Work Text:
i.
you run the memory of your boy’s smile through your mind like tongue running back and forth over the sharpness of your own front teeth. (he isn’t your boy, was never your boy, you are not meant to hold goodness in you any more than a web-cracked glass is meant to hold water, and he runs out empty through the intercostal spaces of your ribcage like saltwater through cupped fingers. he leaves you with palms up and salt on your tongue. newsflash, asshole, you were born lonely and at sea level, and the root cause of one of those attributes doesn’t exist anymore, so. maybe you’re just lonely, now.
ii.
has there has ever been a time without the dead weight of aloneness wrapped cadaver-tight around your neck, overlapping threading red-pink scars with the sickening, wire-tight press of still air, the claustrophobic bassline of your own heartbeat? you don't think so. not within your memory. your loneliness is as much of a certainty as coulomb's constant, pervasive and immutable as gravity before the game.
iii.
some of the thoughts you keep buried deep in the back of your mind are lazy, stomach-twisting conjectures on what would happen if you snipped your own spinal cord with a pair of shears. emergency cutoff. other thoughts are the image of your green-eyed anachronism, caught mid-cheek-stretching-grin, calloused fingers wrapped tight around the butt of a Beretta or tangled with yours. you are permanently burdened with the knowledge that he has kissed the backs of your fingers, chivalry incarnate, and he has met your eyes, warm and sparkling, as he did so. you do not wonder how judas felt. judas' existence took place twenty-four thousand years ago; he is irrelevant in any current context. you wonder how badly one has to fuck up in order to be remembered, infamous, twenty centuries later. you mull over whether a splinter of you could, theoretically exist that far in the past.
iv.
it's not that it's something you think about actively , really. just another comforting certainty- the way the gulls circle low and drunken in the sudden pressure shift before a storm, the way jake english holds a passionate affection for shitty action-adventure blockbusters. the knowledge that one day the splintered, knife-edged fucking mess known as dirk strider will, blessedly, take an extended and permanent hiatus from the heavy-humidity-weight of existence. if a similar certainty in the same corner of your mind is also the knowledge that you will, inevitably, be the one who brings it stuttering to a halt, you don't whisper that to anyone else. it's implicitly obvious.
v.
splinter is an onemotepeia, you think. the heavy, downward jar of the first syllable. the crack of the t again your palate, snapping your stretched-thin existence into another fragment like a brittle pane of old plastic.
vi.
the ocean was your home. not in the way of seadwellers, with dark blue-purple blood in water, cold currents and alien fangs. you are born of salt spray and clear, warm gold sunsets spilling infinitely across the water, the bright-shimmering way light low over the horizon refracts a trail of tangerine light to the foot of your door. raised on the way gale winds shriek and howl at your barred shutters in mid-january. salt and spray and, oh god, so fucking many dead fish. to salt crops was considered a death sentence, in antidiluvian years. perhaps you were stillborn too. dead on arrival.
vii.
the proximity sends you lurching off-center, tailspinning out of orbit. the gulls did not displace much air in your apartment. their presence was less a presence than the awareness of their echoing cries as they spun circles above the water. the existence of warm bodies, complete with heartbeat and breath, forces you to reevaluate yourself. you are newly aware of your forearms and fingers, newly aware of the precise amount of space your legs take up as you sit with your friends. every movement is conscious, now, thought out in relation to the push and pull of the negative space between your skin and their skin. careful equations of undelineated boundaries and hazard zones. jake's fingers brush shirt and skin over a shoulder, briefly, and the encounter leaves you with a head singing, full of dizziness and disjointed, white-hot sensation. you have to concentrate for your eyes to refocus.
viii.
they are louder than you. this is partially calculated- you soften the sharp, cutting edges that are normally honed onto your words. you will drive them away soon enough without tryharding it. there's no sense to hastening the process. some of it is intrinsic, however. they all take up space in an easy, comfortable way. shout across halls and sink to the ground in fits of laughter and sling warm arms across your shoulders. the awareness of your own voice, of the vibration of larynx and throat, are unsettling, at best. you have tried, and succeeded for years, in cultivating an uneasy truce with the existence of your self and your meat body. acknowledging it as something outside a means to an end is not something you are familiar nor comfortable with. your voice is soft, to your ears, rarely raising above a murmur in safe conversation. the less aware you are of you as root self, dirk₀, the better.
(you do not soften your edges when you are fighting. in some way, it is a release. in some way, you feel like the edge of your own blade when sharpened- slowly, surely being ground down, skinned into something sharp and deadly and less than it was, in the beginning.) you never feel as real without the grounding press of hilt to palm, the tempting, illusory promise of blood in your mouth.
ix.
there are some days when your pulse thrums unceasingly under your skin, loud enough for you to hear the flow of blood from vena cava to atrium, whiteout thick static cut only by the creaking open and slamming shut of gates and ventricles pounding an endless sick beat in your prefrontal cortex. days where you do not remember how to speak with the tongue in the mouth that is called your own, and any sign of other creatures cognizance of you, as your own dirk-entity, sends your faulty circuits overloading into a sparking, violent state of combustion. your consciousness tries desperately to overflow from your shitty meat body, at once altogether too much and entirely insufficient. phantom limbs itch for the release of another dream-self, another existence, anything to burn off the nervous energy that consumes you on these days.
predictably, you go to the roof and post the fuck up with your sparring bots. you set them to the jokingly named 'sudden death mode.' (man, dave said, you better not be fuckin' planning on actually fighting those guys.) (dave does not like fighting. the same sharp clang of steel on steel that is your grounding mechanism shoves him brutally into the oncoming traffic of his own fucked up head problems. this is your fault.)
you are good at fighting. you are better at engineering. the optimal result of these strife sessions is that you walk out of them with enough bruises to last you through the day. (the optimal result is that you do not walk out of them at all. regrettably, this has not happened yet. how many fucking times does it take for a death to sink in? maybe the robots are too much of a proxy. it would be worth finding out if a direct suicide would have any different effect. you have noticed a predominance of heroic death by sword. not that you are capable of being a hero, obviously, but a just death must be similar.) (you stopped wanting to be a hero after that first rooftop conversation with your little bro. it just makes you sick, now.)
x.
you are a creaking high-rise gutted by fire, concurrently the shell and the licking flames. you are the rapid oxidation of your own finite self, victim to your own chemical processes of combustion. your own being spills out in crackling flames, too fucking much for any one vessel. (selfish, to let yourself escape past the boundary of self , selfish, to let the number of dirk-splinters steadily rise past saturation point because you are too self-centered and in pain to keep them from freeing themselves.) there is some animal instinct yet untrained in you, keeping you from letting yourself self-immolate past the fragile husk of dirk strider₀, shatter your very being into an untold number of dirk primes in hopes that the fire will, at least, burn less when diffused over god knows how many splinters. you have the patience to wait it out.