“ STARING. “ for sender to find receiver sitting alone staring at a wall, covered in blood, and to touch their arm . / @etvidentium
THERE IS NO saving yancy. he’s known this for a very long time.
HE’S LIVED IN this bubble for too long, he thinks; maybe a decade or two ago, sure, he could’ve been coaxed out of his den; a few before even that, he would’ve jumped for joy at the chance to get the hell out of these brick walls. before that, yancy admittedly has no clue what he’d want, besides revenge - besides his nails digging into someone elses neck. there was a time when throwing a dented baseball bat or a chipped knife down a ravine was a good stress reliever, when violence and tranquility went hand in hand. now, it just makes his heart pound to an unsettling degree.
HE THINKS it might be ready to pop by now. does this mean he’s weaker than he once was, or that he’s come full circle? both ends of the spectrum bring adrenaline in spades.
IF HE ENJOYED IT, yancy thinks, there wouldn’t be this heavy swirl of something sitting in his gut. his limbs wouldn’t feel like lead, his eyes glassy paperweights in his skull, set to bore a hole into the brick before him. he was tired. he didn’t feel like moving. tv was doing him a big favor by dealing with the dead weight on his behalf, the corpse of murderslaughter unceremoniously dumped in the back garden. he’d snapped. it didn’t matter, of course; murderslaughter wasn’t a real man, and the ghost that haunted that poor meat puppet was well and truly alive, making the prison boil and seethe around them. the walls were vibrating; or was that just his eyes.
YANCY LOOKED DOWN. removed his hands from the stinging gash in his abdomen, black and red blood mingling among the wound. at least he could tell whose was whose. he hadn’t gone down without a fight, and maybe that was something for his conscious to grapple with later.
HE REGISTERED tv looming behind him before he felt the hand on his shoulder. feeling was difficult right now; took up way too much of his energy. he looked up at them first, with big, bleary, saint bernard eyes, then looked down at where their arm was stretched out to, and gave the hand a tight lipped smile. whether it was to beckon him, or to provide an amount of comfort, he didn’t know. the latter was pretty hard to come by.
“HEY, YOUSE,” he said, tone jovial but weak, as he finally relaxed into the chair. he tried to turn a tad, look tv in the eye, but the wound smiled and spat more blood onto his shirt and he had to pause and breathe instead. “all done? you’re a good pal, buddy, y’know that? I, uh...”
YANCY LOOKED DOWN once more, eyed the wound, and then turned his attention back to tv. “might, uh, have to leave this life alone. i’m gonna be damn near useless ‘til it’s healed up, and I don’t know if we’s got ‘da time to waste on that. might be ... worth starting over here.”
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