I Saw This Painted on a Bridge [Open-ish, Active]
Characters: Anna Marshall, Machi Tobaye
Setting: Blue Kitchen
Time: Night 006, early
Summary: Machi cannot hide forever.
Warnings: General gross, possible sap.
Machi stood in the kitchen with slightly bent knees so that he would not fall, his overlarge, rotted bare feet flat against the tiled floor. If he looked half as terrible as he felt, it would be a miracle. For days now--'days,' measured by sleep patterns and not the light outside or presence of... monsters, monsters that weren't also pretending to be people, the pain had been slowly ebbing, his body recovering from the trauma and surgery. His appearance, however, had not. His clothes were slightly torn, soiled and stained, his hair greasy and limp, face dirty and pale, the loose loops and ends of the dirty bandage hanging in his face. He was hungry. Even the stitches up his stomach, the weight and movement of the bug, could not make him ignore it any more. He had been filching steadily from food people left out, sneaking what he could from the brown cricket bedroom when he was certain no one would catch him, but eating was a problem now and he had done very little of it over the past week. And he was very hungry. His stomach gnawed at itself, caving in, his head faint with the familiar feel of starvation, of the need to eat, far beyond a missed meal or two or even three. But he couldn't make himself anything. He could barely touch anything--even bread was impossible. He couldn't conscionably touch much at all. His hands... rotted as they were, raw and diseased as they likely were, he could not touch food with them; this was not for aesthetic reasons alone, but for real, practical ones. He knew better. Machi had been gripped by food poisoning more than his share of times from eating food too old, too bad, too dirty to be safe, and he knew he could not foul the foodstuffs here--or even their containers, or the utensils, for fear of making himself ill. Or anyone else.
And now he was taking too long. Had taken too long. The kitchen was a frequently visited place, and he was standing here, undecided, ravenous and sick with hunger but unable to do anything about it and wasting precious time right out in the open. He'd picked this kitchen explicitly because of the stairway, the ill-traversed and much-hated passage to the basements--a place now associated with pain and terror and isolation, but also the best place to hide, the only place that was less-frequented than the morgue and graveyards. He just wanted to eat
Setting: Blue Kitchen
Time: Night 006, early
Summary: Machi cannot hide forever.
Warnings: General gross, possible sap.
Machi stood in the kitchen with slightly bent knees so that he would not fall, his overlarge, rotted bare feet flat against the tiled floor. If he looked half as terrible as he felt, it would be a miracle. For days now--'days,' measured by sleep patterns and not the light outside or presence of... monsters, monsters that weren't also pretending to be people, the pain had been slowly ebbing, his body recovering from the trauma and surgery. His appearance, however, had not. His clothes were slightly torn, soiled and stained, his hair greasy and limp, face dirty and pale, the loose loops and ends of the dirty bandage hanging in his face. He was hungry. Even the stitches up his stomach, the weight and movement of the bug, could not make him ignore it any more. He had been filching steadily from food people left out, sneaking what he could from the brown cricket bedroom when he was certain no one would catch him, but eating was a problem now and he had done very little of it over the past week. And he was very hungry. His stomach gnawed at itself, caving in, his head faint with the familiar feel of starvation, of the need to eat, far beyond a missed meal or two or even three. But he couldn't make himself anything. He could barely touch anything--even bread was impossible. He couldn't conscionably touch much at all. His hands... rotted as they were, raw and diseased as they likely were, he could not touch food with them; this was not for aesthetic reasons alone, but for real, practical ones. He knew better. Machi had been gripped by food poisoning more than his share of times from eating food too old, too bad, too dirty to be safe, and he knew he could not foul the foodstuffs here--or even their containers, or the utensils, for fear of making himself ill. Or anyone else.
And now he was taking too long. Had taken too long. The kitchen was a frequently visited place, and he was standing here, undecided, ravenous and sick with hunger but unable to do anything about it and wasting precious time right out in the open. He'd picked this kitchen explicitly because of the stairway, the ill-traversed and much-hated passage to the basements--a place now associated with pain and terror and isolation, but also the best place to hide, the only place that was less-frequented than the morgue and graveyards. He just wanted to eat