Summary: Post-Karnak, Dan loses some things and gains others; it's not a very fair trade.
Type: Captcha prompt: '$45 retyped'.
Rating/Warnings: T.
Characters/Pairings: Dan.
obsession
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He sits, hunched over a typewriter, banging away. It's not electric, so he can make do without power, without running water, hiding in warehouse after warehouse as he's flushed out like a particularly large specimen of stinking vermin. The typewriter has a handle, is easy to transport, is all that matters. Human life isn't worth much in Adrian's utopia. Ideas, though. Well.
("I'd recommend you keep quiet, or...")
A threat, a warning, a piece of good advice. He'd assumed that trailing end would wrap itself around a lonely, unmarked gravesite, was braided from steel and resolve, had teeth. He'd never expected this kind of detached, anticlimactic ruination.
("Or what, Adrian?")
The journal was easy enough to rescue from the dumpster behind the Frontiersman's office, so much lunatic refuse sent away for burial. That burial was more of a luxury than its owner ever got was not lost on him, did not fail to make his knuckles clamp white in fury around the battered spine. Does not let him forget, even now when so much else has fled, faded like an old, forgotten nightmare.
Somewhere nearby, rats' feet through detritus, and they do not dream. They are fearless.
The keys strike the roller, heavy and final, as he retypes every entry with careful attention to the nearly illegible script. Yesterday, he was mistaken for homeless, and a man tried to palm him five dollars, gave him a look that said there was more to be had if he was desperate enough to... and he is homeless, but he's not that kind of homeless, and he–
He doesn't–
He isn't–
A noise across the room, and he jumps. Reality's getting a little disconnected – yesterday and today, cause and effect, and it's easy to slide into then as if it were now. He has a gash in his side that probably needs attention, but he's wrapped some packing paper over it and that'll be good enough; the ceiling creaks under the weight of snow, makes this space feel like remembrance. His fingers are cold and blue on the keys, crisscrossed in tiny itching slices. Free association: Papercuts, paper hearts, broken hearts, hearts that were never whole to break – the feel of wiry hair and scarred skin under his hands and somewhere in there, something true that he needs to unearth, to understand. He feels hands on his own, sometimes, guiding them to keep typing typing typing until his fingers lock up so hard that will alone can't overcome it.
("Daniel...")
There's $45 in loose mixed bills burning like a brand in his back left pocket. It's charity that sustains him, and it chafes. He doesn't charge for these meticulously drafted pamphlets, but people come back and find him sometimes, whispering mad entreaties into his ear, questions that buzz and buzz like detuned static, and they give him money that they don't expect anything in return for. Repayment for the truth, nothing more. And god but he's thin these days, an open and wasted kind of leanness that marks him, that clings to him like a bad smell. He has to eat. He's still aware of that, that his body is a machine that requires fuel and if he doesn't feed it then eventually he will be bone and skin and three layers of wool, armor against the stinging January freeze, with fingers that no longer move. Duty is more important than pride; he has to eat, so he takes the money.
(And just whose life have you commandeered, what rogue spirit have you let settle into your flesh as if it belongs, as if it's always belonged?)
It was such an easy thing to find, this book, as if it'd walked into his hands of its own volition, and sometimes he remembers it happening that way. So easy and so impossible because he knew what would–
("Whatever precise nature of this conspiracy, Adrian Veidt responsible.")
(Loose paper raining down from a balcony in a flurry of black and white and motion and that's it, that's it–)
He doesn't remember what they did when they finally caught him, pressed his face into the sleet and twisted middle-aged joints further than they ever should have gone. He doesn't remember much anymore, really. Pain, he remembers, sharp in the back of his head, pain like light and discordant music and the color of violets, exploding synesthetically against a backdrop of how could you and this isn't right and I won't let him have died for nothing and rainwater tracing down the edge of painted wood, smearing newsprint into muddy grey and dripping, dripping...
("I do regret that it's come to this, Dan.")
He turns the journal to the last page. He has three copies finished already, needs two more if he wants to hit the street by noon. The voice echoing detached against his urges him on, and some days this feels like defiance, like proving to Adrian that these things cannot be suppressed.
Some days, it just feels like obsession.
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(c) ricebol 2009