listen puppet boy, before you disobey

[generationlost]

There's a knock at the door.

The sound is startling, makes Ranboo suddenly bolt upright from where they'd been lounging on the couch.

Knock-knock.

They pick themselves up from the couch and, as quietly as possible, they creep out of the room, searching frantically for somewhere to hide; his frame is much too long to tuck away into a cabinet or something, but he does, with some internal amusement at the joke, find a closet to tuck himself away into. Thankfully the swords in there aren't taking up too much space.

Knock knock, Dirk! There's a knock at the door!

Comments

Beefed up this reply!

[themostempty]

Dirk doesn't really know how much time passes like that. Emotionality is not something he bears gracefully or well; a more informed take might be that he's dissociated enough to completely lose his place in his body or reality itself. Dirk isn't informed, though. He only becomes aware of sound, and movement, and for a moment, it's all just too hazy and disconnected from any meaning or context to make sense.

What is he hearing? Where is he? Why is he here? Why is there movement? Why can't reality just leave him alone?

The disjointed, badly-cut pieces of reality begin to converge over that sentiment as if it never happened: overlapping a little here, leaving gaps there, but still they're coming together, and how broken it all is becomes even more obvious, and he pushes away from the source of sound and movement, and then he remembers the source, he recognises that source, and--

"Ra--what--why are you alive?" The first words out of his mouth are not graceful ones, or grateful ones. His mouth is so dry it's like he's been sucking off a jock for an hour. He swallows, and it's also dry--and tastes of blood. Which is grounding. In the same way a grain of sand is ground, so too the taste of blood is grounding. An aftertaste of a reality--but nothing more.

Re: Beefed up this reply!

[generationlost]

Ranboo quietly shakes their head, slowly, the slightest touch of exhausted, confused motion.

He doesn't know. Well, that isn't true-- somehow, he does know, though if asked they could never explain exactly how they know this, how he understands this and not anything else that's going on.

It's Showfall's fault. They won't let him die.

They take a shaking breath, a fresh round of hot tears spilling down his face.

"The mask..." The words are slurred and weak, but hopefully convey what Ranboo is attempting to explain.

It hurts. Not dying-- not even awakening from death, not really, but the fact that he did awaken, the fact that he's trapped like this, seemingly forever. The fact that he now has to face the consequences for what he's done. The fact that their very last hope, the last potential escape available to him, is no longer an option-- the pain is a weight sinking into his chest, an ache that radiates out from his ribs and wraps around his body out to his fingertips.

ALSO beefed up this one!

[themostempty]

The disconnected confusion of a fugue abruptly disturbed still lies over Dirk's brain like a film, but the picture snaps into place--like a pair of huge hands came in and forced the pieces together, aggressively. The mask, the woman, Ranboo, her brain. The brains--the brains are what revive them. And Ranboo's brain--

Dirk is weirdly disorientated, and yet that part--and that part alone--all makes sense. His comprehension of it exists. But it's like it exists next to him. There's him, and then there's the part of him that understands--somewhere to his right. Or is that his brain, and he's to the left?

It almost doesn't matter, but it makes for a disjointed state, understanding and not understanding, being present but extremely not present all at the same time. Nothing else has really reached him, yet--the fact that he was just caught embarrassing himself the way he was, that he'd so checked out of the actual events that he fell asleep while curled up with the body of a man who wasn't even dead. It's a distant fifth or eighth or sixteenth on the scale of things he's capable of dealing with right now. The fact that he doesn't want to deal with it--or acknowledge it, or think about that decision at all--is definitely playing a role in its low rank. But mostly, it's just--

Well. It just doesn't fucking matter.

"That--no, hang on--I was trying to fucking show you--" he turns, rolling away from Ranboo, thoughts simultaneously racing and standing still--and grabs the woman's decapitated head, lifting it from the bed to shove it directly into Ranboo's face.

It's a gruesome object. The hair, where it remains, is caked with tacky blood, bone dust, and flecks of gore. It's shiny and slicked where cerebrospinal fluid spilled out, and it smells... well it smells bad. It smells really bad. There's a fatty smell to brain, and that's on top of the smell of gore, and meat, and skin oils... and shampoo. Her lips have long gone dry, and are dark with dried blood, her skin pale and cold and strangely artificial feeling from death. Her eyes are not quite fully closed. And then there's the open bottom of her neck.

But none of that is what he's trying to show Ranboo. This isn't about her, it's what he found in her--he tilts her towards Ranboo's face to reveal it all. Wires, nodes, open cranium, an exposed brain.

The inner workings of Showfall's control.

[generationlost]

Ranboo grunts softly as the head is suddenly forced into his sight-- at first he closes his eyes, tries weakly to turn his head away, but he can't move fast enough. It's like everything is in slow motion, their head slowly tilting aside.

But. The head is still there. Dirk wants him to see. Why? Their eyes slowly open.

The sight is... horrible, of course. The messy hole in the woman's skull, the sight of her formerly living brain directly in front of their eyes, filling their field of view-- but the worst of it catches their eye after only a moment. Something metallic-- wires, attached to some kind of pads, affixed to the surface of her brain, webbed out to touch every part of it.

Ranboo's eyes screw tightly shut then, a whimper rising from their throat as a fresh wave of tears begin to fall.

"No..."

The agony is like a fist squeezing their ribs, their head weakly shaking, the motion slow and delayed.

"No, no..."

He's the same as she is. He knows he is, though he doesn't know how.

[themostempty]

"Don't look away," Dirk commands him, immediately--the potential 'gross out' factor is something that occurs to him only when Ranboo starts shutting down again, but it doesn't inspire sympathy, only impatience. The existential layer doesn't occur to him at all--after all, Dirk's own response to that exact pain is to stare it directly in the eye. Literally, and repeatedly. As often as possible. For Dirk, it becomes a compulsion--he has to seek it out, he has to re-experience it again and again.

So shutting your eyes to it doesn't make any sense.

Regardless, he barely waits for Ranboo to blink--to open his eyes, or not--before he starts to talk, in the same factual, flat tone that he uses when waxing soliloquil about Plato's dialogues while gaming. Just a little faster.

"You told me it was the brain, and you were right. Once I decapitated her, she stopped being a problem, so that was obvious. But the brain isn't the only essential organ for life. Technically most of them are, but most of them don't kill you in seconds when they stop, or revive you pretty much instantly when they're 'turned on.' So there had to be something else. Something connecting the brain to something else, otherwise she'd just be conscious long enough to experience the dying part again, not up and on her feet to attack us. You have no fucking idea how hard it is to open up a human skull without crushing anything inside--"

[generationlost]

Ranboo's only response to Dirk's command is a whimper, a weak, pathetic sound punctuated by their features tightening, a fresh set of tears falling.

Why...? Why... why is this happening? Does he deserve this?

And then Dirk is talking and Ranboo can barely process his words in the first place, still reeling with agony and fresh physical suffering, and they half-shake their head, eyes drifting open to stare weakly up at Dirk--

-- and then only a moment later those eyes seem to gloss over and darken, their vision losing focus and blackness closing in from the edges.

The pills are still in his system, and still functional. The mask can kickstart his lifeless body, but it can't clear the toxins out of it on its own.

Their breathing slows, pitches high in their chest, the sound of him drawing a breath wrong-- a weak wheeze, his eyelids fluttering strangely.

[themostempty]

Dirk is only just starting to get into the real specifics of what he found and how he found it when he hears--

He hears a sound he's heard human beings make only in videos. A ragged, high sound--spasmodic and weak. Ranboo's lungs aren't failing, but his diaphragm is.

Snuff is widely associated with films of violent death--shootings, drownings, stangulations, beatings, bloody dismemberments. All of those are true, and easily available. But it's not just that. Some of it is slow. Not just by prolongued torture (and occasionally repeated revivals.) Slow, often painful drug-induced deaths are also in circulation. Dirk has known what valium overdoses look like for more of his life than he's been taking valium--there's a kind of eroticism to the way the body begins to shut down, and consciousness wanes. The steady, gradual weakening of life, until there is no life left. It's not Dirk's cup of tea, usually--the tension of not knowing the division between when the last breath is taken and when the body is only a body has a tendency to feel more like orgasm denial than edging, at least for him.

Still, he knows it. And combined with the information he's just excavated from the head of a human being whose death was completely by his hand, the problem-solving machinery of Dirk Strider's brain puts things together nigh-instantly.

Which is good, because while Ranboo isn't exactly dying yet, the body-brain system of artificial revival that Dirk has just solved for isn't going to keep him from doing that. It only shocks the body back to life, after all. It doesn't fix anything. The woman whose reanimation he de-animated wasn't going to stay alive for long. How long it would have lasted is an experiment he'll never get to perform, but muscles need oxygen, and to transport oxygen, the body needs blood. And a heart to move it. Her brain assembly and the electrical impulses it could produce definitely had the power to force-start her heart, but it couldn't repair the sizeable holes left in it by his sword.

Similarly, all of Dirk's expensive-ass black market valium that Ranboo swallowed hasn't been bound and neutralised by anything, and it definitely hasn't been expelled from Ranboo's system.

Which is why Dirk drops the cold, gory human head back onto his bed and grabs Ranboo by the shoulder and jaw, turning them toward him as he starts to rise to his knees.

"Oh no you fucking don't--"

[generationlost]

Ranboo doesn't fight Dirk-- they have no strength to, are only semi-conscious at best in this moment. They continue to struggle to breathe as Dirk starts to sit up, grasps their shoulder and jaw, their chest heaving as their body struggles instinctively against the powerful sedatives still processing through their system.

At least he isn't conscious to feel the slowly growing distress his body is in.

His breathing is slow and shallow, thin and high in his chest still, long limbs trembling and jaw flexing in Dirk's grasp.

[themostempty]

Dirk has already made some quick decisions. Like straight-up dropping the mutilated head of a woman he'd decapitated onto his bed--there were several background processes to this decision, like the fact that he already put it down on the bed once and will now need to clean these bedsheets so thoroughly that he might as well, and the fact that he doesn't need her brain and its wiring in undisturbed condition any more, but it was also a matter of priorities.

'Priorities' are why he doesn't bother with anything like 'wiping his hands' of blood before he grabs Ranboo by the shoulder and jaw, and why he doesn't bother talking to them as he rises onto his knees on the bed, pushing them back upright before they jerk too far forward and collapse--

He braces the heel of his right hand on Ranboo's shoulder, holding them up while he uses his left to tilt their jaw up; this becomes a different pose where his right elbow is braced against that same shoulder, and his hand has captured their jaw. His heart is pounding, his head weirdly empty except for the focus required for the task as his left hand gently prises their mouth open. Ranboo's face, which he knows so well... he keeps them as far from his own face as he can, careful not to get bitten as he takes two fingers and presses them into the hot, wet space of their mouth, using his finger pads to press down on the tactile surface of their tongue. They take it easily as he works his fingers back--past the first knuckle, and theen the second, his strong hands probing for the back of the throat.

It's--well, it's actually deeply erotic, as sights go. Ranboo is weak, limp, their eyes glazed and not-quite-open, their chest rising and falling dramatically while they struggle for feeble breaths.

[generationlost]

Ranboo hangs limply in Dirk's grasp, not quite conscious enough to even really feel anything that's being done to them right now-- which is likely for the best, given what is being done. Their tongue flexes unconsciously beneath the press of Dirk's fingers, eyelids fluttering slightly as their breathing continues to tighten and struggle-- sitting up only puts more pressure on their already failing diaphragm, each weak breath coming in mixed with a sickly wheeze, the sound wet and half-muffled around Dirk's intruding fingers.

And then those fingertips find the back of Ranboo's throat and their entire body jolts violently, throat flexing and twitching wet against Dirk's fingertips-- it seems like Ranboo, unlike Dirk, has done absolutely no work on their gag reflex, which in this case is a very good thing. His throat is sensitive despite his unconsciousness, the reflex kicking in easily, jolting Ranboo's ailing body forward to attempt to empty his stomach of its contents... which is almost entirely semi-digested pills, at this point.

He hangs there, trembling, in Dirk's grasp, his slowing breaths loud and almost painful-sounding now, the spilling of those pills apparently eating into what little energy his body has left in it severely.

[themostempty]

Jesus, that was fast. Dirk was ready for it, but still. That was so fast.

(It was also... kind of hot. Not the puking, but the gagging, the choking on his fingers like they were his cock--)

He can't help but wonder, looking at the mass of partially dissolved orange tablets, what would have happened if it had been him. If someone without a fucking hair trigger on his gag reflex had needed this kind of intervention. Would it have worked? Would his hypothetical, nonexistent rescuer have been able to make him throw it up?

Or would he just have--

Well.

The world may never know.

What Dirk does know, as he pushes Ranboo back and away from the hot mess (literal) soaking into his bedcovers, is that this didn't solve everything. Not immediately. Not yet. He hopes--he can really only hope, and assume, based on the information available to him--that it will soon. But if the drugs weren't nullified after the first time Ranboo died, then the drugs already in their system--the drugs he's dying to right now, metabolised and absorbed into his body through his bloodstream--then whatever Ranboo is already about to die to again is going to kill him, again. At least this once more.

He just has to fucking believe--

And he does believe, because he needs it to be true--

That they'll wake up again. And that what he's done will keep them from dying again, or at least not... too many more times. In the meantime, he just has to-- he just has to be patient. He has to be patient.

He can feel sweat on the back of his neck, running down his face from along his hairline where stress and adrenaline and emotion have been pushing his body in ways he's more or less been unaware of until this moment, until now as he lays Ranboo out on the bed and on their back, watching and listening as his breathing degrades, slowing into rasping, occasional gasps and weak wheezes.

And heat, as situationally predictable as it is inappropriate, settles into the tender space between his legs, sensitivity tingling along nerve endings and intruding on his mind now that the call for action is over.

[generationlost]

Ranboo lays there, limp as a doll, struggling to draw breath as Dirk watches him; though his breathing has slowed, his heart is pounding, reflecting the depth of the distress that their body is in, the panic of a body struggling to get oxygen to everywhere that needs it despite taking barely any in at this point.

If Ranboo were aware of the state their body had been reduced to, they might not consider the pills quite as merciful an ending as they think it is. He's unconscious for now, unaware of the agony his body is in without him present, but it's not a calm or peaceful kind of passing, his body clearly fighting to try and remain alive.

The wheezes are spaced further and further apart, though, growing weaker and more shallow, his exhausted body properly beginning to fail in front of Dirk once again.

[themostempty]

To say Dirk experiences 'mixed feelings' here would be to massively understate the cataclysmic intensity of it--the fucked-up mélange of arousal states, literal and otherwise, brewing violence inside of him. The call for action--the immediacy of the situation and his required intervention--is over. Rather than relief, however, Dirk feels its opposite.

Watching Ranboo die is not easy.

It's not hard, either--he doesn't have to do anything, he doesn't have to respond, doesn't have to care, or feel, or even actually watch at all. He could, frankly, go back to the bathroom and start cleaning up in there, or at least as much as he can while the rest of the puppet woman is still locked in rigor mortis. But of course, he can't. He can't, because he doesn't want to. He's already watching--listening to each laboured, shallow wheeze or sudden, futile attempt to gasp. The rise and fall of Ranboo's chest is weak, sporadic and ill-timed as life ebbs out of them. And every one--every sound, every movement--seizes Dirk's chest in a visegrip and jolts heat into his cunt.

Stress suffuses every cell of his body, and with no direction for his energy, a restlessness settles immediately into his muscles and skin and nerves.

His face hurts. His lower back and hips itch to move. Sweat stings his face and neck and scalp. None of these sensations have a single cause, but the ache where his heart should be does. He doesn't really like it. He doesn't like how it feels--but he is gripped by it. The pain-adjacent sensation is so much stronger than most of what he feels, having ground the rest of his emotional capacity to dust while watching partially-dismembered bodies writhe red on screens, or staring cattle in the eye as they jerk their last electric impulses out on a hook.

There are several competing impulses: to wrap his hands around Ranboo's neck to speed up the process, to sit and watch, to make sure he dies and stays dead... amongst others.

He doesn't think about why this one pushes its way to the fore; he doesn't really think too much about it at all before he does it--other than the awareness that he's leaving the land of pretend-decency behind as he crawls over to Ranboo's body, swinging one leg over their limp form to settle himself over their hips. He sinks down to sit flush with the stiff fly of their jeans, shifting his hips forward to press into where he can really feel it before he leans forward, hands roaming for pulse or breath, any part of them he can feel the remaining life in, while any life is left at all.

[generationlost]

Beneath Dirk's searching fingers, Ranboo's breath is a thin, shaking wheeze, choked out only once in a while now, seemingly his body's own panic fighting against the sedative's attempts to shut it down. When Dirk finds their pulse, it's still fast, faster than it should be, but rather than the panicked throbbing it was before, the rhythm has weakened into more of an irregular pattering. Their eyelids, not quite closed, flutter slightly, the muscular reflexes of a dying body rather than any kind of sign of consciousness.

He isn't conscious. Dirk may take some comfort in knowing that they aren't feeling any of this-- or he may be disappointed, depending on his mood. He'll certainly feel the aftermath when next he wakes, but for now, Ranboo is blissfully unaware of the agony his body is enduring as it shuts down around him. For all intents and purposes, he's already dead-- were he not going to wake up again, he would've already lost his last moments of consciousness several seconds ago.

But his body struggles on, despite its rapidly degrading state, the gasps of breath coming further and further apart, their heart skipping as it begins to fail and slow.

[themostempty]

The rapidly-fading flutter of life galvanises something in Dirk--something basic and needy, something hungry and cruel. He rolls his hips against Ranboo's body, seeking pressure--from their cock or from their pelvic bone or simply from flesh bolstered by stiff denim, he doesn't really care which. Heat throbs inside of him and across the hidden secret of his cunt, demanding weight and movement and touch. And for the first time in weeks, he can not only have it as a burden to endure, stoically and silently, but he can chase it. He can pursue it relentlessly and shamelessly and--if he's good, if he's fast--actually take his pleasure and finally, finally relieve himself with release.

In other wwords: Dirk is desperate, and he's in it to cum.

As for whether he'd be relieved or disappointed--well, it's a bit of both. To some extent, it's the not knowing that really drives him. The tension of that passageway not just between death and life, but between sensate and inert. The spaces left along those boundaries, and the fact that no matter what he does, he will never know it so long as he continues to actually live. He can be its arbiter, its custodian, and even its connoisseur--but the actual experience lies just beyond the tips of his fingers, so easy to obtain... and yet he balks every time.

Not so Hal, and not so Ranboo--

This is part of it, really. That incendiary spark. The compulsion. Why does Hal get to have this--why can Ranboo--but not him? What is it about him that denies itself what he craves to know--and un-know? What is it about him that enables others to take it and leave him?

His breath comes in short, heavy, hot bursts, his fingertips chasing every last flicker of pulse, eyes seeking the faintest movement to bear witness--to see the final second as Ranboo, the person, ceases. The moment of true death, when a body ceases to contain and only lies worthless except as meat.

[generationlost]

Dirk won't have to wait long now to see those final seconds, Ranboo's breath coming only in sporadic bursts now, marked with a harsh, rasping wheeze. Beneath Dirk's searching fingers, his pulse suddenly drops from the rapid, weak pattering to nearly nonexistent, faint half-beats as their jaw flexes and eyelids flutter.

They make a choked sound, but another proper attempt at breath doesn't come.

Their chest heaves silently, once more, not strong enough to fill their lungs again, before they fall still and quiet; there is still the faintest life left in their brain, but from the outside, one would never know, and that spark is rapidly fading, the rest of their body lacking the strength to continue attempting to keep it alive.

Only the smallest of muscular twitches and flexes remain; gradually, they fade away as well, the body beneath Dirk growing still and empty even as he ruts desperately against it.

For the second time today, Ranboo dies, though this time he wasn't alone, for better or worse. Even he wouldn't know.

[themostempty]

Every second, every detail of Ranboo's death filters into Dirk's consciousness through a strange sieve. He's in a kind of desperation fugue state, and every bit of it fuels him, his hips rocking him against Ranboo's body, his cunt getting wetter until the entirety of his crotch is slimy and hot, the material of his boxer briefs no longer sticking to him so much as it's just sticky.

He's running hot, but he doesn't feel hot. His mouth is open, his breathing coming in short, ragged puffs as his eyes search Ranboo's stilling body until there really is nothing else to catch--and he can feel that, the emptiness in that form. It's not just the lack of breath and pulse, the vacancy in the slack face and dropped eyelids. There's an inert quality to dead bodies, Dirk knows, that isn't in the living. Stunned or unconscious animals are only indistinguishable from dead ones to a certain point--the absence of life leaves them dead in a way the absence of consciousness does not. Ranboo isn't simply sleeping under him--he's dead, that last speck and final flicker of living completely gone. And it burns Dirk up inside--the ravenousness of it eats him, and the pressure builds in a way he's ached for.

In a body sense, he's so in the moment that he can't feel anything but that--that and, of course, the lances of raw, animal pleasure that race up his cunt and smother his clit and rise into his spine and into his bladder and it feels, quite frankly, like he's going to piss himself.

Right up until he doesn't--and instead (with a cry that sounds almost like a sob, and is truly more pathetic and more gutteral than he would ever allow anyone living to hear): he cums.

[generationlost]

Beneath him, Ranboo's empty body is a quiet, obedient doll, motionless save for the slight shifting of it beneath Dirk as he rolls his hips, desperately chasing relief. Were Ranboo to occupy that body right now, to be aware of what Dirk has done, they wouldn't be angry-- it's not like they're in there to experience this violation. The dead can't say no. If anything, he might be puzzled and a little bit put off by the idea of it-- why? Why would Dirk even enjoy this? Then again, Dirk enjoys many things that they have much the same reaction to even while they're fully conscious and aware of his activities.

The body and the machine inhabiting it are both still and quiet for a very long moment, a toy with no batteries, the typical intensity of their gaze gone, replaced with a vacant, visionless gray that gazes up at and seemingly beyond the dingy ceiling. The internal counter ticks down, the embedded device waiting for a sign of life that it isn't going to receive before it attempts to revive them once again.

[themostempty]

Why?

Dirk might struggle to explain it--at least in terms that the layman without a minor in philosophy could understand--but what he would miss is that it comes down to the same thing Dirk always gets off to: control.

A lot of necrophiliacs want the 'total control' they have over something that's dead. For Dirk, it's his control over death and the corpse that he really craves.

In his ideal fantasy, he would be the one responsible for everything. The life fading from the body beneath him, every final spasm and twitch savoured not just because they'll never return but because of him, his mastery over the body that's dying beneath him.

But this is almost the opposite--seizing control over a death he can neither prevent nor reverse, the body that's dying and the person that was and now no longer is, by way of sexual dominance.

Add the fact that this body, this person-that-was (and he wants, he needs to be a person again) is a body to whom he was already far more attached than he'd allowed himself to know, and the fact that he has, for the sake of his attachment to this very body, been exerting an unspoken burden of self-control regarding not only touch, but sex specifically, and this lapse of control for the sake of satisfying needs like control was all but inevitable.

He'd already been stacking triggers like blocks, a monument to whatever insanity he was born to enact towering taller and taller with every step since Showfall's drone knocked on their door. Every spurt of blood, every act of dismemberment and death. Desite it all, through it all, very deliberately in spite of it all, he'd managed to be just fine. Or he'd thought he was fine. He wasn't.

He's aware of that, vaguely, because his heart hurt as he came--not like an ache, but the kind of overwhelming, piercing, throbbing agony that gave the illusion of imminent rupture. A premonition received too late. A warning. Less 'you've gone too far' and more simply 'you're too far gone.'

Now, with his mind eerily empty and his breathing erratically heavy, his nervous system tingling and his boxer briefs soaked with warmth and what he hopes is just viscous slick and not piss... he lies down. Slowly at first--aiming for a spot halfway on Ranboo's still form but mostly next to it. He gets about halfway there before he decides that's good enough and just drops. Boneless. Still so sensitive between his legs. His mouth is dry, but there's saliva on his chin. He closes his eyes, shifts his hips slightly into the mattress. He... still wants. Wants more. Wants something. Something else, or something more.

Opens his eyes again, purposefully recovering some kind of focus and control over his breathing--all while staring intently and fixedly at the vacant, clear emptiness of Ranboo's eyes. Like his bro's eyes. Perfectly staring.

[generationlost]

Dirk is allowed a long, quiet moment to collect himself before they return again; whether it's because it takes more work this time to revive them or not is impossible to tell. From the outside, it's impossible to see if the mask is doing anything at all, the outer portions removed now and the anchor pressed against the pillow and buried in their wild hair.

When Ranboo awakens again, it isn't a slow, gradual awakening as if from sleep-- Showfall would never be so kind as to ease their actors into anything, much less life itself. The awakening is violent, as if they're ripped out of the numb, peaceful black of death and forced back into their body all at once, a ragged breath drawn, the focus suddenly returning to those vacant eyes.

There's a moment of pained disorientation, wordless, marked with a sob as, all at once, they're once again forced to process the agony that their body has endured-- the mask can awaken them, but it can't repair the damage done to the body in the process of death. Their chest hurts, the muscles in and around their ribs aching with each rough breath, and their head feels as if their brain has been swapped out for something soft and too-light, yet still wrapped with pain. They don't know where they are-- what's happened, why everything hurts the way that it does, and with all the understanding of a child frightened by thunder, they begin to cry again; the tears cause yet another wave of ache, a burning over their dry eyes, left open for too long in their absence from behind them, and he chokes softly, closing them tightly despite the way it only seems to spread that burn further into his skull.

[themostempty]

The instant life hits Ranboo's body, Dirk feels it. Not through any innate sense or intuition, though. He's lost time again, gazing disconnectedly into Ranboo's lifeless stare. But then it's like time reverses. Ranboo's lungs seize, demanding breath; their chest heaves, their eyes move and see, and Dirk is jolted from his fugue by the lightningbolt of living. He jerks back like a startled cat, narrowly avoiding collision with the mess occupying his bed around them (vomit, blood, a severed head) and watches intently as consciousness seeps into Ranboo... and then the tears begin to flow.

It's a shock, really. Dirk's first thought is I thought he was stronger than this.

Then he thinks He is stronger than that. He is. Dirk knows. He's seen it, Ranboo lives because of it. He's free because he's strong. He just doesn't know how to use it.

Most of this knowledge never really takes conscious form, though. Not before he's moving to close the brief gap between him and Ranboo--his hands move with speed and precision, taking them by the face. His calloused palms pressing against tear-stained cheeks, warm fingers splayed to thread into hair, thumbs firm on their cheekbones, just beneath their swollen, red-ringed eyes.

He holds them there, not-quite-gentle but by no means cruel, inches from his face as he forces eye contact--his shades are off so there's no barrier between Ranboo's greenish eyes and Dirk's own piercing, almost unblinking orange.

"Ranboo. Hey. Ranboo. Stop crying and wake up in there."

[generationlost]

Dirk.

The name is a vivid red exclamation point, the sight of Dirk's face, the intense lock of those eyes nearly stealing their breath for a moment. It isn't not a jumpscare, but it does seem to be somewhat effective, startling Ranboo out of their tears for just a moment as they stare back at him with all the wide-eyed fear of a child.

"... hhh." A soft whimper, their aching chest trembling with it as they seem to freeze-- as reality begins to creep back in, their empty yet overstuffed brain beginning to refill with the memories of what happened before this moment.

Dirk... Dirk--

The woman...

A choked sound escapes from Ranboo, their eyes welling up again, shining with fresh tears. Their fingers tighten, almost fists where they grasp the filthy sheet beneath them.

"It hurts," they finally say, and their voice is hoarse unlike anything Dirk has ever heard before, shaken apart with fear and pain, a rasping croak. Their throat burns, their chest aching terribly with each breath, each beat of their heart. "They won't... they won't let me die... please-- hhh, help me..."

Help me die. Help this end.

[themostempty]

The new wave of tears is--frustrating. He wants to lash out, to strike Ranboo to the floor and make him get up on his own power. But something else--some painful clutching in his chest, a searing swell of panicked emotion in his stomach--stops him.

"No," Dirk says, with the bluntness and finality of an axe to the face. "You don't need help. You did it. You're alive. You're not going to die. They won't have you, not now and not ever. You died and came back and you're still free."

His grip on Ranboo's face is unyielding, his gaze unwavering. His teeth are gritted slightly with the force of his own determination--the driven madness of a man who believes in the man whose tears he's denying.

"You're alive. You're going to live."

[generationlost]

An agonized sob wrenches its way from Ranboo's chest, his red, swollen eyes screwing tightly shut, sending tears streaming down his cheeks.

"I don't want to... I don't want to live, I don't..." They trail off, breathless and trembling in Dirk's grasp. "It hurts. It hurts. It hurts."

Physically, emotionally-- being alive hurts right now. He wishes he would at least pass out again, if not die, at least not have to feel this for however long it's going to last.

[themostempty]

Oh, for--

Dirk really grits his teeth now.

"Too bad," he mutters under his breath--he lets go of Ranboo's face, at least for the moment, and glances over his shoulder--towards the door, as though checking for something. Or someone. But no one is there, and it's a habitual motion, not a reasoned one. The intentional movement is this: he grabs the drone's severed head up in the same hands that were just holding Ranboo, and puts her mottled, muscled face between his and Ranboo's. Forcing him to face her. Caked blood, exposed brain, bare wires, hanging strips of scalp, and all the rest.

"Is this what you want? Who you want to be? Where you want to go?" He yanks the head back and plants it firmly on the bed, like a soccer ball, and grabs Ranboo's shoulder with his free hand. In Dirk's mind, this is meant to shock Ranboo into reality and new resolve--or at least resignation--not terrify them into further hysterics.

"That's your choice, and you are making it right now."