Caraphernelia

[backslash]

((Min-jae Parker continued from give me shadow, put on my crown.))

Out of the asylum again, back into the fresh air, such as it was. Clouds had blanketed the sky, and Jae turned his jacket collar up against the occasional wind. Back around the island again, the long way around this time. He didn't want to see the bridge up close again, if he could help it. Nothing good happened there, but then, nothing good happened anywhere in this godforsaken place.

The sky was beginning to darken when Jae reached the other side of the island. He hadn't really been here before, wasn't sure who else would be hanging around, if anyone, but the structures seemed less welcoming shelter-wise than the asylum or the staff housing, so he was hoping they'd be emptier.

He had managed to lose track of the little horror movie gremlin that was apparently stalking him now, though he wasn't willing to take that as the end of the matter. He was still paranoid and pissed off, and he let it keep driving him forward, because when you're a directionless asshole fueled entirely by emotional problems, the best course of action is sometimes to just fall back on what you know best.

The looming clouds threatened the possibility of a rainy night, so Jae ducked into the storehouse. If he was lucky, he might be able to spend the night undisturbed. He wasn't putting any stock in luck at this point, though, so he kept the crossbow at the ready.

The inside of the storehouse was quiet, cool, and still. It was almost unnervingly like what he had thought of the solitary confinement rooms when he first stumbled in there. He couldn't assume that he was alone. The back of his neck prickled, but he didn't know if that was the paranoia rearing its head or something to actually heed.

It isn't paranoia if someone is actually out to get you. Hadn't he thought something like that before?

He had been justified before, pretty much every time. Every time he had hesitated to take action, he had regretted it. He would be plenty justified shooting some creep in a mask; anyone running around like that at this point had clearly gone off the deep end.

Speaking of which, hi Dorothy.

She was there as Jae rounded the corner, and at first he thought she had fallen asleep in some absurd place and position because, well, he didn't think that was out of the ordinary for her. As he drew closer though, he could see that her eyes were open and her face blotchy. There was a half-eaten piece of bread nearby.

She had choked to death while eating, the dumb bitch.

Jae let out a soft, wheezy laugh. God, really? He had been planning to shoot her if he saw her again, and she goes and dies while eating? It looked like she might have stabbed herself in the confusion too. What a fucking spaz. His mirth was faint, but it was there and it was genuine. What that said about his current mental state or the state he had been in all along, who knew. His emotions were swinging all over the place.

Jae sighed and eased himself down to sit next to Dorothy's body, leaning back against a crate with the crossbow in his lap. He lit up a cigarette and let his mind wander.

"Bread, huh? I guess it suits you."

No answer, of course. Dorothy was gone like all the rest. The lucky ones, part of him insisted, but he was obviously no more inclined to actually kill himself than he had been a few days ago, so that part could kindly go fuck itself and stop muddling up his thoughts.

He was feeling a layer of vaguely good humor on top of the underlying anger at everyone and everything, solely because someone he didn't like had died in a stupid way, so getting all deep and introspective at this point was probably just a waste anyways.

"I guess we both fucked up in ways Asha would be pretty mad at us for, huh." Jae blew a stream of smoke over Dorothy's body, watching as it dissipated into the air above. "So here's a riddle: what's worse, doing what we did because you're insane and violent, or because you can't think of anything else to do and you can't keep pretending that you want to kill yourself?"

No answer. Jae doubted that Dorothy would have had much to offer in the way of philosophy even if she had still occupied the body next to him.

"Here's a secret, Dot: there's no such thing as dying honorably. Having a 'good death' is something we made up to make ourselves feel better, because no matter who you are, what you have, or where you're going, you're going alone and you've paved the road yourself. Dying isn't what matters; it's how you live."

Jae exhaled and stared through the smoke and tried to remember how he had felt weeks and months ago, when he tried to capture a similar image in his mind and save it to recreate later.

"And I guess what fucks me up is that none of us have even had a chance to fucking live. It's pointless. This, I mean, this whole situation."

"I think-" Jae closed his eyes for a moment, eyebrows drawing together as he wondered why he was even voicing such things to a corpse that neither know nor cared that it was being spoken to, and then decided that he didn't care either. "I think I don't actually hate myself, you know. I just hate people. I hate our whole rotten species. A lot of us deserve to die. A lot of us deserve Hell."

"But none of us did, not at the start of this."

And maybe that was the point, though Jae didn't really believe that there was a point underneath it all. Maybe there had been, ten years ago when whatever sick mind dreamed this up had its first twisted plan, but whatever it might have been had been lost along with so many lives.

"Somebody came up with this, and they got a whole bunch of people to go along with it, and they got somebody, somewhere to turn a blind eye long enough for them to do it over and over again." No answer. "People are shit, Dot. They're just proving something most of us already knew."

Jae fell silent and stayed that way until his cigarette burned down. The brief glimmer of good humor had faded, but he didn't get up. It would be well after dark now and who knew where his stalker was. If they wanted to start something, they could come to him.

Or maybe they'd wander off and choke on their dinner too. Anything was possible, especially if it was stupid, anti-climactic, or otherwise ample evidence for some kind of cosmic joke being played on Jae in particular.

After tossing away the butt of his cigarette, Jae pulled Dorothy's bag over and rooted through it for a bottle of water. As he pulled one out, his hand brushed some kind of fabric, and he pulled that out too.

It was Asha's flower hair pin. Dorothy must have taken it after Jae left her the first time. Unlike nearly everything else on his or Dot's person (or Asha's, for that matter), it was still clean and undamaged, if a little rumpled. Jae turned it over in his hands for a minute, absently tracing the shape of the petals. He moved to put it back into the bag, paused, and then pinned it to the lapel of his jacket instead.

The taser was still there, of course, with a few charges still remaining. Jae moved some of the food from his bag and put the taser and charges in, banking on needing one more than the other at this point. It couldn't be much longer now.

After a moment's considering, he took the knife from Dorothy's already stiffening fingers as well and stuck it through his belt where he'd kept the baton before. Maybe he'd die, but he could at least be a nasty surprise for his stalker or whoever else.

All of that done, Jae leaned back against the crate again. His eyelids were starting to feel heavy after a day of exertion, between that morning's excitement (if one could call it that) and his trek back around the island afterwards.

He glanced over at Dorothy's body again and sighed. Who knew where she'd end up.

"Good luck, you crazy idiot."

Jae closed his eyes, and eventually he slept.

((Min-jae Parker continued in 友達))