curse me, bless me, whats the difference?

originally written/posted: 2nd july 2021

characters: mateo ojok

relationships: none

additional notes: magical tatoos, magic, angst, hurt no comfort (he just cries then ignores it like a normal sane person), child neglect, implied/refrenced alcohol abuse/alcoholism, shitty dad but not on purpose, unintentional child neglect, implied/referenced suicide, the town is sentient, ghosts, mentioned spirits and other eldritch beings, trust me talubh is just like that (talubh is the setting of this story, it's a fictional town in kerry), not beta read we die like mateo's mam (too soon?)

summary: Mateo was 13 when he noticed them for the first time. The tattoos, that is. Or maybe markings works better? Whatever they're called, he was 13 and far too tired when he spotted them first.

Or

I put Mateo, an oc of mine, through some pain for story reasons. Sorry not sorry.

finished, 1/1 chapters, word count: 1,120

Mateo was 13 when he noticed them for the first time. The tattoos, that is. Or maybe markings works better? Whatever they're called, he was 13 and far too tired when he spotted them first.

He was getting changed when he noticed in his old, dirty mirror the light and translucent things moving and waving starting on his left shoulder and moving down his arm and his chest, the pattern of swirls and lines and dots mixing together in a ghost of a tattoo that disturbed that his previously near unblemished dark skin. They looked red and soft, and he stood there mesmerized for a moment before the reality of it sunk in.

His hands strayed to his shoulder and brushed against the pattern lightly. The tattoos acted like water, rippling at his touch. He pushed at the skin and watched as they swayed once more.

"No." he thought as he rubbed at his skin, "No, they can't be real".

Yet no matter how he scrubbed at the skin, the markings wouldn't leave.

The markings that were said to mean that the town favours you.

The town that killed his mother.

It favours Mateo.

After what the town did, it thinks it can place its fucking mark on him.

Mateo wants to scream. He wants to shout how unfair it is. He wants to cry and beg to the heavens and the town and anything that will listen to make the tattoos disappear, no matter the cost.

Obviously, he can't do that. (Not because anyone might hear it and care, but because he isn't stupid enough to make deals he can't keep.)

Instead, he falls to the floor in front of his mirror, still only half dressed, his t-shirt long abandoned on the floor somewhere behind him, and he sobs. Covers his eyes with his hands and quietly sobs to himself.

He doesn't understand. Why? Why him? He's a child, he shouldn't deal with this! Not when so much is already going wrong, has been going wrong for years! Not when all the shitty things that are happening are this town’s fucking fault! What did he do to deserve this godforsaken blessing-curse-thing?

He doesn't know how long he sits there, sobbing and begging for someone, anyone to explain, but he does know that eventually he runs out of tears, and his knees are aching, and his throat is sore, so he gets up wiping away his tears and continues on about his day. And, well, if he throws out all the shirts that show of his arms or have a lower neckline, then no one is there to care anyway, is there?

(He wishes someone did notice. He wishes his dad was around enough to notice. He wishes he had friends who would get concerned that he was wearing long sleeves in the summer. He wishes and he hopes and he prays, and yet he is still all alone.)

He checks the time on the old, slightly broken clock on his wall, and groans when he realises he wasted an hour crying pathetically. Feeling too sick to be able to stomach anything but some water, he grabs his bag, full of library books and notebooks, and heads over to the one place of comfort in the entirety of Talubh.

The library.

Most people avoid it like the plague, but every day proves more and more that Mateo isn't like most people.

The library is a fairly small, old building with two storeys, one for children, the other for everyone else, that permanently smells like burnt plants and lavender and probably houses something inhuman. Most places in town do. Mateo, having grown up with this, is only vaguely aware that isn't exactly normal for most places. He tries not to focus on that too much, or he thinks he might go insane. Or he might start crying again. He isn't sure which one would be more embarrassing.

Now, when he says that most people avoid the library, he means it. He isn't sure if it's the smell, the whispering, glowing tomes that appear and disappear from the shelves at random, the fact that no one's ever actually seen the librarian, just heard their muttering from behind bookshelves, or the way that sometimes you can see giggling shadow creatures out of the corner of your eye, but no one except desperate parents, desperate exam students, or very, very, very lonely children ever go to the library.

It's gotten so bad that Mateo's heard the town council is planning on building a new library nearer the town centre. He hopes that this one will still tick around, even if they build a new one. He feels safe there. Safer than he feels at home. Safer and more at home than he feels anywhere else.

That should explain why, when Mateo still had red eyes and shaky hands, he went to the library. He’d take any amount of comfort he could get, not that he’d ever admit that was why he went there. He was just bored and didn't want to go grocery shopping yet, is all.

(Ignoring it works, right? It won't have lasting consequences. He’ll be okay because he has to be. He might live with his father, but he might as well live alone with how often that man is drunk off his ass, and he can't afford to fall apart when he has chores, and shopping, and homework, and a million other things to do. He just couldn't. Not again.)

So, Mateo slipped into the top floor of the building and sat down in his designated corner on the red beanbag there, near the young adult section and the computers, and, humming a quiet hello to the shadow creatures, pulled out a notebook and started writing. After all, he couldn't let something as small (life changing, horrific, amazing, terrifying) as this keep him away from his stories. From one of two only forms of escaping reality he had in this hellhole town.

(‘Was it really a hellhole?’ he would think sometimes ‘I mean, it's sentient, right? Just because I think the people living here can be awful sometimes, doesn't mean the town itself is horrible, right?’ Then he reminds himself that the town is the one who drove his mother to what she did, who made her think that the lake was her only escape. He doesn't feel bad calling it a hellhole after that.)

‘One day’, he thinks, ignoring the brand on his skin that tells him his dreams won't become reality, ‘I will leave this town behind and I will become something Mam would have been proud of.’

It used to be a promise, now it's just depressing.