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+--- Thread: [RFC] Some Going nNative. (/showthread.php?tid=8547)
[RFC] Some Going nNative. - Dartz - 09-02-2016
On the one hand, it tell's a lot - but it's trying to show something else underneath it. Foreshadow something else. Set up the tragedy at the end. (We had that gun in the very first section of the story, a long time ago)
I'm curious about what comes across, but not even sure how to describe what it is.
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It hurt to walk. Stabs and jabs ran through my legs, bolting up my back. My panting breath accompanied each step, forcing myself to keep moving. I’d done it before.
I could do it again. No big deal.
One foot in front of the other. Step by step.
Tapping that memory tapped everything that came with it. The hunger the dread, the desperation.
The image of that man, tired grey eyes fixed on the brown bags I carried. The sensation of his hands grasping at my jacket, reaching for the rations, begging, attacking, pleading. A pang bites deep and I’m just so hungry and so is everyone else and I can’t stand the idea of being so hungry and I want him to just fuck off and leave me alone so it just happens. A panic flash.
My arms swing. I hear the crack of a man’s temple and feel the shock run up my arm. The body drops dead to the ground with a meaty thump, pink blood trickling from his nose. One last breath rattles through the lips and then…
Nothing.
I killed him. Dead as disco in one shot. Either the concrete or the hurley, it didn’t matter. One of them did it for him. One moment there and starving, pleading, the next, dead and nothing. Stilled. Face down on the concrete. Glass eyes stared at their own reflection as my soul chilled, the realisation settling in like winter frost.
Cold and slow, clinging on in the shadow. A sensation bigger than my mind, but concentrated in my body, rippling through every muscle and leaving me sick. Not quite regret. I don’t regret surviving. Not quite joy. I amn’t glad I killed him.
Just ambivilant.
I killed him.
I did that.
In the dark, that’s who I am. That wouldn’t go away. He wouldn’t get up. I could beg. I could plead. Nothing would happen. The body stayed dead. I couldn’t rewind, take it back, take a second to think better of it. We wouldn’t have a moment to scuffle, grasp, punch, posture a little, to think better of it like sensible human beings, to try and talk it out and figure out an answer like human beings are fucking supposed to. He had his reason too.
Think about it. Desperation isn’t choosy about who it makes friends with.
His children might’ve been hungry. He might’ve been robbed. The hunger bit him too. It bit deep and he saw me wounded and thought it’d be easy prey, someone young, some prick who might’ve just robbed four rations, and neither of us really wanted it to end up the way it did.
But it did.
He died. The body lay there until someone who cared cleaned up. His kids went hungry. I went fucking home and didn’t sleep for a week, dreading the sight of those dead eyes staring back at me.
Watching.
The eyes of the world on my, glassed and dead. As if everyone could know, could mock me silently for breaking the ultimate taboo, dead ears never hearing me say sorry, I really didn’t meant for that to happen.
He died.
And I lived with that.
Maybe you guessed already, but, I just didn’t want you to think of me like that, not at the start when you were just getting to know me. So I lied a little and let the story sit unfinished.
Something changed. Something warped. Some wire got crossed. Not by my Power, but before that, right in that moment with that hurley in my hand and hunger in my belly.
Something dangerous.
Something terrifying
It happened again with the ring of a steel fire extinguisher hitting bone, or going in to that fight in the street with a knife in my hand, ready to use it.
On some level, Sophia had the ugly measure of me. She could see me in the dark and she liked what she saw.
How fucked up is that?
Looking forward, I could see my final destination. It’d happen in a flash – a moment’s panic with my back against the wall.
Trapped by time.
Trapped by circumstance.
Another bloody case of Skitter syndrome.
Alright. I can deal with that. Can I?
I think you’re laughing.
You’re right too. Really, being sober, one option remain.
Salvation sat in the bay, lit up with shining searchlights reaching for the heavens screaming join the Protectorate you fucking gobshite rather than take the retarded edgelord route.
Get your shit together and go.
But when you look out over the black water of the bay and see that rig sitting there, light up as paragon of a steel Christmas tree, glimmering with manicured hope and feel nothing but sick?
You think of being hollowed out.
Being stuffed with a marketer’s branding.
Being ground against the media schedule; look good, keep up the image, be the shining paragon of hero for all the little kiddies, now, go stop Lung. Of having to work with Sophia and treat her like human being. Being close to people who might figure out my dirty little secret.
What would you do? With all that churning in your head, turning the anxious screws.
That’s not for me.
That’s fucking terrifying.
What sane person wants to be a celebrity? A celebrity with a chance of death and dismemberment every Thursday night. Bugs. Bombs. Behemoth. The Protectorate regrets to inform you parent/guardian/parole officer that your son/daughter/ward has been burned/crushed/eaten by a.....
Standing in the drizzle, I saw my reflection in a pool of water on the footpath. This is who I want to be. Who, or what that is I don’t know but it feels right, right down through my bones. Fast, swift, striking, moving. Riding my Power like a motorcycle. Given time and practice, that’s what I’d be.
Almost soaring. Free. Happy.
That’s the heart of it, I think. Maybe you can understand?
Maybe that’s it.
I had the advantage nobody else did. A little extra perspective to sober me up. The Protectorate isn’t really about just stopping villains, is it? That’s just the justification the world sees to hide the truth.
What was that WoG about Damsel of Distress? How the local office kept the power and television subscription going in her little lair, in the hope it’d keep her calm, and maybe give her the space to turn around. To keep her safe until she sorted herself out, no matter how fucked up she was.
Parahumans are all wounded in some way. By the things that gave us our powers, or the things that happened before that.
Yeah, I said ‘us’. I’m one of the tomatoes too. With the Power in my head and every broken Faustian pact thing that comes with it.
I think that’s the answer.
So long as I kept myself out of situations that triggered that little Serengheti mode, I’d be fine in the short term. It’d carry me through for the next few weeks until I cleared my head and got my legs working and tried to train and practice.
Until I could check in to the asylum with the nerve to say ‘This is who I want to be,” and the skill to match.
Or Leviathan.
And whatever happened after that.
Heal up. Practice up. It’s not my freedom being lost, just the emotion of pride. Work up the nerve to sign my life away on that dotted line. Because that might just save my neck from something worse.
Because I can go in on my terms, rather than theirs. I had control of when I joined.
That’s my plan.
Thanks Sophia. You kept me from going to a really retarded place.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?