#byte sized requests

It’s so *freeing* to just not give a fuck. 

To throw yourself into the pit and let go, propped up on writhing tentacles of flames. Power, far beyond even your cultivated badassery, overflowing, crackling out from the humblest of pinky fingers, dark lightning wrapping and warping around the hilt of your sword as it’s buried in the corpse of what was once your friend. The clock tolls Just as you pull the blade free, the red blood that once belonged to the maid of life dripping down the edge to makes careless splatters on the cell floor as you flick the edge to clean it.

"Dirk--That was--Jane--” 

You turn to your boyfriend in his ridiculously short tights and give him a blinding smile, lips pulled back to show off the bright fangs in your ashen face. 

“Jane wouldn’t have touched you.” 

You pluck the tiara from her head, and place it on your own.

I’m coming for you. You tell the presence on the other end.

It laughs at you.

You reach for the power you took from the gods. Took from and made it your own. The tiaratop sparks and bursts into black flames. Falling to pieces around you.

It’s too quiet.

Too quiet.

Too quiet.

You reach for your headphones. For the audio files sitting on your computer. For the tapes in their cases. And then...

You hesitate.

Instead your searching fingers curl around a can. One of your precious resources. Small legs and small hands carry that can up the stairs. To the roof. To the white feathered bodies and unseen eyes that instantly turn to you.

When the braver of the gulls get curious enough. When pale, scaled legs crabwalk along your outstretched arms. Beak digging curiously at the peeled back metal and the food (?) held within...

A squawk, and the rest descend upon you. 

It’s silent no more. Sometimes a digitized voice or sound isn’t enough. Sometimes, fulfilling a social need takes a small body out onto the roof, playing perch for the squabbling flock of hybridized alien birds that somehow survives out here in the middle of nowhere.

If you get an affectionate peck from one when you try to warble back...

You know what could have been. You play the tapes on loop. Filling the silence with words centuries old. Leaving them running in the other room while you read. While you build. While you curl up in a corner and not cry, because cool kids don’t cry.

Sometimes you feel a hand on your shoulder. Ruffling your hair. You would give anything for the whispered, “I love you, kiddo.” to be more than a ghost on the wind. 

You have to admit, you like Roxy’s planet better than your own.

Perhaps it’s the colors. The frantic collidescope against a black sky and the bright neon filled pyramids. It’s constantly moving. Shifting. Not so obvious a place where a civilization once lived and died waiting for their late Nobels. You look out over the caverns and broken pottery of your own and… it hurts.

It hurts to think that you left them waiting for so long.

It helps that Roxy herself never lets you frown for long, sharing an impish smile with Fefetasprite--the darling--and then dragging you off to see what the newest discovery lay at the other edge of the electrified neon rainbow. 

Puzzles and laughter drown out the breaking of bones as your weapon splinters a rattling turtle skell, it’s shell cracking to the floor. A whine hits your ears and you duck, the blast from Roxy’s portal esque rifle whizzes above you. You look up just in time to see the blue flash envelope the mob of creaking bones.

And they’re gone. 

You straighten.

“Where did you send them?”

Roxy twirls a strand of hair around her finger, humming contentedly with an expression that harkens back to the pink symbol stamped onto her shirt. “Thas a gud quessy. I dunno. Thot I’d try out th’ new randomized settin’. Culd be anywhere!”

“And if you’d hit me?”

“I wuld NEVER, and u know that.” She’s pouting at you. “‘sides, I knew u’d duck.”

You smile and pat her shoulder. “You’re right, as usual.”

Your back pops as you stretch, claws reaching and flexing and catching on the fibres of the carpet. You use the motion to follow the sunlight as it inches across the floor. The solar energy trapped in thick fur seeks to lull you back off to sleep with it’s all encompassing warmth. The soft, amused sigh has an eyelid partially peeling back, lazy sunset orange eye finding the sound.

You flick your tail in it’s direction.