Alister lay motionless in his bed, the vastness of the space surrounding him feeling almost suffocating. His body felt impossibly weak, as though he hadn't moved in years. The soft, velvet curtains hung heavily around him, offering no comfort, and the air felt thick, heavy with the weight of his confusion. His limbs were fragile, almost foreign, as if they no longer belonged to him.
He drifted between fevered dreams and fractured memories, each moment slipping further from his grasp.
The cold crash of waves outside was the only thing that anchored him, their sound distant yet constant, a reminder that the world continued even as his body felt trapped in a fog of time. Faces, half-remembered, flickered around him-distorted and fading.
"Hadn't he died?" He thought, but the question felt too distant, too impossible to answer.
Then, as his mind struggled to make sense of the confusion, something sharp pierced through the haze.
A scream, raw and frantic, tore from his throat. His body jerked upright, his chest tight, his breath shallow. He wasn't sure what had happened-where he was-but the room around him began to come into focus. His heart pounded as the world grew clearer, the shadows retreating.
Figures rushed to his bedside, and in the sudden flurry of movement, Alister's eyes locked onto the face of his nanny. Her eyes, wide with panic and worry, met his.
She was the first to reach him, and in that moment, her presence felt like an anchor, something real in a sea of confusion.
He stared at her, lump of unspoken words building in his throat and choking him .
The tenderness in her eyes-a softness that spoke of care-was enough to make his chest tighten. His mind, muddled with his past arrogance and neglect, was now filled with the bitter realization of what he had lost.
He reached out to her, his fingers trembling, grabbing at her sleeve.
Without a word, she pulled him into her arms, holding him close.
Her voice filled with anguish "My little master! be brave, you have always been on the stronger side."
Tears streamed down his face as he clutched her, feeling the weight of everything he'd never been able to say, everything he'd never been able to feel.
For the first time, he cried, and in her embrace, he found something that had eluded him for so long: peace.
He returned to the time he was ten years old boys going through secondary gender manifestion.