You have been gone for no fewer than eleven months and twenty-three days, each hour’s ticking beyond dutifully kept track of in your mind’s duress while your selfhood is pared down and stripped away. It is what you wanted. Hair to be roughly handled and bleached to its purest state, blunt cut just above your shoulders, laying waste to a litany of unruly inches grown out since you had the gall to envision yourself whole. Your free will an obsolescence, to be annexed at the root. Tools do not want and they certainly do not love; nothing belongs to you with a mouth full of bullets, munitions tucked beneath silver tongue. It simply happens, a flicker, an eclipse, close your eyes to the facsimile of life and reawaken to pristine truth, exeunt humanity. The facility does onto you all harm it may without killing you ⸻ unbirth, unawakening, every spindly limp made bereft of its juvenile indecision ⸻ what cannot be broken will be bent, tested, maimed. Until you react to the stimuli with most barren mien, prim and composed, Durant’s favorite daughter. You even summon the nerve to request a modification, an edit done onto your brainwashing’s script, ghost upon your blue lips for most obedient faculty to implement: a target of your own making, make saccharine memory a palimpsest, callous white heat in its place.
You provide the name Sam Jang.
That is all. No profile to be forged / no locale inscribed into skull’s bone fortress. This is all on you, contingent on your capability, and if @damnd-he is not exactly where you left him, you shall do away with the objective in its entirety, grand him the infinite mercy of separation from you. Call it a last-ditch effort of clinging to lifelong debasement, fingertips clawing to retain their hold until they are nil but bloodied stumps.
No text forewarns your arrival. You have nothing to say through flatly structured composite of programming and cell towers that cannot be better articulated through terse dialogue and an unshakable countenance. It’s not that you want to betray him. You just feel like you have to. You’re stationed at his door, staring blankly, swallowing to alleviate the tension of a tightened throat. Praying, to whatever nameless and formless deity oversees, that Sam will have moved on with his life, found a new home, a new identity for himself beyond orbiting as your protector, you, the fragile thing, the delicate thing, the thing in need of saving and not to be saved from. You do not want to knock on his door. There are countless things in life that you do not want, and your will has always been overwritten and superseded. Your life does not belong to you. It will be easier for him this way. The sooner you tear the bandage off, the better. Your Glock-19 is tucked safely within fabric folds ensconcing your slender frame, intended to blow him an artillery kiss when the moment is exactly right. Knuckles rap upon the door, three times, deliberate and sturdy.
When he swings the door open, you try and ignore the rush.
