled softly and sat in the back of the class, the position that was to become his for the next several years. A pattern in his life began to emerge, coming in and sitting alone, then absorbing the information and disappearing during recess. As soon as the bell rang he went a different way to outside, walking along the paths through the woods that were supposed to be off limits, but even the teachers stayed away from the little tornado of anger. The forest’s silence calmed him and allowed him to scream softly. As his mother began to realize he was becoming anti-social, she took him to a child shrink, trying to see why he was so irritated and hated that environment so much. The shrink couldn’t tell her much, Damien learned his methods quickly and found ways to avoid being found out, but instead suggested that she just let him be himself.

Damien found his anger was causing him problems when focusing in school and such, so he pushed it down, hid it away inside himself and not allowing it to surface, forming a tight ball of hatred and pain in his heart. He spent more and more time drawing and writing, poetry that earned him increasingly high grades in his English portions of class. His reading was college level in months, reading novels in days, while his classmates struggled with basic chapter books. He found math to straightforward, no emotion or relation to his own life or any reason to learn it. Slowly losing touch with reality, Damien spiraled downward inside, keeping appearances up for any onlooker, masks of so many shapes and styles always covering his soul.

His heart began to believe those masks were who he was and tried to accept them; anything was better than the void his heart held. He stopped feeling emotions around the fifth grade, becoming numb to the pain that people pressed on him and boiled inside him. His eyes became haunted by the anguish that pulsed inside him and he became a recluse. His poetry became more and more depressing until he stopped showing it to his teachers because they started to fear he was suicidal. His masks became more and more deceitful, his rage and turmoil threatening to take over his soul. One night not long after he turned 11 he felt an urge to take out that anger on something, to release that rage on something before he just killed someone. Slowly entering the garage behind their home, Damien saw all the sharp objects and a thought came into his head.

Stepping to the workbench he threw off his black t-shirt and walked back inside for a towel, then sitting down on a stool he opened a toolbox, silently drawing out the contents to the wood panels. He selected his tool, a brand new razor, still wrapped in its plastic casing and slid it into his hand. It felt cold in his palm, the blade’s edge pressing against his fingers as he softly gripped the sharp sides. Swiveling it softly, he placed it against his arm, point pressing down against his skin and making an indentation. He pressed down harder and a drop of blood appeared under the tip, slowly filling the tiny indentation then spilling over the edge and sliding down his arm. Damien grimaced at the pain, then smiled sadistically and slowly began to move the razor down his arm in a straight line, blood appearing wherever the blade broke the frail barrier of his skin. After cutting down the length of his arm about 3 inches, he pulled back and laid the blade sideways on his arm, crossing the cut in the shape of Christianity, a symbol he always found in his mind, something that stood for his pain.

Grunting softly as the blood spilled from his cuts, he pressed the towel to his skin, feeling the coarse fibers pull at the cuts and making him gasp in pain as they drained away the blood pouring from his arm. He kept his arm covered and went inside, then cleaned them quietly in the bath, wrapping his arm in gauze he found in the first aid kit. The bleeding stopped after about ten minutes, Damien changing the gauze once, then going straight to bed, feeling as though he had punished himself for his very existence, knowing that he was the source of many people’s problems, namely his mother and brother. Why else would they treat him the way they did he asked himself, not seeing any other reason than the fact that he was the source of their problems.

Damien began to cut as much as once a week, the worst one taking his razor and cutting straight down his chest, between his ribs and stopping right above his navel. It bled profusely as Damien pressed the towel to the cut, reveling in the pain as his blood left red trails down his arm, knowing that he was the source of everyone’s pain, and that his existence only brought more pain to those around him. As his disgust with his life grew, so did the damage the cross shape cuts all over his legs and arms, until finally one night he finished the cross along his chest, cutting horizontally across his ribs, then passed the razor over the vertical cut as well, blood spreading down his chest with incredible speed.

As the blood continued to slide down his stomach, one of the cleaning ladies walked into the garage and saw his standing with blood dripping from his massive gashes, screaming hysterically and running back inside where she fell into emotional shock, more members of the cleaning staff rushing into the garage and seeing the bleeding Damien. They wrapped him in gauze and piled into the car, rushing him to the hospital as fast as the engine would allow, swerving through the other cars, Damien’s mother crying and running her hands over his face, fingertips tracing along the cuts on his arms and crying even more, cursing herself for not noticing this before. Damien slipped out of consciousness and his eyes glazed over from blood loss, sending his mother into even greater tears. They reached the hospital and he was rushed to the emergency room, doctors rushing to close the cuts on his chest, and to give him a blood transfusion.

His pulse was fading, but as he was slipping away from life, his mother begged him not to leave, and he tried to understand in his disturbed mind. Even though he could not contemplate why, he held on for his mother, not wanting to be even more of a burden than he already was. So as the doctors sent blood into his system and stitched his chest shut, his mother watched nearby with tears pouring down her face and Darien glaring at his brother from his place, blaming him for everything and now even more angry for taking all the attention that he craved.

As Damien awoke on his hospital bed a few hours after his time in the emergency room to a hazy vision and tubes coming from his arms as his mother sobbed silently in the corner. He gingerly touched his bandaged stomach and winced, feeling the fresh gash covering his entire chest. The pain brought his senses to full functioning and his eyes opened wide, then closing tightly as he felt his bandage shift. His mother heard the movement and looked up, eyes red and swollen from crying for such a long time, and she unsteadily got to her feet, stumbling over to his bed and settling at the side of his bed.

“D-D-Damien, my dear Damien, why did you do this to yourself? Why? Why would you cut yourself? Would you open your flesh with a razor and watch as you bled all over yourself? Why?” she began to cry again and became slightly hysterical, doctors escorting her out as Damien stared up with apathy at the ceiling.

The doctor came in and began to question him, but Damien began to tune the words out and lost his contact with the room. The questions passed right over him, his eyes glazing over again as his mind defocused on what he didn’t consider important and he was taken home after a few days, then brought to a psych ward to be evaluated. They couldn’t get much out of him, but could tell that he was not in touch with any of them, and was making an important decision in his mind about what came next for him, after a traumatic thing as almost dying left quite a shock to one’s system, especially when self-inflicted. He walked around silently, never speaking to anyone, eyes staring straight ahead, unfocused.

Inside he was in turmoil, part of him wishing to finish what he started and cut again, but in secret and let himself pass out of existence, to fade from his place as the source of so much pain and the holder of his own anguish. The other side of his mind fought rationally, trying desperately to convince himself that he needed to hold on, that his pain would fade and so would the lies that surround him. He slowly began to resist the urge to die and awaken to the world, his demeanor returning to somewhat normalcy, but still not a normal behavior pattern for an 11-year-old boy. He found himself running his fingers along his scars, feeling the cross shaped patterns along his skin. He turned to the only book his mother would let him have these days, a Bible, and read the whole thing through in just two days, his attention grabbed by the definite and strength of conviction behind those words.

He went to church one Sunday and found the environment not what he wanted, still wishing to be alone, and since his near death he had stopped cutting entirely, instead spending time making his scars permanent so they would never fade from his body, constant reminders of what he had done to himself and others. The guilt stayed with him, always trying to get him to cut again, to open his flesh and end his miserable life, blood pouring to the ground and leaving steam to fill the air as he died. But he resisted for himself, not wishing to ever go down that road ever again, and rely on people for his own life, which was his responsibility. He dove into the bible and found that he liked the morals and principles offered, and took them as his own.

He became a Christian through the basic method, and then decided that talking only caused him problems, and that his voice had forsaken far too many people, and swore to be silent. Taking the cross that swung around his neck, Damien took a vow and swore like the monks of olden monasteries, sealing his lips from all words, save laughter and such, and would never speak again, unless his life lead him to find a reason to give forth words at common times, and closed up to the world, becoming a piece of the world, though not functioning in society. His hair grew longer and longer, and by the time he was 16, he was a social outcast in every spectrum, barely finishing high school with good grades because he never spoke, making some presentations that relied on voice was a problem, so he used the computer program Read Please to do it for him. People stopped being around him more than he had disassociated himself already, and he became the loner of loners, totally alone, with no people anywhere around him and counselors worrying that he was not getting human contact. The insults were more than he cared about or needed so people became of no importance to him, and Damien lost all need of human voice or touch.

As he began to drift away, his Christianity continued in his home, where he could pray silently in his room, as his person and his world became adorned with silver crosses and he became known as the Semi-Goth with cross obsession. Several girls thought he was cut because of his looks and actions, but like always he pushed people away and sunk back into himself and his religion, finding no use in people. Then one day he came upon the young Zero and felt as though he knew that if he didn’t go, the little guy would hunt him down, so he kept coming and participating. He laughs now, and smiles sometimes, but most of the time he is still silent and emotionless, but the group does manage to bring him out sometimes, and maybe someday he will talk again if it seems like they have earned his voice.