`tool of misery
@ccjihoon
He was already starting to question what he’d started. He’d effectively ostracized himself from the friends he’d spent his high school years alongside, alienated them from the accidental rebellion he was pouring himself into because he had nowhere else to put his will to live. They wouldn’t come with him, into this world of turning the unknown into the grisly truth. They wouldn’t hear it. They had their teams and their league and their rules. They looked at him like he was the joke, as if protecting innocent kids from selling their souls to the devil himself was a cause worth laughing at. He could feel the pang in his chest grow sharper, could feel the phantom ache where his automail connected with the real flesh of his real leg grow worse the way it did when he was distressed or upset in any way.
He flopped back onto his bed, feeling useless and drained and somehow numb in spite of the pain in his chest, his leg, his head, in spite of the frustration and fear and anger blooming at the base of his skull. His soul, their souls, everyone’s souls, the very essence of their existence, their being, their magic, was wrapped up in the slimy inhuman fingers of Aku to do as he pleased once they were freed from their mortal shells by death. And yet, nobody seemed to care.
He couldn’t sleep knowing that his brother’s soul, his team’s souls, were somewhere in some horrible limbo controlled by Aku, that his soul’s fate would be the same, that no one was doing anything about it. He couldn’t eat knowing his brother had signed his soul away in exchange for Taeyong’s legs to work again only for Taeyong to lose one of those legs to one of Aku’s grotesque creations. His face looked sunken and gaunt, as if he was halfway to dying already. But at least if he starved himself to death, Aku wouldn’t see him turned into one of those horrid familiars he used as a tool of misery and horror--
“Why are you here,” he calls into the stagnant air of his bedroom as he senses the pulsing change in the atmosphere indicative of his card’s presence, more of a command to explain himself than a question, “What do you want.”
