Grencia Mars Elijah Guo Eckener - Tumblr Posts

Soloist

He hadn’t picked up the saxophone because he wanted to stand out on his own. He’d specifically chosen an instrument that shone best when working in conjunction with other instruments in a band or orchestra. He didn’t want to be a soloist. He had always craved connection, camaraderie, companionship. He was a social creature - had been ever since childhood when his best friend and greatest love had been his dear mother. She had been his biggest supporter and had done everything in her power to ensure that he went to the best school, had all the opportunities a gentle musical soul could dream of, and knew how very loved he was by her and by his oft-absent father.

Perhaps part of the allure of the sax had been the fact that his father had played it as well. A man that Gren had idolized throughout his youth, though his father’s career had kept him from being home very often. Indeed, being on the road and playing gigs had kept him from being home when he had been needed the most, when Gren’s mother fell ill and did not recover. It was the only thing he could never forgive his father for.

Foolishly, Gren had chosen to enlist in the army as a way to spit in the face of the man who had devoted his life to music and the pursuit of peace. He had also hoped it would bring him closer to others - give him a chance to build strong friendships like the commercials suggested would happen.

And there was camaraderie to be found there. Reliance upon your fellow soldier meant close knit ties to one another. But being in the midst of a war meant that those to whom you grew attached... could be ripped away without warning.

The military was no place for a softhearted individual like Gren, and he found this out quite early on in his career there. But once you were in it… well, it wasn’t very easy to leave.

And to his surprise, he found another soul to idolize. A man who radiated power and prestige. A man who seemed born for solitude, destined to be above others but alone. A true soloist on the stage of life. And yet… Gren was drawn to this man, this savior. The beauty of his body, the ice in his eyes, the supreme self-confidence…

He could have happily played second fiddle, as it were, to that man for the rest of his days.

If only it were meant to be…

Sleep...

What a curious thing it was.

Necessary to recharge the human body yet fraught with dangers. It was a time of complete vulnerability... Removed from awareness of the world in which you dwelt, unable to defend against assault in that external realm yet also at risk from internal attack in the form of nightmares and sleep paralysis and other nocturnal terrors.

He loathed it. Dreaded it. Sought to rise above the need his body had for it.

But he also longed for it. The escape from the walls of his prison. The chance to see him again... to let memory coalesce into reality if only in the world of dreams...

And despite his warring emotions on the matter... regardless of how his frail human body required that unconscious shutdown...

He could not sleep. It evaded him. It eluded him. It refused him.

Days became weeks became months.

They plied him with drugs. Medications to reorder his synapses. Trial runs of this product, test batches of that... Concoctions created to tap into his neurotransmitters...

Guesswork, they admitted. Throwing possible antidotes to his issue at the proverbial wall to see what may stick.

He was drowning in medications. Desperate for the most debilitating ones. Jonesing for the injections that let him turn off his brain, that enabled him to briefly forget the silver-haired specter that haunted him constantly. Why would he have betrayed him? Lied to the courts and cast him to the wolves?

In his heart of hearts he knew the awful truth. But it was so much easier to simply go mad. His savior in the trenches could not be his downfall once they were free - it was nonsensical. The man he trusted so deeply, the man who had been so intimately a part of his life...

Better to avoid the weakness of sleep, where dreams would tease him and nightmares would force him to acknowledge the truth. Better to drive himself out of his own skull through sheer lack of rest. Better to succumb to the void through whatever combination of drugs cast him into a stupor.

And so he was an unwilling test subject ... though those institutionalized had little say over their own autonomy.

And so the shadow Vicious threw over his life grew larger and darker still.