A new body. A new world. A new chance.
It felt like an opportunity—one I couldn't afford to waste. This time, I wanted to make a difference. If I had never been able to before, surely now, with a human vessel, I could. At least, that's what I had thought.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
Golden-yellow hair. Eyes caught between the deep blue of the ocean and the sharp green of fresh lime. Pale, sensitive skin. Those were the most striking features of this body—this vessel. But there was more. So much more. And as time passed, I would come to learn that the body I inhabited held secrets even I wasn't prepared for.
At first, I wasn't fully myself. A war raged within me—a conflict between who I thought I was and something deeper, something buried within this body. There were moments when I watched myself do things I didn't want to do. Enjoy things I should have despised. Feel guilt over actions I never intended, yet somehow carried out. It was as if I was both the puppeteer and the puppet, torn between control and submission.
And then there was the beginning.
It was already a nightmare.
The place I had been born into—or rather, placed into—was anything but safe. A home filled with demons, not the mythical kind, but the kind that walk in human skin, spreading chaos and pain. Abuse and suffering were stitched into its very fabric. And for reasons I didn't yet understand, this body knew it. It remembered things I did not. It carried a past that wasn't mine, and yet, I was forced to bear its weight.
That past led me down a path I never expected.
One day, as if guided by something beyond my own will, I told my elementary school teacher what had been happening to me. About the hands that had touched where they never should have. About the things that had been done. I didn't understand why I spoke those words, why my lips moved before I had even fully processed the thought. But the vessel knew. And it made me follow through.
It wasn't long before they took me away.
I was placed in a juvenile facility, far from the house that had never been a home. And as quickly as it had all unraveled, I watched the people I had once called friends slip away.
At first, they were worried. Or at least, they seemed to be. But one by one, they disappeared, until only a few still cared. And then, none at all.
But before all of that—before the facility, before the betrayal—there had been someone else. Someone important to this vessel. A best friend.
He had vanished without warning, gone from my life before I could ever truly process his presence. To me, it should have been irrelevant. But the vessel wouldn't let me forget.
No matter how much time passed, I could never shake his name from my mind.
Fede.
Maybe short for Federico. Maybe just a fragment of something lost. I searched for answers, but found nothing.
Nothing but the emptiness he left behind.