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 Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2013 7:32 am
Give it a few more minutes and he'd probably get interrupted by some busybody tech, and then he'd have to stop smoking.
Taym stared at the far wall for a few long seconds. Leave it to Taym to smoke in a hospital room given ten seconds to get away with it.
He'd had no intentions of visiting Rep, not to lord it over him or otherwise. But he'd returned aching from his last mission desperately longing for someone to cry on, for a warm body to curl up against, and the absence of either had made him bitter and resentful and desperate for some sort of diversion for his chaotic emotions, some tiny re-assertion of his power over something, anything. The feeling had been building up for days, and soon there was another conversation he needed to have in the infirmary anyway. Another reason to visit. Rep would be a side trip, at worst.
Rep had been asleep when he arrived, and so much the better. Taym had sat himself down in the chair, and after a minute of waiting he'd lit a cigarette, comfortable in the temporary absence of non-distracted techs to get down his throat about it. As was usual for him he sat on the edge of the seat, hunched forward, taut; Taym always looked like he wasn't entirely sure if chairs were things to be trusted, and today was no different. But instead of his hands thrust into his pockets, his elbows were on his knees, one hand dangling his cigarette, the other lifted to roll his lower lip back and forth between trembling fingers. His eyes slid off the wall and down to Rep, dispassionate, calm, his eyebrows lifted in an expression of vague, exhausted sarcasm as his thoughts chased themselves in circles.
He didn't look at Rep now the way he had before, when Rep had come to his room, or when he'd fallen out of the pod, or on that day in the cafeteria. During those times Taym had been the snapping, bristling shadow of a feral dog threatened by a larger, sleeker predator.
The Taym watching Rep now was entirely and unnervingly human. There was no fear in him, or perhaps it was simply that the fear had changed so completely as to be unrecognizable. He didn't look at Rep as though the injured man were a threat or even a wild animal, let alone a human. Rep was a thing on the periphery. A widower at a funeral home might look at a painting hanging in the reception area the same way Taym looked at Rep: the absent focus for his distracted emotions, a place to put his eyes.
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Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2013 7:49 am
Rep had been loathe to go to sleep when finally he was left on his own, but much like everything else lately, what he wanted didn't actually ******** matter. Exhaustion and injury saw to it that he slid off into unconsciousness the moment he was left alone.
And the dreams came.
Cold. Impossibly cold, as if the sun had died and what was left of the latent heat in the world had flitted off into the vast and black sky. It was like creeping death, the chill he'd felt slithering up his limbs as his heart was exposed to the air and his life slowly ebbed away. There was a frantic knowledge that he was dying, that he had to feed, had to find something, someone to fight off the cold before it overcame him and he became just a silent scream in that vast open sky.
The shadow watched him and he felt the pressure of its gaze, felt the chill indifference to his success or failure.
In the world of cold, he knew where the warmth lay. He turned, drew Tracey up and brought the axe down. There was a jumble of sensations he veered away from, a cry, a wet seeping hint of red and a realisation.
In his sleep he'd stirred now and then, making low distressed sounds. When he woke he arched his back, threw himself into his restraints and all but roared "NO." before slumping back, gasping as pain lanced repeatedly through his chest. His breathing was ragged sobs, pained, eyes closed as he tried to forget what he'd just seen as he tried to tell himself all of the last few days were an extended and horrible nightmare.
She remains.> Tracey reported in.
Shame mingled with the fear and rage as Rep realised just who was in the room with them, witness to a moment of raw weakness he wouldn't have wished even those close to him to witness. He narrowed his eyes and curled his lip as he tried to regulate his breathing and sit confidently, the instincts of a wounded predator feigning good health lest it become prey.
"How ******** long have you been sitting there you creep?"
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Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2013 8:00 am
He didn't answer immediately, just stared at him dispassionately and without defiance, still twisting his lip between his fingers before slowly leaning back, folding his arm over the spot where his stomach would be if he weren't an ambulatory skeleton, and lifting the cigarette to his mouth again. He looked distinctly cleaner than he had before, in newer clothes, with his hair half-grown-out, with the intermediate coat still fresh for him albeit showing the signs of secondhand wear. But he looked, simultaneously, worse than he had before: face wasted, focus turned inward, his knuckles swollen on his skeletal fingers. "Lot of people cried over Shiloh," he informed him after a long lull.
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Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2013 8:12 am
Rep raised a brow at Taym slightly considering that it was one of the rare ******** times when both of them looked probably looked about even in the pathetic stakes. He wouldn't entertain the idea that he potentially looked worse, his long garishly red hair tangled and scruffy, his complexion paler and shallower than usual and what was visible of him clad in nothing but a standard issue gown, bandages wrapped around his chest repeatedly, some of them blossoming with fresh red blood from his panic of moments before. He wanted to seem invincible but he was lucky if he could even seem rough around the edges.
Still, what he couldn't reflect on the outside, he could compensate for on the inside. The bitterness and sharp loathing leant him strength where his body failed.
"More people probably cried over the movie Titanic. People will cry about ******** anything. Why should I care? Kid ******** up, he gets to live to tell about it, that's more than most people got where I came from."
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Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2013 8:23 am
Another lull before he spoke. This was apparently going to be a hallmark of this conversation. "Which part is it," he asked, dropping a cough into his shoulder, "that you get off on? The actual violence, or the making people scared of you?"
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Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2013 8:44 am
Rep would have laughed if it didn't cause so much pain in his physical state, instead he smiled, eyes fixed on Taym with that wild slightly unfocused stare he always adopted when what was going on behind them was wild and visceral. He had lost everything and had nothing left to lose but his life, the one thing in the room Taym couldn't take from him without consequence.
"Are you my ******** psychologist now?" he asked, "Because I've had a few and most of them didn't look too pathetic to be a hobo. Like they'd even be fired from selling the big issue for being too sullen and anorexic. I'd say you have your own problems to be ******** going on with."
He took a shallow breath and felt Tracey move in his mind, a gentle brush of affection and attentiveness. Still there, always there, both of them prisoners but victorious in their continued survival.
"But whatever. I'll humour you, because no one cares what you say to them. Not even Jordan and he normally cares about everyone. What do I get off on? Both. The fear in someone's ******** eyes when they realise what they've walked into isn't like them, it isn't a ******** person who is going to care about their ******** relationship problems or the way they pretend to like one another to hide the daggers behind their backs. When they realise I see them for what they are, right past their walls to the very ******** core of their self. It's the look they get when they realise that all the ******** monsters they made while they pretended to be good people climbed in behind some guy's eyes to look back at them and that the mercy they didn't ******** show other people won't be shown to them. I get off on getting into their ******** head and making them submit, making them toe the line and ******** pretend to respect - and pretending is all I ******** need because lets face it, people will never ******** respect someone like me or like you." He traced a finger in the sheets idly as if he was talking about something as casual as the weather. "Violence is power, blood is power made flesh - it is purer than what that person is, raw primal and flawless. Hurting others or being hurt, it doesn't matter which, both are satisfying, both mean you are alive, both are feeling. Both of them mean that someone hated you enough to want to stand up to you, to interact with you, both of them are saying you ******** exist. Both of them mean you won, that now they are like you, everyone down in the ******** gutter, stuck on even ground."
He looked up from where he'd been eyeing his finger. "That what you wanted to hear?"
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Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2013 9:01 am
"I didn't want to hear anything," he said. "Just curious." Another pause while he finished the cigarette and stubbed it out on the bedside table, leaving the butt there. Maybe he was hoping Rep would get blamed for it, or maybe he didn't care. He sent a glance around the room, or what was visible of it beyond the curtains around the bed; he lifted his gaze to the ceiling in a sweep for cameras in what amounted to old, old habit. And then he summoned his weapon, without leaning forward and in fact without brandishing it at all, just absently resting the tip of the blade against his palm and letting his eyes drop down to runes the color of late-afternoon sunlight, the same way a man in a diner might distract himself with a straw by twisting it in his fingers. He did it because he could. He did it because the knife, sleek and dark, looked like something that could slide between ribs without anyone noticing but the wielder. Specifically because it wasn't impressive. Specifically because it was small and discreet. If Tracey was a roar, Fionnghal was a whisper against an ear in the dark. If Tracey was a hail of closed fists and open jaws, Fionnghal was a sudden cold touch against the throat. The weapon looked like a thing designed to dispassionately and without mess or fuss or a noisy show dispose of living things: quietly dangerous. Taym looked anything but. There was nothing in him--in his face, or his body language, or in his voice when he spoke--that was even remotely threatening. "Looking right past their walls at their core," he echoed. "Got a microscope trained on the soul, I'm sure. Let me ask you something, Reid. Satisfy this curiosity too: what do you see when you look at mine?"
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Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2013 11:14 am
Rep eyed the weapon without fear or concern, it wasn't that he didn't realise the danger, he knew Taym's weapon was just as lethal as any oversized or ridiculous thing that anyone on the hunter wielded, simply condensed lethal power where there might have otherwise been size. But he was unafraid because he didn't think he'd use it against him, doing so would harm Taym more than it would harm him, he'd be diminished by the action whereas Rep would just be dead.
He eyed the man in front of him thoughtfully. He didn't hate Taym. He hated him when he got in his way, the same way he hated everyone else, when he was harmless he found him fascinating, he always found people fascinating and for the longest time he'd told himself it was because he cared about them, deep down. Maybe it was just because they were fascinating.
"When I look at you? You don't let a lot get to the surface. You want to come across like the guys I used to ******** hate, wiry, self interested, chasing death as if they could steal his ******** trainies and mobile phone. Selfish and indifferent, outside the world looking in with no remorse or nothing left of what remorse they had. Except you fail at it, there's something wounded about you, you care a little too much about bad s**t and the people who do it. You don't get upset much, but that too is just surface level, an attempt to hide the s**t you care about. You hate me because I don't care much about things that aren't me. You told Jordan you ran away from your life to protect people, that wasn't the actions of a slinking ******** scavenger, that was the actions of a guy who wanted to change but was chained to addiction or just chained to feeling loved the times when he didn't ******** everything up, the ******** little windows when you fly in out of the dark into a lit room. You know you'll end up back out there again, but its the moment that is so sweet you can't ******** let go. It's why you fear death too, it'd be another departure and it might be to a worse place than this shithole."
He looked Taym over again, but it wasn't with the usual malice but a slightly more sinister sort of endearment. "When I look at you I see a man who is trying to starve the heroic ******** soul out of himself like an animal in a burrow. You'd rather be the villain because its easy than be what you are capable of ******** being, hiding in the dark and resenting the world. That's what I think you are and its why I ******** enjoy flouting immorality at you, because it hits that spark every time and ******** reminds you that like probably every ******** thing else in your life, you have great potential but you are just too chicken s**t to go for it."
He grinned toothily "And that's why I sometimes hate you so much, I spend my whole ******** life trying to be the hero. Just ******** once. You have the natural ******** ability to be a good person, it peeks through all the cracks, but you try and stifle it out and hide it. I hate it. I want to rip it out. But you won't even fight me, you won't even slay the dragon, instead you come in when I'm weak and helpless to ask me why and here I ******** am, telling you."
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Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2013 1:15 pm
The silence this time was still longer, stretching out endlessly, Taym twisting the blade back and forth against his palm and staring into the middle distance, brows drawn together, his face not having betrayed a single flicker of expression for the entire duration of Rep's deconstruction. "You know," he said finally, still without looking at him, "you're the only one who seems to think any of that s**t about me being a decent person." A pause, and a quiet little laugh, tired, unstable, sincere. He dragged his eyes back up to Rep's face, and his face was dangerously calm but his hands had started shaking again, the blade trembling between them, and it was impossible to say if that was the nerve-damage shake or the trembling of fear and anticipation. "I don't wanna sit here and discuss your abstract, though. I just want to correct you on one point. You think I didn't come in here to 'slay the dragon' because you think I'm a person concerned about doing what's right. You think it's not in me to murder someone. You think I'm afraid of the consequences. And you're right, but only mostly." Taym's eyes drifted away from Rep's face, down to the knife, and then back up to the various dangling bags pumping his body full of life-sustaining chemicals before landing back on his eyes, squarely. The shake had extended to his voice. "But here's where you ******** up your understanding of the situation: I want to prove you right. You see some flicker of good in me? I want to let it out. And I can't think of much that's better than a personal sacrifice for the greater good. There's not a doubt in my ******** mind that when they let you off the leash they've got you on you're going to murder someone else. Maybe more than one person. Maybe next time you snap you'll take out someone I have a personal investment in: Bix, or Gale, or Peyton, or even someone like Bashmet. But even if it isn't, it'll be a Hunter, or it'll be a civilian, and probably someone innocent. Someone like Shiloh. Someone who deserves to die a lot less than you do. It's not murder to put down a dangerous dog. A sociopath isn't a human." He looked back over, absently, distractedly, at the tubes running into Rep's arms, and he ran his thumb, the shaking now violent, along the hilt of the knife but didn't brandish it. He didn't need to. How long had he been sitting there before Rep woke up, exactly, ensconced in the things keeping him alive? His voice was strained around the words, trembling. "By your assessment I have the potential to be great. Slaying a dragon would be great. Even if the dragon's already chained up and weak, if no one else has the balls to finish it off, finishing it off is a great act. All I wanted," he finished, and he was meeting his eye again, "when I signed up, was to help. All I wanted was to do some good for my fellow man."
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Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2013 2:00 pm
Rep watched Taym with that same distance, like an animal watching the barrel of a gun, even when he eyed the bags, as long as he didn't break anything it was fine. "Except if you kill me now you are no ******** better than me. It's not heroic, its not for the better good, its none of those things. That's justifying it to yourself and I ******** know that you will never listen to that voice because the good part of you won't let you. If you were the guys my mum let ******** her, you'd do it. You'd kill me and be like well then that's that done and not give a ******** and if people asked you'd say you did the world a favour, you got rid of something evil and broken and that shouldn't have ******** been there in the first place." he raised a brow carefully. "But you aren't stupid, or ignorant. You won't be doing a great act, you'll be hurting a lot of innocent ******** people, including yourself and the people close to you. You might take me out of the picture, you might think you set the people who lean on me free, you don't, you pull out their supports I've put there. You kill me you are a murderer, you take on everything I am, you get the consequences, you change how people see you forever and you put out that spark permanently. But justify it away to yourself man. I'm no able to stop you. I just alsoknow I might one day be the line between you getting killed on the battlefield or no. Because I do my job. I do my ******** job with everything I am, that's why they keep me alive."
He would have shrugged his shoulders but he couldn't even do that much. "If you want to do good for your fellow man then just ******** be a good man, if I'm right, you are capable of it on your ******** own. Don't get caught up in the ******** toxic cycle I'm caught in. You start trying to prove you are good and you end up like me."
He took a deep breath and exhaled. "But do it if you want man. You'd probably be doing me personally a favour, the people you like to ******** think trust me unconditionally actually don't any longer. It's just me. You won't feel better afterwards."
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Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2013 2:38 pm
"Anyone hurt by your dying," he said quietly, and his voice had steadied somewhat, "needed to see you dead more than anyone. I bet there were people that cried for the Unabomber, somewhere. You don't build supports. You build cages." He extended an arm, finally, to put the tip of the blade against the bandages on Rep's chest, above the healing wreck that H had left. It shook, violently. "And hell," he said bitterly, and the effort of not withdrawing his hands was glazing his eyes with unshed tears. If Rep had seen Taym cave against his principles when he'd come to barter for cigarettes, he was seeing, now, a Taym utterly steeled, fighting against himself and winning. "Maybe you're wrong and I'm right, and I'm doing this--" he pushed, not enough to maim, just enough to hurt "--because it feels good. It does." And it did, underneath the nausea and the tightness in his ribs and the pounding in his temples. It always did--for a second. He knew what came after. The self-hate. The guilt. The desperate wish that he could unroll time and redo it differently. All the things that Rep, so beloved, would never ******** feel. Fiona was oddly silent. "Even if I did this I'd be better than you," he whispered, and he was looking, not at Rep, but at the end of the knife. It pressed, but then it lifted, and it snaked towards Rep's throat but went wide at the last second. Fiona was a whisper of disappointment, a thought that would haunt him for several days. "You're right," he said exhaustedly, and without shame or even self-awareness he dragged the back of his free hand over his eyes, knuckling away the tears threatening to fall before they'd have a chance. "Not about cutting your throat making me a bad person. It wouldn't. But people would say it did. Congratulations. You win again." He stood up, unfolding creakily, tiredly. "Don't feed me your bullshit about toxic cycles and trying to be good. You're evil, you're broken, and you shouldn't have been here in the first place. But apparently no one else can see it. Credit where it's due: good work."
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Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2013 3:22 pm
The pain was intense, even from the pressure, fanning out across his ribs in white hot agony, the pain flickered across his features, he didn't have the strength to stop it. In his thoughts Tracey hissed.
<>
<> He wasn't sure why he was so sure, but it was a certainty his very life depended on.
He smiled, all teeth. "It feels ******** good to me too." The tangled feelings were always there, he savoured people hurting him almost as much as he savoured doing it to them. Right down at the core of things he hated no one so much as he hated himself. Pain became pleasure as sure as violence became it.
Fiona's blade moved upwards and there was a sharp thrill of adrenaline, unable to convince his body to trust his instincts. He exhaled only when he was sure he was still alive, watching Taym unreadably. "I never once said you weren't better than me. You are scum, you are a coward, you are everything I ever ******** called you, but I never said I was better at anything other than fighting."
He was shivering from the pain, breathing still difficult. "And you say no one else can see it, you are dead wrong. Ace and Jordan know exactly what they are dealing with, it just doesn't matter to them." Or it hadn't, he wasn't so sure if that applied any longer. "And you might think I'm just ******** naturally evil or whatever but the day I give in to that s**t and believe it is the day I might as well ******** off myself."
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Posted: Wed Dec 11, 2013 2:07 am
The knife vanished. "That'll be the day you prove me wrong," said Taym flatly, and without further comment he pushed aside the curtains to go, followed moments afterward by the distant open and close of an infirmary door.
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