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

[generationlost]

"Ah..."

Though her smile remains firmly in place, something around the edges shifts; the tilt of her well-groomed brows, the edges of her mouth turning just slightly. She isn't angry; if anything, she seems disappointed.

"Oh, I was hoping I wouldn't have to do this," she says, shaking her head just a touch. "I'm so sorry, but... to be honest, we know that he was seen entering your apartment on a neighbor's security camera. I really don't want to get the police involved, so, please..."

Her smile is gently coaxing as she gazes at him with her empty, unfocused eyes.

"I'll ask one more time: have you seen him? If you're honest with me, nothing bad will happen to you, I promise. I won't even tell the police about this."

[themostempty]

Dirk doesn't flinch. He doesn't curse. Internally or otherwise. He didn't plan for this, explicitly. At no point in the hundreds of hours he has spent knowing Ranboo, or being in danger for Ranboo, has he played this scenario out in his head. He hasn't scripted it, imagined it, or even fantasised about it.

Instead, he's planned, prepared, and plotted everything else around it. What little he hadn't established for his own security ahead of time, he set up--physically and mentally--before releasing Ranboo from his captivity on Dirk's bed, with only minor adjustments since then.

And now that it's here, he doesn't experience an oh, fuck moment. The only thing on his mind is which neighbours' security cameras actually caught him--his first instinct being to try and catch this woman in a lie.

Even as it occurs to him, he realises he has no chance. Ranboo did walk his way back up to Dirk's door after he ran out that one time, and Dirk did let him in. Even if he wasn't in visible camera range, the microphones that come attached to some cameras have some fucking range. Dirk can't jam them all the time. And even if he tried to catch her out, there's always the possibility of neighbours with cameras that he doesn't know about. So just as soon as that method is thought of, it's immediately discarded.

He hates that he doesn't know how much Ranboo can hear from their hiding place. That makes Ranboo the wild card now.

As for him?

Dirk has, on multiple levels, spent his entire life in preparation for this. In fact, more time was spent on preparing for what he's about to do than how to talk his way out of it.

What he does is this: he grabs the woman by the front of her insurance-adjustor bank-employee pantsuit and pulls her forward into him, where he claps his hand over her mouth and yanks her inside, slamming the door shut behind him.

No sooner has he slammed the door shut with his leg and hip than he's let go of her shirt and seized the katana hanging on the waall behind him. It's so fast, so practised and smooth, that he does it practically in between breaths. Hooking a leg inside of her knee, he trips her to the ground, and--letting her face go--grips the katana in both hands to decapitate her.

It's done in a single stroke; he puts every ounce of strength in his body behind the blow, and as a result, the sword comes down so hard that it embeds in the linoleum, and whatever else is under there. Presumably not concrete. But so focused is he on what he's doing that he barely acknowledges anything else happening from her or anything else, except to correct his swing.

And then, suddenly, it's over.

[generationlost]

She barely even has time to react.

Her programming tries, seizing his wrist with an unnaturally strong grasp-- but before she can even act, before she has time to do anything with that grasp, she's hurled to the floor--

-- and then it's all over.

The room is silent. The silence frightens Ranboo more than any of the noise beforehand; hesitantly, they peer out from their hiding place, and all they can see from that angle is Dirk, still, blade in hand.

Oh, shit.

He emerges from his hiding place quietly, finally gains a better view of what exactly Dirk just did-- the head and body where they lie on the floor, the blood beginning to pool lazily beneath her. The Showfall-branded missing poster still grasped loosely in her hand.

They stare at it for a long moment. When was that picture taken...? The mask covering their face is cloth-- it was before the mask was even installed. Did Showfall take that photo? Or was it an existing one that they stole?

Hetch was telling the truth about the missing posters.

The raw shock of everything about the sight in front of him leaves Ranboo frozen for a moment in the living room's doorway, gaze just slightly unfocused and dazed, their breathing muffled, almost stopped completely for a moment.

"Oh."

[themostempty]

Ranboo isn't the only one temporarily frozen by what Dirk's done, and all the attendant details.

Dirk, too, is left immobilised by the sheer volume of processing he's being forced to do in the aftermath--he's less in shock than a normal human being might be, but it's still some shock. He was taught how to do this, was given the skills, practise, information, and training to pull it off. And he was, at his heart, always, always one degree of readiness away from actually doing it. Truthfully, he's spent years obsessed with it. With his ability to kill. The hollow ache of wanting drove him to take up work that breaks people emotionally, psychologically, and physically. Cashing in paychecks that most people take on only as an act of desperation or heartless need. And it wasn't enough. Now, here, on his cheap linoleum floor, is the enough.

It doesn't feel like he expected it to. It doesn't feel like... well, much of anything, except the well-worn edge of panic and a new set of crises he has to solve. Immediately. His heart rate feels... normal. Prominent, but normal. His brain is silent, mostly. His breathing is just... breathing. Only the prickle of heat along the back of his neck and shoulders, and the accompanying sensation of sweat there and on his chest and under his arms, cues him in to adrenaline flow at all.

The steady, pulsing flow of blood from the stump of the woman's neck produces a rapidly growing pool of red, which is the first thing that galvanises him to action. In that time, Ranboo has emerged, and Dirk is aware of this, on a process-only level.

"Shit. Fuck--"

He glances up to Ranboo's face, searching first for a reaction, and then--seeing only shock--some kind of connection to their brain at all.

"--fuck me, snap out of it. Grab a tarp, help me move this. Fast."

[generationlost]

They feel... strange. Not quite numb, but something close to it, their body seeming somehow far away, thoughts processing slowly, as if moving through water. As if they're being made to watch this on a screen. This is real, right? Isn't it? Because it certainly doesn't feel real--

Ranboo jolts as if electrocuted when Dirk snaps at him, suddenly dragged back to earth, back into his body; he frantically begins to search the apartment for something, even before exactly what they're even looking for processes properly.

"-- a-a tarp? Do you-- have one of those?"

They've never really had any reason to drag one out before now, so they honestly have no idea. Why would Dirk have one to begin with...?

Despite scanning the room in an effort to try and find what Dirk is requesting, though, their gaze keeps drifting back to the body-- specifically, to the missing poster that she died holding, his face printed across it in stark black and white ink, now slowly soaking up the stranger's blood.

[themostempty]

Dirk, on the other hand, is hyper-present. Everything is happening exactly at the pace it should be, it just feels slower because the problem hasn't been solved yet. That's how he perceives it, anyway. Every second is excruciatingly slow, every millimetre that the pool of blood spreads across his floor towards the doorway and the carpet is too much time. He doesn't feel his own pulse, creating a weird effect like he simply haas none. He has no blood, no heartbeat, no heart. He's an artificial, hollow-bodied marionette or mannequin or simply fellow corpse, only of course he's not. He's breathing. He's hot under the skin. Sweat is beading. He just has no pulse.

"Of course I have a fucking tarp," Dirk snaps. It's a lot sharper than he means for it to be, or at least sharper than he knew it would be until it's out of his mouth. Okay, so he might be feeling some pressure. That's reasonable. He can accept that. He takes a deep breath, quickly re-composing his presentation to something more direct, more purposefully commanding.

The breath he takes in smells so much like blood it's almost like being back at work. This body isn't kicking, though. It doesn't thrash, doesn't tremor, barely flailed for more than a second. It was like cutting the head off a doll with wiring in it. A Furby reacts more when its wires are cut than this corpse did. It leaves a weird, sour pit at the base of his stomach. Like he's powerless over it now. The body, that is. It just lies there, bleeding. He can't stop it from bleeding, he can't clean it up, he can't re-do or un-do or solve, or--

"One under the bed, another under the bathroom sink. Pick one." And with that, he grabs his own shirt, yanking it off over his head and throwing it down on the linoleum in front of the door frame, desperate to at least stop the blood from leaving his apartment.

[generationlost]

Ranboo recoils as Dirk snaps at him-- just slightly, but very visibly, and despite how he towers over Dirk, it makes him look remarkably small. Fortunately for Dirk, the urgency and severity of the current situation doesn't allow Ranboo the time to feel properly annoyed, so they just wait quietly, anxiously until Dirk explains the location of the tarps, then quickly hurry off to retrieve the closest one.

Everything still feels strange-- it's as if the light has somehow changed, or the air. The familiar setting of the cluttered apartment feels alien somehow, or like they're trapped inside a copy of the real thing, swaying their way over to fetch the tarp from where it's hidden, folded as neatly as possible.

Dully, Ranboo realizes that they're standing back in the living room now, opening the tarp up, and that they have no idea how or when they arrived there.

Don't panic. Now is not the time to fucking panic. He sucks in a breath through his teeth and slowly releases it, trying to hide his rising panic from Dirk the best that he knows how.

"Okay. Okay, okay, now... now what...?"

[themostempty]

Dirk blinks, once, as Ranboo reacts to his slip, but he doesn't just stand there staring at the body once he's gone. As Ranboo begins to move, so does he--and despite his fondness for horror, it does not occur to him not to leave the body. After all, he has experience with them now. Thousands of hours with living, breathing animals ranging from sheep to cattle weighing as much as a tonne, from walking in under their own power with bright, wary eyes and swishing tails, to.... well, the moment they hit the floor. Hoisted and swinging as they bleed and kick, until they no longer do either. Death is common, it's cheap, it's done on a timer, and if you know what you're doing, it's easy.

Which doesn't make this less weird, somehow. But he has a task now, a purpose motivating his body--and as Ranboo comes back with a tarp, Dirk is laying towels he's seized from his living room, towels that normally exist there solely for workout purposes and which are now the main line of defence between incriminating evidence and the hallway, the carpet, and the layers below the linoleum.

"Uh." He glances over his shoulder. His first thought is for both of them to take a limb--an arm and a leg each--and swing the body onto the tarp, but that's. Stupid. Human bodies don't weigh that much, and their range of motion is completely different. They can just. He's been trying not to look at anything except her head, which is. Easier to look at. It's just a head.

The body is what's weird. She was dressed nicely, for her little job. The way her limbs... lie there.. is weird. It's weird, because it looks so fake. The lay of it, her limbs and the bend of her spine, is exactly like how he'd expect it to. But it's the fact that it's a woman, maybe, and nicely dressed? It's like looking at World Trade Center site photos. Or like, an assassination of some politician he doesn't care about.

He can't get off to this.

"Fuck it. Grab her legs. We're just going to roll her on, so we don't splatter the walls. I don't want dripping, let's keep it all clean between here and the bath tub." He glances at Ranboo, sees how pale they are.

"Are you going to make it? Don't answer that. Once I get her in the tub you can go lie down. I'll take care of this." The confidence in his voice sounds earned.

[generationlost]

Are you going to make it?

Ranboo simply blinks at Dirk as the question takes a moment to process-- fortunately by the time it does, Dirk has already made answering unnecessary, rushing right ahead to assure Ranboo that he'll take care of it.

But...

Slightly sluggishly, Ranboo shakes their head as they move their way down to her legs, trying to figure out the best way to just... grab them. They finally settle for just... wrapping their long fingers around her calves, lifting her legs slightly from the floor.

She's still warm. The sensation of handling her body makes their stomach lurch, the room seem hazy and wobbly around them. She's still warm, and the weight and shape of her is disturbingly human, and Ranboo knows that this was necessary, that she isn't-- she couldn't be human, not anymore, but... she sure does look and feel human right now, laying like a broken doll in a growing puddle of her own blood.

"No, you... did this-- for me, I can't just..." Ranboo takes a breath, releases it in a sigh. "I can't just leave you to deal with it by yourself..."

Dirk did this, this, to... protect Ranboo. And their conflicting feelings about that are squarely filed away to be dealt with later. Ranboo really couldn't handle them right now on top of everything else, even if they wanted to.

[themostempty]

Dirk doesn't flinch. He doesn't curse. Internally or otherwise. He didn't plan for this, explicitly. At no point in the hundreds of hours he has spent knowing Ranboo, or being in danger for Ranboo, has he played this scenario out in his head. He hasn't scripted it, imagined it, or even fantasised about it.

Instead, he's planned, prepared, and plotted everything else around it. What little he hadn't established for his own security ahead of time, he set up--physically and mentally--before releasing Ranboo from his captivity on Dirk's bed, with only minor adjustments since then.

And now that it's here, he doesn't experience an oh, fuck moment. The only thing on his mind is which neighbours' security cameras actually caught him--his first instinct being to try and catch this woman in a lie.

Even as it occurs to him, he realises he has no chance. Ranboo did walk his way back up to Dirk's door after he ran out that one time, and Dirk did let him in. Even if he wasn't in visible camera range, the microphones that come attached to some cameras have some fucking range. Dirk can't jam them all the time. And even if he tried to catch her out, there's always the possibility of neighbours with cameras that he doesn't know about. So just as soon as that method is thought of, it's immediately discarded.

He hates that he doesn't know how much Ranboo can hear from their hiding place. That makes Ranboo the wild card now.

As for him?

Dirk has, on multiple levels, spent his entire life in preparation for this. In fact, more time was spent on preparing for what he's about to do than how to talk his way out of it.

What he does is this: he grabs the woman by the front of her insurance-adjustor bank-employee pantsuit and pulls her forward into him, where he claps his hand over her mouth and yanks her inside, slamming the door shut behind him.

No sooner has he slammed the door shut with his leg and hip than he's let go of her shirt--and seized the katana hanging on the wall behind him. It's so fast, so practised and smooth, that he does it practically in between breaths. Hooking a leg inside of her knee, he trips her to the ground, and--letting her face go--grips the katana in both hands and thrusts it through her chest.

It's done in a single stroke; he puts every ounce of strength in his body behind the blow. The sword pierces her torso, right where her heart should be, and cuts through her to emerge cleanly out her back, by her spine. He uses so much force that it pins her to the drywall, or more accurately whatever more solid substance comes after it. Presumably wood. But so focused is he on what he's doing that he barely acknowledges anything else happening from her or anything else, except to correct his aim.

It's just that fast, that efficient. That trained.

And now, as suddenly as the one sided 'fight' started, it's over.

Dirk Strider has just killed a woman.

[generationlost]

She barely even has time to react.

Her programming tries, seizing his wrist with an unnaturally strong grasp-- but before she can even act, before she has time to do anything with that grasp, she's hurled to the floor--

-- and then it's all over.

The room is silent. The silence frightens Ranboo more than any of the noise beforehand; hesitantly, they peer out from their hiding place, and all they can see from that angle is Dirk, still, hand still wrapped around the sword's handle.

Oh, shit.

He emerges from his hiding place quietly, finally gains a better view of what exactly Dirk just did-- the body hanging limp around the long blade, the blood beginning to run down their wall from the place Dirk has her pinned like an insect. The Showfall-branded missing poster still grasped loosely in her hand.

They stare at it for a long moment. When was that picture taken...? The mask covering their face is cloth-- it was before the mask was even installed. Did Showfall take that photo? Or was it an existing one that they stole?

Hetch was telling the truth about the missing posters.

The raw shock of everything about the sight in front of him leaves Ranboo frozen for a moment in the living room's doorway, gaze just slightly unfocused and dazed, their breathing muffled, almost stopped completely for a moment.

"Oh."

[themostempty]

Ranboo isn't the only one temporarily frozen by what Dirk's done, and all the attendant details. It's just that the details--and emotional processing--that Dirk is doing is very, very differently.

He, too, is immobilised by the sheer volume of processing he's being forced to do, but he's less in shock than a normal human being might be. At his heart, he was always, always one degree of readiness away from actually doing this. He was taught how to do this, was given the skills, practise, information, and training to pull it off. And truthfully, he's spent years obsessed with it. With his ability to kill. The hollow ache of wanting drove him to take up work that breaks people emotionally, psychologically, and physically. Cashing in paychecks that most people take on only as an act of desperation or heartless need. And it wasn't enough.

He hasn't yet absorbed enough of the aftermath to know if he's satisfied now.

It doesn't feel like he expected it to. It doesn't feel like... well, much of anything, except the well-worn edge of panic and a new set of crises he has to solve. Immediately.

Two things occur to him with an equal level of urgency.

The first is that he absolutely does not want blood seeping through his neighbour's wall. He doesn't know exactly how far the blade has penetrated past the framework that divides the two, but he knows (from a number of patch jobs on his end) that the only substances between him and absolute catastrophe are drywall, wood, and thin concrete partitions. If water can penetrate those materials, so can blood.

The second is that he can't remove his katana if he doesn't want the steady, dark flow of blood to become a torrent. And he can't risk it leaking out under the door--or seeping through the floor. These two primary concerns circle in his head like agitated birds, harrying each other and him. He wants a second to look at her face--to see what she looks like, how aware she was in those last seconds.

But those first rivulets of blood have already started multiplying and joining into wider streams, forming a rapidly growing pool of red below her. In that time, Ranboo has emerged, and Dirk is aware of this, on a process-only level.

He glances up to Ranboo's face, searching first for a reaction, and then--seeing only shock--some kind of connection to their brain at all.

"--yeah, oh. Now snap out of it. Grab a tarp, help me move this. Fast."

[generationlost]

They feel... strange. Not quite numb, but something close to it, their body seeming somehow far away, thoughts processing slowly, as if moving through water. As if they're being made to watch this on a screen. This is real, right? Isn't it? Because it certainly doesn't feel real--

Ranboo jolts as if electrocuted when Dirk snaps at him, suddenly dragged back to earth, back into his body; he frantically begins to search the apartment for something, even before exactly what they're even looking for processes properly.

"-- a-a tarp? Do you-- have one of those?"

They've never really had any reason to drag one out before now, so they honestly have no idea. Why would Dirk have one to begin with...?

Despite scanning the room in an effort to try and find what Dirk is requesting, though, their gaze keeps drifting back to the body-- specifically, to the missing poster that she died holding, his face printed across it in stark black and white ink, now slowly soaking up the stranger's blood.

[themostempty]

Dirk, on the other hand, is hyper-present. Everything is happening exactly at the pace it should be, it just feels slower because the problem hasn't been solved yet. That's how he perceives it, anyway. Every second is excruciatingly slow, every millimetre that the pool of blood spreads across his floor towards the doorway and the carpet is time he's not doing something about it. He doesn't feel his own pulse, creating a weird effect like he simply haas none. He has no blood, no heartbeat, no heart. He's an artificial, hollow-bodied marionette or mannequin or simply fellow corpse, only of course he's not. He's breathing. He's hot under the skin. Sweat is beading. He just has no pulse.

"Of course I have a fucking tarp," Dirk snaps. It's a lot sharper than he means for it to be, or at least sharper than he knew it would be until it's out of his mouth. Okay, so he might be feeling some pressure. That's reasonable. He can accept that. He takes a deep breath, quickly re-composing his presentation to something more direct, more purposefully commanding.

The breath he takes in smells enough like blood it's almost like being back at work. This body isn't kicking, though. It doesn't thrash, doesn't tremor, barely struggled for more than a second. Then he could see it: the vacancy inside as its eyes lost focus far too fast for his liking. A Furby reacts more when its wires are cut than this corpse did. It leaves a weird, sour pit at the base of his stomach. Like he's powerless over it now. The body, that is. It just hangs there, bleeding. He can't stop it from bleeding, he can't clean it up, he can't re-do or un-do or solve, or--

"One under the bed, another under the bathroom sink. Pick one." And with that, he grabs his own shirt, yanking it off over his head and throwing it down on the linoleum beneath her where she hangs, desperate to at least stop the blood from leaving his apartment.

Then he takes hold of the katana's hilt with both hands--one gripping it firmly under the hand guard, the other braced for support--and pulls.

[generationlost]

Ranboo recoils as Dirk snaps at him-- just slightly, but very visibly, and despite how he towers over Dirk, it makes him look remarkably small. Fortunately for Dirk, the urgency and severity of the current situation doesn't allow Ranboo the time to feel properly annoyed, so they just wait quietly, anxiously until Dirk explains the location of the tarps, then quickly hurry off to retrieve the closest one.

Everything still feels strange-- it's as if the light has somehow changed, or the air. The familiar setting of the cluttered apartment feels alien somehow, or like they're trapped inside a copy of the real thing, swaying their way over to fetch the tarp from where it's hidden, folded as neatly as possible.

As Dirk pulls the sword from the woman's body, she silently falls to the floor, as lifeless as a doll. She's heavier than a doll, though, softer, collapses in a heap as if her strings were cut as soon as the only thing supporting her weight is suddenly pulled away.

Dully, Ranboo realizes that they're standing back in the living room now, opening the tarp up, and that they have no idea how or when they arrived there.

Don't panic. Now is not the time to fucking panic. He sucks in a breath through his teeth and slowly releases it, trying to hide his rising panic from Dirk the best that he knows how.

"Okay. Okay, okay, now... now what...?"

[themostempty]

Dirk blinks, once, as Ranboo reacts to his slip, but he doesn't just stand there staring at the body once he's gone. As Ranboo begins to move, so does he--and despite his fondness for horror, it does not occur to him not to leave the body. After all, he has experience with them now. Thousands of hours with living, breathing animals ranging from sheep to cattle weighing as much as a tonne, from walking in under their own power with bright, wary eyes and swishing tails, to.... well, the moment they hit the floor. Hoisted and swinging as they bleed and kick, until they no longer do either. Death is common, it's cheap, it's done on a timer, and if you know what you're doing, it's easy.

Which doesn't make this less weird, somehow. But he has a task now, a purpose motivating his body--and as Ranboo comes back with a tarp, Dirk is laying towels he's seized from his living room, towels that normally exist there solely for workout purposes and which are now the main line of defence between incriminating evidence and the hallway, the carpet, and the layers below the linoleum. He's also jammed a washcloth into the wall where the katana left a red-seeped, gory hole, just in case that helps.

"Uh." He glances over his shoulder. His first thought is for both of them to take a limb--an arm and a leg each--and swing the body onto the tarp, but that's. Stupid. Human bodies don't weigh that much, and their range of motion is completely different. He glances over her again. She looks like a prop. She was dressed nicely for her little job. The way her limbs... lie there.. is weird. It's weird, because it looks so fake. The lay of it, her limbs and the bend of her spine, is exactly like how he'd expect it to. But it's the fact that it's a woman, maybe, and nicely dressed? It's like looking at World Trade Center site photos. Or like, an assassination of some politician he doesn't care about. Ungulate legs stick out in weird ways, but she's just lying there.

Fuck. He can't get off to this.

Even thinking of her as a doll doesn't help. That's actually less--

Anyway.

"Fuck it. Grab her legs. We're just going to roll her on, so we don't splatter the walls. I don't want any more dripping, let's keep it all clean between here and the bath tub." He glances at Ranboo, sees how pale they are.

"Are you going to make it? Don't answer that. Once I get her in the tub you can go lie down. I'll take care of this." The confidence in his voice sounds earned.

[generationlost]

Are you going to make it?

Ranboo simply blinks at Dirk as the question takes a moment to process-- fortunately by the time it does, Dirk has already made answering unnecessary, rushing right ahead to assure Ranboo that he'll take care of it.

But...

Slightly sluggishly, Ranboo shakes their head as they move their way down to her legs, trying to figure out the best way to just... grab them. They finally settle for just... wrapping their long fingers around her calves, lifting her legs slightly from the floor.

She's still warm. The sensation of handling her body makes their stomach lurch, the room seem hazy and wobbly around them. She's still warm, and the weight and shape of her is disturbingly human, and Ranboo knows that this was necessary, that she isn't-- she couldn't be human, not anymore, but... she sure does look and feel human right now, laying like a broken doll in a growing puddle of her own blood.

"No, you... did this-- for me, I can't just..." Ranboo takes a breath, releases it in a sigh. "I can't just leave you to deal with it by yourself..."

Dirk did this, this, to... protect Ranboo. And their conflicting feelings about that are squarely filed away to be dealt with later. Ranboo really couldn't handle them right now on top of everything else, even if they wanted to.

Unfortunately, it's then that something new occurs that they're going to have to deal with-- the body begins to move.

The body, this woman who absolutely should be just a body, who absolutely should not be moving, begins to move, to sit up, and Ranboo drops her legs in shock and backs away, frozen in disbelief.

The woman stands-- moves to her feet, a hand wandering to press at her still-bleeding chest, and her gaze seems confused for a moment-- and then she looks at Ranboo, and suddenly, her focus returns, laser-like, and she reaches out for him.

[themostempty]

Dirk was prepared for a lot. He was prepared for mess, for smells. For the feeling of human skin under his hands, and muscle and blood and organs. For the way a body hung slack when lifted, for the long, trailing drape of her hair.

He was even prepared for a little movement--for the seeming sigh as the last remaining oxygen was expelled from the lungs, for the way a limp body's weight or its tendons might pull a limb 'back' or flop unexpectedly.

He was not prepared for--for animation.

"Holy shit!" He drops her, too--jumps back to land in a ready crouch, one hand braced on the floor by his fingers, mouth slightly open (he tastes blood, but he's not sure if it's really in his mouth or just from the smell) in disbelief as she not only sits up but then staggers upright. He doesn't get to see her face, but he doesn't need to. Now his heart is racing. Now heat floods his body, burning him with the adrenaline hit that might have come from the first words exchanged between the two of them, or when he made the split-second decision to kill what came for Ranboo and followed through on instinct. Sweat, which he will feel only later, has been beading on his neck and back and along his hairline, the fabric of his shirt sticking to him as he snatches up his katana--

And springs.

[generationlost]

Ranboo's back touches the wall just before Dirk springs into action; they freeze as he suddenly shoots forward, sword in hand, to once again pin the woman against the wall like an oversize insect, this time right beside Ranboo.

Ranboo has seen people die before. They have personally caused death by their own hands. But it never gets any easier to watch-- there's a moment's pause where she simply hangs there, disoriented, in pain, a single shaking breath escaping her lungs before her body shuts down, her head lolling aside like a ragdoll, eyes growing hollow and glossy.

Ranboo feels sick.

But the worst thing is that he knows this isn't enough. They aren't sure how they know, maybe it's just a guess based on pop culture or maybe it's knowledge he knew and then forgot, but somehow, he knows what has to be done to stop her from waking up again.

He opens his mouth, and all that comes out is a weak kind of grunt at first; they try again.

"Her brain-- it's... that's what's... waking her up. I think."

[themostempty]

Dirk had no fear plunging his blade through this bitch a second time, not even this close to Ranboo. His acts of violence are a practised, controlled art--but there is nothing especially controlled about the way he rips his katana back out of the wall after her new final breath, dropping her to the floor like so much cement.

There is, in fact, a spatter of blood from the force of it, which hits Ranboo in the face and the wall behind Dirk, leaving bright, wet flecks of red on both.

The instant Ranboo makes a sound, he looks at them.

Then actual words come out, and he opens his mouth. Closes it. Speaks.

He's still dizzy from the rush of how the fuck and what the fuck just happened and fuck, fuck and Ranboo telling him what to do in such an indirect way is perfectly clear, but the steps involved are a mess.

Much like the scene itself, now.

"Her brain. So, you--or I. What, I cut off her--? Fuck. Not here. Bathroom. Now. Hurry." He doesn't wait for an answer, and this time he grabs her much more roughly, without dropping his sword in the process.

Now that he knows he's still going to need it.

[generationlost]

That blood is warm, but only for a split second before it cools. And it sits there, sticky and cooling, on Ranboo's skin, and it's familiar, and he freezes, the breath trapped in his lungs, lanky frame frozen in place until Dirk speaks and breaks him out of it, barking orders--

Bathroom. Now. Hurry.

Ranboo again grabs her legs, this time without the hesitation, mindlessly following Dirk's orders-- their mind is elsewhere, somewhere outside of the room, numb and distant and far away.

Bathroom. Get her to the bathroom. Then they can... do something.

[themostempty]

Dirk, on the flip side, is at his most functional now. Here, in the midst of pure physical and existential crisis, he's ultra-present, his mind hyper-clear, his body pumped and primed for action. The fact that Ranboo has completely checked out hasn't registered yet--the need for this step, and the myriad steps that come after, takes complete precedence, with his brain rapidly mapping out contingencies and plans for each possible complication as they walk. If she wakes back up again, if they get her body caught on something, if the unlocked door is breached by more of her kind--zombies of the brain, he thinks.

He's never carried a human corpse before. They're different from livestock--the range of mottion is different, the limbs attached by ball-and-socket joints with so much more freedom that it really does feel like transporting a warm, strangely tacky doll. The only thing close to it is lambs. Lambs are so soft and so pliable in death, especially very young ones. He's thinking about this--all of this--on the short trek to the bathroom. And he's talking. More or less without filter.

"When we get to the bathroom, I'm going to hang her over the side of the tub, so the blood can drain. I'm going to need you to hold her head. Otherwise it's going to be hard to cut it off. Maybe grab her by the hair, and put a hand on the side of her head to stabilise her neck so there's tension. I don't want to have to hack at the neck or take multiple swings or have her wiggling around. The faster and cleaner it is, the less of a mess it'll be. And from an ethical standpoint, it's basically the only conscionable way to do this. And it's going to be really nasty unless we get this right. Are you listening to me?"

[generationlost]

Ranboo is going to help Dirk behead someone.

They feel faint and wobbly, as if their joints have been loosened, their head light and empty-feeling despite how packed full it is. His body mindlessly follows Dirk's direction, aiding him in transporting the woman to the bathtub, but when he turns his gaze towards Dirk, his face is sickly pale, his gaze glossed over and distant.

"Y-yeah," he responds breathlessly, despite not really fully processing the question.

[themostempty]

Once Ranboo lets go of the woman, Dirk finally looks at him--really looks at him--for the first time since his first attempt to kill this woman. Prior to this moment, he's mostly been making sure Ranboo is still following his directions. Now, with his hands and front splattered with this woman's blood, he looks at them.

And he doesn't like what he sees.

".... once you're done with that, you can leave." It sounds callous. Hard. In the stone way, and not in the difficulty way. He tries to find a way to communicate his intentions, but Dirk's struggle with language is that what comes out of his mouth is often the only option for speech that he has, in that moment. He can't re-create a sentence with different words, unless he created that sentence with wordplay in mind to begin with. Clarity happens immediately, or not at all. So the best he's got is more words.

"If you want. I can't do this part alone--I mean, I can, I can do that if I really have to. But it will be messier, and this is faster. Just hold her and you can go. I'll get the rest."

As he talks, he works--glancing up every few seconds to make sure Ranboo is still as mentally present as possible. But the places Dirk is comfortable touching this corpse are limited. The wound, he has no trouble with, but he doesn't really want to have his hands on her waist or hips, and her chest is extremely out of the question. Her limbs and legs--mostly--are fine, as long as he keeps those legs more or less together.

Solving his own problems is normal, though. So without commentary, he drapes her arms forward into the tub, and steps--after a moment of hesitation--over the edge to join her in there, pulling her forward by the arms until she's hung over the edge by her hips, so that the wound is draining into the tub itself. This feels... weird. Stupid, kind of. He feels awkward somehow, and tightens his grip on the katana that he's now extremely reluctant to let go of. Just in case.

"You good? You ready?"

[generationlost]

Ranboo desperately wants to be somewhere else.

It's not an unfamiliar feeling. The pulling dread and rapidly growing agony, the knowledge of what will happen and how there's no way out of this and no relief to come. Did he ever really leave Showfall after all? This can't possibly be life outside of it, can it? Ranboo wants to say no. In a flash moment of lucidity, he wants to tell Dirk to go fuck himself, to walk out of this apartment and leave all this pain behind-- whatever is out there, it can't be worse than this, or than what lies behind at Showfall. It's as if every sight in this apartment, every thought inside of Ranboo's head, the sound of Dirk's voice are all coated in razors that slash into Ranboo's brain.

But the woman. Dirk isn't going to let her leave now. Ranboo is finding it very hard to care what she might tell Showfall, if she even tries to drag them back personally, but this woman isn't leaving this apartment alive. Not as long as Dirk is here. Ranboo can't save her. He can never save anyone. But at the very least, they can help keep this from being worse than it has to be.

Numbly, Ranboo nods his head, steps awkwardly over to the side of the tub. His vision still swims, but the sudden rush of anger and disgust is at least slightly grounding.

"How do I... do this, exactly...?"