Razor Wings

She is tiny; petite, really – she barely comes up to his shoulder. Her small stature and beautiful face are associated with innocence and fragility, and she is as delicate as a butterfly, and lovely as one too.

She has always been a little too sharp with her words, a little too harsh with her actions. Her teasing is fun, but her barbs hit a little too close to home; her light-hearted words are sometimes heavy with accusations and taunts.

It begins at work, a day when–

No, it truly all begins when they are in high school, and they think they love each other because they are too young and naïve to know better. But they care for each other, and that’s all that matters. Life goes on and time passes and many years later, they are together – they live together, they attend the same university, and they even work at the same restaurant.

Perhaps it was their closeness that it was their undoing. He thought it would strengthen their relationship, and help them weather the storms that would come, but he was wrong. According to her, he is wrong about most things.

It begins at work, where he is a waiter and she a waitress – he is friendly and charming to the customers, making them feel a little more inclined to tip as they finish. She is efficient and hard-working, and whatever the customers need, she will get. They make a good team; they always have.

It is a hard time, and they are struggling to pay for everything, but they get by – they always have. Today is worse than usual, and suddenly his hand is shaking, the plates are sliding and the glass shatters on the floor. The crystalline tinkling is loud in the sudden hush, but just as quickly, conversations resume and he is left to pick up the mistakes.

She hurries over and helps him clean up, nothing but concerned for his job, or perhaps the possibility of tiny glass shards embedding themselves in his flesh. She insists that he is working too hard, that she needs to take a break, but the manager comes over and jumps to conclusions.

Sometimes she is a little too harsh, a little too sharp with her words, but it isn’t sometimes anymore. They are both valuable members of the staff, but his way with the customers is enough to let him stay. She is not so lucky, but the manager knows their situation and lets them take the day off. He’ll come back to work tomorrow, but she won’t. Her lips are pressed into a thin line, her eyes are cold and hard and there’s nothing he can say.

They get home, but he does his best – he draws a warm bath for her, prepares her favourite food and fills their glasses up with sparkling apple juice. The candles are lit, and they give off that strangely comforting smell that he hopes will calm her down.

As they eat dinner, she smiles a little more and is pleased with his efforts. Then he makes the mistake – the first of many – of mentioning that this is a nice end to a bad day, and the reminder shuts her down and makes her angry.

Tomorrow, she says loudly, she will go back to the restaurant and explain everything. It is not her fault, and they both know it; it is his. He should’ve told the truth, she accuses, but instead, kept silent – why? She demands to know why, but he doesn’t know.

No, she says suddenly. He doesn’t know anything, much less how to serve properly and it’s no wonder that he dropped everything; he’s a clumsy, bumbling fool and it’s a miracle that they’ve even been employed for so long. It’s all his fault, she says.

He tries his hardest to placate her, and she slaps him. She is too small to do any lasting damage, but although her words hurt, her actions have wounded him. He has never been hit before, except, perhaps, when he was a young, disobedient boy, and that one time when he had started a fight with another boy. But never hit by a girl, and one who he loved.

They gape at each other for a moment, and her eyes are hard, and he thinks that everything is ruined between them, but then she cries and falls into his arms like a little girl.

It is the first fight of many to come. His co-workers sometimes notice the bruises (she’s learning to channel her anger into her strength) and he dismisses them – after all, he’s clumsy. Sometimes his friends notice the small scratches and nail marks, and mistake them for marks of love.

Oh, how wrong they are.

Worse are the times when there is glass, but they only come in fleeting moments of fury. She makes sure there is no lasting damage to his face, but his arms take the brunt of her anger, held defensively in front as a shield, as weak protection against her wrath.

Worse still are her apologies. He’ll come home, and she’ll be waiting for him, and as soon as she sees him, she bursts into tears and confesses that she loves him, that she’s sorry, that she missed him and that she needs him more than anyone – needs him to keep her sane.

The worst moments are when he believes her, and they come often. She is so defenceless, so fragile that he cannot help but love her. Sometimes he wonders why he is so reluctant to return home, and sometimes he wonders why he leaves in the first place.

He is pathetic, and they both know it. She makes it a point to tell him so, wielding broken glass and sharp nails, and he cowers on his knees and apologises. She screams at him. She asks him why he is still here; she asks him why he hasn’t left and made them both happy. The answer? He can’t.

She is the only thing between him and the door, between him and freedom. She knows it and she taunts him; she is still tiny, still petite, but she used to barely come up to his shoulder. Now, she towers over him as he kneels. She is still delicate, and this is why there is unbalance – because while she can hit him, he cannot hit her; her beauty remains untouched, unscarred.

She is still as lovely as a butterfly, and everyone sees this, but not everyone sees that her wings are razors, sharp as shattered glass.

A/N: So I wrote this story on a whim, because my school has a group (High Resolves) and they're targeting domestic violence. Most people will be picturing a husband hitting his wife, a man abusing is children, and yeah, this happens. But women and children aren't the only victims - men, I think, are often a little bit worse off.

Think of how humiliating it would be to be a man, and have to admit that your female partner, who is probably smaller and a lot less physically intimidating, is abusing you. In the last few paragraphs, 'she' is the only thing stopping him, but not physically. Society always wants men to be strong and macho, in the same way they want women to be beautiful and pretty much helpless. It's a lot harder for a man to admit he is being abused (my opinion) than it would be for a woman to admit the same.

Back to my school. Their motto is "Speak Out" and you can follow them on Tumblr (and then you'll know what school I go to OTL) here: www.speakout-hghs.tumblr.com. You'll probably get more information than what I've tried to say here.

But no matter who you are, domestic violence is never okay.