"I wish...I wish...I wish..."
Salem awoke with those words still echoing in his mind.
Salem opened his eyes and saw both Alina and Ruby sitting next to him quietly arguing as to whether or not they should wake him.
"He doesn't seem to be having a nightmare though!" Alina hissed. "He might just be having a sad dream or recalling something! We shouldn't interrupt that!"
"But what if it effects him when he wakes up?" Ruby asked quietly.
"Then we talk with him about it." Alina responded as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
"You don't need to wake me." Salem said mildly, patting their shoulders. "I'm up."
He sat up and wiped his eyes, which were wet.
"What happened?" Alina asked concernedly.
"I dreamed about the night my parents left me and my brother to fend for ourselves." Salem sighed sadly. "I was one at the time. Callum was seven."
"Why would they do such a thing?" Ruby asked wondering at how cold people could be.
"Greed? Money? Power?" Salem gave them a few of his best guesses. "Whatever it was, they offered no money, no support, no way for us to survive on our own, and never contacted us again."
"Your parents left you two and up and left?" Alina asked, utterly shocked.
"Yeah." Salem nodded. "In my dream I was reliving the night we learned but the me you know now was in control of the little me."
"I'm sorry." Ruby tried to comfort him.
"It doesn't hurt as much as it did when I was old enough to understand what they did." Salem said. "When I turned two I finally understood that they had just left us to fend for ourselves. When I understood that I cried for days."
"You were two!" Alina said indignantly. "You shouldn't have had to go through that!"
"We were then stuck in a foster home that both Callum and I considered a hell on earth." Salem continued.
Ruby sat next to him silently, listening to him recount his old life, and resting a hand on his back to try and comfort him.
"When I turned four I was a freshman in high school, taking high-level math, science, and history classes." Salem said emotionlessly. "I was bullied in both school and at the orphanage."
"I was kicked against walls, stolen from, verbally abused, and deliberately cut off from any sort of group that could help me in high school." Salem looked into the red-streaked dawn sky as he recalled some of his most painful memories. "I remember at high school how small I felt, how insignificant, and how helpless I was when I was."
"Why are people like that?" Alina asked. "What would they stand to gain from such atrocious treatment for you?"
"Satisfaction, a feeling of power, pleasure, entertainment, to name just a few." Salem cracked a smile. "At the orphanage it was worse."
Alina opened her mouth before closing it again and copied Ruby and let him continue his story.
"In the orphanage I was everyone's toy, for lack of a better word." Salem remembered the awful treatment he had endured and smiled lightly. "I was used to test everything from their makeshift knives to their Jerry-rigged crossbows. I was beaten mercilessly, called horrible things by both staff and children alike, and there were kids who specifically tried to damage my head because they were jealous of my intelligence."
"That's awful." Ruby said. "I can't imagine being treated that way by my own species."
"This wasn't new for humanity" Salem shook his head. "Before I was even born, several races of humanity were decimated, be it by disease, genocide, slavery, and segrigation. This went on for centuries.
"Adolf Hitler killed over six million jews, along with eleven million of those who were mentally disabled or didn't fit their 'master race' profile during world war II.
"And then there was Joseph Stalin. He didn't kill as many, but he still killed as many as nine million, over three million credited to his harsh policies, along with around six million people killed from being sent to the gulag, being forced to relocate, and executions.
"My country did nothing direct about Hitler until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Prior to the United States joining the war, we were supplying millions of weapons and billions of rounds to our allied countries as aid.
"The war lasted about six years, and ended four years after we entered it.
"As for Stalin, no one did anything about Stalin and his actions were only declassified after the Soviet Union, his country, dissolved."
"I tell you this because I want you two to understand that the world didn't care about what happened until it affected them." Salem explained. "We were cold until it directly affected us. And that's how it turned out for the people that ran the orphanage I stayed in.
"Callum got a job, and we were able to move ourselves away from the area." Salem shook his head. "We were seen off with derision and ridicule, but when Callum went to an attorney, their attitudes quickly changed."