Bleed

[Ragunn]

Obstinately, he had stopped taking the morphine and relished the pain. It was as he had said -- he had a rather interesting reaction to it, first noted by the medics back on Wolcott. Cordell Kirklin had managed to surprise the doctor and medic in the first aid tent by simply saying: "That stuff kept me awake and fighting for three days." Both medic and doctor had looked at each other. Morphine usually made people sleepy after all.

That was not he only reason. He relished the pain in his chest, although by now he was finding (much to his disappointment) that the physical pain was abating, yet even so he wished it to be almost unbearable. In his black mood, he sat outside in the warming shine of the suns and found that that missing third sun that still gravitated around his heart caused him agony that should have been over-ridden by physical pain. The irony of having two kinds of heartache had at least kept him amused. But now there was almost nothing but the mental pain, caused by many things, regrets and losses and the general feeling of inexorable fate having dug a well in which he sat, stubbornly attempting to stayed and paddled water.

Having finished yet another crane, he placed it on top of the mountain of cranes, lotuses, bulls, tigers and other origami and settled down, adjusting the cloak around him and eyeing half-heartedly the now cold food, the grease on which was coagulating. Coagulating like blood. Short and tough as he had always been and with a need to always keep up with his muscles by consuming enough calories, Cordell now found that even the very idea didn't appeal to him any more. Eating. He'd done plenty of that, oh, certainly.

But now it seemed to him that much of his energy was focused on treading water, watching the water slowly flow into the well so that he could once again climb up from the hell that was a dark place that echoed with each sound from above and within and from below. It did not help that he had not smoked a cigarette for a few days now. It did not help that somewhere in the damp and the moist, when the sky above the well was not lit by any natural light but that of the moons, he wondered.

Cordell took a deep breath and finally scavenged a cold, far too cold piece of fish off the plate and began to eat it, tasting dirt instead of ocean or lake. It went down, but it did not give him any satisfaction. The light was dimming again, and with it came the echoes -- the sound of gunfire, screams, the whistling of artillery shells, the rumbling of tanks. There was nobody to talk to, and even his damned heart wasn't aching physically to give him something else to be worried about. The sacrosanct feelings he had did not help either, but in another way there was a hint of ironic humour that he could draw upon.

What would the rest of Assembly think if he said he did not, had not in the least, blamed Jen for that Phillips affair? Watching quietly at the mountain of napkins, receipts and other assorted papers turned into a mountain of origami, he took a sip of water and then scratched at his beard.

They would be stunned at least, he figured. But what they did not figure was that they did not know Jennie as well, necessarily. She'd been inside his mind, true, but Cordell had always sensed people's emotions and been able to play the game -- just not entirely understand what his role in it was. He could function, but in his mind he was still the tree that watched people, the tree upon which a bird could perch and around which people moved in their own happiness, sadness, fear, hate and confusion, sometimes stopping to have a few moments on the swing that hung from a branch. Few noticed how the smaller branches hesitantly tried to touch them, the leaves appearing as though they only moved in the wind.

Yes. They would be stunned. But he was rooted to his spot, feeling homeless and sad for the lack of kinsmen other than these that he had now. It was not all bad, but he weathered the seasons just as stubbornly as he was, in his mind, treading water in the well. The fact that the well was also the source of the tree's water was a fact Cordell intended to keep to himself for now, considering then the matter of Phillips. Jennie never did anything without a reason (emotions counted, especially when she got riled up enough), and... the blame on him. Inexorable fate. Causality. Just one question and another and none of this mess would be tainting the house of Assembly, the lawn of which the tree with the swing and the well that whispered remained.

Finally, the wanderer looks up, listening in the well and being the tree at the same time. Yes. Her suggestion had been correct.

It was time to find help.

Another artillery strike echoes in the well.

[Ragunn]

He opened his eyes. Cord was frankly amazed. He had paid a small fortune, but even so he was amazed when he opened his eyes and felt... whole, in a sense. They'd said thirty minutes. The'd done it under the time. And now, awake and taking his first few breaths with a new heart and a fresh lease on life...

He felt it. The power of being without a pacemaker. Certainly, the good doctors had said that might happen, but the difference was that of night and day. They sure as hell had not been kidding when they'd said that once the heart, implanted and stuck in, would change things. No. Cordell was starting to feel like himself again, the Cordell of years past -- not waking up with foam covering his mouth, not needing to crawl his way to the bathroom. Not needing... anything, really.

The doctors had asked him to strip, and being a soldier, he'd not not thought twice of the request. And then they'd knocked him out with something that disabled not only his mind but the nanobots coursing through his veins. He had been, effectively, disabled as a whole. The blindness that he was uncertain of, the one he thought would be the last of anything he saw of anything after those heartfelt kisses and shows of affection with Jennie...

...they came back.

He sat up, head aching, doctors looking at him. The monitors beeping. He felt his chest. Found some blood, but... no ache. No ache anymore. No shortness of breath. It was just as promised, and more than that. Had they...? "...I feel mint."

"You should. It's a fresh heart," said doctor number one.

Two said: "Exercise."

"Does sex count?" Cordell asked, eliciting laughter even when he'd been serious.

Three said: "It just might. How do you feel?"

"Ready to blow shit up, like you told me." Cord was looking at Doctor Two. She just laughed.

"Well, then you can!" Three replied.

Cord was silent a moment, considering the room.

"Questions, sir?"

"Yeah. Where the fuck did I leave my axes?"

[Ragunn]

Even his dreams had changed. A little, but no longer did he dream of being a tree that was rotting on the inside. The leaves still remained in autumn colours -- that had never changed -- and the well was taking in water closer to the surface where his other self remained. He was considering this as he smoked a cigarette and sat on a corpse, surrounded by several other corpses. One of them was still moaning. Cordell paid no attention; with an axe stuck in the woman's ribcage like that, it was unlikely she'd get up. Rather uncharitably he wondered if the approaching sandstorm would make things even more difficult for the woman, where as he was comfortably sat on a beheaded atrox, already adjusting his cloak and hood, examining the smoke that permeated the air within the hood.

Yes... there was that other thing about the dreams, too. He'd begun to speak to people in them as he wandered through landscapes unknown, seeing reflections of the past once more. He didn't mind that the least for much of the time -- expect for when his mind began to hover around one battle or another. Like the one in Flag Hill. He closed his eyes and sheltered as the sand began to blow viciously around him. As he'd expected, the moaning turned into a couple of screams that were quickly extinguished by the fact that sand entered her mouth and nostril and the gaping wound -- and then they were over.

Cordell sat there on the corpse, listening to the pitter patter of sand against his hood, within which the circuitry hummed. The cigarette was wrested from his hand, but that did not bother him. What bothered him was that he was sinking in the well even though he was sitting in the middle of a desert. It would have been funny if the feeling of sinking and drowning didn't preoccupy his mind, and how Flag Hill happened all over again.

An echo came, thrumming in the water...

--

"Sarge!" were the first words he heard after surfacing from the water, lungs aching with shockwave and water that he began to retch the moment he found solid ground, looking over at the soldier after he was done. His nose was bleeding, his rifle was bent and the only reason -- he knew -- he was alive because the goddamn tank next to him had taken the force of the explosion on the bridge. Even that hadn't been enough. He felt pain, but was a live, having been knocked off the bridge and into a fucking rock under the water. His shoulder blade ached viciously.

"Aye, Hull?" he asked, listening to the chatter of his platoon (they'd finally found some shavetail lieutenant to run the company, which both pleased and displeased him) nearby, trying to get out of the river and up, up toward his guys, who were doing their best to make the orderly retreat.

But those were the last words he'd ever say to Hull, a tough PFC with whom he'd snuck around enemy lines often. Hull disintegrated before he could even answer. Disintegrated was a fair way of putting it when an enemy tank fires off a canister shot that turns the main weapon into God's own little shotgun. Cordell paled as he was covered with a spray of blood not just out of Hull, but the rest of the guys. Something clanged against his breastplate, and it wasn't until later that he realised what it was.

"Anyone alive up there, jump in the fucking river! We'll float the hell out of here! The fuckers can't swivel the turrets down, but their infantry's going to fuck you up either way!" he yelled, then settled back into the water, hood and cloak (they had teased him about them and much of his gear... but not for long) wrapped around tight, wet and heavy. But then again, so was much of him. After hearing two splashes, he sank a little and began to swim downstream, knowing fully well that even in that direction there might be enemies... but he could circumvent. They could.

Only one of the others made it with him, and he sank under the current more often than he liked himself.

After a harrowing ten minutes, First Sergeant Kirklin swallowed and retched water, sometimes nearly losing his consciousness. It took the other survivor, Stockton, to drag him to solid ground, where he slumped.

"Don't really want to drink water anymore," he remarked to the soldier.

Not in any better shape himself, Stockton, a big burly man with red hair and a genuinely murderous mind mixed with an innocent face began to laugh -- and then stopped.

Frowning, Cordell followed his gaze. "What?" he asked hoarsely, knowing the man usually had a sharp sense of humour, but this time even that sadistic bastard as he lovingly called Stockton was looking a little green.

Embedded there in his armour was half of a lower jaw.

He pulled it out, noting the one golden tooth Hull had always been so proud of.

--

The sand storm abated. With it, he rose back to the surface and went to retrieve his axe. The only thing he could do was turn around from the carnage and walk away. He didn't for a while, looking at the violence he'd committed with mixed feelings. If they were feelings. How did one know? Was there a trick to it?

Was there a trick to being normal?

Shaking his head, he finally walked away, wondering how, years past, he had wondered the very same things...

The sand beckoned.

[Ragunn]

"I heard stories about this place. Used to be some small time clan on these grounds," Harrison said to the other, watching over the land next to the Omni compound in Stret West.

"Why didn't we ever go and shoot them up then?" asked Morris, staring at the water on the beach. They had been sitting there for quite sometime, to eat their lunches.

"We didn't have to. They'd come to us, scuttlebutt says," Harrison replied, chewing on a sandwich he suspected his wife had packed with far more lettuce and tomato than bacon.

"Huh?"

"Yeah. Just for the hell of it, one of the guys from years back said. Of course, they did keep the aliens away pretty handily. As did the other clan nearby, but heh."

"Yeah. Heh."

Neither of them was aware that behind them sat something sleek, powerful and feral.

"Seen pictures of it," Harrison continued. "We kept tabs on them, though we never did get anything useful out of it."

"Huh." Morris bit into his own sandwich, one bought from the cafeteria in the base. Even visually it didn't match what Harrison was having, but it certainly had a lot more meat in it.

"Yeah, well, their loss, our gain."

The shadow padded over silently.

"When will those mooks even get the idea that they're losing?" Morris asked.

"Right now they're not, but I guess soon. Bastards."

Morris eyed his sandwich again, tasting all the additional chemicals that went into making a chicken sandwich... taste like a chicken sandwich. He tossed the wrapper on the ground and sipped his Smudge Cola.

"Piss on them then."

That was the moment when they heard a slight sound from behind them. Seated as closely as they were, they both turned to look at a pair of heads and four eyes. The wolf grinned with both mouths.

"Oh s--"

"Oh f--"

Neither of them could ever even finish the sentence before finding themselves in reclaim, the wolf having used both heads to crack their skulls... simultaneously. Later, they nursed their reclaim hangover by being berated by a disgusted superior, who predictably chastised them for not being vigilant enough.

The wolf, however, still sat at the water in human form now, chewing on what was left of Harrison's (admittedly slightly sandy) sandwich and collecting the discarded sandwich wrapper and other trash in a plastic bag. Then he lit a cigarette and walked away, shaking his head.

Teaching people manners wasn't so hard after all.

[Kotts]

((Where is the 'like' button? ))

[Ragunn]

[Back on Youtube where I have a million followers. <3]

[Ragunn]

He awoke in the middle of the night from another nightmare, suddenly finding the faint darkness different than usual. There was a different feel to it, not the usual one when Jennie lay next to him. Slowly, slowly, he sat up and realised what was making all the difference. There was no emotional weight on his shoulders. Some, yes, but... one thing had changed. One tiny, tiny thing that was major at the same time.

Love and affection he understood, awkwardly but knowing of it. Always had, actually, even for his family, even his team mates in the Corps, but this different kind? This had taken a while to wrap his mind around -- and then? She'd broken into his mind with the information of this other kind the first time he saw her, but worrying about that love had always been a heavy weight, an anvil, nearly all of it. The amount of trust they'd... well, the amount of trust they'd had for each other from the first moment had been staggeringly strong. It had confused him at first, and with no psychologist to tell him what the feeling was, he'd figured it out slowly and meekly.

That drunken binge a year later... that had sealed it. He'd understood a proper emotion aside from his detached hatred and... then found not envy nor jealousy, but worry for the emotion itself. Sadness, loneliness and stoicism shielded by a gruff exterior had always been his shield, but she'd nearly broken it in half the moment they met -- that the blade took a year or two to finally crack the well-polished metal of the shield was just something.

As he thought on that, Cordell kept sitting up, trying to fathom exactly what had happened. It was still too unreal. In that barely lit apartment, he stared at Jennie and the room, finding the faint sounds of her breath echoing. It was not one of those times when he thought he heard voices. Now it was... he supposed there was a psychological term for it. Hypersensitive as he was to everything due to his conditions, Cordell now found himself suddenly in a vacuum. There was nothing to hear. Strangely, he felt safe, floating in a strange microcosmos of bewilderment.

Blinking a few times he snuck out of bed, then settled into the cloak he'd been so used to using as a blanket (at least he'd used a proper blanket this night) and sat leaning his back against the wall. For a moment he was tempted to light a cigarette, but decided against it, then returned to his jumbled but strong thoughts and feelings. Thus, Cordell remained still, watching her on the bed, trying to get one good look at something.

He was rewarded when she turned on the bed and half-tossed her blanket away. There. There it was, in the half-darkness.

The ring.

His shoulders felt relaxed, his chest light.

[Ragunn]

The swamp was silent in its own way. The birds chittered, the bugs had their own sounds, and the wolves were out there silent, watching and smelling. There was a scent that did not belong, full with pheromones and a smell they mostly associated with gunfire. They had learned to watch and listen and prowl, and thus when the alpha suddenly stopped near a tree that had been felled due to its own aging process, he realised something was wrong. There was a smell of something that the hunters and outdoorsmen sometimes carried with them. Persistent and potent. Scarcely noticeable to the human nose, but to a wolf, very much like a telltale sign to move on.

High up in the tree next to the one that had fallen over out of its own accord, Cordell watched the pack move away carefully and nodded with respect. They'd smelled him. The omega of the pack had even looked up, following in the pack's trail with none of the others any wiser. For him, the humid afternoon in Wine was just one of the many moments when he remained still and silent, watching nature take its course. Even the occasional reet did not bother him very much as he perched on the tree overlooking a pond which he still smelled of.

Perplexing, how everything natural knew there was something more dangerous than them there, he thought, lighting another cigarette, keeping watch of the area he considered his demesne, thinking in silence.

It had been a good last night. Oh, Vis might have been confusing, but he didn't mind that. He was a creature of habits himself, and if Vis had his own habits, then so be it. Cordell may not have understood it, but it had still been nice to see the pale man again, riding into town with remorse. But of course...

There had been Luci. No joke about that. He had touched her, and found her the same old Luci. Condescending in her own way toward Solituses, warm and happy and that of jumbled speech. His Luci. Jennie was the love of his life, but that confounding nanomage was the closest he'd ever come to think of someone between the love for a unit or place and friends, ranking somewhere between love of and friendship. A sibling, in a way.

Cordell adjusted his hood and position on the branch, watching and listening, mostly left undisturbed by the insects in the hot sunlight underneath the foliage, smoking and sipping water. No, sibling wasn't a good word. It was something far more esoteric. Not romantic love. Platonic, perhaps? No. Not even that. He thought on that, examining the moss on the branch (he'd nearly fallen off once) as if it could spare the answers. Perhaps...

Hm, yes. Perhaps. He adjusted his cloak then instead of his hood, thinking in what went for silence in his mind. No people bothering him. No wondering whether or not the person talking to him was real. No thinking as to what their motives were. Cordell remained there, thinking a little while before the tranquillity provided the answer. Luci was too real. She had always been so real, what with her personal reality distortion field. Even in this silence, he could have remained quiet and she talked, but he'd always known her to be real and to understand his silences. Oh, it was not to say Jennie wasn't real. Or the Clays. Or Isha. He knew they were real because they communicated with each other.

Luci simply was. She was not the scary thing like that doctor, who seemed ephemeral, nor those threats around him. He could remember times when the nanomage had simple walked into a room, and he'd been at ease, not wound up but relaxed.

Tere, in the forest, on a branch, Cordell smiled sadly. The chance of her returning to her sleep and rest was still there, but at least his new heart still beat for her the same way as always. A person he never had to explain his thoughts to had come and gone like the whirlwind that her mind was. She'd seen him bruised, scarred and momentarily happy for his lot in the cosmos. That was something to relish, at least?

He did so, lowering the hood and napping on the branch, only to wake up an hour later to thunder and lightning. Only then did Cordell climb down carefully and begin his trek to follow the pack of wolves, who -- when he found them -- were as unmindful of the torrent of rain as he was.

[Ragunn]

"I don't like this," said the first trooper to the tracker, who was having the same thoughts. The tracks had ended. Just a day earlier, they had been attacked on a routine training camp-out by what had seemed to been a wolf. Wine and the swamps were, however, persistently unforgiving. Their allotted task was to find that particular wolf as punishment now, and it had gone swimmingly (at point literally). The three-man patrol had lost the track at a river bend, however, and by now they had been accosted by a reet and other fauna.

Murchinson was especially worried about the leet that had suddenly ran at them, bitten him in the shin and made them fire after it only to realise they were beset by snakes that had been running after the leet. And those snakes had been huge, to the point of actually swallowing one of their patrol. They'd patiently waited for Ennis to come back from reclaim, and upon arrival the man was horrified by the corpse of that giant swamp snake -- not because it was dead, but because he saw his previous body in the burst open stomach of the thing.

They had then decided to camp out as dark fell underneath a tree, lighting up a campfire and huddling in their survival gear.

"Guys..."

Ennis sighed at Greene. "Yeah? What is it this time?"

"Perimeter check. Think I heard something."

"You go do it, then. We haven't seen any tracks for a couple of clicks," Ennis grumbled, still peeved as he ate beans straight from the can. Although... he did have to admit, the journey so far had been more than odd. Leets, reets, wolves attacking them and tracks ending nowhere. As the tracker, Ennis was puzzled -- but more than that, worried. He had a little pet theory about what was plaguing them. Murchinson seemed the calmest of the lot, playing his mitaar and treating this as a grand adventure. Even with the leet episode.

Greene, he was worried. This didn't make any sense, and thus he looked around in the dark underneath the foliage with night vision goggles, then thermals. Nothing at all aside from a lot of bugs and a damned bad place that promised that he'd have a yeast infection sooner or later. Or athlete's foot. Then again, hah, nanobots. He kept checking the perimeter for a while, even as the other two were stopping to have a quiet chat about their trainer and his hare-brained training methods. Eventually, Greene just stopped to have a smoke and a drink, careful of any snakes.

When he returned to camp, he was ready to quip about a few things. The guys had been awfully quiet. Suspecting that was them either trying to scare him or a reason for him to poke fun at their own scaredy-cat routine, he stepped through the ferns.

The quips fell short when he saw both Ennis and Murchinson lie on the ground. They were dead. Somewhere in the forest, a reet was asking for someone's sword and a cat growled. "Guys? Guys?" Greene rushed over, only to find no pulse and a hint of after-reclaim static on his comms. It made no sense. What did they mean by "branches... not what they seem?" Looking at the two dead bodies, Greene wondered even farther, shakily listening to the spooky sounds of the night as he crawled backward to lean against the tree, shivering. He should have listened to his father and become a paperpusher.

The tree creaked a little, adding to the general hysteria he felt. For what felt like hours, he held onto his weapon before finally finding the staccato of different sounds in the swamp much too scary. And the reception on his comms was horrible. Horrible. He stood up, looking around and finding... nothing but two dead bodies, a fire and a mitaar that had been broken into half.

Finally, Greene lost it. "Goddammit! I know you're there! You... ghost wolf!" Another creaking sound from the tree made him turn over to aim upward into the tree.

The tree had a face. "Ghost tree," it said with an ancient voice and smashed a branch against his face so hard, his nose ended up inside his brain casing. The very next day, he opted to become a clerk.

[Ragunn]

[I suddenly got it in my head to write about Cord's inner world in first person.]

Doesn't seem like a threat, might be, hope he's not coming over to talk to me and swagger with that gun... she's egging me on. Five blocks, she followed me before accosting someone with a whole arsenal on his person.

Kodaik backfired. It's fine. It's fine. Too much chatter. Moving over to the other side of the bridge. Good tree there. Nice shade at around this time of day, and only lovers go there to get a bit of privacy. Maybe families. Mostly not -- hard place to escape from if there's another invader attack.

Taken. Other way around then -- oh, wait. Rain. Good, silence. Can rest on the tree. They're running away anyway.

Too much glare from the Kodaiks. Why can't they just accept rain as it is. Typical. Fine. Wine it is. Quick. Too many people chattering and moaning about the rain anyway, probably the same at the whompa.

Was right, wasn't I. Get it together, people. Stop shouting.

Belial. Good. This is -- the fuck was that? Another bunch of assholes at the domes? Real or not? Shit. That's it. Can't nap. Nicotine. Tir.

This too? Goddamnit. 'Vanda.

Nice. Least she's quiet and predictable. Going to stab that other guy if he doesn't stop bending over the counter with his ass up, talking to 'Vanda. Never mind. 'Vanda stabbed him with a fork. Good girl. Can't tell if that other person in the bar is real. Is. 'Vanda served him. Calm down.

Tiger, crane or lotus? Lotus. Tree's empty and only 'Vanda's wandering around it.

New guy? Real. Also, the fucking fact that you're on the run from something and just want to get drunk doesn't concern me. Divorce? Probably in the works. Considering he's getting drunk and is pale... hm. Wife's left him. Suave suit, expensive cuff links -- works too hard. Wife's left him then for his absences or his mistresses.

Eh, whatever.