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It’s around half past 8 when Scott sits down on his kitchen floor, careful to avoid any rat droppings (frankly disgusting, but he’d never admit to thinking as much) or newly added glass shards that are splayed across the concrete. He lays his jacket down. It’s the only one he owns; winter one with brown fabric and some sort of white fluff on the inside of the hood and wrapping around the cuffs. He positions it below where his head would be because he knows how much of a bitch it is to lay on hard flooring without some sort of cushioning.
He lays himself back, and even with his jacket beneath him he immediately registers this as an uncomfortable position to be in at best and an outright painful one at worst. He ignores this because ‘how is thinking about what hurts gonna help him solve that, huh? Idiot.’
He looks up at the ceiling finally and the world feels silent. He can’t truly tell what’s going on around him on account of the fact that he stole noise canceling ear muffs from his pappy’s bag; the one he always takes to the shooting range. The one he used to take Scott to as well. Those visited stopped the moment his child hit more targets slightly better than him. Scott found it fun. Key word is found, not finds. He isn’t sure if he would like it anymore.
The ceiling has a few lights engrained into the popcorn texture, one or two of the lightbulbs either smashed due to a gun misfire; some 50-something year old’s admittedly shitty aim, or the bulb simply burned out. They usually tick, this annoying clicking noise that never ceases no matter what room you go to. The sound is drowned out by the ear protection and Scott’s own inner monologue. He doesn’t even really have a ‘voice’ in his head like Al says she does so to speak, but somehow the words flashing across his mind without a sound ring louder throughout him than the lights. He’s told he focuses too much on those by multiple members of his family, constantly ‘pissy’ about them.
It strikes him that he’s been looking too close to where the lightbulbs are and his brain registers the slight burn in his eyes that match his headache. If he had half a mind he’d just turn the lights off but he quickly decided he would rather sit in the annoyingly bright light that pisses him off more often than he cares to admit than sit in total darkness. Something fuzzy dashes past his head and he does an involuntary full body flinch.
He finally remembers why he had even came to his trashed kitchen in the first place. The two little strays Scott cares for to spite Pappy didn’t seem too pleased when Scott had accidentally left them in the pouring rain that had been happening from the moment he woke up to now. He had fed them something he assumed wouldn’t immediately nuke their immune system and decided against shoving them back into the cold. So now they’re running around the admittedly dangerous kitchen with little supervision.
It’s kinda his fault that they’re unsupervised in a dangerous area, but whatever.
Scott’s eyes drift further along the ceiling and he sees the hole square in the middle. He was fairly sure that he had done that one himself when he was first learning to shoot a gun, around 6, he thinks, and had gotten his fair share of beating and bitching at for it. Mama and Pappy are such hypocrites it’s annoying.
He glares into the hole, thinking about how he could have saved himself a lot of trouble had it not been there. He glanced inside, and his mind went to whatever could be at the top of it.
Maybe one of the little bastard cats could get up there, probably bring any stray it knows, jump down to his body and tear him to shreds. He sees some large mass inside of the ceiling, and rationally he knows it must be some maintenance bullshit to keep the house from caving in on itself, but in his head it’s some other, far larger and more menacing than a simply stray cat is stalking up there and waiting for the perfect chance to rip Scott apart.
It annoys him, he realizes, how sporadic his thoughts tend to be. He was just thinking about like… well he was thinking about something, and it somehow wound up with him being torn to shreds by an aggressive wild animal. How the hell does that even happen? He shoves this entire thought process down to the bottom of his mind in favor of sitting himself up. It must have only been a few minutes, maybe ten at most that he’s been having some bullshit string of thoughts but he checks the time on the ancient ass clock that sits itself to the left of the cross above the dinner table (if you could even still call it a table), and it’s 9:21.
How the actual fuck.
He opts to curl into himself, arms wrapping around the knees he rests his chin atop of. He looks over at the cats, seeing one of them, black with white patterns on the torso and stupid limbs and stupid tail, now doing little more than cowering under a table when it sees some being, much much larger than itself. He vaguely remembers when Pappy had seen those whisker faced ‘dickheads’, he kicked Scott’s ass and threw the cats, like full on threw the outside as far as his arms could throw. It makes sense that they’re afraid, or at the very least dislike being seen by someone larger than it, and probably assumes Scott a threat. He’s never claimed to be a good person, but he doesn’t exactly have the urge to chuck an animal a good few yards into hard land.
He offhandedly wonders if that’s how someone on the outside sees him. He wonders if Pappy, or Mama, or even someone like Al sees him as some monster, too. Willing enough to harm someone to be rid of them. He wouldn’t mind that all too much. The idea of being feared, untouchable.
What if they view him as the cats? some afraid animal, thrown to the side at the earliest convenience and having nothing to their name but pity? The question pisses him off. He shoves it down to the same place all of his thoughts for the past hour went, because it has been that long and he knows it.
Scott’s head is pounding. Actually, so are his legs, but it’s only a vague burn that he assumes comes with sitting too still, with too much pressure on one part of him, for too long. He realizes the pulsing of his headache lines up perfectly with the heartbeat he feels reverberating through his body and thumping in his ears from below the headphones. Something inside his body hurts more than his head. He just hadn’t registered the strange pain in his chest because of his headache. Yeah. That’s it. He had bigger problems.
He stands up, stretching his arms out and closing his eyes for a brief moment. Bad idea, because for the few seconds it lasted, his headache and whatever else was wrong got worse. Whatever. One his vision clears up he leans down and offers a hand for the animal under the furniture to.. sniff or lick or whatever gross ass animals do. Once he feels the weird sandpaper-ey feeling of a cat’s tongue stop licking at his finger, he offers his other hand and moves the already inspected one to lightly scratch at the cat’s head. He is met with little resistance, so he picks the animal up and begins his search for the other one. The moment he looks on top of the table, he locks eyes with a little bastard nibbling on rotting wood.
He walks with long strides to the table and scoops the other cat up and marches them into the safest place near the house he can think of. And that’s one of the storage rooms. Most days he hides shit he knows he isn’t supposed to have in a storage closet full of fertilizer. Stolen beer cans and blades and whatnot, regular things to hide so he tells himself. Tonight is no exception. He finds a small sack and leads them into it before turning the small overhead light on (, he can’t imagine they enjoy total darkness,) and closing the door. He knows that he’s probably making a shitty move and someone’s at least going to comment on it and Pappy may or may not kill baby animals or Scott himself-
But it’s fine. That’s an issue for tomorrow, and now is not then.
He stalks off to his and Albertha’s shared bedroom and, once again, lays on the floor with only some laundry to rest his head on. The headphones clack uncomfortably against the flooring but he doesn’t care all too much. The thought of taking the, what, bag of cats? He guesses? Whatever it is, the thought of using it as his pillow tonight crosses his mind. He, however, also recalls accidentally or purposely killing more animals than he cares to admit in his sleep. If those things die, he refuses to let himself take the blame. And the easiest way to do that is simply don’t kill them or don’t be there for the death. Boring, yes, but realistic enough to fool himself into not taking that action.
In the back of his mind, the thought of being torn open by some creature keeps playing no matter how hard he tells himself he’s ignoring it. The idea that maybe, one of the animals would grow to be large, larger than Scott or pappy or anyone, and it would take revenge on who it thinks wronged it. Maybe it would be too trigger happy in the first place to care. Thinking of the term trigger happy brings his mind back to the shooting range and he realizes he’s going in circles, laying on the floor, staring into space.
Some part of him, the part he knows is stupid and has to kill in his brain every morning, wants Al to walk in and ask why. Anyone, actually. Just to be curious. Why is he like how he is. Why would the thought of killing a cat be followed by the cat killing him. Why does he fantasize about being torn apart. Why is he such an asshole. Why, on god’s green earth, is he laying on the fucking floor with stolen headphones and a stolen shirt because he left his own jacket behind, and Al’s weird ass stolen Adam Sandler looking shorts that barely cover the raised scars beneath them, and thinking about nothing good or important or worth their time. Just, why.
The larger part of him, the part he parades, thinks that he shouldn’t give a single damn about the fate of useless little blobs of cells. They’re just some animals at the end of the day. Humans literally kill eachother on a regular enough basis that there’s whole established buildings to keep both the corpses and them in. Hell, people in his own house kill other things way higher up on the food chain than a goddamn stray cat almost daily and eat it. Who the hell cares?
Scott isn’t sure why he doesn’t agree with either side of what’s being told to him.
He closes his eyes.