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Revenge.
Such a simple maxim, such an easy mantra.
For years upon years, thoughts of revenge fueled Simon Keyes. They were his lifeblood, filling in the cracks of idle moments in his mind, soaking everything in their scarlet hue. When he was bored, he’d tinker with his plan like he would with a Rubik’s cube, changing details and moving parts around until everything was perfect. It gave him something to do. A purpose.
But now everything's said and done. The days of fearing for his life are over. His enemies have been eliminated, and so has his purpose. And Simon has to grapple with the most terrifying question of all:
What now?
His mentor had suggested getting a hobby. Simon scoffed at the idea at first: he had plenty of hobbies already, thank you very much! A creative hobby, Mr. Dogen then went on to clarify. It’s harder to feel aimless when you have a physical object you can point to and say: there, I made that, he said.
So against Simon’s better judgement, here he is, with a crochet hook and a ball of yarn.
Insert, yarn over, pull through, yarn over, pull through.
"My first thought was knitting, but they didn't let me have knitting needles for obvious reasons. They figured a crochet hook is okay though, which is stupid because you absolutely could stab someone with this too. Wouldn't even be that hard." Simon makes a stabbing motion with the hook to emphasize his point, despite Mr. Dogen not being able to see it.
They’re sitting across from each other in the special cell, Simon crocheting, Mr. Dogen whittling. At first Simon just made some plain squares to practice the single stitch, and now he’s attempting a dog amigurumi, pattern book opened before him. This one’s meant for beginners, so it includes explanations and pictures of all the different acronyms that crochet patterns use, and thank God for that.
“Certainly, it wouldn’t,” Mr. Dogen replies with a smile (or as much of a smile as the man can muster – it looks more like a hound baring its teeth), and Simon’s eyes can’t help but be drawn to the chisel in his hand.
You could stab someone with that too.
He shakes his head. She didn’t actually stab him with the chisel, remember?
Still, an unpleasant feeling starts pooling in his stomach, heavy and suffocating. He shifts his focus back to the crochet project in an attempt to chase it away.
Insert, yarn over, pull through, yarn over, pull through.
“I still don’t see how this could help much.” Right now it’s only helping him feel more frustrated. Insert, yarn over– fuck. Yarn ove– fuck. Yarn over, there we go, pull through, yarn over, pull through.
“It does. Trust me, I know from experience.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
Simon stays silent, wordlessly imploring Mr. Dogen to elaborate. The old man seemingly gets the message, as he puts down his half-finished wood carving and lifts his head. “Have I ever told you how I came to be an assassin?”
“No, you haven’t.” Mr. Dogen hadn’t told Simon anything of his past, really. Sure, the acolyte wondered about it sometimes, but it’s not like he was about to pry. The assassin never brought it up and Simon could empathize with not wanting to talk of your history, so he never asked.
“Well…” Mr. Dogen begins, and then pauses. He leans in towards Simon and asks in a hushed voice: “There’s nobody around, right?”
“Yeah,” Simon confirms, looking around. They usher the guard away whenever they manage to (which is often, as none of the staff here have a spine). It’s nice to have some privacy while spending time together, after all.
“Good. As I was saying,” Dogen says, nevertheless keeping the hushed tone, “my becoming a contract killer was less a choice and moreso… an inevitability, if you could call it that. I’m told I was abandoned as an infant, however I was found and taken in by an ancient khura’inese order of assassins. They trained me well in the art of taking lives and they convinced me that this was the only path I could take, and so I followed it dutifully. Once I was determined to be skilled enough, I was sent off into the world, ended up here, and the rest of the story you know. So suffice to say that I am no stranger to these issues you’re dealing with currently.”
“Woah,” Simon exclaims. “That’s… wild, quite frankly.”
“It is. But hardly anything in this life is normal.”
Simon mulls over Mr. Dogen’s story for a moment. “So what, wood carving is an adequate replacement for the thrill of the hunt and the scent of your victim’s blood? Really?”
“You miss the point, my acolyte. It’s not about the activity itself, it’s about the presence of an activity in the first place. When you’ve been living your whole life in pursuit of one thing, the pursuit becomes your life. And then once you reach the finish line, the absence of pursuit leaves you in the absence of a life,” Mr. Dogen says, unseeing eyes closed in thought. “So the point is to find something new to pursue to fill that void. Set new goals for yourself, even if they’re banal compared to your previous ones. It's even better if they’re banal, as it helps you learn to slow down and smell the roses, so to speak.”
Slow down… Slow down. That’s exactly the problem, though. Simon’s been running his whole life, and now that he’s finally ground to a halt, the things around him that used to be meaningless, used to just go by in a blur, have started to come into focus. Namely, just how… detached he is compared to everyone else.
Prisoners form cliques. They forge friendships, alliances, some even romantic relationships (like those two loudmouths with the blonde-and-black hair…), but Simon is… alone. Except for Mr. Dogen and Anubis, that is. The three of them are in their own little bubble, separate from everyone else.
Superficially, Simon does exist on the prison food chain – as an apex predator. But it’s lonely at the top, or whatever. While everything else is pulsing in the rhythm of the ecosystem, all he can manage is robotic movements. A plastic animal figurine left in a forest. A cheap imitation of life. Doing without participating.
In truth, he never thought about what he’d do after he’d pulled off his revenge plan. Sure, logically he knew there would be an after, but it always felt… distant. It’s hard to focus on an uncertain future when you first have to worry about surviving ‘til the end of the day. It’s been like this his whole life, how is he supposed to try and live normally now? As normal as you could get in prison, anyway. Relationships, hobbies, all those things that most people learn to do to feel fulfilled, it’s all so alien to him. Like he’s looking at the world from behind a wall of plexiglass.
Insert, yarn over, pull through, yarn over, pull through.
“Still, I feel like I’m so… behind. On all this personal life shit. I’m a grown ass adult and I’m just stumbling around, drowning in the kiddie pool.” His crocheting grows more aggressive. “I’m a master manipulator! Social skills are my thing, it shouldn’t be this hard! And I skipped a stitch, gah!” He starts undoing the lopsided project one stitch at a time, searching for the place where he went wrong.
“Cut yourself some slack, my boy. Just because you have some years under your belt doesn’t mean you have the same experience as others of your age might. Beating yourself up over what you ‘should’ be capable of gets you nowhere. And about that second part… I’d wager that psychological manipulation and sincere connection are two entirely different skillsets.”
“...You’re right,” Simon sighs. “And the more time passes, the more I’m convinced you can only have one or the other. I feel like with every single interaction with another person, even if I try to be sincere, I’m just creating new, fake versions of myself without even fully being aware I’m doing it. Just an… endless, twisting fractal of mirrors. Like in a carnival funhouse, but infinitely worse.” A sardonic chuckle. “I fear the real me might be lost in there forever.”
“Hmm. Might I propose then that it is less so a matter of finding your true self, and moreso creating it?”
“I’m looking at you inquisitively. Exasperatedly, dare I say,” Simon deadpans, looking at Mr. Dogen inquisitively. Exasperatedly, dare he say.
“Identity is as much an innate quality as it is a conscious choice. If you feel that your true self is irrecoverably lost, then it is up to you to build something new, my acolyte. Keep what you like, discard what you don’t, and from there, bloom anew.”
“What makes that any different from the masks I've been putting on?”
Mr. Dogen puts down his chisel for a moment to pet Anubis, who is lying by his side. “Attitude, I suppose.”
“That’s a non-answer and you know it.”
“It is. But it’s also true,” the assassin shrugs.
From then on, silence falls, the pair working on their individual projects quietly.
Bloom anew…
The things that Simon’s considered core parts of his identity for so long now have been direct results of his trauma. He hates sweets, because of what happened. He hates the cold, because of what happened. He’s smart and cunning, because of what happened. He wanted revenge, because of what happened.
It might be nice to have something outside of that. Simon, the revenge seeker, has already been laid to rest. Maybe he doesn’t always have to be Simon, the apex predator, or Simon, the aimless husk, either.
Maybe today he can be Simon, the guy who crochets a wonky dog. Maybe with time, the mirrors can start reflecting something he likes to be, instead of something he has to be.
As he finishes sewing up the last of the amigurumi parts, he inspects his work. It’s not neat all – the stitches are uneven, the sewing inelegant. The dog has no eyes or nose, because he didn’t have the little plastic parts that can be to used to make those. Still, he made it. Wow, Mr. Dogen was right, that does feel good!
“I’m finished. Check it out,” Simon says, putting the plushie into the assassin’s hands.
He turns it over a couple of times, feeling the stitchwork. “Excellent work, pup. You’ve made your first Thing,” the capital T can be heard with the way he says it. He hands the amigurumi back to Simon. “What are you going to do with it?”
“I don’t know, actually. I didn’t really think about it.”
“Might I suggest a place for it, then? Over there, by the Buddha statue,” he nods to the far wall of the cell, “there should be a little dog made of wood. It’s the first thing I ever whittled. You can put yours next to it.”
Simon walks over, and sure enough, there it is. He’s noticed the figurine before, but never paid it much mind. He inspects it closely – it’s chunky, the surface of the wood uneven. One of its legs is shorter than the others, so it leans a bit to one side. All in all, it’s quite ugly, especially compared to Mr. Dogen’s recent works, but it’s also beautiful in its own way – a testament to the human who made it and the growth he has experienced since.
He puts his own chunky, uneven puppy next to it. It also leans, but to the opposite side as the wooden one, so that they end up leaning on each other when put together like this.
He sits back down in his previous place and looks at the two Things. “Yeah, they do look nice together.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Mr. Dogen responds, buffing out the wood on his piece – a little monkey figurine.
Simon picks up the pattern book and thumbs through the pages, dog-earing the ones containing stuff he’d like to make. Maybe tomorrow he’ll make a bee, and the day after that, a cat. Perhaps a blanket, one day.
He looks forward to it.