Gwydion: Help Me

**Content Warning:** **Potential depressive thoughts**.

Setting: A little bit after Candy Night and speaking with Jonn.

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

*“Daddy, why do they*
hate me?”

*“No one hates you,*
*honey.”*

*“Yes, they do.  They said they did.”*

*Aesar didn’t answer*
*right away, stroking softly through his son’s hair. “No one hates you…they just*
*don’t understand*.”

\_\_

Moonlight bathed the overgrown garden behind Azriel’s house,
lighting the world in silvery hues.
Somewhere insects buzzed and the soft hooting of an owl reached Gwydion’s
ears as he strode through the garden, its soft grass flattening beneath his
bare feet.

*They just don’t*
*understand.*

They were his father’s favorite words of comfort:  *they*
*just don’t understand.*

At first that was all Gwydion believed and that meant he
could make them understand.  He could
teach them, but soon he grew aware that they were also frightened of him, or of
what he could do.  No one wanted to
learn, wanted to listen to him.   His
father did, at least he pretended to.  He
knew his father didn’t truly understand, but he support him and he never told
him to stop.  He told him to be careful with
what he was learning.

Then his father died and it was just him and Raef.

Then Raef left and it was just him.

Depending on his mood, that suited him just fine.  When he was alone he could learn to his heart’s
content and no one told him, *You should*
*die, freak.* No one told him*, That’s disgusting.  What’s wrong with you?* He still couldn’t teach them.They just stared at him in disgust or, like
Jonn, they asked him what it was like, what he could do (*Did you keep him?*).  It was
thrilling someone cared enough to ask him questions instead of leaving
him, not expecting anything of him.  Oh, Abel had asked him a question,
but the tiefling wanted something from it and he couldn’t give it to him.

Not yet.

Gwydion sighed softly as he continued to walk, ignoring the
chill start to creep through his feet and ankles from the dew on the
grass.  It was nights like this, when it
was just him and the moonlight that he could feel the most like him.   There
were no pressures when it was just him, no desire to entertain or to charm.  No desire to frighten and intimidate.

It was simply him and all of what he was, and what he wasn’t.

He settled down onto a bench in the back corner of the
garden, stretching out his legs and resting back on his hands.   He
stared out at the back of Azriel’s house.
 He had to get away from them for
a moment.  They were all so terribly,
wonderfully *alive*.  There was laughter with them, friendly
bantering, and teasing.  They got along
and no one cared what he did; no one had batted an eye when he removed what
feeble life force there was in the undead to heal his own body.  No one had batted eye when a walking skeleton
had joined their ranks.

He hadn’t known what to do with that, he still didn’t.  It was as if it had created a war that he no
longer knew what side to be on.  Jonn on
one side, whispering in that sweet, almost delicate voice of his on one side with
these *terribly, wonderfully* alive
people who didn’t care on the other.  He
envied them just as he reveled in them. They were so *wonderfully* alive within their world and he...he was not.

Something soft lightly touched his fingertips and Gwydion
looked down to see a small, brown mouse resting nearby.

“Oh, good evening,” he said as he carefully picked it up,
moving slow to not startle the creature.
It stared at him with its nose twitching (there was no blood this time
on the rising and falling chest).   He
stroked down across the mouse’s back with a soft smile. “Maybe you can help me.”