Being Gem

            For three years now they had been hammering it into him. This man killed your parents. Gem had no choice but to believe what Donoterase told him. The part of him that protested, the instinctual knowledge that said This man is good, the way he felt the man’s soul inside his own—he learned to distrust them. All he had to do was think of the parents he would never know, and something inside him raged. He heard the stories of the man’s brutality, and he feared him.

            But at night when he dreamed about him, he never saw that face filled with murderous rage. He only saw the pain, the gentleness, the strange familiarity. In his dreams he knew him as he knew himself. Upon waking, the dreams disappeared and there was cold reality. Out there a man lived who had killed Gem’s parents and sought a way to kill him, too. Donoterase protected him. He was safe there, in the little world that was all he knew. The dichotomy was all part of the life that was Gem’s.

            In his deepest soul, in the place even he dared not examine, for fear Mr. Raines would find it out, he hated his life. How could you hate the only thing you’d ever known? If he hated it, he would be a bad person, because his life was about helping others, about doing his duty. But in the secret places of his psyche, he hated it. He hated being the center of attention, judging attention. He hated being afraid his simulation results would not please Mr. Raines or the other shadowy figures that surrounded him. He hated the simulations and the nightmares they gave him. He hated having to hide the nightmares from Mr. Raines, the effort it took to present an untroubled face day after day. He hated the nights when liquid stung his eyes and his chest felt a heavy weight, and he had to lie perfectly still with his face in his pillow to keep the liquid from coming out and betraying him. He hated how waves of emotion he couldn’t name but knew were unacceptable surged through him. He hated the feeling that his inner self was unacceptable, that to be the Gemini he was supposed to be, he had to stifle the Gem he knew himself to be. Why was so much of him unacceptable? Why was he such a bad person?

            He knew he was bad, because he hated Mr. Raines most of all. It was bad because Mr. Raines was in charge of taking care of him, of teaching him, of making sure his simulation results helped someone. He owed everything to Mr. Raines. But nothing terrified him as Mr. Raines did. He didn’t have to raise a hand to terrify him, though he raised a hand often enough. Gem had seen inside his mind, once, when he couldn’t help it, and now he felt a shudder of horror every time he saw him. Surely that was wrong. It had to be wrong that his nightmares involved Mr. Raines and the rare dreams that brought him comfort involved the man who killed his parents.