Path of the Vampire forum

Otis liked the green. He liked the splash of earthen colors, even though they hid a darker threat to what he was now. Even though it would never be to him what it once was. A place, a refugee. Now the wilds beyond the city were like criss-crossed wires, the fence to his prison. They were still very beautiful for prison walls. Much as he wanted to reach out as he did before, he’d seen through others eyes what lay out there. Only glimpses, of course, but enough to convince even his wandering feet not to go that far. There was nothing out there for him. The fae didn’t need his help.

It was quiet, though, out here. Not quiet enough, no. Nowhere was ever quiet enough, but out here he could pull together more of himself, away from the prying demands flying through one subconscious to another, and the maddening ring of electronic signals. This was limbo, true as can be. A place between one hell and the next, between the mental and the physical. He could almost see the lines where one faded into the other, and that thin space between where lines were blurred and the closest thing to peace could be obtained. Here, hidden pressed in the shadowy grove of a tree, safe in the folds like a mothers embrace, he could almost lose himself in the basic levels of the Vathiá with less fear. He couldn’t draw himself fully into it, of course, but he could see it’s edges like the precipice of an uncharted land. It was.. Comforting, somehow.

Rolling his head, Otis found his lips working, picking up snippets of random thoughts like one turning the dials of a radio at random. “Eyes crinkling, weight lifting, desperate to forget. Bubbling, crawling to the surface, shaking, trembling, laughing, forgetting. Wide awake, sheets soaked in sweat, gripped tight. Shapes in the shadows, gripping, inviting. Mommy, don’t let them take me. Not real, she says, but they are, she just can’t see them like I do. Kick the can, cracks like a gun shot. Don’t think about guns. Shiny, slim, deadly, doesn’t fit, awkward in my palm. Don’t want to kill her, see the blood, but he’ll kill me if I don’t. Pulling the trigger, can’t hear, but can see. Slide the king in the boot, smile, never has a clue, so gullible. The man’s angry, so he drinks, but the drink makes him angrier. Shoes crunching, eating up the grass, lines like magic forming what the eye sees. The dagger glints in the light, closer, impossibly unreal, but too real, singing for blood, singing in the air-”

Otis shrank back, covering his head with his hands. In moments he’d sunk to the ground, curled as small as he could make himself. He didn’t remember making a sound, but he must have, because he was sure something had heard him. Not to mention that same something called out, a voice soft and feminine, wary in it’s whisper, but clear enough to be heard. He didn’t remember the bench, sitting a good distance away, having an occupant, but it did now. Slowly, carefully, Otis uncurled himself. It would, from anothers perspective, be quite eerie in the way he uncurled, pulling himself from the shadows of the tree that had hidden him. Not to mention how not a bit of skin was visible. The old duster, heavy, hid his arms as well as the rest of his clothes. The gloves covered the flesh of his hands, and the soft, warm face mask hid everything up to the bridge of his nose. His eyes might have been visible, but the pulled up hood left it in shadows. The only thing that indicated anything lived under all that cloth was a few locks of silver hair that crept of from the shadows, hanging like spiders webs in front of his face.

Upright at last, he began to shuffle closer. Her voice had been so sudden, it had shocked some clarity into the muddle of his mind for the moment. A rare moment these days, it seemed. “Hello..” he answered, his voice soft as a winter breeze. Heavy boots ate up the leaves underfoot with a crunch that was louder than their voices. He stopped a few steps away, close enough he could have reached and touched her face. Instead he simply shifted from foot to foot, shoulders hunched forward and hands digging at each-other, as if he itched to do something with them but didn’t know what. Dazed gray eyes were visible this close up, peering at her, yet past her, and then away and down to the bench, as if they too couldn’t stay still. Heavy bags hung beneath those eyes, and around that, flesh pale and twitching. Nothing about him was stationary, it seemed. “It’s night..” Such an obvious comment, spoken soft and as if it were a very important fact to be noted now.

There was, in response, a long moment of silence. Then, like a band pulled to tight, the moment of clarity was broken and snapped. He tipped, rather alarmingly, to the left, then steadied himself. “One.. Two.. Three.. Counting stars, wishing for years, but wishes don’t come true. A dancing candle, it swings like a ballerina. Why won’t he let me go? The father doesn’t trust her, she thinks, but it’s them he doesn’t trust. Doesn’t want his little girl hurt, knows they’re bad, because he was bad. Hurt the woman he loved, doesn’t want her hurt, such a simple, fragile thing. Love breaks like a dropped glass, broken shreds cutting, bleeding..” He made a small, sickly sort of groan and hung his head forward. For the moment he was still, but the moment passed, as moments often do. “Yes.. Beautiful..” he mumbled, almost as an afterthought, but not once did he actually raise his head to look at the stars. Instead he stared out, across the wilds, fixed on the fae glimpsed earlier.

“It speaks in ways that are wrong, wrong to me, but not to them, but it’s hungry. Watching, daring, laughing, beckoning. Dare to come out, and it will feed on you... Foolish fanged feeble fledglings are nothing but toys...” The fae seemed to twist about with his words, and then Otis dropped his gaze so fast he pulled a muscle in his neck, and had to poke and dig under his hood for a while before he could move his head without pain. “Digging, feeding... I need a bird.” The comment was as sudden and out of place as his first, to an almost comedic effect.

Without waiting for permission, or even asking, he made his way around the bench and perched on a free edge, as far as space allowed from the girl. His heels clung to the lip, toes towards the ground, and he rocked forward so that his backside never touched the metal. It was a curious posture, as well as quite the show of balance. “Peck, peck, peck, peck..” he muttered, nearly fifty times under his breath. With every 'peck' his finger scratched the front of his right knee, each time harder than the last until the scent of blood filled the air. Then he stopped, and rocked in place. "It was supposed to be quieter, here... it is but... not enough..." Another pause. "You were drawing.. I interrupted.. Sorry."

Otis had been briefly surprised when she’d reached to steady him. Most recoiled, hated the thought of touching him. Nobody willingly held out their hand with the intent to touch him. Probably because of the smell. One didn’t hold house to a party of corpse-devouring insects without some sort of odor, though he did cover as much as he could with cloth and soap. “A bird,” he repeated as she asked. After she spoke, he rocked forward and spoke in return. That was often how conversations worked after-all. Minus the rocking, perhaps. “They eat. Feathers, soft as silk. Claws and beaks to dig them out. It hurts, but it’s a good hurt. Cleans them, makes them less. I can’t dig like a bird.” As if to prove his point he shrugged off his gloves and started to scratch his palm with a cracked but clean nail, digging until something squirmed underneath, running along his wrist and diving under his sleeve. “They’re too fast for me..”

He tapped the reddened flesh of his palm with the same finger and leaned to the side, watching her work on the page. “Noise..” he mumbled, looking from the page to her face in a sort of intense concentration, as if he couldn’t survive missing a single detail. “Yes.. So much noise. So much need, begging and pleading. Help. They want help. So many of them want help, too many to aid. Like a raging rapid...” He ducked his head and began to rock again. “Pulling, churning, white and frothing, forcing me under, can’t breath, can’t see, nothing but noise. So loud it’s silent. Pain, lashing my side, darkness pressing in, need air... Silence.” He froze, then ducked his head farther. “She’s dead.” He stated this softly, but with a sort of distance one said of any fact that bore no emotional attachment. Like the weather.

Otis thought about her questions, and answered them in the same puzzling order he did many things. It was as if the order of their asking meant little. Time meant little. His mind muddled and tossed it around regardless. Instead of answering her question immediately, he spoke on what she had said. “It comes with a choice. Block it, pass it by, keep yourself, don’t collect two-hundred dollars. Or take it in, absorb it, let it fill you up until there isn’t any you anymore. You aren’t you, you are just it. It leaves pieces, it needs to leave pieces to keep you interested. It can’t make you a servant, not completely. It’s always a choice. It has to make room, though, or it can’t be used. I don’t know if I chose. I don’t know... I just am. Can hear it, it comes, it goes, too fast, can’t always catch them in time. Raven, black bird, black as night, glossy, here again. Pretty bird comes for the treats and leaves the coins. They fed them, always fed them, every time. The birds brought the lense back, left it in the birdbath with all the other odd things.” He smiled, and it was such an odd thing the way it showed in the corners of his eyes, the rest hidden by the cloth of his facemask. Then it was gone, and he was rocking again.

“They don’t know it’s wrong. They think the flesh is dead, free to eat. They don’t know any better. Such a quiet voice, but they all think together. I’ve tried to take them out, but they grow too fast. They can’t be taken out, not all, but a bird.. A bird is fast and hungry. They won’t all leave, but they’ll be enough... I can take it off if the bird eats them.. Then they won’t smell so bad. They won’t be so many. They won’t be seen. Too many, too easy to-” Suddenly he broke off, and silence remained. Where Otis had been, for a full minute he suddenly wasn’t anymore. And then, sixty seconds later he was there again, rocking back and forth and speaking as if he’d never vanished. “-see. Need to lessen them, see?” He turned, staring at her and still for a second. Yet he wasn’t quite still. Like an old television, or someone blinking really fast, here and there he would seem to vanish. Only for split seconds, but enough to be noticed.

The moment she’d brought his existence to attention, the flickering ceased. Perhaps it was some sort of trick, but not all the variables thus far led to such an assumption. He followed her gaze to his own self, and began to move off the bench so that he too was standing. “Flickering? Existence, flickering, like he’s not even there. Half in, half out, where does it lead? What lies on the other side? I don’t know, I never know. You see me, so I must exist, right? They see me. Or are they all seeing what they want to see, afraid to believe what they see isn’t what is to be seen? Do I exist?”

He looked back up at her, and a sort of desperation flickered in his eyes. He wanted, it seemed, to know so desperately if he was merely a delusion of others minds, or if he truly held some manner of solidity in the world. It was hard, so hard, to form an understanding of himself when so much of him was erased. Few thoughts belonged to him, when so many that moved through his mind took up the space. He couldn’t even seem to rely on his physical being, when he saw through others eyes the way he never really remained for long. These thoughts pressed in a sort of shapeless mass of emotion, strong enough for just that brief second to perhaps be picked up by the fellow telepath, if luck allowed.

Then they were gone, as was his gaze, and he was staring out at nothing. All that was his own never lasted, as if he himself were just a tool of the world, and of the shapeless will of those that occupied it. “The builder never calls the wrench his friend, but so much of his work depends on it. Turning, twisting, the tool never complains, never happy or sad to be used. The wrench is nothing, and the builder thinks nothing of it. The people in the building think nothing of it. The man with the paycheck thinks nothing of it. When the wrench breaks...”