#p-gio

ཐི༏ཋྀ󠀮 ཐི༏ཋྀ󠀮

When first he smiled beyond a customary pleasantry, the concern which had sparked by the touch of his hand pushed to be taken more seriously. A smile that to most was like any other, and wouldn’t have been extraordinary to you either when your new life in the city of Krat began.

However, after you’d spent time with him, befriended him and discovered who Pinocchio was as a man underneath the violent machine his father had built him to be, the affection he’d shown with that smile swept your insides into a whirlwind of distress.

The sheer softness of the expression while directed at you alone hit harder than it had a right to, and in a swift and unexpected manner that couldn’t be recovered from, like walking face first into a live wire.

Splatters of human blood and smudged machine oil that mixed amongst his freckles should’ve sullied it, instead you found they framed his sweet blue eyes in an endearingly honest way. Because Pinocchio is violent, a dangerous weapon, the mayhem of the world he’d awoken to demanded nothing less of him.

But there lived a kindliness in him despite it, and that as well he wielded with a frightful strength. You suspect that was how, although armed with such a gentle, angelic thing, he had left your heart so gravely wounded.

// If dangerous, why pretty?

I spent 84 years on this edit. Tried to smudge out the bigger blood spots to look like remnants of machine oil instead because P kills both people and puppets in the game, but maybe I should've left them darker. I'm just going to assume that he tried to wipe some of it off before seeing you.

ཐི༏ཋྀ󠀮 ཐི༏ཋྀ󠀮 ཐི༏ཋྀ󠀮

The first time you grieved in his absence you realized the impossibility of hiding from these strange feelings, steadily growing like a patch of indomitable weeds. So frequent it was to expect Pinocchio gone for hours on end, working tirelessly toward freeing Krat from its plague of ravenous beasts like you should be doing as well.

Alas no matter the method to shut it out for the sake of productivity or, hell…sanity, a disheartening truth rubbed your nose into the failures to ignore it: focus on anything aside from Geppetto’s puppet was dead. The efforts to shoo every trace of him from your skull had been notable, and in fact deserved recognition for their existence at all, though still at ten times their size they’d never pose a fair match.

The same as if you were to be made his opponent in a duel, he was far stronger, and he won before you could blink. His silver blue eyes and peppered skin stubbornly refusing to leave you, which posed an immense detriment to the tasks lined out on a list at your desk. The lonely inkpen waiting atop the page to checkmark completed tasks had went untouched since the early hours of the morning.

Often you worried Geppetto might admonish you about your inadequacy unknowingly by the fault of his own charming creation, though even that had a shocking powerlessness to shove Pinocchio to the back of your mind long enough to make use of yourself. By the approach of sundown that usually preceded his return you were almost pulling your hair in frustration, impatient to see if he appeared a fraction as frazzled.

You’d wasted an entire day coming apart at the seams, and all the while you couldn’t help but wonder if, or rather cruelly wish, he were as mercilessly tormented by thoughts of you.

// He is, just fyi. May have even gotten him injured during a battle that he should’ve been paying more attention to, but his focus was lured to you instead. I have one more that I will post after this and then I’ll continue on the haunting fic. And if you couldn’t tell, I’m a sucker for writing characters who fall in love and their reaction is “Oh my god this is awful”