For some reason, I'm really self conscience about uploading this... I think it's because this is my first attempt at writing first person. So I have no idea if the second chapter will be in first person or if I'll give up and go back to the style I normally write in *shrug* You guys will have to let me know what you think of it.

Anyway, this first chapter is really short because it's more of an introduction sort of thing. Expect future chapters to be a little longer (though don't ever take my word for it).

Enjoy~!

"I'm not taking those damn things again."

"You will, even if I have to force them down your throat like some dog, you'll take them."

Ever since I can remember, I had been a little...different. He always told me it was just a faze, I'd grow out of it. The list of excuses was endless; they weren't real, I was seeing things, they were only in my head. When I would wake him with my screaming in the middle of the night, he would never believe me, no one did. They couldn't see what I could; the things that I shouldn't. Unlike most young children, I never grew out of it.

It only got worse as I started attending high school. As if I didn't stand out enough, I had been too young, too stupid to understand that the other kids couldn't see the same things I could. It got me into a lot of trouble, a lot of fights. The teachers didn't like me telling stories and scaring the other kids. They didn't like me spreading lies. They called my father and told him I was trying to scare the other students, that I was looking for attention and starting fights. They no longer chocked it up to an over active imagination like when I was little, but started saying there was something wrong with me.

It angered me when they sent me to the office, or tried to make me hold a meeting with the school counselor, like I was supposed to pour my guts out and cry about all my problems. Tch. There was nothing wrong with me. I'd shut my mouth and grit my teeth, refusing to talk. I'd clench my fists at my sides, knuckles turning white as I fought to stay calm and not lash out. I've always been brash, easy to anger and quick to battle and it was no different when I was younger.

"I don't need them. There is nothing wrong with me."

The taunting got to be too much, the yelling and teasing wore on my already short temper. At first I just tried to talk my way out, reason with the bullies who thought they could beat up on the weird kid with the odd hair that talked about even stranger things. When that didn't work, I tried running away. Kind of. I'd never really been the type to tuck my tail and flee. I dragged myself home limping and bleeding from another unfair fight too many times to count. They'd corner me in alleys outside of the school, or drag me into the locker room, occasionally one of the assholes would get brave and attempt to beat me down in the hallway while his cronies laughed. After taking beating after beating, for any reason some asshole could come up with, one tends to learn how to fight back. I had even had to be taken to the hospital a couple times; broken bones, bruised muscle, stitches for gashes caused by broken glass and hard knuckles.

Eventually, he got sick of it, something inside snapping his patience for his 'problematic' and unruly child. When yelling, scolding and threatening didn't solve the problem, he turned to other methods.

Then came the shrinks. He took me to doctor after doctor, to psychiatrists and therapists, counselors, anyone he could find. They ran test after test, asked me question after question, poked and prodded, made me do the stupidest things. They took MRIs and scans of my brain, one even tried hypnosis. Everything always pointed to the same prognosis, the same conclusion; that there was nothing wrong with me, physically or mentally. But my problem kept persisting. They didn't go away. The specters and the entities still hovered at the edge of my vision. Sometimes I wouldn't see them for days, sometimes weeks, but they always came back; dark shadows darting down hallways and around corners. It didn't seem to matter where I was. I'd see a certain few I came to recognize while at home, but I would see others while walking down the street, or in stores, even in the school occasionally. Most were just shadows, some of them almost had a body, others hardly looked human at all. They were the things of nightmares and cheap horror movies but they were real. I tried to ignore them, but I didn't understand what they were or what was causing them. I didn't understand why I could see these things and no one else could.

They weren't everywhere at once. It's not like there were millions just walking down the streets. They were shadowy things, hard to see and harder to identify as real and if you tried to look right at them they usually disappeared like smoke. I rarely saw more than one a day, usually a couple times a week at most. But the occurrences and visions added up over the years and the older I got the angrier my father got and the more trouble I got into.

After nearly a year of searching for a doctor that could help me, that could make these things go away, a doctor that could make me normal, my father finally found one. The shrink was an odd man that charged nearly double what the others had just to look at me. I had tried telling my father it wasn't worth it, this guy would say the same thing all the others did; that there was nothing wrong with me.

But he didn't say the same things. He conducted his tests, made me answer his questions and tell him about the things I would see, tell him about how they usually didn't seem to see me, like they weren't really in the same place at the same time as me. Most of the time they would just repeat on a loop, going about their business and not bother to acknowledge my presence. Every once in a while, one would glance in my direction before disappearing, but I could never tell if it was coincidence or if it was actually looking at me.

After seeing this guy for a week and waiting even longer for results, my father was told I had some type of mental disorder. He said the things I was seeing were hallucinations and symptoms of the disorder. Apparently it also explained why I got angry easily, why I started fights and it could even be the cause of my less then perfect grades. It became the answer for everything that was wrong with me; just another excuse. I was prescribed with medication; pills to make the visions and specters go away, drugs to make me normal.

"Just swallow already and you'd quit choking." My father said, his voice deep and calm, showing no strain at all as he clamped his hand over my face and forced me to tilt my head back. He pinched my nose closed, not letting me draw breath until I swallowed the damn pills. It didn't matter that his only child was beginning to get light-headed and my face was turning purple. It didn't matter that tears stung my eyes and ran down my face, that my legs were shaking and trying to give out on me, just so long as I took the medication. I struggled and fought against him, but in the end, I had to breathe somehow.

But the drugs didn't make the visions stop, they didn't scare the entities away or release my demons. They only numbed me up, drugged me and dragged me down, clouded my head until I couldn't focus on them enough to care. Shadows still danced at the edges of my vision, still brushed passed me in the dark hallways of my family home. I just couldn't bring myself to care anymore. The medicine didn't fix anything, it didn't make me normal, it only made me...placid, dulled, less than myself. It took my fire. But maybe that's what normal was.

Something took notice of my less than alert condition. It was the first time one of them that had ever touched me, ever showed it's self so obviously and so boldly. It was the first time one had deviated from it's loop to inspect the weird kid that could see it. It didn't flit around the edges of my vision like the others, it didn't scurry away when I tried to look directly at it, didn't fade away into nothingness like a hallucination. It waited until the drugs in my system kicked in and made me drowsy, made me lethargic. Made me normal.

I would wake up the next morning, vague memories of this hulking, dark mass floating about and think it had been a dream induced by my medication only to try getting out of bed to find that I had claw marks covering my arms, or a black eye and bloody lip, or some other wound that I had no explanation for.

I could swallow all the pills he forced down my throat, but I could never swallow the shadows.

I sat on the cold tile of the kitchen floor, coughing and sucking in lungfuls of air, waiting for my head to stop spinning and start sinking. Finally, the medication sank in and the color returned to my face and I pulled myself from the floor, ignoring my father's disapproving, disappointed glare. I told myself I'd find a way to make this stop; I'll end this, I'm not crazy, I don't need to be medicated like a mental patient. I chanted it over and over in my hazy mind as I walked toward the bathroom and began cleaning up the dried blood scabbing the dragging marks down my back as best I could. By the time the blood was gone, the marks were nearly gone as well and the medication I was on made me forget what I had been trying to convince myself of in the first place.

The marks always hurt, always stung like a bitch, nearly bringing tears to my eyes but by the end of the day all evidence would be gone, like nothing had happened at all. It was scary shit; not having proof that something was happening to you when you slept and having no one believe you. I was terrified to enter my room, terrified to fall asleep but you can only stay awake for so long before exhaustion takes hold. After the third time falling asleep during class I got sent home with a detention, my father got mad. I was forced to take my meds and I fell asleep after dragging myself to my room. It would find me again, that massive, shadowy thing that couldn't have been a human once upon a time. Again, just like every other night, it would leave me no proof that something was happening.

I tried going to the only person I knew, the one that should have cared, that should have helped me. My father once again told me it was all in my head, that I must have done it to myself in my sleep or he would accuse me of fighting at school again. He turned me away and, just like that, I did the same to him. I did the same to everyone.

I stopped going to my father for support. I stopped trying to tell others of the things I could see, the things they couldn't and so therefore couldn't exist. I stopped asking for help. I played the part of the good boy, the good son, so long as I was left alone. I was done taking shit from others and I was done caring what they thought. The people around me learned of the change in attitude quickly.

"Grimmjow. The principal called again." I just ignored him, like always. Kept staring straight ahead with slightly dulled blue eyes as I walked through the front door and dropped my bag of untouched school books onto the floor. I raised my hand and wiped a small trickle of blood from my lip with the backs of my fingers.

"Ok." I shrugged and trudged down the hall, hoping, nearly praying, that he would slip up, that he would be too busy thinking about the phone call he apparently just received to force me to take the medication I had been taking since my sophomore year. It was finally beginning to wear off since this morning's dose, I was finally beginning to be able to see straight again. No such luck.

The fights persisted, of course, at least for a while. My father would get a call, I would get scolded and ultimately be forced to take more pills after I cleaned up whatever was left behind from my fights. The routine got old and I got mad. I destroyed things; my room, the mirror that hung there, the pictures that I once cherished, the people that got in my way. It didn't take long to gain the reputation I desired; fuck with me and I'll gladly fuck you up.

Without being worried about fitting in or pleasing those around me, without being afraid of what would happen, I was free. It was a new found freedom of sorts that I had never before had. By my senior year, I was the loner that everyone had forgotten why they left alone but knew it was in their best interest to continue doing so. It was the freedom to wonder at my sanity and hate those around me in privacy. I had become a King with no subjects and I was ok with that.

My last year of high school didn't fly by like old people always say it does. It dragged by, crawled passed and seemed to never end. It was filled with the same shit; more fights, more jeers and broken noses, more phone calls to my father and the threat to send me away. I almost would have welcomed that, had I not known it would have been to juvenile or worse.

I kept to myself, keeping my hands stuffed in my pockets where they couldn't hurt anyone but I kept my head held high. I had no friends and nothing better to do so I worked out, buffed up and surely put an end to any thoughts that I was just some scrawny kid to pick on. I mastered the art of intimidation with my looks alone. Crazy blue hair, wild blue eyes and a manic grin full of white teeth will help with that.

"Where'd you get the cuts, Grimmjow? There was blood in the sink again. Another fight? Should I be expecting another phone call?"

I rubbed at my face, feeling numb and hardly able to register the evening sun shining in my eyes as the forced medication began taking affect. "No." I told him, slipping up, forgetting how bad of an idea that was. "but ya wouldn't believe me anyway."

I heard the crack of his hand connecting before I realized he had even hit me. My jaw hurt but the tile of the kitchen floor was cool against it as I listened to his retreating footsteps. My glacial colored eyes slowly widened in terror as that black, shadowy bastard started creeping in along the edges of my vision. Tonight would not be a good night and tomorrow morning would only reveal more blood and pills.

I got a job, saved up money so that I could move out as soon as I graduated. I could have went to college, I had a decent GPA, good enough to get into the local schools anyway. But I didn't want to go. It would have just been another four years of harassment and fighting because I was a little different. My father was disappointed. I didn't care. I would never care, couldn't have even if I wanted to. But wasn't that what normal was? He wanted this, didn't he? I would have thought he'd be happy by now.

My things, what little I owned and could call my own, were packed before my father returned from work. The last day of my senior year, he walked through the front door as I was walking out. With a couple bags slung over one broad shoulder, I hailed a cab, feeling the man's glare drill into me from behind. I never gave him a backward glance nor my new address and he never came looking for me.

I ended up in a decent little, one bedroom apartment on the edge of town. It was an old building but it was clean and well maintained. It was far enough away from everyone that I didn't draw attention to myself and close enough that I could walk to work. I kept to myself and my neighbors left me alone. The land lord let me pick up doing some of the maintenance work around the place, replacing locks, fixing furnaces, that sort of thing. She didn't pay me, but she lessened the rent so it was fine.

With no one around to force pills down my throat, it took no time at all for me to toss the bottle in a drawer and forget about them. But I kept them, couldn't flush them like I should have. They were nothing but a drug to dull me, proof that there was something wrong with me, that I wasn't normal, yet for some reason I still have that little bottle. After years of being drugged up and numbed, as much as I loathed the medication I knew I didn't need, some part of me was afraid to just throw them away. So I kept them, even though just thinking about taking them made my stomach churn and usually ended in a new hole in the wall that I'd have to fix.

Tch. What the hell is normal, anyway?

Strangely enough, with my mind cleared of the numbing effects from the medication, that shadowy thing disappeared, like it knew I was freed from my indifferent haze. It flitted around in the corners for a few weeks, watching, observing and waiting, but never drew near. Eventually it stopped showing up altogether. I no longer woke up with cuts and bruises, no more random injuries that I couldn't remember getting. But it wouldn't last forever, that would have been too normal.

I learned the hard way that certain objects could hold memories and that if those memories were strong enough, I could feel them, see them. Touching things, coming into contact with older furniture or an old picture would send lightening through my skull. It didn't last long, not even long enough for me to react to it and therefore anyone around wouldn't have noticed anything more than a pause in whatever I had been doing. But in that split second, I would feel like my mind was being torn apart. Images would flash through my mind, behind my eyes; ghostly figures replaying their loop as if a film was being rewound and replayed over and over and over.

I didn't know it at first, but I do know. Even through all the drugs that kept me tied down and dulled up, whatever was wrong with me kept getting stronger. I just couldn't tell, couldn't care enough to take notice.

After realizing what triggered these things, these visions or memories or whatever, I quickly got rid of half the old furniture the lady that had lived in the apartment before me had left behind. Now my place is pretty bare, but it did the trick and I haven't had any problems since.

But all that would change. Whatever was wrong with me kept getting stronger, and so did the things around me, the specters and ghosts, the shadowy creature that lurked in my childhood nightmares. I would soon find out that just because it wasn't showing it's self anymore, didn't mean that it wasn't there. It watched and it grew stronger, feeding off my energy and bidding it's time. It was an ageless thing, a ghost and a demon, a creature both alive and dead. It knew what it wanted and it knew how to get it, all it had to do was wait in the shadows.

The medication wouldn't make it go away and I couldn't swallow shadows. All I could do was wait with it.

So... Any thoughts? Should I continue this?

And I have a question for you~ Do you believe in the paranormal?