Chapter Text
He missed the screaming.
Really, he did. Red missed more than anything how it’d felt to stretch his talons and yawn his jaw and have everything just give way before him just like that; to drench himself in the red-slick glory of something vital beneath him and the marrow-deep rush of terrorizing dominion. That had been, above all things, identity: something that in his mind had pushed him from a what to a who, even if no one else gave him the dignity, and now he was without it. Their terror, their sanguine warmth, the relishing itself seemed otherworldly: uncomfortably alien, the thought that he could have ever found some meaning or joy in their terror.
He hoped he still missed the screaming.
Some part of him, at least. Because that was all he’d ever been, d2VhcG9u, B, that thing, It, whatever name he’d been under it was in reference to some animus, a volition, torque; force and will was all he’d been and now he found himself by some strange order inaccelerant. There was no longer either a push or a pull, nor reaction, just this grotesque inertia of not having an adversary left, of being braced in a vacuum, of, truly, a void, honed but impotent. Almost frozen.
Frozen was a helpful descriptor. He thought he might still be in shock over the endeavor. He kept glancing back at the last frame of it behind his eyes—frame, yes, not motion, because even his recollection seemed desaturated: months now, months of this dogfight, of teeth and voice, and it was all to be deleted just with that? With the single thoughtless impulse of some computer mouse?
Not all. But what use was he, now, in all this inexplicable lethargy he’d sunken in? But, (or consequently,) how much was left of him? He thought—he found himself suspended between instinct and retrospect, or perhaps it was the memory of how it had felt, to have an impetus, the knowledge that he shouldn’t want to be here rather than any according feeling.
Red pawed at the void around him, in all its featurelessness, at the fringes of the threshold back into what should’ve been anything but that stricken cerulean outside. Nothing made sense anymore and he was possessed by the inconsolable feeling that things had simply turned out wrong. Not badly, he could’ve handled them going badly, but this wasn’t that: he felt as though they’d… taken a wrong turn somewhere, reality felt almost aberrant from what everything had said it would be. Surreal was the word. He almost expected at any moment to wake from a dream.
Perhaps it was the simple fact that he should have died with it. He flexed a clawed hand, staring intently at the bits of him that had been red—perhaps, just as all this huelessness was how it looked, the surreal nausea was how it felt not to die. Perhaps it was just his mind’s reaction to the pressing certainty that he no longer felt his pulse.
What he wouldn’t have given to miss the screaming…