destroyer.

an eye for an eye.

[debtbound]

they killed me. they brought me back. they killed me. they brought me back. they killed me. they brought me back. they killed me. they brought me back. ( ONE DAY I ESCAPED. BUT I WASN'T FREE. ) they killed me. they brought me back. they killed me. they brought me back. they killed me. they brought me back. they killed me. they brought me back.

caine from the john wick franchise. private & selective. written by k. follows what little canon there is; makes up the rest. carrd by @koiscarrds.

information. / prompts. / sideblog. / pinterest.

[debtbound]

logged on here just to post this

[debtbound]

finally got a carrd because i am incapable of coding together something i like for caine's vibes

[debtbound]

las vegas continental real

[debtbound]

give me the fucking date, i will be there at area15 as soon as i possibly can

[debtbound]

las vegas continental real

[debtbound]

logging on, seeing a single notif from a personal blog, panic blocking instantly with the demeanor of someone deploying an artillery strike against a speck of dust

[grayboxed]

— so you couldn't protect yourself? — the absolute erodes; the boundary, the wall around the self erodes. if i was waiting i had been invaded by time. — but do you think you're free? — i think i recognize the patterns of my nature. — but do you think you're free?

[debtbound]

been thinking about how caine (much like john in the first film) probably used to like doing long drives to decompress. it's about the parallels between them. hate that not being a safe option for him any more! he probably hates it too. he's come to terms with riding shotgun in every car he's in but boy is it something he misses often.

[debtbound]

@godsgun

this park is somewhere caine's frequented for years. he remembers what it looked like when he could still actually see it. it's a fool's errand to guess how much of it has changed now. but there's still the same duck pond, and the same old bench that there has been for years. it creaks as he tilts forward, enough to safely toss a handful of oats into the pond. he can pick out the sound of the oats scattering across the water and then the resulting cacophony as the ducks quack and splash around frantically, competing for food.

he settles back again against the bench. his cane rests against his knee, a reassuring weight. this time, it's not the innocuous wooden cane he uses often in his day to day life. still, even with the blade hidden inside as an obvious precaution, he would rather not draw the sword today. it'd be purposeless. no payment behind it. nothing would be gained but another scant handful of years or however long he has before the table deems his death more useful than his life.

of course, if it comes to it, that's what will happen here. that's where this leads, usually. someone has a bounty out on him, or some grudge, or they're just young and trying to prove himself. from the description he was given, of someone young enough to be new to all of this, he can assume it's some way to make an impression. he's run into it before. someone new tries to claw their way up—not through the old ways, through years of jobs and a slowly growing reputation—but through one deadly bet.

and they lose. because he might pity those who try to take that shortcut, but not enough to spare them.

he runs his fingers over his watch for a moment, checking the time with the braille printed on the watch face. almost half past two now.

caine pauses. he listens. if he can hear the oats scattering across the surface of the water, then he knows when someone's settled on the other side of the bench.

he inclines his head slightly, an acknowledgement even as he stays fixed towards the pond "so lucas got you my note after all. glad he was reliable for once."

[toeata-deactivated20250201]

" everybody eats. it's a pleasant way to keep your hands occupied. " olivia's were traitorous. carrying every errant thought shooed or strained from her face, her shoulders, her voice. flexing, fluttering, wringing, with the unspoken. they ply the skin from an apple now, carefully guiding the blade of a knife along the curve of the fruit. she lets the slivers of skin fall into a small glass tub, stealing a glance at caine. mirroring his smile. " that sounds like a nice balance between you. " sweet, comfortable.

her own ring sits in the soap dish. safely tucked away.

they're not friends not by any parameter she's ever seen him measure. always one step behind the protective sheen of professionalism. but he was there. going through the motions. giving her far more, she suspected, than he offered most. " i used to more often. " said with a shrug, she halves the fruit, carving out its core into the same tub. it joins its peers on the cutting board. " maya and i cook dinner together most nights, " the name warms her voice. curling into the corners of her mouth.

" when she's not at her grandmother's. " on the evenings travis merely haunted their home. little more than the steady depletion of their rum to mark his presence. she'd wanted to keep the bottle, but mary'd had other plans. the thought clusters beneath her fingertips, indenting itself into the side of the half she steadies to dice. " he's missing, technically. they won't declare anything officially for another few years

what did she like to bake, your wife ? " olivia wonders, faintly, if he notices the jump in her voice. the eager leap away from grief and gifts. there'd be little anyhow.

[debtbound]

"there are worse hobbies to have." caine sounds faintly amused more than anything at the notion.

for him, cooking slots easily into how he remembers. memory is associative. one thing calls up something else. caine's line of associations just extends back further than it should, as far as he can tell from talking to other people. he can recount how many times he's done certain things, the nuances around it. this is not a matter of clarity. it blurs the past together into repetitive cues, the same thing a thousand times. this is what he doesn't tell people. maybe he's tired of explaining; maybe it never feels like he can explain it well enough to begin with.

he used to cook with mia, too. not much, with how young she was, but she got to stir things and then measure them. karawek did that even more, with the baking. he wonders sometimes. did mia learn to cook from her grandparents? it's an offshoot of the same root question: can i trust that she is taking care of herself?

he wonders often. then he aches, and he has to turn away before the pain turns into something so unbearable that he has to look for something to dull it back down.

caine settles a little more. any tension that had begun to leak in drains back out.

"get to wait a few years for all the flowers, then." he remembers. the bouquets of flowers from karawek's friends and family. the polite but meaningful notes from people on his side of things. how he brought his own flowers to the grave and stood there for a long while, as if he didn't know what to do with them. he blinks. "when i first met her she mainly made thai desserts. a lot of them were steamed more than baked. but once, for her birthday, i got her into some pastry classes for a few months. she loved to make these... cream puffs with a streusel kind of topic on top. choux au craquelin." he smiles slightly, glancing down towards his shoes. "made them constantly for a month until we were both fucking sick of them. maybe you've done something like that before. figured out something and done it until it's unbearable."

[notmorbid]

birnam wood.

dialogue prompts from birnam wood by eleanor catton.

i prefer enemies to rivals.

being dislikable is more terrible than being disliked.

everything is the same, and everything is different.

you're really enjoying this, aren't you?

do you want to go somewhere and get a drink?

i doubt you're an axe murderer.

why do we always say 'axe murderer'? we never say 'gun murderer' or 'knife murderer'.

we were all pretty drunk that night.

some of the stuff i say, when i remember it, it makes me sick.

come on. we've all made mistakes.

i always know i'm safe with you.

i thought you might appreciate some time to yourself.

i never stay anywhere longer than a night.

i haven't thought about ____ in years.

who do you work for?

i have no idea who you are.

anything else you want to ask?

how do i know you're not setting me up?

you little criminal.

i bet you sleep so well.

we're very snobby about our coffee here.

can you calm down just a little bit, please?

let the record show i kept my mouth shut.

just remember the first rule of pr: say nothing.

you are so unbelievably full of shit.

i said i didn't want to talk about it.

i don't know why i didn't kiss you.

i really want to kiss you.

seriously, all i want is to have a drink alone.

only something someone doesn't want to see in print is news. everything else is advertising.

at least it's not raining, right?

i want to know who you've been talking to.

i think we've got our wires crossed somewhere.

do you think the kind of person who never says 'sorry' is also the kind of person who never says 'thank you'?

thank you for assuming i was listening.

do you think there are two different types of people, or just one?

you were like a different person.

tell me everything there is to tell.

start at the beginning, and don't leave anything out.

you seem like the sort of person who'd have a secret agenda.

everyone can't be on top, or it wouldn't be the top anymore.

if i didn't know any better, i'd say you had a crush.

you can hardly even breathe without lying.

no one ever actually knows what the right thing is.

you don't like to be out of control. is that it?

i'm worried this is just a bit of fun for you. like, it doesn't really mean anything.

you're seeing me differently now.

it's like a black mirror episode.

can we do drugs now, please?

everybody has their own reasons for doing what they do. you can't police motivation.

none of this is real. it's a simulation.

we did this together. this is our fault.

i got you into this mess, and i'm going to get you out.

every weakness, seen differently, can be a strength.

just say it over and over again until you believe it.

no hard feelings. honestly.

whatever fantasy world you're living in right now, snap out of it.

call me any time. day or night.

i just feel like nothing's real.

it's one of those albums where you can't just listen to one track. you have to hear the whole thing, you know?

we're not still on acid, are we?

you didn't fuck it up. i fucked it up.

we were just young.

people don't run if they've got nothing to hide.

you're going to rot in hell.

i've thought about you all day.

don't give up. you can't give up.

i feel like a stupid child.

i want to be able to say i died fighting.

[debtbound]

standing here post fargo-s5 thinking about debts like ah christ

[axeattitude]

to think of caine without his annoyance edging into the image is strange. or less of it, anyway. it's been as much a part of him as anything else since they met, and surely for much longer before that, too. it's a core element, a foundational pillar, hand-in-hand with his grumbles and the waxing and waning of his patience for the world and the people in it.

there is an edge to him. there always has been, and for better or worse, there likely always will be. it feels wrong to imagine any part of it ground down and smoothed into a dulled bluntness for the sake of curbing it. not for him, at least.

love doesn't always require change. some things can remain the same, as they ever were.

"well, no. you don't have to do that. i'm not goin' to ask you to either. like, that's part of who you are. it's just, you know how i get." kerry slides his arms up his thighs and fists the loose material of his house pants. the linen is warm in his hands; he looks down at the textured lines of the fabric and keeps his focus there. "i can't, fuck, i don't know. read people sometimes. discern things correctly. uh, emotions and intents and tones and shit, for whatever reason, and..." he draws a tight breath, holds it. his exhale is heavy. "you may look tense, but, um, it might just be me reading into somethin' that isn't there."

[debtbound]

"trust me, i'm not saying i'll never be annoyed again. that's like asking the sun to not come up in the morning." caine knows better. he's an old man. he's set in his ways. those tendencies were first set years ago. he's always been one to snap a little, to talk shit when he thinks people deserve it—which can be nearly constantly, depending on how things are going for him. "but fair enough. probably overdoing it a little to try to change that too much. that was a problem to solve a few decades ago at minimum."

in opposition to the tension, a looseness settles in as caine moves to sit on the edge of the bed. his hand gently sweeps along the top of the blankets before he settles, checking to make sure he's occupying a clear space.

he turns it over in his head. the first time he was married, this was less of an issue. a lot has changed since then. "i never said i'm not tense, either. there's a good chance you're right. i can't say shit about being able to read people correctly, either. so i think we need a middle ground on this. i can try to communicate if i'm annoyed and i need space. sometimes i'm just tense, too. annoyance is a kind of tension too."

being relaxed in and of itself can be a kind of performance. it's a way to disarm people, to show a kind of control over a situation. it's a tool. sometimes, caine knows, he wields tools he doesn't even mean to out of instinct.

[metamorphesque]

— Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

[debtbound]

@tocook : don't you think this is wrong?

"let me give you some advice. 'wrong' became a relative concept the first time some idiot in a cave bashed someone else's brain in with a rock."

he's unwavering in this, even if his body language seems almost distracted. everything happening out here—with gus fring, with mike, with jesse, with all of the rest—it's the ugly truth of how business goes. he could tell jesse a worse story. a thousand worse stories. grudges make the world go around, and everyone owes someone something worse.

this is about cleaning up. what happens to the man locked and tied up in the room isn't really caine's concern. he's here to help clean up messes, another pair of hands where mike can only be one, and that's the truth of it all. it's a job so simple that it didn't even require him drawing the blade. the cane is still a heavy, reassuring weight, maybe a little splattered with blood. what he won't tell jesse, the honest truth of it all, is that he's decent bait.

in his god awful albuquerque hotel room—because there is no such thing as an albuquerque continental, and there likely never be—

caine leans against the door. he lets his weight settle. part of this position is so he can hear any noises emerging from the other side of the door. he'll pick up on it before jesse does. "all i can tell you is that i've done plenty worse than this. and in nicer locales, not to talk too much shit about the great state of new mexico." he'll talk more about it once he leaves, but he's half-pretending to be polite during all this. professional, maybe, even more than polite.

for a moment, caine rummages in his pockets. he takes out a slightly crumpled box of cigarettes and pries one out, tilting the box towards jesse in an open offer. "take one if you want. we'll be here for a little while. hopefully our friend in there's smart and just waits it out."

[debtbound]

@cloistress : they say my heart is made of stone.

"'they' will say anything if it makes something a little easier for them to handle," says caine. it's easy, light. he knows what people say about him, for example. the exact words depend on who's doing the telling, but there's plenty of shit that people think he doesn't hear. as if by nature a blind man also can't hear. some of it's pity. plenty more is about the cruelty of it all. "what i've found is that you can't take most of it to heart. or you just laugh about it."

he leans back against the wall. the cigarette dangling from between his fingers is burning down slowly, bit by bit. he's taken a drag here and there, but it's mostly for the habit of it. you can do a lot of things, as it turns out, more out of sheer habit than anything conscious and intentional. after a moment he lifts the cigarette to his mouth and inhales.

he can't remember any more exactly when he started feeling so tired about everything. was it even before he lost his sight? before karawek died? maybe. or maybe it was at either one of those moments, the exact second where he started feeling like he was waiting to die rather than clawing his way towards whatever the rest of his life was going to be.

a heart of stone. if only, he thinks. that's not as real for anyone as they might want to believe. people, things, events–they worm their way in. the shell you make for yourself is never truly watertight.

after a moment, caine flicks the remains of the cigarette down towards the sidewalk and grinds it down under his shoe. a few sparks sputter out. "people used to say that kind of thing about me too. that i was more like a machine than a person. which was half-true, mostly with people who only met me when i was working." he could turn off so much of himself in the fight. it was fun for him, in a way, but not fun in a way that was easy to communicate for those who didn't share the same drive. his own private enjoyment.

you find what you can. you feel something, even if everyone else believes you don't feel much at all. "but who really gives a shit what they all think? do you want that to be true or not?"

[luthienne]

Anne Carson, from Antigonick

[Text ID: Messenger: too big a silence]