Pathetic by Udekai ( @udekai )
Serie with 15 works. Ongoing, 188k words.
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Part 1, chap 7:
Didn’t deserve it. Nobody does. Happens anyway. You deserve help. Temptation. Something he could not have- did not need to be reminded. Stop dangling it in front of him. Love. Addiction. Keep it away. Couldn’t have that, either. Comfort. Please. What? What comfort? Something stopped him from abusing the voice in his head. Not compassion. Fuck off. A couple of beats of silence. He found himself regretting the thought, though it was the right thing to think. The right thing to do. Leave him alone. Still here. Matt swallowed thickly. His skin was clammy and cold, his hair plastered to his forehead from leftover sweat. It was turning into a gel. He was disgusting. Disgusting. Beautiful. Loved. It wasn’t as easy to smile at this one; the last path he went down, the last train of thought- that one was a comedian. He didn’t know what this one was. He could only manage the vaguest smirk. I’d like to be alone now, he thought, more gently than he'd like. More fragile, like he was pleading. You are. Matt won. He fucking won.
Part 1, chap 8:
Good job, dad! You did it. A giggle bubbled up in him that turned into an earnest laugh. He threw his head back and chuckled until he had to wipe a tear from his eye. It took a moment to settle down, laughter still bouncing off of the distant hills. What a fucking way to get something done. Absolutely insane. Of course, that was somebody else that dear ol' dad died for. Some schmuck with big, hopeful dreams and a soul. Matt didn't have either of those things. Didn't need them. Anything he didn't already have, he had the tools to acquire, and in the absence of anything worthwhile, he planned to take whatever he wanted. The world that forgot him would know his name, but they wouldn't dare say it aloud. He wasn't supposed to be like this, but they didn't call men "self-made" because they came out of factories. He would build himself out of blood and money, and carve what he was owed out of the same breed of people that put him here. Prissy PR executives. Slimy, ineffective lawyers. Guns for hire. Desperate, stupid people. Any one of them could be snapped, just as he had. Even the Hand would bow. A king, at last.
Because laughing in the face of despair... is the right way to go.
Part 10, chapter 25:
There was anger in him. Matt, at his core, was vengeful, but he had not known this kind of raw rage since he was a child. He felt unstable and volatile; running on natural gas that had yet to catch a spark. He didn't know what he was so pissy about. Maybe he was angry that there were so many obstacles between him and being known, or that he wanted to be known in the first place, or that he couldn't allow himself to be known. Maybe a mixture of all of them. He wanted, and he could not have, and maybe it was as simple as that. Maybe the familiarity of this bitter taste on the back of his tongue was what inspired it: because he did know this. He knew temptation like an old enemy: he wanted a father, he wanted a family, he wanted his mother when the blood dried between his fingers, he wanted to run away with someone who understood, he wanted vengeance without cost, he wanted the world to see what they had created and weep with apology. He wanted to be mourned. He wanted, and he could not have.
