EVERYTHING (but in sections cause I need to be more organised)
Paper Fangs (Incomplete)
#Mafia #2nd person POV #Jay Devell #Suspense #Mystery #Amnesia #Ongoing #Violence #Fighting #Tattoos #Family Issues
Chapter 1: The Morning Before
Chapter 2: Snake Eyes
Chapter 3: Trying To Remember
Chapter 4: Friend or Foe?
Chapter 5: Jun Park
Chapter 6: Something's Coming
Chapter 7: Captain Elias Grey
Chapter 8: Marco Diaz
Chapter 9: Laila Kapoor
Chapter 10: The USB Burns
Chapter 11: The Warden's Teeth
Unchosen (Complete)
#Chosen One #Living Weapon Whumpee #Whumpee runs away #Magic #Romance #Magic Powers #3rd person limited POV
Chapter 1: Finn Rook
Chapter 2: Leave Them
Chapter 3: Gone
Chapter 4: Learning
Chapter 5: You Failed
Chapter 6: Not Alone
Chapter 7: Who are you?
Chapter 8: Tell Him
Chapter 9: Fight Only To Disable
Chapter 10: Soren Vane
Chapter 11: Torture
Chapter 12: Listen
Chapter 13: Just Finn
Chapter 14: Before Chosen
Chapter 15: All Wrong
Chapter 16: Going Back
Chapter 17: Help Each Other
Chapter 18: The Alpha
Chapter 19: The Woman At The Door
Chapter 20: The Architect
Foundlings (Incomplete)
#Monster and girl #Found Family #Siblings relationship #Life lessons #1st person POV #3rd person POV
The Monster That Stayed
The Song That Changed
The Parts That Aren't Cruel
The Choice She Made
Humanity
The Wearing
~~ More to be written ~~
The Borrowed Week
The Village Was Saved
WHUMP Situations (Updating)
#whumpee+knife #helpless!caretaker #whumpee!bleeding out #magic!whumper
#famous!whumpee #merman!whumpee #hostage!whump #whumpee!bleeding #kidnapped #Plot
Knife under chin
Caretaker forced to watch
Whumpee unable to move
Famous Whumpee praised for 'realistic acting'
Part 2 of Famous Whumpee
Part 3 of Famous Whumpee
Magic Whumper x Helpless Whumpee
Part 2 of Magic Whumper x Helpless Whumpee
Part 3 of Magic Whumper x Helpless Whumpee
Mermay Whump
Hostage Situation
Part 2 of Hostage Situation
Distant!Whumper + Calm!Whumpee
Kidnapping
Disguised (Incomplete)
DON'T KILL ME FOR POSTING THE CHAPTERS ON WATTPAD (It's not the best place to post but I already have so many things here on Tumblr)
#Mafia #Secret Identity #Marcus Hemming #Wattpad #Violence #Humour #Runaway
CHARACTER AESTHETICS
Chapter 1 - Marcus Hemming
Chapter 2 - Reputation
Chapter 3 - Control
Chapter 4 - The Man
Chapter 5 - Terminal
Chapter 6 - Natural Talent
Chapter 7 - The Gym
Chapter 8 - The Car
Short Stories
#Horror #Romance #Dark themes #Humour #Plot
Horror
Divine Intervention
Assignment: “Write an essay about something you wish more people understood.”
SnowBaz
SnowBaz #2
SnowBaz #3
Fluffy SnowBaz
The Tell-Tale Heart
Kidnapped Wife
Horror #2
Drarry Dialogue
Not Yet
Scars and Kisses
Writing Things
#Advice #Tips #Dialogue #Writing Problems
@alexazucchie GUESS WHO DECIDED TO FINALLY POST AFTER EDITING FOR WEEKSS (I have finally properly planned the chapters and at the moment the plan is 85+ chapters... that's excluding the flashbacks btw... hehe)
Your apartment is too small for this. The walls seem closer than they did this morning, the ceiling lower, the closed window barely enough to let in the grey light of a city that doesn't care what you're becoming. You sit at the kitchen table with the laptop open, the USB drive still warm from your pocket, and you don't move for ten minutes.
You don't want to see more.
You plug it in anyway.
The directories bloom across the screen like poison flowers. ASSETS. Devell. ARCHIVE. SUBJECT. Each folder nested inside another, Russian dolls of a life you don't recognise. You click through methodically — not because you're calm, because method is the only thing keeping your hands from shaking.
The first video is the parking garage. You hesitate, then click on the video gain, watching yourself offer Jun the gun again. You watch Jun take it. You watch the timestamp in the corner — 11:47 PM, one year and three months ago — and you try to feel something. Anything.
The man on the screen is you. The jawline is yours. The way he stands, weight on the balls of his feet, ready to move in any direction — that's yours too. But the confidence, the looseness, the casual authority of a man who expects to be obeyed — that feels borrowed. Stolen. Like someone wearing your face.
You close it. Open another.
This one is different. Brighter. A warehouse or a conference room, long table, men in suits that cost less than yours. You walk in — not the you from the parking garage, harder now, older, the snake tattoo visible where your sleeve rides up. The room goes still. Not quiet — still. Like prey freezing when the predator enters the clearing. God.
It doesn't sound like you raise your voice. Nor gesture. Past you just looks at each man in turn, and one by one they find reasons to study their hands, their drinks, the polished surface of the table. You say something about territory, about percentages, about consequences — the audio is degraded, you catch only fragments — and when you finish, nobody argues. Nobody even breathes until you've left the frame.
You watch it three times. The stillness. The fear. The professionalism of it. It's stupid to say you don't know who you used to be. That's a lie. It's clear you used to be someone feared. Someone… someone who just had to stand there, and the room would freeze.
You open another.
This one is darker. Night, or a room with covered windows. You're with a man you don't recognise — large, scarred, hands that shake as he cleans something from the trunk of a car. It isn't Marco, the build is too big. It isn't Jun either, who's much taller. Maybe Laila will tell you later?
He's saying something, voice low and urgent, and you — the you on screen — you're not listening. You're checking your phone, thumb moving across the screen, while this man scrubs blood from the rubber lining with a rag that was probably white once.
Your hands are steady. You've seen enough crime shows to know what steady hands mean. They mean practice. They mean familiarity. They mean this isn't your first trunk, your first body, your first night of cleaning up something that shouldn't exist.
He looks up at you, and even through the grainy footage, you see the question in his eyes. Not fear — something worse. Loyalty. The kind that survives blood and silence and the casual indifference of a man who checks his phone while someone else does the wet work. Fuck.
You close the video. Open another.
This one is shorter. You're at a table — different table, nicer, wood that probably cost more than your monthly salary as a guard. Counting money. Stacks of it, banded, precise.
A woman's hand enters the frame, rests on your shoulder. Dark red nails. The same shade as the snake's tongue, the same shade you've stared at a hundred times on your own arm, trying to remember why you chose it.
You don't look up at her. Don't acknowledge the touch. Just keep counting, keep stacking, keep being the man who doesn't need to see whoever she is to know she's there.
You close it. You should stop. You know you should stop.
You don't.
The violence is in a folder labeled OPERATIONS. You open it like opening a wound, expecting to flinch, expecting to feel something like horror or disgust or the moral clarity of a man who knows this is wrong.
What you feel is worse.
In the first video, you're shooting at a man. Methodically, again and again, your stance loose and bored. The man is screaming — you can see his mouth open, the tendons in his neck straining — but the audio is muted, or corrupted, or you don't want to hear it. You don't look at his face. You look at your screen, thumb scrolling, while your hand does its work.
In the second, you're ordering someone taken "to the docks." You don't look up from paperwork. Don't raise your voice. Just gesture with your pen, a flick of the wrist like brushing away a fly, and two men step forward to escort the third out of frame. The man being escorted is crying. You're signing something.
In the third, you're hitting someone. Not fighting — hitting. Over and over, fist to face, while a room of people watch. Not for information, not for revenge. For demonstration. You can see it in your own posture, the way you step back between blows to let the room see, the way you adjust your cuff after. The performance of violence. The theater of control. You notice Jun walk forward holding a cloth.
You close the laptop. Your hands are shaking now — finally, finally shaking — and you press them flat against the table until they stop. The Serpent isn't a monster in these files.
He's not some demon of rage, some animal of instinct. He's a professional. He schedules violence between meetings. He multitasks torture. He treats fear as a management tool and blood as overhead.
And that professionalism is more frightening than any rage. Because rage you could understand. Rage you could distance yourself from, say that wasn't me, that was someone else, someone broken.
But this — this calm, this efficiency, this boredom — this is a career. This is a life. This is a man who built himself from the ground up to be exactly this, and enjoyed the construction.
You don't sleep. You pace the apartment, five steps one way, five steps back, the snake tattoo catching the streetlight through the window. You make coffee you don't drink. You stand in the bathroom and stare at your face in the mirror, searching for the man from the videos, finding only yourself — tired, scared, ordinary.
But your hands aren't shaking anymore.
You lie down at 3 AM, give up on sleep, close your eyes just to rest them. And the dream comes immediately, without transition, without mercy.
You're standing on an overpass. The highway below is wet, the lights smeared by rain or memory or both. You can feel the concrete railing under your hands, the cold air on your face, the sense of height that should trigger vertigo but doesn't. Below, headlights approach. A single car, black, familiar.
You know this car. You dreamed it before, the night after the staged fight, the night you first felt the Serpent move under your skin.
But this time, you're not inside it.
You're watching it. From above. From outside. From a distance that feels like grief.
The car accelerates. You can see yourself through the windshield — the same face, the same jaw, the same snake tattoo on the arm gripping the wheel. You're smiling. Not desperate, not resigned. Smiling. Like this is a choice. Like this is what you wanted.
The car hits the barrier. The sound doesn't reach you — delayed, or dream-muffled, or your mind protecting itself from the truth of impact. Glass sprays. Metal screams. The car rolls, once, twice, down the embankment, and you watch from the overpass with your hands still resting on the railing, still calm, still smiling.
You wake gasping. The sheets are tangled around your legs, soaked with sweat, and for a moment you can't tell if the dampness is yours or rain from the dream. The scar across your chest — the one the nurse said was from the crash, the one you accepted without question — aches like it's fresh. Like it just happened. Like you're still bleeding.
You sit up. The apartment is silent except for your breathing, too loud, too desperate. The laptop glows from the kitchen table, screen saver cycling through images you don't remember setting. The USB drive sits beside it, small, innocent, poisonous.
You don't sleep again.
At 5:47 AM, you shower. The water is too hot, scalding, and you stand under it until your skin is pink and tender and you can feel something other than the dream. You dress in your uniform — the cheap fabric, the tight sleeves, the badge that says Jay because James was too long and you never bothered to correct them. You look at yourself in the cracked mirror by the door.
The man looking back is the same man from the videos. Same jaw. Same eyes. Same snake coiled around his wrist, jaws open, waiting.
But the expression — that's different. The man in the videos was bored. The man in the mirror is afraid.
You don't know if that's better or worse.
You leave for work. The city is grey, indifferent, already moving. You walk through it like you're learning to swim, like every step could be the one that drowns you. The prison looms ahead, concrete and steel, Victor's property, your cage and your weapon and your only familiar thing in a world that keeps revealing itself as stranger.
You flash your badge at the gate. The guard barely looks up. You walk to your locker, spin the dial, and freeze.
There's a folded piece of paper inside. Typed, no handwriting, same as before: "The Viper is watching. Keep your fangs in. Don't act out."
Your heart skips. Again?
You crumple the note. Throw it in the trash. But the words stay with you, coiled around your spine, as you walk onto the unit for another shift.
The inmates watch you differently today. Or maybe you're watching yourself differently — seeing the Serpent in every reflection, every shadow, every pair of eyes that finds yours and looks away too fast.
Marco is at his bars, bouncing that rubber ball. Thump. Catch. Thump. Catch. He doesn't call out to you. Just watches you pass with something like satisfaction, like he's been waiting for this version of you to arrive.
You don't stop. Don't speak. But your hand drifts to your left arm, to the snake beneath the sleeve, and you feel its weight like a promise.
Posted for my #1 supporter @alexazucchie <3 This is a flashback which will come later on in the story. I think you're gonna like how badass Jay is in this one...
----
The club is called Eden, which is a joke.
You stand at the bar with your back to the room, nursing whiskey you haven't touched, listening to the pulse of bass throb through the floorboards like a second heartbeat.
The place reeks of spilled vodka and overpriced perfume, bodies pressed too close, laughter too sharp. Above you, chandeliers drip crystal in shades of blood-red and bruise-purple, casting everything in a glow that makes the beautiful look dangerous and the dangerous look beautiful.
You are here because Malik "Ghost" Washington asked for a meeting.
You are here because Malik thinks he can renegotiate the terms you already set.
You are here because you are tired, and because being tired makes you cruel, and because sometimes cruelty is the only language men like Malik understand.
The bartender — a kid with hoops in his ears and a tattoo of a compass on his neck — glances at your arm. At the snake. He looks away fast, pours someone else, keeps his hands busy.
Smart kid.
"Devell." The voice comes from your left, smooth as oil on water. "Didn't think you'd come alone."
You don't turn. You know what you'll see: Malik, tall and thin and elegant in a cream suit that costs more than the bartender makes in a year. Gold rings on every finger. Eyes like wet stones. He thinks the suit makes him look civilized. You know it makes him look like a corpse dressed for his own funeral.
"I don't need company to drink," you say.
Malik slides onto the stool beside you, close enough that his shoulder almost brushes yours. A test. You let him stay there. Let him think he's earned the proximity.
"Victor's been talking," Malik says. "Says you're overextended. Says the east side is slipping."
You lift the glass. Swirl the whiskey. Watch the light fracture through amber.
"Victor talks a lot," you say. "It's why he's still alive. Talking keeps him busy."
Malik laughs — too loud, performative. The people around him glance over, then away. They know better than to watch.
"I'm proposing an adjustment," Malik says. "The pipeline through the docks — I want twenty percent more cut. And I want access to your contacts in the precinct."
You set the glass down. The click of crystal on wood is louder than it should be.
"No," you say.
"Jay—"
"No," you repeat. You turn to face him now, and whatever he sees in your eyes makes his smile falter. "You want to renegotiate, Malik? Fine. Let's renegotiate. You currently have forty percent of the dock traffic because I allow it. Because I decided that forty percent keeps you useful without making you greedy. You want more?"
You lean in. Close enough to smell the cologne he bathed in, the nervous sweat breaking through underneath.
"Take it," you whisper. "See what happens."
Malik's jaw tightens. His hand moves — not toward you, toward his jacket. Toward the gun you already know is there, the one he thinks you don't see.
You move before he finishes the thought.
Your left hand closes around his wrist before his fingers find the grip. Your thumb presses into the pressure point, and his hand spasms open, useless. You don't break the bone. Not yet. You want him to feel the choice you're making.
"Malik," you say, conversational, like you're discussing the weather. "Do you know why they call me Serpent?"
He's breathing hard. The elegant mask is cracking. "Because you're a cold-blooded fucking—"
"Because I don't strike where you see me," you say. "I strike where you forget to look."
You twist his wrist — sharp, precise — and he gasps, drops to one knee on the sticky floor. The club keeps moving around you, music pounding, bodies swaying. No one looks. No one wants to see.
"You came here thinking you had leverage," you say. Your voice doesn't rise. Doesn't need to. It cuts through the noise like a blade through silk. "You thought because I'm young, because I don't shout, because I let men like you keep breathing — you thought that meant I was soft."
You lean down, still holding his wrist, your face inches from his. The snake tattoo seems to pulse in the red light, jaws open, fangs bared.
"I let you keep breathing," you say, "because you were useful. Because you moved product without causing problems. Because every time you looked at me, I saw the math in your eyes — the cost of crossing me, the profit of staying loyal. You did the math right, Malik. Until tonight."
"Jay—" His voice cracks. "Jay, I didn't mean—"
"You meant exactly what you said." You straighten, release his wrist. He cradles it against his chest, eyes wide, waiting. "You meant to test me. To see if the rumors were true. If the Serpent still had fangs."
You step back. Adjust your cuff. The movement is deliberate, unhurried. Let him see the predator beneath the polish.
"Here's what happens now," you say. "You stand up. You walk out. You take your forty percent, and you thank whatever god you pray to that you're leaving with your hand attached. Tomorrow, you'll hear that Victor lost three shipments in one night. You'll wonder if that was me, or if he really is as sloppy as I say. You'll wonder if I planned this meeting to put you in debt, to make you need me more than you fear me."
You pick up your whiskey. Drink it in one swallow. The burn is familiar, welcome.
"And next time you want to renegotiate," you say, setting the empty glass on the bar, "you'll remember how this felt. On your knees. In a room full of people who pretended not to see. You'll remember that I didn't need to break your wrist — I chose not to. That I didn't need to let you leave — I chose to. And you'll wonder, every night before you sleep, what happens on the day I choose differently."
Malik stares up at you. The wet-stone eyes are dry now, desperate. He looks like a man who just realized the ground he's been walking on was a bridge, and the bridge is burning.
"Get up," you say.
He gets up.
"Walk out."
He walks.
You don't watch him go. You signal the bartender for another drink, and the kid pours with shaking hands, and you sit there in the red light with the snake coiled on your arm and the city breathing around you, waiting.
-----
Two hours later:
The alley behind Eden is where the trash goes to rot.
You're here because Malik didn't walk far enough. Because he made a call in the parking lot, voice low and urgent, and because Laila is very good at listening to calls. Because sometimes mercy is a message, and sometimes a message needs a postscript.
Malik's men — three of them, hired muscle with more steroids than sense — wait in the shadows by the dumpster. You see them before they see you. You always do.
The first one steps out when you're ten feet away. Baseball bat, wood, nails driven through the business end. He swings before he finishes his threat, which is almost admirable.
You duck under the arc, move inside his reach, and drive your elbow into his solar plexus. He folds, gasping, and you take the bat from his hands like you're accepting a gift. The nails catch the streetlight as you turn.
The second one has a knife. He lunges.
You swing the bat low, catch his knee, hear something pop. He screams, drops, and you bring the nailed end down into his shoulder — not deep enough to kill, deep enough to make the point. He stops screaming. Starts whimpering.
The third one runs.
You let him.
Malik is by the fire exit, cream suit ruined by the alley's grime, gun in his hand. It's shaking. You can see it from here, twenty feet of shadow and garbage between you.
"You set me up," he says. His voice is high, broken. "You knew I'd call them. You wanted this."
You lean on the bat like a cane. The nails drip something dark onto the concrete.
"I wanted you to understand," you say. "The difference between talking and doing. Between threatening and meaning it."
He raises the gun. The barrel wavers, finds your chest, steadies. "I'll shoot you," Malik says. "I will. I'll—"
"You won't," you say.
You start walking toward him. Slow. Unhurried. The bat drags against the ground, screeching, a sound like teeth on bone.
"Because if you pull that trigger," you say, "you have to be sure. Sure I'm alone. Sure there isn't someone on the roof with a rifle. Sure Victor won't hear about this by morning and decide you're too messy to keep alive. You have to be sure, Malik. And you're not sure of anything right now."
Ten feet. The gun trembles.
"You're sure of one thing," you continue. "You're sure I walked into that club alone. You're sure I let you leave alive. You're sure I knew about your men and came anyway. And now you're wondering — if I knew about them, what else do I know? What else am I walking into? What else is waiting in the dark that you can't see?"
Five feet. You can smell the fear on him now, sour and sharp.
"Put the gun down, Malik."
He does.
You stop in front of him. Close enough to touch. You don't.
"Tomorrow," you say, "you'll transfer full control of the docks to my people. You'll take fifteen percent, not forty. You'll consider it a retirement fund. And if I ever hear your name in connection with my business again — if I ever see your face in a room I'm in — I won't come alone. I won't be merciful. I won't give you a chance to kneel."
You reach out. He flinches. You straighten his collar, the same gesture from the bar, and pat his cheek twice. Patronising. Intimate. A reminder that you could have killed him twice tonight and chose not to.
"Go home, Malik," you say. "Sleep if you can."
He goes.
You stand in the alley with the bat in your hand and the blood on the ground and the city humming beyond the walls, and you breathe in the smell of victory — which is the same as the smell of fear, which is the same as the smell of power, which is the same as the smell of yourself.
Your phone buzzes.
Jun's voice, when you answer, is sharp with worry. "You good? Laila said she intercepted a call—"
"I'm fine," you say.
"You alone?"
You look at the man curled by the dumpster, the one still whimpering with nails in his shoulder. You look at the fire exit, still swinging from Malik's flight. You look at the snake on your arm, jaws open, hungry.
"Always," you say.
You hang up. Drop the bat in the trash. Walk toward the street, adjusting your cuffs, smoothing your coat, becoming invisible again.
Behind you, the alley breathes out.
Ahead, the city waits.
And somewhere, in the dark between streetlights, you smile — not because you're happy, but because you're awake, and because being awake is the only thing you've ever been good at, and because tonight, like every night, you proved that the Serpent doesn't need to strike to be feared.
I asked if I should drop this mafia has amnesia mess and the unanimous reply was “yes, coward.” So I’m crawling out from under my blanket fort to drop Chapter 1. Please be gentle, I left my dignity in the Google doc.
PAPER FANGS - all chapters
----
"Boss, where you been? We all thought you were dead.”
You freeze. First day on the job. Cheap uniform clinging too tight across your chest. The prisoner’s voice cuts through the noise, low and sharp — not curious. Certain.
You don’t answer. Can’t. You just look at him — broad nose, tattooed neck, a long scar slicing from eyebrow to jaw like a violent signature. His face means nothing to you. But the way he looks at you…
That means something.
His gaze drops to your arm, to the snake tattoo curling out from beneath your sleeve — red tongue flicking toward your thumb like a threat. He smirks. “Should’ve covered better.”
----------------------------------
Six months ago, they found you in a ditch outside town. No ID. Skull shattered. A concussion so bad the nurses didn’t think you’d wake up. When you did, they started calling you James — one of the nurses said you looked like her brother. Same messy black hair, same olive skin.
But he was older. Long gone. Another nurse once looked at your chart, then at your face — really looked — and said, “You’re lucky you made it out alive.” But there was something in her voice. Not sympathy. Worry.
You don’t remember the crash, the surgery, or the life that landed you there.
James wasn’t official — just something they scribbled on a clipboard until someone found the real you. No one did. So the name stuck. And you never bothered to change it. They told you that you could pick something else, choose your own name — but that felt strange, like naming a stray dog. You had to be someone. And in that moment, James was the closest thing to… you. A borrowed coat that happened to fit.
In the beginning you asked every few days if anyone had come looking. Did you have no family? No friends? After a month the question felt selfish; after two, pathetic. Nobody was coming, and that was final. Still, the nurse kept visiting. She’d talk about her dead brother — the one you apparently resembled — same hair, same skin tone. You used to nod politely, smile when it felt right, but inside, it grated. It wasn’t just that she kept talking about someone else — it was how certain she was that he looked like you, but wasn’t you. He’d died years ago, she said. So you let it go.
The doctors said the trauma should’ve healed by now — and physically, it has. The aches are gone. The pounding in your skull no longer comes in waves. But the memories? Nothing. Just a blank wall with something hidden on the other side. Your memories seemed just out of reach, close enough to touch with your fingertips but too far to grab and hold onto. You stopped pressing against it because no matter how hard you tried, you ended up with nothing.
You’ve built a life around that emptiness. After the hospital, they sent you to a shelter run by the county. You spent two months in a bunk bed next to a guy who thought he was Elvis then a few weeks next to someone who thought she was still a teenager though she was a middle aged white lady. A caseworker got you a nice enough bed, then a voucher, and eventually, a key to a one-room apartment above a corner shop. Not glamorous, but the lock turns for you alone.
You chase three jobs at once—dishwasher, night stocker, weekend car-wash—because exhaustion is a cheaper sedative than anything on the street. Meals happen when the clock reminds you. Six months of that and you trade up: slightly less cracked walls, a window that actually opens. You leave the new place bare. A few pieces of furniture, a clock above the TV, and nothing else. No memories. No pictures—what would you frame, static?
You tried reading. Bought a stack of books. Never made it past chapter one.
The social worker suggested gardening. You hated it—too slow, too delicate.
The gym suited you better. Quiet. Focused. You went often. Build up strength - although you already had a fair amount to begin with. You drink your coffee black now — no idea if that’s how you liked it before, but it works.
Then the prison hung a NOW HIRING sign. Steady cheque, government dental, zero résumé fireworks. At the interview the warden riffled your file a beat too long. “We don’t usually get your type,” he muttered, already shoving a uniform across the desk. You didn’t ask what type; lesson one of amnesia: don’t poke fog.
The admin handed you your badge next. It said Jay — short and sharp, easier to say than James. She glanced at your file, then back at you. “Jay works,” she said, like it was already decided. You didn’t argue. But something about the way she smiled felt off. Too knowing. But good pay. Government benefits. And a small satisfaction that you get to do something useful for once.
You slept straight through to 5:47, three minutes before the alarm. Shirt ironed, coffee black, birds arguing on the wire—ordinary ritual for an ordinary day. The uniform still reeks of factory plastic and industrial detergent, hospital air you hoped you’d left behind.
Twenty minutes later the locker-room mirror gives you back a stranger in that same shirt. You tug the collar straight and the cotton crawls over the old scars that mark your skin like a forgotten map—one across your chest from a fight you don’t remember, and a pair of puckered bullet wounds on your arm. A long, jagged scar down your back—glass, the nurse said. But it looks too old to be from the crash.
The sleeves cling too tight over your muscles and stop just after the snake tattoo on your left arm. The snake begins at your thenar space, its jaws wide open, fangs bared as if in mid-strike. The mouth is the first thing you see—brutal, aggressive, and impossible to ignore. Its forked tongue flicks across the side of your thumb, inked in dark red, almost like a warning. The eyes are pitch black, slitted like a blade.
Some of the guards glance at it, then look away too quickly. One mutters something under his breath to the other — you catch only the word “snake” — before both go quiet. No one ever asks. They never do. And if they did, you’d have no response. There’s faint scarring beneath the ink that shows it’s old. Years old. Done when the skin was younger, when you still remembered why you chose it.
You stand at a solid six feet, lean but muscular, some muscle gained recently. Most of it is older, earned before the crash. Every move feels borrowed, like it belongs to someone else. Sometimes you wonder how no one remembers you — especially since you look like someone who plans ahead. Someone dangerous. You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and wonder: who the hell was that? Today isn’t any different.
Your face looks sharper than you remember from the hospital mirrors. Jawline clean. Hair dark and longer on top, messily swept to one side. You were just some guy pulled out of a ditch with no ID and a shattered skull. Now you’re on your first day as a prison guard in a town where no one asks why you sleep with the lights on.
The walk to the unit is long and cold — harsh concrete underfoot, cold metal looming overhead. This place feels less like a building and more like a mausoleum for the living. Fluorescent lights hum and flicker, casting a sickly glow over peeling paint and heavy doors. The air is thick with tension, like something waiting to snap. Conversation drops a semitone when you cross the line; two hundred men just agreed to pretend they weren’t talking about you.
Inmates glance at you.
A few hold the stare until it itches.
Then one voice slices the hush—low, almost amused: “Boss, where you been? We all thought you were dead.”
You freeze. The inmates' words echo in your head. Your pulse jumps. But you keep a straight face, turning to face him, eyes narrowed. You take in his face - broad nose, tattooed neck, and a huge scar across his face, from the top of his eyebrow to the bottom of his hardened jaw - but nothing stirs in your mind. He's nobody to you. A stranger. But he looks at you like you're not.
“Wrong guy,” you mutter and try to walk past the cell, but he reaches through the bars, grabbing onto your inked arm. “No Serpent. Eyes don't lie." He looks down at the cuff of your left arm and smirks, “Should’ve covered better. You don’t know how many want you dead.” He looks behind him then drops his voice slightly. “They say you got hit in an accident but you disappeared before Jun could find you.” Jun. The name means nothing. But it sounds like a problem.
The inmate’s voice drops to a near whisper. “You said if things went south, you had a way out. Guess it worked.”
A way out?
The words coil around your spine. You remember the hospital, staring at the mirror like it owed you answers. If you had a plan… why are you still here? What went wrong? Your eyes drift to your tattoo — the snake’s tongue flicks red up the side of your thumb. A warning. A memory buried in skin.
Voice leaves your mouth before permission: “Who am I?”
The con’s grin turns nasty, all teeth and no warmth. “So the stories are true—Serpent pulled his own fangs.” He flicks two fingers beside his mouth like broken fangs, then eases off the bars. “You ran this city whisper-quiet: no footprints, no bodies anyone could find. Word was you let yourself get caged just to vanish without a whisper.”
Your arm coils without permission—muscle memory older than the scar. “Could be fairy-tales,” you say, eyes narrowed.
He chuckles, low and bitter. Then jerks a thumb toward the deep scar slicing across his face. “You did this. Years ago.” He makes a slashing motion with his hand, and your eyes flicker with something you don’t quite place. “Fairy-tales don’t carve a zipper across your face.”
He draws a finger down his face slowly, his grin widening as you watch him. “ I’d love to believe you’re some imposter, but imposters don’t stand like they own the concrete.” Behind you, a guard calls out: "Hey! New guy! Count time, let’s move!" You stay locked on the con’s glare.
He leans in, voice a razor whisper. "Jay—they hate that name more than they hate you. When it hits the yard, every con’s gonna race to see who guts you first. Real Serpent would’ve—"
He grins, teeth bared, and slams his head forward, stopping just short of the steel. "—caved my skull for saying Jay out loud. Clock’s ticking."
He steps back, arms folded. “Watch your back, Jay. Even the devil can get jumped in the dark.”
The warden reappears on a Tuesday that smells like bleach and old rain — weeks gone, weeks of you checking empty offices, studying personnel rosters, wondering if the man had been recalled by Victor, reassigned, or simply disposed of for talking too much to the wrong person.
You find him in the parking garage during shift change, the concrete still wet from a storm that blew through an hour ago, oil stains rainbowed on the surface like bruises.
The warden is fumbling with his keys at a black sedan that costs more than a prison administrator should afford, his collar dark with sweat despite the garage's chill, his hands shaking enough that the keys jingle like bells.
You don't announce yourself. Just step from behind a pillar, close enough to smell the warden's aftershave — cheap, musky, the kind that tries too hard — and watch the man's face cycle through recognition, fear, and the desperate performance of innocence.
"Mr. Devell— I mean, Officer— I wasn't expecting—"
"Weeks," you say. Not a question. A measurement. "You were gone for weeks. No notice. No replacement. Just empty office, locked drawers, and a staff that pretended not to notice."
The warden's throat works. His eyes dart toward the garage exit, the stairwell, the shadows between parked cars where you know there are cameras, guards, witnesses who won't intervene. "Vacation," he says, too fast. "Family emergency. My mother, she's—"
"Victor has a man inside," you say, cutting through the fiction. You step closer, close enough to see the sweat beading at the warden's hairline, the pulse hammering in his neck. "Watching me. Reporting back. Telling him what I eat, who I talk to, whether I'm remembering."
The warden's keys drop. They hit the concrete with a sound that echoes, too loud, and neither of you moves to pick them up. "I don't— I don't know what you're—"
"One of the guards," you continue, your voice dropping to something almost gentle, almost intimate, the same tone you used on the inmate in solitary, the tone that isn't yours but fits you like a second skin. "Not an inmate. Not a prisoner with a grudge. One of mine. One of the men I eat with, walk with, stand beside while we pretend this place is anything other than what it is."
The warden goes still. The performance drops, or cracks, or simply exhausts itself — you can't tell which, don't care. What remains is a small man in an expensive car, caught between loyalties that were never his to choose.
"Briggs," the warden whispers. Or maybe he says "Grey." Maybe he says a name you don't recognise, a name that doesn't matter because the truth is larger than any single man. "Victor has— he has people. Everywhere. I didn't have a choice, they told me to—"
"Who?"
The warden shakes his head, hands raised, palms out, the universal posture of the unarmed and cornered. "I don't know names. I don't— I just pass messages. Drop points. I don't even read them, I swear, I just—"
You step closer. The warden flinches, presses his back against the sedan's door, and you see yourself reflected in the man's eyes — tall, lean, the snake tattoo visible where your sleeve rides up, jaws open, fangs bared. A predator wearing a uniform that doesn't fit, that never fit, that was designed to contain you and failed.
You could break the warden's fingers. The thought arrives casually, almost bored. You could break fingers, extract names, follow the chain of fear and leverage back to Victor and whoever else is pulling strings in this puppet show.
You don't.
You step back. Let the warden breathe, recover, fumble for his keys with hands that still shake. The mercy feels wrong — not soft, not kind, but strategic, a move in a game you're only beginning to understand you're playing.
Let the warden go. Let him report back that you know, that you're watching, that the Serpent isn't sleeping as deeply as they hoped.
Or let him run. Disappear. Become another absence that means something, that signals something, that you'll have to interpret later with whatever instincts you're recovering, whatever memories surface, whatever fragments of the man you were still live beneath the amnesia's blank wall.
"Go," you say.
The warden stares at you, keys finally in hand, frozen between flight and the desperate need to understand what just happened, what this means, whether he's been spared or simply postponed.
"Go," you repeat. "Before I remember why I used to kill messengers."
The warden goes. The sedan's engine catches, whines, tears out of the garage with a screech of tires that bounces off concrete walls and fades into the city's hum. You stand in the oil stains, the rainbow bruises, the smell of exhaust and rain, and try to feel something about what you just did.
Nothing comes. Or rather — something does, but you can't name it. A weight in your chest, a pressure behind your eyes, the sense that you've set a trap without knowing the bait or the prey or even what you're trying to catch.
Mercy. You offered fucking mercy. And it felt like surrender, like strategy, like the first move in a game where the rules are written in a language you're still learning to read.
You walk back inside. The prison swallows you, indifferent, the same fluorescent hum and concrete chill, the same weight of watching eyes.
In the locker room, you sit on the bench between rows of metal cabinets and study the other guards as they change shifts, laugh, complain about overtime and bad coffee and inmates who don't know their place.
Briggs with his toothpick, shifting it from one side of his mouth to the other, telling a joke that isn't funny but gets laughs anyway. His eyes find yours across the room, hold for a fraction too long, look away.
Ko with his steady hands, methodically wrapping his knuckles with athletic tape, precise, practised, the hands of a man who knows how to hurt people and chooses when.
He doesn't look up. Never looks up. But you notice the way his shoulders tense when you move, the micro-adjustment of posture that says aware.
Matthews, fresh-faced, eager, still carrying the idealism that will get him killed or corrupted or simply worn down to the same dull acceptance that coats everyone else in this place.
He smiles at you, genuine, unguarded, and you think: too easy. Too open. Or exactly what he seems, which would be worse — innocence in a place that devours it.
And Grey. Captain Elias Grey, immaculate uniform, hands folded behind his back, watching everything from the doorway with the patience of a man who has nowhere else to be, nothing else to do, no purpose beyond observation.
His eyes meet yours, hold, and something passes between you — not recognition, not threat, just... weight. The weight of two men who know they're playing roles, who suspect each other's performances, who haven't yet decided whether to be allies or obstacles or simply parallel lines that never intersect.
One of them is Victor's. The thought repeats, circles, digs in. One of these men reports to the Viper, carries your movements back to the man who built this cage, who watches from a distance with the patience of someone who believes time is on his side.
All of them could be. The paranoia is logical, mathematical, the only rational response to a system designed to contain you. Trust no one. Suspect everyone. Calculate the angles, the leverage, the cost of each relationship until you find the thread that leads back to the spider at the center of the web.
You change into your uniform. The fabric is rough against your skin, the badge heavy on your chest, the snake tattoo hidden beneath the sleeve where it waits, coiled, patient.
You look at your hands — steady, as always, as they were in the videos, as they are now, folding your street clothes with mechanical precision.
One of them is Victor's.
You close your locker. The slam echoes, and Briggs looks over, and Ko's shoulders tense, and Matthews smiles, and Grey watches from the doorway with eyes that give away nothing.
You walk toward the unit. Toward Marco, bouncing his rubber ball. Toward whatever comes next, whoever waits in the dark, whatever truth coils beneath the surface of this place like the serpent beneath your skin.
You don't know who to trust.
You don't know if trust is something you're capable of anymore, or ever were, or if it's just another word for leverage dressed in softer clothes.
But you walk anyway. Because stopping is death, and hesitation is surrender, and the man you were — the man you're becoming — doesn't know how to do either.
Rounds blur into reports. Reports into routine. Flickering lights, sour coffee, the same silence pressing behind your eyes like a headache waiting for permission to bloom. Your body moves without instruction—scan, step, respond—but your mind keeps slipping its leash, circling the same unanswered questions no matter how tightly you pull.
By the time your shift ends, it’s dark outside.
You walk home like a man half-asleep, city noise sliding past you without leaving an imprint. The apartment greets you with its familiar stillness, the kind that hums faintly, like static trapped in the walls. You switch on the hall light and stand there longer than necessary, breathing it in.
Then you sit heavily on the edge of the bed. The folded flyer presses against your ribs through your jacket and after a split hesitation, you pull it out. Smooth the creases. Read it again, slower this time.
“Charity Match – Featuring Jun Park vs Danny “Brick” Lowell” Saturday – Tonight
8:30 PM Eastside
Rec Hall Gym.
You glance at the time on your phone.
8:24.
For a long second, you hesitate. Go, or stay. Risk, or silence. But silence has never kept you alive. It clearly hasn't kept you hidden. The lights are turned off. The door is locked behind you. And before you know it–
You're standing outside the gym.
The city is different at night. Neon buzzes. Windows throw out fractured light. Somewhere down an alley, a bottle shatters, laughter too sharp, too quick. You cut through side streets, every nerve alert, shoulders tight. The Eastside Rec Hall looms ahead, a blocky brick building with paint peeling off its frame and music leaking faintly from inside. A handmade sign points toward the gym entrance.
The air changes when you step inside.
The boxing gym is a blunt instrument—leather cracking, trainers shouting, the ring ropes groaning under bodies thrown against them. It smells like chalk and old rubber, undercut with something coppery and sharp. Blood.
You move through the press of bodies, boots scraping concrete. Most people are focused on the ring, but a few faces flicker at the edges of your awareness. Too interested. Too still. Former cons, maybe. Off-duty guards. Or maybe no one at all. But you catalogue them anyway, angles and exits, in case you need them later. Then you pause. Why did that thought even occur to you? Why would you even—
Then you see him.
Jun Park.
And he looks like he’s losing.
His guard hangs too low. His arms droop, heavy at his sides. The first hook smashes into his ribs. He folds slightly, breath ripping from his lungs. The next comes higher, slamming into his jaw. His head whips sideways, spit and blood misting the air.
The crowd surges, hungry. Another strike drives him back into the ropes. Then another. Each hit lands with a sound too loud to ignore—meat on bone, sharp and final. His knees dip. His arms twitch like they might rise, but they don’t.
He looks breakable.
You feel the pain in your own bones—the hollow ache of ribs caving, the burn in your lungs, the dizzy spin after a jaw shot. Everything pressing in like a new memory you just unlocked. The thing is, this should already be over. Any sane man would be sprawled across the canvas, out cold.
But Jun doesn’t fall. He takes it. Again and again. His feet drag across the mat like dead weight, but they never leave it. His eyes stay open. Blood slips from the corner of his mouth, dark and steady. He blinks hard, shakes his head once, like he’s trying to clear water from his ears.
His gaze lifts. Just a reflexive glance—one more sweep of the crowd before the next hit lands.
And then he sees you.
His eyes—brown, sharp, assessing—widen for a fraction of a second, so fast you almost miss it. But then his posture tightens. It’s subtle, almost invisible unless you’re watching for it. His shoulders square. His guard rises without hesitation. The slack vanishes from his stance, replaced by something cleaner, more controlled, like a bad habit being snapped out of all at once.
The next punch never lands.
Jun ducks, pivots, drives his elbow into the man’s ribs with enough force to crack bone. His opponent staggers, wide-eyed. Another strike, precise as a blade, and the brick wall buckles. Jun presses forward, relentless, surgical. It’s not brawling anymore—it’s dismantling. His fists move like he’s been holding back his whole life, waiting for this exact moment.
The crowd roared, shocked. They sound almost... disappointed? Is this not how he fights? Was he supposed to take more? Suffer and bleed? Tonight, he didn't wait. He saw you, and he moved.
Jun moves fast and efficiently— like me you think, before dismissing the thought temporarily. The fight doesn't last longer than two minutes. One last right hook to the jaw, and his opponent crumples to the mat. Jun doesn’t even look at him.
He stands in the centre of the ring, chest heaving, eyes scanning the crowd again. For a fraction of a second, they land on you again. And in that look, you feel it—confirmation. Not coincidence. Not chance. He knows. Or at least… it looks like he does.
You melt away into the periphery before he can come for more. The noise closes over you. Your pulse hammers under your ribs but you keep it even, measured. You catalogue the shift: the dragged feet, the bleeding mouth, the sudden precision. Not proof. Evidence you can work with.
----------
Later that night, back in your apartment, the silence presses down on you harder than ever. The drawing of the serpent you found earlier sits folded on your kitchen table, a constant reminder that you’re not invisible here—not really. But you don't care about that. Not now.
You pull the laptop from your bag and start to dig. The name turns up dozens of results at first. Students. Shopkeepers. Musicians. You scroll past them, refine the search, narrow the parameters. Location. Age range. Eventually it sticks.
A local boxer.
The profile is barebones. Amateur circuit. A handful of regional matches. No interviews. No personal history worth noting. But there’s footage—years of it. Grainy recordings uploaded by spectators, shaky phone angles, poor lighting.
You watch anyway.
The pattern is impossible to miss. He takes the hits. Lets them land. Bleeds for it. Waits. Always waits. Then, at the end, he finishes it. Clean. Decisive. Like he’d been biding his time the whole match. Every report says the same thing. Same language. Same rhythm.
It’s his trademark.
You scrub back through one of the videos, pausing at a moment when he turns sideways under the lights. Sweat slicks his skin. For half a second, something dark flashes along his upper ribs—ink, maybe. A tattoo, half-hidden by motion blur and shadow.
You pause it.
The image is too soft to make out properly. Just a curve of lettering, distorted by muscle and movement. You lean closer to the screen, squinting.
It almost looks like a name.
Jun, you think absently, and let it go.
The footage jumps as the camera shifts, the moment lost. You don’t rewind again. A soft ping interrupts your concentration. The screen flickers, a line of text appears, stark, no sender:
“Jay, if you want to live, don’t trust Jun. Not yet.”
The message vanishes. No trace, no sender, nothing but quiet static in your mind. You do not panic nor shout. You don't even flinch. Instead, you note it. Someone is watching. Someone knows. You've known this for a while. But now, you know for certain. They're tracking your every move. Outside and inside. Someone is playing a game with pieces you cannot yet see.
You close the laptop. Slowly. Each movement is precise. Outside, the city hums. Inside, your past presses closer, shadows brushing your thoughts, whispering of answers, betrayals, and danger. You are not unprepared. You will wait. You will watch. You will gather the data. And when the time comes, you will move. Because you are not ready to face the truth alone—and someone knows it.
I want to thank these amazing people: @alexazucchiereblogs @justluchii @orcaraminga Thank you for reading my story and showing your appreciation 🩷
The metal doors slam shut behind you with a heavy, hydraulic groan—like something locking into place deep underground. The sound lingers in your ears, echoing longer than it should. You keep walking. Keep breathing. Keep acting like your pulse isn’t pounding in your neck.
You rub your forehead. The dull throb is back. Just a headache, you tell yourself. Nothing more. Ahead of you stretches the unit—a claustrophobic fortress of steel and concrete. Rows of cells, stacked two stories high, are tight-packed with men who have nothing better to do than watch you. Their eyes are sharp and hungry, as if trying to dig up every detail they can, searching for cracks, weaknesses, or forgotten memories. You force your gaze away, not daring to let your eyes linger on any one of them. This is just another shift. Another day at work. Nothing more. You keep repeating it like a mantra.
The air smelled stale, tinged with sweat, bleach, and the faint metallic tang of blood. The fluorescent lights overhead flickered faintly, buzzing with a low, mechanical hum that felt like a static charge in the silence between the noise.
Your boots clicked on the concrete floor — sharp and deliberate — echoing through the hollow hallways. The symphony of shouting, laughter, and insults you heard on the other side of the prison was different here, it felt strangely muted, like everyone was holding their breath. Waiting. Watching. Anticipating something, or someone.
You hated it.
You try to learn names as you pass, but most of them slide away the moment you hear them. Marco Diaz stays. The familiarity of it is wrong, pressing at the edges of your thoughts without offering an explanation. The others blur together, indistinct and strangely irrelevant, even as it becomes clear that they know you far better than you know yourself. A few nod when you pass. Others stare with something that might be fear or respect, and the uncertainty of it sits heavy in your chest. You guard a cluster of cells, walk past others without meeting their eyes, and still their attention follows you, unbroken, until the question settles in for good: how can they all recognise you when you don’t?
You don’t remember who you are, but Marco was right—everyone here does.
When you pass his cell again, you keep your gaze forward, even as the awareness of him sharpens, his attention settling against your back like a physical pressure. You are almost past before you look, and when you do, he is grinning openly, the expression easy and knowing, as though the gap in your memory is something he finds entertaining.
Breakroom, 10:07 a.m.
The breakroom offers no real relief, only a change in pressure, the air thick with burnt coffee and the low murmur of voices that blur together without quite forming meaning. You wrap your hand around a chipped mug and hold it there, grounding yourself in the warmth, though the bitterness on your tongue barely registers. The lights flicker overhead, and the familiarity of it unsettles you more than it should.
One of the guards—Briggs—throws a paper ball at the trash can and misses. He cracks a not-so-funny joke and a few people laugh, but you zone out trying to make sense of the past events.
“Hey, new guy,” Briggs says at last, not bothering to look up. “You settling in alright?”
The question pulls you back sharply enough that you push your hair away from your face without thinking, the motion instinctive and oddly familiar, as if it belongs to a version of you that existed before this job, before the gaps. You nod once. “Yeah.”
“Good,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “This place’ll eat you alive if you let it.” His mouth quirks into something that might be a smile. “Or worse. It’ll keep you breathing while it chews.” You force a polite chuckle. He doesn’t notice the way your hand tightens around the cup. Or the way your other hand unconsciously brushes the inside of your left arm—where the snake tattoo coils like memory waiting to strike.
Briggs leans back in his chair and eyes you with a mixture of challenge and curiosity, but said nothing more. The chatter continues and you glance down, avoiding conversation, though you still feel his eyes drilling into the front of your head.
Cellblock C, 12:42 p.m.
You’re halfway through the midday round when it happens. The echo of the cell door slamming. Shouts from the far end of the block. Then—too quickly—two inmates rush at each other. A staged fight, textbook distraction. You sprint, shouting orders, your voice sharp and commanding.
Backup arrives quickly, faster than protocol would suggest, and the block explodes into motion. Fists slam. A kick to the stomach and a punch to the jaw and suddenly there’s blood on the concrete and a writhing man on the ground. Everyone's loud and rowdy and you struggle to make yourself heard over the racket. And suddenly—
A hand grabs you from the side. Slams you into the bars. Not hard. Not a real attack. Just a message. You twist instinctively, your body moving before your brain could react. You’ve done this before. You fight with a controlled instinct, every movement sharp and precise. There’s no wasted effort—your body flows through the motions before your mind fully registers the threat.
You pivot on your heel, twisting away from the grip, using the attacker’s momentum against them. Your hands move quickly, aiming for vulnerable spots—wrists, ribs, the side of the neck—each hit landing with practised accuracy that sends a jolt of unease through you even as it works.
You don’t pause to question it. There’s no time.
Briggs steps in beside you, his presence immediate and solid, and you catch the briefest exchange of looks between him and the other guards, a flicker of shared understanding that passes so quickly you might have imagined it. It doesn’t look like surprise. It looks like confirmation.
The inmate you’ve restrained doesn’t struggle. He grins instead, slow and deliberate, a gold tooth flashing under the harsh lights. “Still got it,” he murmurs, the words casual enough to sound rehearsed.
Your left hand tightens around his throat before you consciously decide to move it.
The snake tattoo is visible now, its dark coils stretched across your skin, the open jaws aligned with the pulse beneath his jaw. The effect is immediate. His grin falters, then disappears entirely as his body goes rigid under your grip, bravado evaporating into something closer to fear. For a brief, suspended moment, he seems to understand something you don’t, and whatever he sees there is enough to still him completely.
Then pain lances through the side of your head, sharp and sudden, forcing a breath from your lungs as your vision blurs at the edges. Another look passes between the guards, different from the first—heavier, edged with something like concern, or recognition—and before you can read it properly, it’s gone.
You release the inmate and step back. The shouting dies down and the tension feels warm and fuzzy in the air. The guards disperse, returning to their positions as if this were routine, as if nothing about it had been out of the ordinary.
You’re left standing there when a thought crosses your mind — What if they know more about my past than I do? What if they’re not as clueless as they pretend?
----------
Later, alone in the observation room, you sit in the flickering light of the monitors, eyes fixed on the grainy footage. Frame by frame, the moment unfolds again: the grab, the turn, the way your body shifts as if following a blueprint it has never forgotten.
There is no hesitation. No confusion. No wasted movement.
You watch your own hands, the way your weight shifts naturally, efficiently, as though violence were simply another language you happen to be fluent in. It isn’t aggression that unsettles you most, but familiarity—the unmistakable ease of it, the certainty with which your body knows exactly what to do. This isn’t improvisation. It’s memory, buried somewhere deeper than thought.
Muscle memory, you realise, is still memory.
You lean closer to the screen, the cold blue light sharpening the hollows of your face, and for a moment the person staring back at you looks like a stranger wearing your features. Someone competent. Someone dangerous. Someone who has done this before and expects to do it again. The thought settles heavily in your chest, refusing to dislodge, and when you finally speak, your voice sounds quieter than you expect in the enclosed space.
“Who the hell was I?”
The question hangs there unanswered, absorbed by the low hum of the room.
---------
Sleep came uneasy, a fitful thing that slipped away like water through your fingers. When the dream arrived, it was jagged, fragmented — not a full memory, but sharp flashes that stabbed at your mind.
White room.
Surgical light, glaring and sterile.
A scream, cut off abruptly.
Your own hands — covered in blood. Not your blood.
Boots pounding concrete.
Screaming behind a closed door.
A name, spat like a curse: Sokolov.
A voice — unfamiliar, menacing, echoing in your head.
A blurry face looking down at you before everythin goes black.
You wake drenched in sweat, the sheets twisted tightly around your legs as if you’ve been fighting them in your sleep. The ceiling fan rattles overhead, too loud in the stillness.
The flat seems eerily quiet at this time of night, and every creak and distant sound feels amplified in the stillness. Outside, the faint hum of streetlights buzzes through the window, but inside, the silence presses down on you like a weight. You run a hand through your hair, your mind racing, replaying the fragments of the dream again and again.
You stand and move toward the window, pulling back the curtain just enough to peer out at the empty street below. The world looks calm—too calm—and it feels like everything is holding its breath, waiting. Waiting for something you can’t name.
Your gaze falls on your left arm—the snake tattoo curling around your wrist like a silent warning. The ink seems darker somehow in the dim light, as if it’s alive, watching. You shiver, though the air is warm, and wonder how much of your past is still lurking in the shadows, ready to strike when you least expect it.
You step away from the window and head to the tiny kitchenette. The kettle clicks on, its low hum a small comfort in the heavy quiet. You move with practised motions—cup, coffee grounds, water—trying to find normalcy in routine.
You try to remember. Anything. A face. A name. A place. But the memories stay locked behind an invisible wall, teasing and out of reach.
A flash—no, a feeling. A rush of adrenaline, a sharp scent of smoke, the sting of cold air on your skin. You open your eyes, gripping the mug tighter, heart pounding. It’s gone as fast as it came, leaving only a hollow ache.
You must have fallen asleep because the next time you open your eyes, pale morning light is filtering through the blinds, casting slats of shadow across the room. The mug is cold in your hand, now half-empty and forgotten. The silence feels heavier somehow, weighed down by the emptiness inside you.
For a moment, you just lie there, staring at the ceiling, the faint hum of the city waking up outside your window. Then you pull yourself up and busy yourself getting ready. Movements slow at first, like you’re underwater, but soon your body kicks into routine—shower, brush teeth, shirt, boots. Familiar. Automatic. The hot water stings your skin, but it’s grounding. Real. You focus on the steam curling upward, trying not to think.
But you are thinking.
You’re thinking about the fight yesterday—the staged brawl, the inmate who grabbed you, the way your body moved like it had done it a thousand times before. And the guards—how they came in fast, too fast. Not surprised. Like they’d been expecting it. Like it wasn’t their first time breaking up chaos that was more performance than accident.
They’d shared a look, just a flicker between them, but it stuck with you. That look wasn’t confusion. It wasn’t surprise. It was recognition. Understanding.
You grab your keys off the table and check your reflection in the cracked mirror by the door. Same face. Same eyes. Still no answers.
You flash your ID at the checkpoint and nod to the guard at the front desk. He barely glances up, presses a button, and the gate buzzes you through. You head straight for the locker room. Your boots echo along the hallway, a sharp rhythm that sounds louder than usual. Inside, fluorescent lights hum overhead, flickering slightly like they’re struggling to stay awake. The room is empty. For now.
You reach your locker, spin the dial, pop the lock, and pull the door open. There’s a folded piece of paper inside. No handwriting. Just a single, typed line: “The Viper is watching. Keep your fangs in. Don’t act out.”
Your heart skips.
The warning felt more real than any threat you’d heard.
And you knew — the past wasn’t done with you yet. But the worst part? You had no idea what was coming next. No warning signs, no clues. You didn’t know who was watching, who was hunting, or what they wanted.
All you knew was that the past had teeth — and it wasn’t done sinking them in.
This chapter was for you @alexazucchiereblogs thank you so much for your amazing comment! I truly appreciate it <3
ACTUAL STORY:
Chapter 1: The Morning Before
Chapter 2: Snake Eyes
Chapter 3: Trying To Remember
Chapter 4: Friend or Foe?
Chapter 5: Jun Park
Chapter 6: Something's Coming
Chapter 7: Captain Elias Grey
Chapter 8: Marco Diaz
Chapter 9: Laila Kapoor
Chapter 10: The USB Burns
Chapter 11: The Warden's Teeth
Writing again!! Approximately 85 chapters (not including flashbacks), updates will be slowww but it will come (unless I explain why it wouldn't...)
FLASHBACKS (not in order):
Flashback #1
Flashback #2
