knock off of a knock off

writing blog: mostly ocs or personal, sometimes fanfic

[word-dissociation]

I.O.U.

i wrote this story earlier this semester for school but i still like the characters a lot so ! here it is !

slight warning for some surrealism/disassociation and very very brief mentions of drinking and sex. nothing too bad but better safe than sorry

[word-dissociation]

time to write something Dumb and Emo

[grodyego]

the topsy turvy gang on a secret spy mission? maybe they have to sneakliy snap photo of someone, or get back a confisated cell phone... mission impossible!

Charon could not be happier. He was grinning ear to ear, absolutely over the moon as he fixed his cuff links. “I can’t believe it,” He gushed. “A real mission. An actual, real mission!”

“You know,” Polly chimed in through the radio. “Unlike our other fake missions that didn’t exist.”

Keep reading

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vacation day

normally i would put one of these under the cut but im just going to link the doc to it here bc the tumblr format Vexes me

tw warnings for: slight body horror

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the path (part I)

canon divergence/alternate ending (no warnings as of yet)

read it on ao3 here

“And all of this made him realize that Ashi was possibly even more alone than he had been, left out in such a confusing, chaotic world with nothing. It made him realize what she needed was a mentor and a friend.”

XCIX

     Jack notices a great deal of curious things about Ashi as they travel together. He’d noticed things about her that were strange before, when at first, she still seemed set on killing him. He does appreciate that she seems to have moved on from that goal; it’s good to have help, company, on his journey again, after being alone for so long. After convincing himself that’s what he had deserved.

    But Ashi was a great comfort, and a great help. Capable in a fight, and undoubtedly resilient- so much so to the point where Jack had to urge or remind her to eat, drink, sleep when it was her turn (they slept in shifts). Jack recalls how she beat an entire army on her own, with nothing but her own two hands, and he can’t help but wonder how someone so young could fight so viciously, and push their body so much. He can’t help but wonder how anybody so young could be sent out, with the rest of their company, who like them are so young, on what was surely a suicide mission. Sent out to fight or die.

    He still thinks about the other six, though he doesn’t mention any of them to Ashi, who in turn doesn’t mention them to him. Though the cruel shape of anger that used to blind him is gone, he still thinks about what he had said. What he had did. They were real flesh and blood, real humans, just as much as he or Ashi were, and one after another he’d taken each of their lives. More than once now he’s closed his eyes and felt his hand swing the knife, cut through the flesh of the neck. Seen the girl laying down dead, her face so much like Ashi’s.

    He wants to tell himself that it’s not his fault. It’s not his fault, and he didn’t know (though that only excuses the first one, if he can call it that). It’s not his fault and if he had yielded, he would have been killed. He still has to complete his quest, especially when now, for the first time in so long, it seems to finally be within reach again. He cannot let his home and his family die.

    He does, still, experience such horrible visions of his past. Some are still gruesome, but ever since his encounter with the Gods, they are less frequent, a little more manageable. Having company serves to distract him, Ashi’s curiosity about the world is obvious- almost insatiable- particularly whenever they leave less densely-populated cities and living complexes and come across jungles, forests, even deserts. She asks him more about his stories, wanting to know how everything is made; the sand, the sea, the sky above them with all the clouds, the different creatures around them. Some questions Jack can’t answer, but others he can seem to recall a story to satisfy her with. Some he’d even forgotten he had heard, put to pass them along, as his mother did, feels so natural.

    Through this time they have together, traveling along such a vast land together, this is where he realizes what’s bothered him about Ashi. She is so curious, to the point of being almost clueless. He remembers her trying to tell him Aku had made the stars, that he must’ve been the only one to shape the world into its untainted beauty. The way she’d spoken of it too, swinging from that tree branch, You will die and Aku will sing , Jack had never heard of the demon spoken in such a way. In all the time he’d been in this strange future, both enemies and allies had different ways of looking at him; there was obviously the more rebellious, dedicated to being a thorn in his side at least, and then there were those afraid of him- beaten into submission by such fear. There were those who wanted to believe in the empty promises he made, and then there were those who just wanted his money. And then of course there were the minions he had created, either built of his own evil or engineered around it. But what Ashi spoke of was none of this- it was reverence. Blind, almost infallible reverence, and that was something he had not seen before.

    And all of this made him realize that Ashi was possibly even more alone than he had been, left out in such a confusing, chaotic world with nothing. It made him realize what she needed was a mentor and a friend.

* * *

    They’re in the desert together, sun beating down, when Ashi turns to talk to him suddenly.

    “Jack,” She says, cautiously. “Can I ask you something?”

    “Of course, what is it?”

    He can tell something heavy is weighing on her mind, the way she almost doesn’t quite look at him, fingers absently shifting through the sand. “Your journey, your… mission… you’ve met a lot of people. You’ve helped them.”

    Jack nods. “Yes.”

    “Did you ever meet anybody who seemed like… like they were beyond saving?”

    It’s clear she is supposed to be the hypothetical lost cause in this question, and Jack wonders how long this must have been troubling her. He feels slightly negligent for not noticing earlier, so preoccupied with regaining his sword, continuing his quest, he had not considered his traveling companion. “There are few truly beyond saving, Ashi. I have met men- even ferocious monsters- who had realized the errors of their ways and tried to make amends.”

    She nods, but does not seem entirely convinced. Jack hesitates, but then moves to put his hand on her shoulder, continues, “I told you that the sword left me because I had lost my way. I let my anger and my hopelessness blind me, and I lost sight of my mission- and the decisions I made caused me to stray from the path I needed to follow.” She turns to face him now- a good sign- and Jack tries to smile in an effort to encourage her. “It is never too late to choose your own path, Ashi. What matters now is what you choose to do next.”

    Ashi smiles back at him, small and just a little bit uncertain, but it seems like she’s allowed his words to be taken somewhat to heart. She opens her mouth to say something when a harsh gust of wind blows sand all around them, causing her to cough. Both of them quickly rise to their feet, trying to shield their mouths and eyes from the onslaught of sand. Jack tries to yell over the noise, suggesting they find shelter, and it seems they’re both on the same train of thought. Far in the distance, there is a great black shape that can be made out behind the cloud of sand. Both move towards it in hope of cover.

* * *

    Suddenly, thankfully, Jack can breathe. He tries to hoist himself up as the shrivelled bodies of the dead creatures fall off him, into the charred pile of the rest of the little monsters that had engulfed him and Ashi moments before. Jack drops the disc of the weapon he’d finally managed to activate and focuses on breathing, in and out, and looks to see if Ashi is alright. She’s not on her feet yet, but she’s clearly conscious and breathing, and doesn’t seem gravely injured from what he can tell. Both of them are dirty, with holes in their clothing, but alive.

    “Ashi,” Jack goes over to her, tries to help her up slowly. “Are you alright? Can you stand?”

    She nods, and slowly but surely gets to her feet. Both of them are still breathing fairly hard, simply looking at each other. Ashi makes a bizarre noise, something like a halted sigh, or a snort, and then all of a sudden she starts to laugh. Not with any spite or bitterness; just a fully-belly laugh, that makes her shake so much she nearly falls over again. Jack for one moment is worried she still might be poisoned, but after a moment it dies down to a few sporadic bursts of laughter.

    “I can’t believe you almost died again ,” She says. “At the last minute! Does this happen to you every day?”

    “No.” He says, and then thinking on it, corrects, “Maybe.” He can’t help but smile as she laughs again.

    “You smell terrible,” She makes a point to sniff the air, and then immediately plugs her nose, face the picture of regret. “Oh- So do I.”

    “I think we have both deserved a bath,” He says, letting go now that he’s sure she’s fine. “But perhaps… you should look for new clothes. I don’t think I can mend leaves very well.”

    She looks down at herself, grimacing at what’s become of her dress, and nods. Both of them agree to meet outside, at the back of the prison, and camp for the night. Jack picks a leech out of his gi and searches for the exit.

[word-dissociation]

that being said i hope the Hets send me hate when i write said samjack fic

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i kno this blog probably wont get Much Attention until i post my first fanfic probably but i have to wait until saturday to start it........ when samjack ends............ Only Then

[word-dissociation]

romanticism

(warnings for: vague mentions of gore, maybe)

what’s a little self torture among friends?

Cliches remain cliche for a reason, and that’s because as soon as humanity gives a name to a pattern that pattern clings to them in turn like a bad burn. So even after nuclear fallout had left its own caustic burn marks on humanity, still did it survive and stumble back onto its own wobbling feet with them, and so did it’s close relatives. The most notorious being romanticism, which haunted mankind in its own sinister and self-perpetuating fashion, sinking deep into the spirit of those who were disillusioned, or desperate, or both, and sent them out on the rose-colored road to Hell in their best, marching happily along to the war drum.

It was for this reason Charon Lennox was really quite afraid of cliches and romanticism, as much as he used both, though he told himself with a disciplined mind. It could be worked out, he told himself, whipped into shape. It was supposed to be the sugar that coated the pill, the gloved hand that held your arm in place, not the lethal injection; but at times he was really unsure. He fell in love fast, hard, and often, and with each time it was all thanks to looking back on simple and regular acts of kindness through the blurry lense that romanticism offered him, and more often than not what he found to be reciprocated feelings was really just a script written to get him into his place in bed. Looking for love nowadays made him feel like an anglerfish, both as a pair of accessory gonads and as a hungry creature waving a pretty lure in front of its face.

And it was so much worse in the workplace, so when he came to realize he was starting to get butterflies in his stomach around his closest “co-worker”, Dove, he recoiled in on himself and put aside a vacation day to lament over the fact. Then when it showed no signs of stopping (the opposite, actually), he tried to cushion the inevitable blow by reasoning with himself that they were employees, and coworkers, sure, but informally. The set up that ANTEATER, the international string-pulling organization that most were luckily ignorant to, had provided for both of them was built upon beams of an offer neither of them could refuse. Charon hated to think of his set up that way, and tried to convince himself that his work was done solely in the name of humanitarianism and not because he was afraid of the indirect threat of being taken apart of like an old mechanical pencil. And Dove, who was afraid of nothing it seemed, was confronted with going home or going into a cryogenically induced coma for who knew how long, to have who knew what done with him, unless he do some humanitarianism of his own.

And Dove- Dove, without any family, with literally anybody who knew who he was left literally thousands of years in the past- was in a spot worse than being a non-person, as most ANTEATER employees were. For all anyone knew, which is to say nobody any time soon, Dove was non-existent, somebody who had and would never exist. A similar thought used to keep Charon up like the boogeyman, but Dove prefered it this way. To not even enter anyone’s thoughts, to not even be a concept in the back of their mind, to leave the smallest shadow imaginable on Earth, if one at all; that was peace, the real kind of peace philosophers and acolytes alike spent their whole lives looking for. That’s what he’d said, anyways.

So it stood to reason that Charon felt that guilty twist in his gut when he pictured Dove and himself in the back of his car necking and cooing over each other, or when he heard Dove’s laugh even hours after the rare event had occurred, or really when Dove entered his thoughts at all. Who was he to disturb the peace? Who was he to selfishly vocalize it either, put them both in a place neither could ever get back from with something as silly as a cliched proclamation of love?

Charon had been looking for the right time and place to really agonize over this and torment himself accordingly, and for some reason the little devil that pulled on all the levers and pushed all the buttons in his brain decided now- perhaps the worst time- was when it was going to get done. When he was pinned to an alley wall by a piece of loose pipe that had run through his stomach, a little to the left, watching with the usual blood-loss wooziness as Dove drove his sword through the head of the big ugly mutant they were supposed to be bringing back (alive, as it was requested). Dove shoved his foot into the thing’s neck while it was pinned, which cracked like a gunshot, and then left the thing to wheeze out its final and most agonizing breaths as he retrieved his sword and rushed immediately to Charon. He jerked and choked when he felt Dove’s grip on the pipe, trying to jar it out of him.

“No- no, no, no,” He hissed, still trying to sound calm. “Don’t pull it out, Dove. The car. Go to the car. Go call the medic- and Polly, call Polly.”

Dove nods, slowly, then in much more frantic understanding. He takes his hands off the pipe, and before he clenches them back into resolved fists Charon can see what he thinks is a tremor in them. Thinks he hears it far away in his voice when he calls, tells the medic to get here now, immediately, telling Polly on the other line that Charon’s hurt, and then tells her again that he’s hurt, he has to get back to him now. And in one heavy blink he’s back by Charon’s side, eyes wide and jaw set, sweaty hair clumped and matted to his face.

“I- Charon, you- y-you, guhh,” His words are coming out choked, strained, tongue and lips moving heavily to try to accommodate his uncooperative throat. “Guhh- got… hurt, I-”

“Dove, shh,” Charon tries to say. He knows what’s happening, having suffered from the same thing over much less.

“My fault,” He forces out, trembling in full now- clawing at his face. “My fault, my fault, my fault- it was my fault! It was my fault… my... my-”

Charon can only grasp at him so much, still stuck in his spot, but he manages to swat at Dove’s elbow in the effort to get his hands away from his face. “Shh… it’s not, listen to me. It’s not.” The pain is bad now, having moved so much, dotting his vision with fireflies; but he can’t take the guilt on Dove’s face, when he himself knows he’ll make it out of this just fine. So he thinks out loud, assuring, “It’s just a sign that everything’s working. It means I haven’t- lost anything yet, like my stomach- thank heavens too because I- I do need that.” He coughs, a little wetly, poshness of his accent beginning to slur together. “And I’m not paralyzed! Which means it’s probably not so bad. Won’t die from bleeding out- even if I did, what would that take to come back from? An hour? Two? Hah. Nothing. That’s nothing, it’s like a nap.”

Dove is breathing harshly, and shuddering still, but he’s left his face alone- wet with tears and drool, but more or less unscathed. There’s a guilt in his still-wide eyes, clamped tight over his jaw; Charon’s been speared by old rusty metal and here he is trying to comfort him. He looks like he wants to say as much, offer his own comfort, but Charon finds the need to keep talking, babbling in the one does when they haven’t slept enough the previous night.

“A you know what’s- what’s a little nap? How about this… After this why don’t we take a day? Just,” He coughs again. “You and me. Why don’t we go bowling? Or maybe I could just- What if I just, put an old record on, we could both just… Sit together… Have a listen…” Distantly, he is aware of the sounds of feet scuffling towards him and doors being slammed shut, but he is so caught up in the image to put much substance towards the noise. Dove is curled around him with a heavy blanket over both of them, nose just barely nudged at his temple and eyes just barely visible through his heavy lids as he dozes off, music crooning around them. And then Charon realizes he’s had his eyes closed, because when he opens them he sees Dove struggling against three ANTEATER employees who have “DAMAGE CONTROL” printed in comically large font across their chests.

He moves to say something, but then a glistening, white metal arm cuts through them, and suddenly Polly is there with her hand on Dove’s shoulders. “Alright, meatheads, back off- I got this,” She says, tugging at Dove. He writhes against her, but less violently, letting her pull him away towards the car with quiet promises of, “He’ll be fine, when isn’t he?”

Charon moves again to open his mouth and murmurs something thickly unintelligible, and then promptly blacks out.

When he wakes up later the pipe is gone, and he’s folded in by crisp, white walls and even crisper white sheets. A monitor beeps in his ear, fluttering by like a horsefly, before Charon rattles his eyes inside of his skull and then forces them to focus. Medical wards and hospitals are beginning to become instantly recognizable to him, and he turns his head to see Polly in the cranny of a chair dozing off. She blinks, meets eyes with him, and then blinks again, proclaiming, “Oh, finally, you’re up.”

Charon cranes his head when he hears rustling, seeing Dove at the other side of his bed, snort to attentiveness, cheek still slightly pressed to the small of his palm as he straightens up. Something about his posture and his groggy face tries to impart that he was definitely not sleeping a moment ago, but nonetheless, Charon is touched both of them would wait for so long to greet him. The thought that Dove had dozed off still sitting up is cute, but then in remembering the strife he’s caused and Dove’s preferences he strikes that and re-settles on touching.

He notices now Dove has stripped out of his chainmail and leather, leaving only his moth-bitten undershirt on, and so the splashes of vitiligo that embellish his light brown skin are visible all along his neck. They look at each other for a while, wordlessly, though in Dove’s face there isn’t any hostility- just the tired relief of a thank god you made it out of there. Charon himself can’t place what his face is doing, hopefully nothing too embarrassing, when Polly takes it upon herself to cut through the silence of the room.

“His frontal lobe’s still blown out, by the way,” She says, pointing to her temple with an easy smile. It’s well known of course that Dove doesn’t really know what a frontal lobe is, but he nods regardless, because the real meaning is understood by all three; sometimes when the world, external or internal, becomes too much, speech is simply too Herculean of a task to pursue for a while.

“I understand. Things got a little tense back there,” He moves his covers back, trying to inspect his would. As he had expected, under the bandage, it’s already beginning to recede to the flaky skin of a mostly-healed scab. “Doesn’t seem like I lost any major organs, though, so no harm done.”

When he looks back up Dove is frowning, a less frantic version of the guilt he had been wearing earlier. He reaches out and wordlessly takes Charon’s hand, gives it a gentle squeeze before bringing it to the curve of his nose and lips. He nudges it gently, eyes downcast, a silent, I’m sorry that had to happen, I’m sorry I made it harder on you he can offer while his voice still escapes him. Charon feels something in his chest swell, hot and thick like magma but dizzy like air, and looks back to Dove with some kind of smile on his face that he wants to call forgiving, but that he knows is nowhere near as formal.

Polly is still in the room of course, eyes darting between them with a disbelievingly amused smile quietly spreading out her face. Charon feels her eyes just barely, and he clears his throat; and while Dove moves the hand from his face, he does not release it.

“Weeell,” Polly says, getting to her feet. “I’ve got a colony of bacteria left on my coffee table that’s calling my name. Gonna head out. Glad to see you’re still in one piece,” She offers him a peck on the cheek and then a harsh ruffling of his hair on the way out.

Charon and Dove remain, Charon recalling his previous torture in the fight. Workplace romance, even if coerced into a workplace, don’t ever end well. Doomed to fail, like reunion tours and pyramid schemes. He wants to be alone in his sterile, adjustable bed before how he has to think about Dove sabotaging their mission over one tiny mistake that got him hurt makes him feel, how he’s acted in such a way again and again that shows Charn must have some kind of weight in his heart- how it makes him feel about that, to have his own little corner in anyone’s heart. Let alone Dove’s. So he clears his throat, says, “It wasn’t your fault. So a little bit of pipe got loose- not your fault, you had bigger fish to fry, and-”

Dove cuts him off by letting go of his hand and, in the short-lived fear Charon thinks he might be going, decides to clamber into bed with him. He settles down as Charon gapes at him, comfortably on his side, taking up more than enough room in the little one-person fold out. He tries to move his mouth to protest, but then Dove reaches over and drags him close and up against him, and Charon forgets what he was going to say to begin with. He does stare bug-eyed at Dove for an answer.

He shrugs noncommittally to do so, trying to think of how to explain his reasoning while he still can’t talk, and instead puts his pointer finger to his own lips. Stop apologizing, maybe, is what it means, or perhaps stop trying to coddle him, because Charon doesn’t think Dove would be so blunt or cruel as to just tell him to stop talking. So Charon sighs and decides it probably would be better to discuss the whole thing when Dove can say something back to him in full, but right now he also really needs to distract himself from how solid and comforting Dove is pressed so close against him.

“You.. comfortable up here?” Dove nods. “Any reason you’ve taken up the bed? Fancy a nap or something?” To his surprise, Dove nods again, accenting his answer with a quiet yawn. “Oh. Well, God, Dove, couldn’t you have waited to go back to your chambers? You don’t need me nearby to sleep, do you?”

Dove fixes him with a look, something he can’t- or is maybe too blindly excited- to decipher, and Charon tries not to see it as a positive affirmation to the question, because he isn’t sure if that would be better or worse. But all the same Dove puts his fingers to his lips, and then folds his hands together like he’s sleeping, and then ruffles his hair much like Polly had before she left. And really, looking at the sleepy contentment on Dove’s face, he’s powerless to stop him, so he sighs and makes a big show out of rolling his eyes and mumbles, “Fine, just don’t push me off.”

It feels inappropriate to think about his romantic conflict of interest with Dove right there, so he mentally schedules an HR meeting in the meantime instead, and tries his best to focus on the ceiling with his mind totally blank. If he can keep himself from viewing this through the lens of romanticism in the future than he can make it through the two-or-so hours Dove chooses to rest, and if he can do that just this once then maybe he can keep at it for the rest of his life. Because if romanticism can’t have him dramatics can, and he’s more than willing to torment himself than to make himself out to be a fool.

[word-dissociation]

headstone

(warning for suicide ideation, mentions of gore/beheading, heavily implied child abuse)

“The thing about it was that he had died and been born in the woods...”

The future is such rigid and bright place, the light is almost impossible to escape. It clogs the sky, like the heavy smoke of a forest fire, blotting out the stars at night and leaving a hazy blue blanket smother the inhabitants under it; not that anybody else seems to mind but him. When he looks at people he sees bloodshot eyes and lines upon lines of neon lighting. Even Charon had just shrugged, told Dove it was just how it was now, light pollution and all that, and that he should really take a look at the planet from its immediate orbit- maybe the moon, if he really wanted to see how much things had changed. Dove wasn’t interested in that, however, though it did hurt him to know how much the earth had been poisoned in the thousand of years it had been turning.

There were no woodlands or anything near ANTEATER headquarters, which meant everyday things were hollow, and droning, just the indifferent rattling of machinery and the hum of lights, people, and information being passed along and hidden; stolen and burned and suppressed. He would have given anything to have heard the buzz of a fly or even the skitter of a cockroach. To have looked up at the moon and had the shadow soothe his aching eyes. To hear the proper weeping of the rain as it slide down the trunks of the trees and deep into the soul. But it was just buzz, and the caved-in feeling in his chest, and Dove felt it so strange to pine after something that was still left in such an accursed place.

The thing about it was that he’d died and been born in the woods. An infant had been killed and skinned, gutted, deboned, and when the child was cracked clean open like lemon, the soul had been scraped out of it and fixed in place. Forced to take the remains and build itself not into a new child, not a man, but the headstone of the baby; and thus the soul was set out to carry itself, heavy like a headstone, and just as relentlessly final as a headstone was, though the grave was empty. Forced to drag along its feet and funnel light into its chest. As gruesome as ivy and as foul-smelling as bile; and that’s what he was. Undead and reborn, like a revenant, full of bile and light and heavy stone.

Dove wandered into the little room that held his little garden, not exactly spacious, but dim enough and comfortably warm and damp, dirt spilling out onto the floor. He lays down and closes his eyes, pictures the moon above him, smiling at him with her sliver of a mouth. He pictures silverfish and moths, skittering around, gnawing on the hem of his shirt. He pictures roots around him, pictures himself turning into bone, then dust, then nothing; crisp, clean nothing. It was a relaxing thought, and he found himself on the cusp of dozing, until a new thought crept quietly into his mind. Well, part thought and part memory, anyways: he got to thinking about the past.

It was no secret that the world was a graveyard, and while far from any grass or trees, when he pressed his ear to the ground he could hear all the bones of the dead labor out their heavy breath. He could feel the layers of the earth all the way to the bottom of the planet, and as it spun, he could feel it tilt just slightly. The world was largely a mass burial of children, who were always the most spiteful of departed, too young to fully understand what had been taken from them but angry all the same that they were missing something everybody else got to have. There were either children in the pit of the earth, or the things like him, stolen babies made to build their own headstones, or made to build other things; cobblestone paths to the edge of the earth, or two-foot coffins that could never fit what a coffin was meant to hold, red-hot hunting swords that were meant to cut down other stolen or loss children. Dove had almost been a hunting sword, and though a headstone was not much better, he was glad he hadn’t been forced to skin anyone else.

He could recall it, heavy like a thought, but in a far-away place, high up in a dream. It was a hot and viscous memory. The sky was gray, as it often was, and Dove had set out on his daily quest to humiliate himself- and thus his Lord by tenfold- walking along the dirt-and-stone road to the center of the village. And there, on the edge of the bridge, was a straight-backed man and a child who couldn’t have been any older than five or six years old. There was wailing so loud it drew and quartered Dove’s brain, and something malicious making the air hot around him. He saw the man (at the time he had not been sure it was a man, and maybe was instead a creature hidden behind the mask of a man; he knew now men were creatures, either born or grown) contort his face into something hateful, and then raise his arm up. And when Dove touched the hilt of his sword, he thought of all the stolen and buried children in the world, surely too many to count, and when he pulled it out of his sheath he thought about how he- a stolen child- had been taken without anybody lifting a pinkie to reclaim him, and how he’d been beaten into the shape of a headstone, and how he could recognize two things when he saw them: a stolen child, and the angry pull-back of a coward.

To Dove, cowards had one perfect counterpart: eggs. Both took little effort to break, and both were yellow and runny on the inside. So his sword came down to crack the coward, taking his oblong head off his stiff shoulders, which fell with a dull noise between his shoes. The air felt dense around Dove as he sheathed his sword again, like he was moving through tree sap, but he managed to slide the blade back into its leather case. The body stood for five seconds and then fell backwards onto his chest, spritzing him with a final shot or two of blood. And just like that, the nameless coward was dead.

Dove shoved the body off, not particularly enjoying the sensation of being bled on, and looked up to regard the child, who was no longer there. He turned his head both ways to see them running towards the village, stumbling somewhat, but never looking behind. On and on, until there was just a speck on the horizon. Dove regarded the body at his feet, kicked it once or twice, and then hefted it up by the ankles, ready to send it off to the bottom of the river. How little time that had took, he thought, just one swift motion and that was it; head departed from shoulders, soul departed from body. Completely still but still oddly warm. In just one movement, in just one moment, Dove had blotted off one cowardly soul, had kept one child out of the hands of a straight-backed architect or worse, had reduced a whole body to just two equally repellent parts. Had begun a calling.

Dove thought about this moment very often, and always recounted some of the same small regrets; he felt nothing for the man he’d killed, who, if Dove had not intervened, nobody would have- not even bitter Nemesis. But it was for the child. Who, in Dove’s mind, was always running, further and further away, into a village that seemed to move just that further than the child could run. He often wondered where they had ended up; he hoped it was into the arms of a mother or father, who would see the blood on their shoes and the tears in their eyes and do whatever it was mothers and fathers were supposed to do; pet your hair and hold you, tell you it was okay, and it was a blessing to even see you back safe. He hoped he hadn’t inadvertently molded the child into something that could not be sustained, and was destined to fall into pieces. But he could never be sure, and he had to jolt himself out of the memory by ripping out a small bundle of hair.

It felt inappropriate to revisit the thoughts now, so he rolled onto his side, and chewing on his fistful of hair, rocked back and forth until his daydreams of tall trees and old bones and blissful nothingness found their way back to him. He did not sleep, but he did doze, with the invisible weight of the moon over him, and the solid layers of the earth underneath.

[word-dissociation]

me realizing i gotta put names on my writing instead of just my shitty google docs titles: fuck

[word-dissociation]

i got something in the works i wanna finish tonight but actually in the meantime im gonna post something i finished from a Little while ago