Daily Life in the Hunter's Dream: A Much Needed Day Off
The doll was a servant of the nightmare. She would tend to the garden's, sweep the steps, dust the shelves, wipe a dementiatic Gehrman's drool from his chin and repeat the process over and over again, never stopping and never breaking from the routine. She couldn't escape the Hunter's Rest. To say she was bored was an understatement.
How did boredom ever possibly strike her? She was a doll, an inanimate object with artificial emotion made to do nothing more than serve those who came to the Dream in any way they required. The fact that her Good Hunter didn't want to take advantage of her in that way was admirable at first, then later rather amusing. Now, however, it seemed to annoy her. Was she not desirable to him? Not just someone to share his bed with, but even as a maid or a cook? Shaking her head with a dry smile, the Doll kicked herself. She chided herself for so stubbornly demanding that Hunter meet her own selfish wishes.
Wiping her hands from the dirt of the garden, she stretched, crackling her wooden joints a few times before wiping off her dress and stepping back inside the workshop. Now that the plants had been watered and weeds removed, she needed to clean the weaponry. She had already planned ahead which blades she would begin caring for and how long it would take to complete this routine when she stepped inside and her plans were dashed.
"Hey, Darlin'," greeted the Hunter, his leather coat thrown over a chair and his shirt and vest stained with blood, "S'good to see you again."
The Doll dropped her gardening equipment. The spade and pale hit the floor with a clang, yet the woman was already by her friend's side before they dropped. Gently but quickly, she ran his hands over him, examining every inch of his bruised and battered form.
"What. Happened. To. My. Hunter?" she demanded harshly. The Hunter croaked out a laugh, then winced in pain as he clawed at his ribs where a dirty pile of bloody bandages were poking out of his shirt. The Doll gave him an exasperated look.
"Some kind of gangly son of a gun," the Hunter explained, yelping when the Doll set his broken arm.
"You fight beasts all the time. Why have you come home looking like this?" the Doll demanded as she removed the wraps sticking to his wet skin, then grimacing when she saw the flesh had turned a sickly shade of gangrene, "Is that poison?"
"Have I ever told you I love that accent of yours?" the Hunter interceded with a flirtatious grin. However, the Doll popping his shoulder back into his socket of the same arm as before shut him up. After he screamed, of course.
The Doll raised her eyebrow with a concerned parting of her lips, slowly realizing that she wasn't going to get anywhere with the Hunter's mind addled the way it was. Standing up, she tore her way through the storage boxes. Gehrman was a practiced hunter with decades worth of experience under his belt, so he must have something hidden somewhere that she could use to ease his predecessor's pain. After awhile, she shoved some white pills she had found down the Hunter's throat with a tankard of ale, making him fall asleep quickly. While unconscious, the Doll gathered a few supplies and got to work treating the poor man's wounds, beginning first and most importantly with the poisoned slashes on his rib cage.
Dutifully, the Doll cringed at the scene. While his muscles were finely toned to the point of even making her fake tongue salivate in anticipation, the wound itself was three deep cuts right across his rib cage, creeping up his side to his chest, his veins pulsing a sickly green. It was disgusting. Is this what the many hunters of the Waking World had to experience?
After washing, cleaning, dressing, and stitching the wound, the Doll set a powerful resolve to not let this Hunter leave the Rest for a long time. His responsibilities to the Hunt were important, but the Doll promised herself that she would make him see that his own safety was just as important, or else dive into the Waking World alongside him just to make sure he wouldn't die on her like all the rest.
A few hours later, the Hunter awoke to the sound of a song from his childhood and the smell of bacon, eggs, and sausages. Before he had even opened his eyes he was already drooling. Rolling out of a bed he didn't remember placing himself in, stumbling a few times and using the wall as a brace until he could find his balance, he crawled down the hall in an attempt to find the source of his desires. It had been so long since he heard anything so joyous as the sound of sizzling meat. It had been ages since he was able to fill his belly with a decent meal. Before now, the only things he could use to sate those voids were the screams of the suffering, and the entrails of the beasts he eviscerated, and given how the Beast Plague spreads through the contaminated blood of the afflicted, that probably wasn't the best idea. That smell, however, was real pork. Pork was the Hunter's favorite meat back in his former life, but that music that was playing alongside it was a song he had come to love called "Party Party Party" by Andrew W.K. and while not being his favorite artist, the song was still a welcome comfort.
Where was he? Judging by the feeling of the space around him, he could tell he was back in the Hunter's Rest, but he never remembered there being a building in this alternate reality big enough to house such a long hallway. He hadn't even seen a kitchen nor a bedroom in the minimal time he had spent in the area.
Perhaps a better question would be who was cooking, and to what end? Given the kind of horrors he had seen in Yharnam, he could think of a number of horrifying answers to that question, and none of them gave him any comfort.
Continuing to push his way down the hall, he forced himself to steady his mind and ignore the succulent euphoria that bacon can bring. He wasn't in any danger. The homey, comfortable aura flowing through the room made that apparent to him. However, even before he gained enough insight to pick up the subtle vibrations of the metaphysical barriers of the universe, and gained a small amount of arcane power, he was a warrior first and foremost. In his old life, he was a martial artist, and this ability remained in the Nightmare at his most instinctive level. This situation was peculiar and put his body was still on high alert as it had been trained. Without anything else in the room, he pulled a candelabra off the wall, ready to defend himself, and crashed through the door.
"Oh, Good Hunter! It is good to see you awake!" said the Doll with a brief smile, glancing over her shoulder then turning back to the stove, "I pray for your forgiveness. I reached into your memories so I could find something to remind you of your homeworld and discovered an image about a breakfast of champions? I'm not sure what that means, but I was able to tell that it would comfort you."
The Hunter eyed her up and down. She wasn't serious, was she? A woman like her making him breakfast after waking up in a peculiar area, feeling as though his world had been rocked the night before? If only she knew the implications of this scenario back in his homeworld.
The Doll took in a sharp breath of air. She wasn't expecting it, especially with her back turned, but the Hunter had wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her back into his chest as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Nuzzling into her coif, he hugged her tightly. He even briefly tightened his hold on her for a few seconds which only served to make the Doll smile warmly. Then, just as suddenly as he hugged her, he let her go and sat at the table in the center of the room.
"How you managed to find bacon in Yharnam astounds me, but I'm not going to say no to it," he said happily, folding his hands.
"That pleases me," the Doll replied, scraping the meal onto a plate for him and setting it on the table, "Is everything to your liking?"
"Yes ma'am!" he said fervently, wiping the drool from his mouth, but then he looked up at her with a bemused look, "Why are you still standing there?" The Doll's regularly demure expression returned to her face before responding.
"Would you request anything else from me, Good Hunter?" she asked casually. The Hunter tilted his head to one side in confusion, a strip of bacon hanging between his teeth.
"Um… No?" he answered. The Doll bowed low.
"Then, if you'll excuse me." With that declaration, the Doll began to leave, but then she felt something tighten around her mannequin hand and turned her around until she was face to face with her Good Hunter. She wasn't aware if it was intentional, but the motion made her twirl into his chest. Her nonexistent breath drained from her lungs from the warmth of his body, but then the Hunter released her and gave her a look that spoke of the one thing she knew better than anything else- loneliness.
"I didn't say to leave," he told her happily with a false smile, "Why don't you join me? It's not like I can eat all of this myself. You made enough food for an army!"
"I have other duties to do, Hunter," the Doll tried to argue, but the Hunter crossed his arms with a sarcastic smirk.
"I thought your primary concern was supposed to be the hunters of the Dream?" he asked with an accusatory air, "My mistake."
"Why must you do this?" the Doll asked irritatedly, groaning slightly before sitting down across from her charge. He wasn't wrong. The Doll did have a duty to make sure that the workshop was functioning properly, but the visitors to the Rest were her most important concern. Plus, it wasn't as if she couldn't return to her chores on the Hunter's next excursion. Also, silently watching him devour the breakfast she so painstakingly prepared for him, a song titled "Devour" by a band called Shinedown ironically playing in the background, she figured her other duties could wait.
"So, what did I tell you before I blacked out?" the Hunter asked once he finished his eggs, moving to his link sausages.
"You mentioned something of a gangle creature, but you didn't explain why your wound was poisoned," the Doll explained, "What kind of beast was it that harmed you?" The Hunter examined the Doll cautiously before responding, slowly chewing on a cut of meat.
"Another hunter I've run into on occasion, a Church Executioner named Alfred, called this one the Blood-Starved Beast," the Hunter explained after some deliberation, "And the name was accurate. I'm not entirely sure how much insight this victim of the plague had or the circumstances of his transformation, but the result of his suffering was a gangly beast that was little more than a furry skeleton that not only devoured innocent people, but drained them of all of their blood. It was more vampiric than other beasts that only ate their prey. It's claws were long and curved, and my wounds could probably attest to how sharp they were, but as for the poison, I can only summarize that as really bad, B.O."
The Hunter gave the Doll a cheerful grin, showing that the last comment was a joke, so the Doll rolled her eyes playfully and gave him a sharp slap on his arm. They laughed for a second, then the Hunter raised his hands in surrender.
"Alright, to be serious for a second, the Blood-Starved Beast had these spores," the Hunter continued, "Whenever the beast would shake itself like a one year old golden retriever, the spores would release in a cloud around it, but the ones remaining on his body would just loosen up and fly off with every following movement, so basically, if I got too close to him after he created his initial poison cloud, I'd inhale some of those spores and get poisoned myself. When he cut open my ribs, I wasn't expecting his toxin to travel down his claws and enter the wound."
"I'm glad to see you're alright, Good Hunter," the Doll admitted, reaching over the table and grabbing his hand in a rather bold move.
The Hunter blushed. Despite her hands being made out of wood, polished to the point of being smooth and almost as soft as human skin, there was a warmth to them reminiscent of a real human. When he looked up, her glass eyes were dead and soulless. There was no life in them, yet the Hunter was able to see all kinds of emotion akin to humanity if he looked deeply enough. This sapient being… this humanoid toy that walked and spoke like a human, was never a human despite the qualities it shared with them, but it made him question the idea of what really defined someone as such. Compassion? Free will? Perhaps it was the insight he had obtained over the past few weeks in the Nightmare, but he figured that perhaps this artificial lifeform understood the qualities living beings hold dear better than those who actually possessed them. All this from a simple squeeze of his hand. What was she? Was she truly a simple creation by the hands of man, or was she herself one of the eldritch horrors that the Hunter had come to know and contracted into the service of the Hunt?
Perhaps, she was just a doll. Who truly knew? Regardless, the Hunter resolved himself to find out what this mild curiosity would lead to.
(A/N) It's about freaking time! I want to remind everyone that is following these releases that because I'm focusing on a major writing project at the moment, and might be focusing on a second one very soon, that "Daily Life in the Hunter's Dream" updates sporadically. As for why this one took months to release, I couldn't figure out how to write it and make it sound good. This is the result of me changing up the idea entirely and deciding to write something different instead.
Enjoy!