tells me all the ways he's gonna mess me up
WHO: Katurian and Heine
WHERE: Super jail
WHEN: Early morning Saturday
WARNINGS: Violent imagery, dark themes, possibly violence.
SUMMARY: Katurian sees something in the shadows.
FORMAT: oh god. Starting out with tl;dr (I'm not joking), going to either paragraph or quickpara from there.
Once upon a time there was a man, a storybook man who lived between the pages of books and typewriter keys, who didn't understand or care for the real world very much at all; in fact, he went as far as to think of his life in acts and story arcs and silly writer things like that, and whenever something crumpled that well-crafted structure like a piece of loose leaf paper, it felt to the poor man rather like dying.
Well, one day, after things had gotten about as bad as they possibly could, the man decided on an ending for himself and he worked to set it in motion - saying his goodbyes, writing letters - and he recognized that he couldn't very well have a proper ending without tying up some loose ends, and so he publicly confessed to each and every crime he had ever committed in his short, misery fraught life. He confessed to killing his parents one by one and the strange mix of satisfaction and fear he felt as they died underneath him, almost beautiful in its horror. He confessed to killing his brother, whom he didn't want to kill, who hollowed him out into the broken man he had become today. He confessed to helping a woman kill herself by taking away her past, of leaving a hole in the world one person wide. In prison, the man - who was so often sleepless - slept and had beautiful dreams about wet pavement and green paint. The man was happy when his ending came, when he was swept back to his old world where his body was nothing but dust and decaying matter.
But then the man was brought back to the world of living. His ending was ruined, was inconsistent, was bursting and writhing and sloppy at its seams. He stood, disoriented, in an unwritten story where he was neither the hero nor the villain, nor - more importantly - its writer.
To the poor man, it felt worse than dying.
When he went back to prison, he couldn't sleep. He had nightmares and night terrors and woke up drenched in sweat, fists clenching his blanket, praying to God and Death to let him end, PLEASE because if his story was still going, he needed to live with the truth of those confessions on his lips and in the eyes of everyone around him.
--
Shadows. Saturday. Two in the morning. Katurian picks at the side of his prison bed and tries to make up stories while watching the darkness shift across the floor and down the walls, but he keeps coming up with the same self-pitying dribble again and again, like his thoughts are caught on a loop. He buries his head under the pillow. He can make out Heine's sleeping form in the darkness, and he thinks, he has a real reason to be in this prison. He has a noble reason.
In his head, Katurian lists poisons. Methanol. Ethylene glycol. Cyanide. Atropine. Thallium. Five ways to kill five characters that aren't him. He lists diseases. Chicken pox. Cervical cancer. Meningitis. Pertussis.
The shadows shift.
He sees it immediately, and then his internal voice sounds different, like it's three voices instead of one, and he catches something in the shadows outside his cell. Glasses. No? Yes. But--
He eases out of his bed and pads over to the edge of the cell where he hooks his hands around the bars. He can't see anyone. "Once upon a time," he whispers under his breath, and he can feel the air warm on his neck, "there was a man who was seeing things."
He chokes on a laugh.
--
And this man thought he must be so silly, staring out into the blackened hallway as though expecting someone to be waiting for him, and he told himself that he needed sleep and a better diet, for the man had seen things before that were never there in the first place and he couldn't let that happen again. However, as he released his hands from the cold, thick metal that was responsible keeping him prisoner for an indeterminate period of time, he saw it again, the unmistakable shine of glasses in low light, and as he leaned forward to get a better look, he--
--
Katurian loses all the air in his lungs.
He's looking at his parents.
Rail thin, jutting elbows that could slice open somebody's stomach. Smiles that end in points. They're just as he remembers in every way, only they're coming out of the floor like liquid, their lower legs smudged and folded unnaturally into the concrete floor. They're still taller than him. Their torsos, skewed and stretched, more than make up for the height lost in their legs.
Oh, poor little Kat.How sad you look these days!We could have never imagined such a dark place for you.Prison!And you were such a good little boy.
He can't even tell if the voices are coming from inside his own head.
You were destined for wonderful things.Your mother is still so torn up.But we forgive you, little Kat.You must admit, thoughThat this really fits in rather nicely With that whole "tragic artist" thing! Doesn't it?
In the next minute they're gone and Katurian is breathing through his mouth, sucking in gulps of air faster than he can think. He stays like this for a long time, frozen solid, knees locked, until he hears one of the prisoners down the whole yell JESUS CHRIST IS SOME FUCKING RETARD HAVING A HEART ATTACK DOWN THERE FUCKING CHRIST.
And then he starts screaming.
WHERE: Super jail
WHEN: Early morning Saturday
WARNINGS: Violent imagery, dark themes, possibly violence.
SUMMARY: Katurian sees something in the shadows.
FORMAT: oh god. Starting out with tl;dr (I'm not joking), going to either paragraph or quickpara from there.
Once upon a time there was a man, a storybook man who lived between the pages of books and typewriter keys, who didn't understand or care for the real world very much at all; in fact, he went as far as to think of his life in acts and story arcs and silly writer things like that, and whenever something crumpled that well-crafted structure like a piece of loose leaf paper, it felt to the poor man rather like dying.
Well, one day, after things had gotten about as bad as they possibly could, the man decided on an ending for himself and he worked to set it in motion - saying his goodbyes, writing letters - and he recognized that he couldn't very well have a proper ending without tying up some loose ends, and so he publicly confessed to each and every crime he had ever committed in his short, misery fraught life. He confessed to killing his parents one by one and the strange mix of satisfaction and fear he felt as they died underneath him, almost beautiful in its horror. He confessed to killing his brother, whom he didn't want to kill, who hollowed him out into the broken man he had become today. He confessed to helping a woman kill herself by taking away her past, of leaving a hole in the world one person wide. In prison, the man - who was so often sleepless - slept and had beautiful dreams about wet pavement and green paint. The man was happy when his ending came, when he was swept back to his old world where his body was nothing but dust and decaying matter.
But then the man was brought back to the world of living. His ending was ruined, was inconsistent, was bursting and writhing and sloppy at its seams. He stood, disoriented, in an unwritten story where he was neither the hero nor the villain, nor - more importantly - its writer.
To the poor man, it felt worse than dying.
When he went back to prison, he couldn't sleep. He had nightmares and night terrors and woke up drenched in sweat, fists clenching his blanket, praying to God and Death to let him end, PLEASE because if his story was still going, he needed to live with the truth of those confessions on his lips and in the eyes of everyone around him.
--
Shadows. Saturday. Two in the morning. Katurian picks at the side of his prison bed and tries to make up stories while watching the darkness shift across the floor and down the walls, but he keeps coming up with the same self-pitying dribble again and again, like his thoughts are caught on a loop. He buries his head under the pillow. He can make out Heine's sleeping form in the darkness, and he thinks, he has a real reason to be in this prison. He has a noble reason.
In his head, Katurian lists poisons. Methanol. Ethylene glycol. Cyanide. Atropine. Thallium. Five ways to kill five characters that aren't him. He lists diseases. Chicken pox. Cervical cancer. Meningitis. Pertussis.
The shadows shift.
He sees it immediately, and then his internal voice sounds different, like it's three voices instead of one, and he catches something in the shadows outside his cell. Glasses. No? Yes. But--
He eases out of his bed and pads over to the edge of the cell where he hooks his hands around the bars. He can't see anyone. "Once upon a time," he whispers under his breath, and he can feel the air warm on his neck, "there was a man who was seeing things."
He chokes on a laugh.
--
And this man thought he must be so silly, staring out into the blackened hallway as though expecting someone to be waiting for him, and he told himself that he needed sleep and a better diet, for the man had seen things before that were never there in the first place and he couldn't let that happen again. However, as he released his hands from the cold, thick metal that was responsible keeping him prisoner for an indeterminate period of time, he saw it again, the unmistakable shine of glasses in low light, and as he leaned forward to get a better look, he--
--
Katurian loses all the air in his lungs.
He's looking at his parents.
Rail thin, jutting elbows that could slice open somebody's stomach. Smiles that end in points. They're just as he remembers in every way, only they're coming out of the floor like liquid, their lower legs smudged and folded unnaturally into the concrete floor. They're still taller than him. Their torsos, skewed and stretched, more than make up for the height lost in their legs.
Oh, poor little Kat.How sad you look these days!We could have never imagined such a dark place for you.Prison!And you were such a good little boy.
He can't even tell if the voices are coming from inside his own head.
You were destined for wonderful things.Your mother is still so torn up.But we forgive you, little Kat.You must admit, thoughThat this really fits in rather nicely With that whole "tragic artist" thing! Doesn't it?
In the next minute they're gone and Katurian is breathing through his mouth, sucking in gulps of air faster than he can think. He stays like this for a long time, frozen solid, knees locked, until he hears one of the prisoners down the whole yell JESUS CHRIST IS SOME FUCKING RETARD HAVING A HEART ATTACK DOWN THERE FUCKING CHRIST.
And then he starts screaming.