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]

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...?"

[themostempty]

Ranboo is right, of course. About Dirk, and about this woman. It has not occurred to Dirk even once to let her live, not since about twenty seconds into answering the door. The instant he moved to kill her, the window for any other thought about her closed. She was simply dead, or about to be dead--as a person, she only ever existed to be deceived and misdirected or dissuaded, so her death is simply the inevitable extension of that.

And he has felt nothing resembling a moment of hesitation or doubt.

Other than the unexpected twist of of her reawakening, the only shock he's felt at all is at how easy it really is. Killing a human being. It's weirdly anticlimactic. Even kind of a let-down. And yet exactly like he thought it would be.

He doesn't know what to do with this knowledge yet, hasn't unpacked how he's going to proceed with it.

But he's about to test it again, and maybe that's what's adding anxiety to this next step. Or maybe it's the lack of immediacy. Now it's premeditated, and the potential for complications feels larger.

Or maybe it's Ranboo.

"I literally just..." He takes a breath, and he inhales the smells of blood and shampoo and soap and water and a marked lack of livestock, animal smell. Okay. It's frustrating, but Ranboo is crumbling. Fast. He can't blow up about this or it's going to turn into another fight. He's got to suck it up for now. He's got to hurry.

"Just... hold her head up. Maybe pull her hair forward so I can get a clear strike, but keep your hands and arms out of the sword's path. Think you can do that for me?"

[generationlost]

Ranboo is silent as he kneels beside her body-- he's so much bigger than her. He could've overpowered her without it turning into this if Dirk had let him. The thought strikes before Ranboo can stop it, can even really pause to consider it, but once it lands it causes another fresh sting of guilt and horror over what he's about to do now.

It's too late. No one in this room can back out of this at this point, not with Dirk at the helm-- and he is certainly at the helm, whether Ranboo would choose that or not.

Ranboo reaches out to hold her, the warmth of her still somewhat-living body making his stomach turn; he brushes her hair where it's fallen from its neat business bun away from her neck, likely being a bit more gentle than Dirk would like, exposing her neck for him and, still gently, holding her hair in place above her head. Ranboo's gentle nature is involuntary-- his mind still registers what he's handling as a person.

They try to angle their arms out of Dirk's way, hopefully succeeding. They don't look at Dirk. He actually closes his eyes, features tightening with a quiet kind of dread for what's about to happen.

[themostempty]

It's not that Dirk doesn't regard the woman below his blade as a person.

The truth is much, much worse than that.

But it's a problem with Dirk that Ranboo won't need to pick apart until some day far in the future. For now, Dirk watches with barely-contained impatience as Ranboo handles the liminal corpse with undue care--it's only by holding his literal breath that he keeps his thoughts on this perimortem hypersensitivity to himself. The deep breath he takes beforehand, however, might still give him away.

"Are you done?"

Ranboo's closed eyes are going to have to be answer enough. Dirk isn't waiting any longer. Not when she could wake back up any moment.

Bracing himself in the tub, he grips the hilt of his katana in both hands and raises it over her--

Just like a video he watched in his younger years--

And brings it down in one smooth, swift stroke.

There's resistance, of course. It's not like he's cutting only through skin and muscle and meat this time. But that video was the subject of his fantasies for so long--and he can see the ridge of the first thoracic vertebrae at the top of her shoulders, before the narrower, tighter cervical vertbrae. He knows where the skull ends. And with enough strength--strength he's worked for, sweated for, ached for--and a sharp, well-crafted blade, he cuts her head off clean.

It's so fast that it's almost a surprise--just like in the video, but it feels even faster when it's real life. The gout of blood that he's expecting from her neck is smaller--it's a shorter spray, and there's less of it, but her head comes off into Ranboo's hands and her already-limp body sags down into the tub as more of that hot arterial flow pours down the side of the bleach-white fiberglass to run towards the drain.

Dirk is not aware of a lot in that moment. It's so fast, and he feels something tense in his chest uncoil--even while something else in his groin flushes hot and tightens--but he's not really turned on so much as simply responding to the new, faster speed of his own pulse. The yellow-white of bone and cartilage is barely visible for all the reds, both bright and so dark it's tinting black, but there's something else.

Something that he knows doesn't belong, because he knows what a decapitation looks like--something thin, and blue, and yellow, and white, and metal. Like worms, but they're not worms.

"--I fucking knew it."

Did he? It feels true when he says it. Either way, he knows exactly what he's looking at now.

More wires.

[generationlost]

The second that Ranboo feels that drop, that release of tension, her head falling away from the rest of her, his grip releases, dropping the head into the tub. It lands with such a heavy, horribly soft sound, and Ranboo quickly sits up to get away from the corpse-- but not before opening their eyes and getting an awful eyeful of the situation.

Blood. Less blood than the movies would have you think, but still too much, and the head expressionless and cold in the tub, and then the stump of her neck and--

And...

And something horribly inorganic protruding, the copper internals of wires sticking out where they were just cut away, plastic coating.

Something inside of Ranboo's stomach twists horribly.

Without a word, he staggers to his feet and out of the bathroom, seemingly struggling to stay on his feet. He doesn't make it far down the hall before Dirk would hear him heaving violently-- nothing comes up, but the spasms of it rock his body painfully, making him feel sick and woozy.

They don't go back. Ranboo staggers off down the hall, collapses onto their bed and curls up tightly, as if trying to disappear. His head is roaring and beating with blood, and when he closes his eyes all he can see is blood and wires and her face, hair sticking to her carefully painted lips, and he can feel the soft warm weight of her body in his hands, and--

They screw their eyes tightly shut, shuddering.

[themostempty]

The sound as the head hits the tub is... blunt, duller than Dirk was expectting. It's still heavy--as heavy as a human head can be, anyway--but there's so much more soft flesh than on a cow's head. Her blood smears along the tub before the head comes to rest by the drain.

And Ranboo--

Dirk was expecting him to leave. Considering the way he looked, Dirk had fully intended to force him to at least sit down out of the way--because of course Dirk had already run the possibility that Ranboo changed his mind about leaving through his mental arithmetic.

But he didn't entirely expect for Ranboo to stumble out of the tub in a panic, acting like he was about to hurl. He races into the hall, leaving blood on the floor, his retreat soon followed by the sound of gagging and heaving. He hears Ranboo gasping for breath, and does some unintentional maths on the last time Ranboo had anything to eat or drink, but...

He doesn't know why he does that.

He can't do anything about it. Not right now. He looks down at himself and at the corpse--her body is still draining into the tub. Good. But his legs and front are wet with blood. His hands are equally bloody, his arms are spattered, his face and neck wet in spots, and he can't know whether it's blood or sweat without looking in the mirror. Which would require him to step out of the tub. Which he knows he can't do.

It's just him and the body, then.

Carefully, he lays his katana down on the edge of the tub--he's been gripping it so ttighttly that his arm hurts. It smells so much like blood on top of the normal shower smells that he's starting to feel a little weird. Like he's nauseous from hunger, but also he's going to puke if he tries to eat anything. So, another problem about which he can do nothing.

Unlike Ranboo, he's not experiencing an overwhelming monsoon of emotion, nor is he struggling to keep his connection to the world.

He just feels... weird. Like he knows there's a point after this point in time, and that he's not there yet. But he feels like he is, and he's looking back on this, and he should know the next events already. Like the moment he's in is his memory of it, maybe because it's so empty of other information? But anything he does now is what happens next, and as long as he doesn't leave this tub, it doesn't matter what he does. He can do literally anything. He just has to do something.

He's hot. He realises that finally.

His skin is flushed and he can feel it in the way his shirt sticks to him; he's sweating and he doesn't like it. So the first thing he does is strip off his shirt.

The time elapsed between setting down the katana and taking his shirt off is maybe ten seconds, tops. If that.

The head, resting by the drain, is where he starts.

Picking it up is an empty act; he almost takes it in his hands, like a ball, but instead he puts some distance in between him and the object she is by grabbing a fistful of hair and lifting it one-handed. Like the way you pick up a cow's head, by the ear or horn. It makes him feel like he's pretending to be some kind of barbarian warlord. It's very juvenile, and he doesn't like it. So he jerks his hand, using physics and the loose length of her hair to transfer it properly into his hands.

Like he once did with his own brother, he holds her by the sides of the head and looks into the face.

Is it lighter than Hal's head was? Because it's smaller? If it is, the difference isn't noticeable. His brain only informs him, helpfully, that it feels light compared to a cow's head. He didn't really need to pick it up to know that.

The lips are dark with blood, the eyes mostly closed and hair plastered to any place that blood has touched. Strands stick to the mouth, clump at the neck, and lay in the eyes where the lashes stick to them. It's in her mouth, too. Stuck to the tongue and teeth, probably.

Already she's got that pallor. He remembers Hal being cooler to the touch, but she's already a bit cool. He turns her in his calloused hands, studying her until he suddenly feels a surge in his gut--revulsion, bile that sours his stomach and burns his throat. As he pushes it down, he realises why.

He didn't choose to have to deal with a woman's corpse. That's just what happened. He doesn't need this shit right now.

[generationlost]

Ranboo has not moved from his place on the bed. If anything, they've sunken even deeper, curled up more tightly. At some point they started crying, though he has no idea when that happened exactly.

There is no safety for them in this world. No relief, no security. There's nowhere to hide. Showfall found him. He can't hide behind Dirk, can't hide anywhere, there is seemingly nowhere to run.

God, he wishes Dirk hadn't made him stay alive this long. If this is the life they've got left to live, this kind of existence, what's the point? It hurts-- everything, every thought inside his head, anything that might bring them comfort now soured and stained in blood. Brushing his mind over a new thought, desperately seeking comfort, inevitably feels like dragging his mind over a bed of nails, and it all leads him right back to the head in the tub, to Dirk coated in fresh blood, Dirk pinning him down, Dirk--

A sob that makes their chest ache wrenches free from their lips, fingers tangling into his hair. He can't breathe. Distantly they hear themselves trying, but it hurts, everything hurts.

He groans like a wounded animal, wishing something could just shut his consciousness off and let him stop feeling. Just for a little while.

[themostempty]

In the bathroom, the possibilty that Ranboo is having some kind of breakdown exists, part of the ongoing blueprint of events and possibilities that is always being drawn inside Dirk's mind.

It just doesn't matter.

He sits down on the side of the tub, next to the limp, cooling body in its too-formal attire. Getting rid of her clothing is going to be more annoying than the body, and some part of his brain is already running through the how of possible solutions to that. But he doesn't really want to think about it. He doesn't want to think abouttt.... her. The act of stripping her down, of handling her body. Dismantling her would be fine if she was a man, but she's not. Even a severed arm or leg becomes somehow lewd in a way he hates. Thinking about it is uncomfortable.

So he doesn't. Not any more than he already has to, anyway. Instead, he turns the head in his hands--there's no way to NOT get his DNA all over this, so there's no reason to try and avoid it. He touches the bottom lip with his thumb, feeling the softness and the slack, and the substance of it despite those things. He wants to interrogate it--this impulse to interact, somehow. But he doesn't want to question it too hard, either. He doesn't want to do nothing, which is what he'd do if he was being strictly pragmatic.

With his hand, he flexes the jaw, opening the mouth so he can press his thumb into it, touching teeth and palate and tongue.

The tongue is a bit weird--it's a muscle, but one he's used to being 'dead' on cattle and sheep. A human tongue, however, is alive. It moves, he talks, it presses into your own mouth or licks its lips or welcomes a finger or resists it. None of those happen now, and the limp tongue has so much give to it. He pulls his thumb out and turns his hand to press his two fingers inside instead--opening the mouth further, probing back as far on the tongue as he can reach.

The entire inside of the mouth is still hot in a living way, and very wet with the combination of saliva and fresh blood. The thing about fucking the mouths of corpses makes perfect sense to him, actually.

Fuck. He wishes it wasn't a woman. For so many goddamn reasons. But it's not like her being a man would help him with that thought.

The blood on the nose is already crusting, so he pulls his fingers out of the mouth and wipes them off on the face before turning the head over to study the neck.

He did a good job.

That's his first thought. But he did. The cut is so clean. A perfect job, in fact. He runs his thumb and then his fingers over tthe vertebrae where it's bared, feeling the cartilage and the muscles around it. He thinks about fucking the throat from this angle, and how that would feel. It would have to feel good. With her turned away like tthis, it's easier to think about a man's head. Thank god.

Of course, the head he visualises after that thought isn't anonymous.

He loses a little time like that. Touching this body part, so essential not only to life but to self. If you cut off someone's head, the body is still theirs, but... anonymised, in a way. The you that you are is inside this. This ten pound weight. Meat and bone. Tubes that you can see and feel and put your fingers inside. A wrapping of skin that only conceals the fat and muscles underneath until you split it open, hair in everything and impossible to fix once the seal on all that liquid and flesh is broken. And inside of that... in this case, apparently riddled with wires...

He has been isolating those wires, more or less without thinking. Parting them and pulling them to be more visible, trying to follow tthem with his fingers. But they're definitely attached to something. Anchored. And he doesn't want to pull hard. He doesn't want to... rip up whatever they're connected to. He won't learn anything that way.

He can taste blood, imagines he can feel bits of gore on his tongue--and maybe he can. He was so focused on what he was doing (...what is he doing? Studying. He's studying. That's what he's doing.) can't say he hasn't wiped his face or put his fingers anywhere near his mouth.

But he's going to have to break the perfectly preserved 'her' of this head open to see.

He does, at least, put the head back in the tub and stop to wash his hands at the sink before he leaves, padding barefoot down the hallway.

He needs... a hammer. No. Something broader. Something with a less direct, circular conduit for force...

Tw suicide

[generationlost]

Ranboo doesn't know what Dirk is doing. No, that's a lie-- they know exactly what Dirk is doing, but not where he is in the process. Part of him isn't sure why he even wonders about Dirk. Why think about him at all? He's just another in the list of terrible things to happen to Ranboo.

From the control of one exploitative owner and into the control of another.

This isn't freedom. Not really.

Ranboo hears movement, opens his eyes for a moment to see Dirk passing by the door-- calm, focused, soaked in a stranger's blood. It's as if they've glanced up to watch a scene from a horror movie playing out in a familiar hallway.

This is hell, right? Or a bad dream. This can't be real. Then again, Ranboo can't remember the last time anything truly felt real to him at all.

(That isn't true. They were with Dirk. Laying peacefully in bed together, in the quiet, comfortable, resting. That feels like another lifetime now.)

Ranboo rolls over limply, sits up to open a drawer near the bed. He knows it's full of condoms and lube. He also knows what else Dirk keeps there. They dig until they find the pill bottle, lift it carefully to avoid making too much noise and alerting Dirk to what they're doing. There's a partial bottle of water on the night stand-- Ranboo can't remember whose it is, but it doesn't really matter now.

He looks over the label. He feels... a lot less and a lot more at once than he thought he would if this were ever to happen. Relief, some agonizing form of it that makes his gut feel cold and hollow, and grief, grieving the person they used to be and can never be again. They wished they knew what name that person had. They wonder what name they'll be buried beneath.

He can't swallow all of the pills at once, so he takes a few at a time. It gives them time to think, to wonder what they could've been, who they could've been if only they'd never been taken. In another life, what could he've been? Happy? Loved? Maybe even normal?

Well, it doesn't matter now. And the pain won't last much longer, the unbearable point that it's come to making their hands shake as they take the last few pills left in the bottle and set it aside, then fall back onto the bed, curling up tightly again to wait.

They hope that it won't hurt. It would suck if the last thing he ever got to feel was pain.

Re: Tw suicide

[themostempty]

To Ranboo's credit, they do manage to avoid making any sounds that would attract Dirk to the scene. Not that this is difficult. Dirk is purpose-driven by nature, his brain always focused on his goals both immediate and grand. This makes him prone to tunnel vision at the best of times. Even if he had heard Ranboo rattle a pill bottle, he'd assume they were sedating themself through whatever breakdown they're having. The same way he does. That's what those pills are for. To shut it down--to shut it all down--when he's having 'an episode.'

In the kitchen, Dirk searches for tools. He finds his club hammer, which is a little more suited to widely distrubuting a blow, and he grabs a crowbar while he's at it. He has scalpels in the bathroom already. He has to do some searching to unearth his bonesaw and meat saw, but eventually he has an armful of tools (mostly like four different saws) and he's confident he has what he needs to do almost everything he's going to spend tonight doing.... thinking about it, he realises just how much work is ahead of him.

The interest and excitement of the wiring wanes slightly.

This is exhausting. All of it. The woman, her body, her clothes... her her. He hates so much that he's going to spend the next several hours on this, on her. Touching her. Looking at her. Getting her in his mouth and on his hands. He hates it. Some visceral sense of revulsion pushes back on it, not on the labour of it all, but on the intimacy. He doesn't want to know her like that. He doesn't want to see her, or feel her. He wants to put her somewhere that will obliterate her and destroy her completely, without his involvement.

But that's not how this works, and at the very least he has something he's excited to learn from before he has to get really personal about it. He is nothing if not suited to the dirty work, tthe work no one else wants to do or likes, or is capable of. That's what he's developed in himself, more than anything else. It has to happen, so he makes it happen.

You endure it and you get it over with.

So, with his armful of tools, he heads back the way he came--none the wiser as to Ranboo's actions in his absence.

Re: Tw suicide

[generationlost]

It's a while before anything happens. Ranboo isn't sure how long exactly; he's tuned the world out entirely. There's no real reason to worry about it anymore.

A part of them wants to feel bad about leaving Dirk to clean all this up on his own. Another part is so deeply hurt and angry with Dirk still, so tired and even frightened of his current behavior that they just don't care. He'll figure something out.

Ranboo wonders with an odd kind of morbid curiosity what Dirk will do to his body once he finds them. Will he be taken apart like this woman? Like something from the abattoir? Probably, since Dirk will have to get rid of him somehow.

So that answers his question about what name he'll be buried under: none of them, probably. He likely won't see a proper burial at all. It makes him feel a little sick-- he didn't exist in life, and he won't exist in death. At least Showfall definitely won't be able to reclaim his body.

After a while, they start to feel very, very drowsy. His body feels heavy, his mind slowing down to a crawl. Even breathing becomes a focused labor, something his body forces them to do once it begins to panic, and breath comes in slow, tired pulls, escapes all at once in a rush.

This must be it.

The world around seems distant, everything in slow motion, as if he's under water. Ranboo doesn't know how long they lay there like that, on the edge of consciousness, unable to move even if he wanted to, but eventually, his consciousness finally slips away into blissful darkness.

Tw suicide

[generationlost]

It's a while before anything happens. Ranboo isn't sure how long exactly; he's tuned the world out entirely. There's no real reason to worry about it anymore.

A part of them wants to feel bad about leaving Dirk to clean all this up on his own. Another part is so deeply hurt and angry with Dirk still, so tired and even frightened of his current behavior that they just don't care. He'll figure something out.

Ranboo wonders with an odd kind of morbid curiosity what Dirk will do to his body once he finds them. Will he be taken apart like this woman? Like something from the abattoir? Probably, since Dirk will have to get rid of him somehow.

So that answers his question about what name he'll be buried under: none of them, probably. He likely won't see a proper burial at all. It makes him feel a little sick-- he didn't exist in life, and he won't exist in death. At least Showfall definitely won't be able to reclaim his body.

What a weird thought.

It makes Ranboo hyperaware of their own body-- the way blood flows through his veins, his own pulse which is now beginning to slow, the tendons and joints that give him motion and will likely soon be severed. He's spent his entire life in this body, fit together as it is, and soon, it'll be taken apart. They know that they won't feel it, but it's still kind of a scary thought-- that his body is in its last few minutes whole, living. He tries to imagine what it would be like without his arms or legs, and it's... strange. But that's silly, anyway, because he's not going to be alive to experience life without them. This is the last thing he'll ever experience-- laying curled up in Dirk's bed, alone.

If he'd thought about this sooner, maybe he would've done something fun first, something he'd never done before and would never get to do again. Maybe they would've had a good snack, or kissed someone-- enjoyed his senses for the last time he'd get the chance. Well, it's too late now.

Dirk will probably enjoy taking his body apart. Weird. They try not to think about that too much.

After a while, they start to feel very, very drowsy. His body feels heavy, his mind slowing down to a crawl. Even breathing becomes a focused labor, something his body forces them to do once it begins to panic, and breath comes in slow, tired pulls, escapes all at once in a rush.

This must be it.

The world around seems distant, everything in slow motion, as if he's under water. Ranboo doesn't know how long they lay there like that, on the edge of consciousness, unable to move even if he wanted to, but eventually, his consciousness finally slips away into blissful darkness.