#vii asks

Characteristics: ~He has no understanding of personal space. His idea of being near someone is standing directly behind them without making a sound. You would turn around and nearly walk into his chest constantly. ~His medical knowledge is real, though he occasionally says things that remind you how differently he sees the human body now. You have to ask him to stop identifying ways you could die. ~He may follow/stalk you without telling you. When confronted, he sees no reason to deny it. He understands attachment as attention. ~His responses depend entirely on what kind of mood you are in. If you are spiraling or anxious, he picks up on the sudden spike in your heart rate and breathing instantly. Because he doesn't know how to offer gentle, comforting words, his version of helping is brutally direct: he will either track down whatever is stressing you out and try to kill it, or he will simply stand around until you finally snap and vent at him. On the other hand, if you are feeling quiet and contemplative, he adapts to that too. You can sit in absolute silence with him for hours without any pressure to speak, or you can just talk at him—venting, rambling, or hashing out your thoughts while he sits motionless, listening to every word without interrupting. In the case your personality leans being more decisive, hotheaded, or stubbornly proactive, he is entirely content ceding everything and being in a passive role. You can drag him out, tell him what to do, or make every decision for the both of you, and he will go along with it without a single word of complaint (selfish plug because i personally enjoy irrationally angry x docile ej). He is also entirely comfortable holing up in a room with you for days if you’re feeling up to it. Whatever you want to do, he agrees to, provided you manage to keep a low enough profile that you don't accidentally draw the cops or the wrong kind of attention around. ~Being eyeless does not make Jack unaware of you. If anything, he notices far more than most people do. He knows when you are smiling because your voice changes slightly, but he cannot explain exactly how. He recognizes you by the rhythm of your footsteps before you enter a room, when you're approaching even in a crowded place, the way you breathe when you are tired, and the subtle changes in your heartbeat when something is wrong. ~Eventually, he begins associating those certain rhythms with specific emotions because he cannot always identify those emotions within himself anymore. Likewise, he initially assumes your heartbeat is a more reliable measure of emotion than your words; if you say you are fine while your pulse is racing, he believes your body instead. It takes him time to understand that people can be physically anxious without being afraid, or that excitement and fear can sound nearly identical. Even then, he becomes especially confused when your heart rate changes around him. He can tell that you are reacting to his presence, but he cannot immediately determine whether the reaction is fear, attraction, anticipation, or all three.   ~He also knows your scent well enough to tell when you have been somewhere unfamiliar. Smoke, rain, dust, another person's perfume, blood, unfamiliar detergent—he notices all of it. He's wired to it, and the longer he lingers in your space, the more intoxicated he becomes by it. Your skin, the fabric of your clothes, the subtle salt of your sweat...it all acts as a slow-acting fixative that drives him insane, a craving that intensifies tenfold when he's running on empty and hasn't eaten in days.

Sleep:  ~Unlike humans, he doesn't experience normal nightly rest. Most of the time, he just sits in the dark, motionless and awake, watching you and tracking the neighborhood sounds. But once every few days, his body undergoes a total systemic crash—a dead, terrifyingly deep sleep where his breathing stops or slows to an imperceptible crawl, leaving him entirely unresponsive. He cannot be woken from it. It is the only time he is truly defenseless, which is precisely why he prefers to slip back to your apartment to weather it, using your home as a place where he can drop his guard into that absolute, unawakenable slumber, trusting (in whatever twisted way he manages attachment) that you will still be there when he finally wakes up later.

Physicality: ~Jack is enormous. Not merely tall, but dense. His body is built (or molted) like something designed to overpower. Even when he is standing still, there is an uncomfortable sense that he could break you without much effort. He is conscious of the size difference; by contrast, he does not seem to understand that his size affects ordinary interactions. He will lean down until his face is directly in front of yours without realizing how intimidating it is. He also frequently forgets that you cannot simply reach things the way he can. ~His claws are not decorative. They are quite dangerous weapons, and he uses them efficiently. He keeps them clean because dried blood beneath them irritates him. Similarly, he is strangely meticulous about hygiene. Considering what he eats, you expect him to be filthy. Instead, he is almost obsessive about cleaning himself after feeding. The smell of blood bothers him once the hunger has passed.

Insecurity: ~Jack is unexpectedly self-conscious. He knows that people are afraid of him, and he expects disgust before anyone has a chance to express it. He is particularly aware of his appearance, although he would never openly admit it. If you stare at his face for too long, he becomes uncomfortable. Likewise, he goes still if you touch him first. Not that he dislikes it (he certainly likes it), but because he does not know what you are seeing. ~Compliments confuse him. It usually ends up going something like this: “You look nice.” “No.” “That…wasn’t a question? Hey, where are you going??” In truth, he doesn’t know how to respond to affection verbally, so he often just leaves. ~He is particularly uncomfortable with being seen while eating. It has never happened before and he intends to keep it that way. He doesn’t want you to see the parts of him that feel most obviously inhuman, and even if you reassure him that you are not afraid, he won’t believe you. After all, you would be lying; he has watched your body react to him too many times. And although he does not apologize for needing to eat, he may apologize for frightening you.

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hunting & feeding

~You reacted to his cannibalism like a normal person: with disgust, fear, anger, and the persistent question of whether associating with him makes you complicit. You do not find it quirky. The first time you see evidence of a feeding, you are sick afterward. You never get used to the smell, and you certainly never romanticize it. The copper tang of a fresh kill clings to him even after he washes, and the knowledge of what is under his fingernails turns your stomach. When he comes back from a hunt, there is just the horrifying, visceral reality of a serial killer returning to a safehouse, your house. You have screamed at him, thrown things at him, and spent entire nights dry-heaving in the bathroom, and he only watches your revulsion with a blank, heavy stare. He feels conflicted because hunger to him is mechanical, but he hates that it disgusts you, mostly because it reminds him of the gulf between what he is and what you need him to be. ~At least he isn’t constantly killing. At most, his hunger drives him out every other day during a bad stretch; at least, he can go a few weeks of relative quiet where he just sticks around. You know the cadence of it too well by now. You can track the shift in his posture days before he goes, the way his stillness becomes more rigid, the way he tracks you with a heavier, more intense focus. By then, you usually push him out to feed in case he decides to eat you. ~He knows you despise when he hunts. He knows the mere mention of what he does makes you sick, so he doesn't talk about it, and he actively tries to keep the aftermath away from your eyes. Purposefully, he times his absences around your vulnerability of sleep during the night, so that he can feed, clean himself meticulously, and slide back through your window just before you wake up at dawn. ~His interest in organs is not entirely hunger. There is also a clinical fascination behind it. He knows what they look like, how they function, and how quickly they fail. The kidney fixation is difficult to separate from the rest of him. He genuinely enjoys the taste, but he also fixates on their anatomy in detail. ~After one too many violent fights over his midnight hunts, you tried desperately to find a loophole. You started hauling home heavy butcher's paper wrapped in plastic from the supermarket: raw beef, bloody organ meats, anything with enough iron to satisfy the biological demand without him tearing someone apart in a back alley. It was a miserable experiment. He can technically sustain himself on animal protein, but to him, it tastes horribly distinct from his preferred palate. Through trial and error, you eventually mapped out the narrow overlap between what keeps him from going feral and what you can stomach feeding him. It's all itemized on a paper you stick to the fridge. ~He surprisingly doesn't mind raw fish, provided it has a very specific preparation: you have to sear only the outer layer over an open flame until it’s blackened and crisp, leaving the inside completely raw and cold. Standing in your kitchen at two in the morning, blowtorching the edges of a massive raw salmon fillet so a serial-killer urban legend can eat it off a paper plate, is a new low in domesticity you never anticipated. ~When he does tolerate other alternative foods, his preferences are deeply unsettling. He likes things intensely metallic or heavily salted, occasionally crunching down on raw ice cubes just for the jarring sensory distraction. He has zero appreciation for flavor profiles, but he is obsessed with temperature extremes, meaning either things that are ice-cold or scorched directly from the fire. You’ve occasionally caught him eating things that defy explanation, but you don't question it. Another weird sustenance, another safe human.

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First impressions:  ~When you first meet him, you do not know his face. You know the mask: the smooth blue surface, the black eyeholes, and the fact that he appears in places where there should be no one. For a while, you genuinely believe the mask is his face, and perhaps you would’ve preferred if that were the case. The first time you see him without it is not romantic. You walk in unexpectedly and catch him cleaning blood from his hands. His skin is ashen gray and uneven, stretched tightly in some places and peeling in others. The empty sockets are worse without the mask because there is nothing obscuring the fact that there should be eyes there. It was surely a…surreal experience. ~Your first impression otherwise was probably that he was stalking you, simply appearing nearby often with no explanation. You would notice him in places where no person should reasonably go, like crouched on a roof, sitting in a tree, or standing motionless, creepily, at the end of a hallway.

Names:  ~When he says your name, he almost always uses a shortened version or simply gets your attention physically. But he does like to say it at random times occasionally, particularly when he doesn't even want anything or if you aren’t even in danger; he just likes testing the sound of it in his throat, treating your name like a strange, foreign word he's trying to memorize so he doesn't forget it. ~On the other hand, he doesn't really consider himself "Jack" anymore, having long since detached from whatever humanity or identity that label belonged to, but he still answers to it out of sheer habit. Likewise, he doesn't care whether you say his name or not, and unlike the tropes on the internet, he thinks arguing over whether to call him "Jack" or "Eyeless Jack" is a completely pointless distinction. You could probably call him almost anything, and as long as you're intending it at him when you say it, he’ll react.

Fear: ~You never stopped being afraid of him, and he knows it. Even after all this time, the terror never entirely fades out of your system, and you live in a state of semi-vigilance, constantly bracing yourself because he is still too silent and unpredictable. When you get scared and shrink back, he notices every single reaction. He doesn't offer flowery reassurances, and he doesn't even try to soothe the panic. He knows it wouldn't make it better so he simply doesn't try at all. Maybe, eventually, you can learn how to live with it.

Conflicts: ~He understands your anger better than sadness. If you are angry, he stays nearby. If you are crying, then he becomes visibly uncertain. He learns that you sometimes need to be left alone, but he never goes far. Even when giving you space, he remains close enough to hear you. (He simply assumes that if you are his person, he should know where you are and whether you are safe) Some days it's endearing; on other days, it's simply aggravating. ~There is no emotional processing with him. If an argument gets too heated, or if you start screaming at him about his kills, the hypocrisy of his protection, or just the absolute horror, he doesn't shout back. A heavy, suffocating silence drops between you, and the next time you turn around, he is simply gone. He will vanish for days, sometimes a week, leaving you alone in the quiet house with your own nervous mind wondering if he left for good or if he’s just sitting on a dark roof somewhere letting your temper cool. ~He hates discussing his past, or really anything besides daily life and you. You likely won’t be able to pry anything out of him for a long time, and even then, you have to get the pieces from elsewhere. If you talk about any of it to him, he becomes instantly dangerous. The air goes dead. His jaw tightens, his claws instinctively flex against whatever surface is near, and the cold hatred bleeds into the room. ~His relationship with you would mainly be difficult partly because you know both versions of him exist. You know he can carefully stitch your wounds without causing unnecessary pain, but you also know those same hands have opened people apart. He does not know how to reconcile those things for you, so he generally does not try.

Affection:  ~Jack has to consciously remember that human bodies are fragile. His natural sense of pressure is completely overhauled. What feels like a light touch to him can leave a bruise, and you have to teach him through trial and error. ~He then becomes unusually attentive to injuries because pain is one of the few human experiences left he can understand in a direct way. He's careful around you in an awkward, overcorrecting way. At first, for example, after you complained that his grip hurt, he would hold your wrist with only two fingers or hover his hand near your back without actually touching you. After that, he became visibly careful around you, even if it was strange—after all, no one ever needed to be worried about hurting prey. ~Everything about whatever tangled dynamic existed between you was fundamentally abnormal, but he is naturally very physical. His version of spending time together is sitting nearby, no need for conversation or an activity; if you are in the same room, that is enough. His habits include resting his head against you, and because he is so large, this is often extremely inconvenient and not to mention, messy. ~Similarly, his first disastrous attempts at hugging are essentially restraining you. You have to explain that affection is not supposed to make breathing difficult, but he likes having you tucked against his side because he can keep track of where you are. ~He is constantly warm. Not necessarily in a comforting human way, but more like an animal with an unusually high body temperature. ~He would never say this, but he has a bizarrely heavy-handed fixation on size dynamics. He likes it when you have to physically climb over him or wedge yourself into his space just to get by, treating you almost like something small and warm in a comforting human way. He also likes to imagine that you're dependent on his restraint to stay alive because of some weird, fucked-up control fantasy in him wanting the stark contrast between his massive, slaughterhouse-built frame and your fragile humanity.  ~Beneath all of that, he does have a deeply physical, almost compulsive obsession with you that goes beyond just being in the same room. As mentioned earlier, he likes your natural scent, when you sweat, your bare skin against his ashen palms, the steady thrum of your heartbeat and the churn of your organs beneath your ribs, the texture of your flesh, all of it. If you get a small paper cut or a minor scrape, his attention instantly zeroes in on it with a strange laser-focused intensity; sometimes he might lean in and suck the drop away directly, entirely comforted by anything he can get his hands on, so long as he toes the line carefully enough to not make you too uncomfortable. ~The relationship is not soft, and there are too many arguments. He is protective in a way that can become invasive because his understanding of danger is much broader than yours. It borders on the territoriality of a predator securing a kill. He views you as his in the most literal unsettling sense, similar to how an apex predator regards the only thing in the wilderness it hasn't torn apart.

Domestic life: ~He doesn't knock, and he doesn't use the front door like a normal person. You might wake up at three in the morning to the heavy thud of a window sliding open or the floorboards groaning under a weight that shouldn't be inside your apartment. You’ve stopped locking the bedroom door at night because you know if he wants to get in, he will, and arguing about boundary lines with someone who can rip a deadbolt out of the frame is a waste of breath. ~Living with him means accepting a profound lack of normalcy. He doesn't contribute to rent, he doesn't eat human groceries, and his idea of "helping around the house" is physically removing things or people that irritate you or him. If you try to complain, he simply won't engage until you run out of breath. ~The surreal horror of your daily routine hits a peak whenever you turn on the evening news. While he sits across the room methodically cleaning his scalpels, the local anchor is talking about the ongoing panic over an organ-stealing serial killer operating in the suburbs, complete with descriptions of the blue-masked assailant and frantic warnings for residents to lock their doors. You look from the television screen to the towering, gray-skinned nightmare sitting in your living room, the blue mask laid off to the side. The whole situation always leaves you to deal with the constant grinding anxiety that his presence is going to bring the wrong kind of attention to your doorstep. You don't know whether you dislike it or enjoy it.

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extras

~On a more positive note, before you, his existence was an endless monotonous blur of survival, wandering, and the mechanical drive to feed. He didn't exactly keep his hobbies, schedules, or distractions, if there were any to begin with. After inserting himself into your life, however, he realizes how agonizingly dull eternity used to be. Suddenly, there are hours filled with strange, trivial human routines as he watches you pace around the apartment, dealing with your frustration, or simply sitting in the corner tracking your movements. It gives his endless time an entertainment he didn't know he was missing. ~He cannot see your expressions, so you eventually learn that facial reactions are useless unless you make a sound. You can roll your eyes directly at him, and he will not know, and you take advantage of this constantly. ~He never learned to read braille, and human text holds no visual appeal for him. Instead, he likes to sit completely still in the dark while you read out loud to him just to fill the dead air. He doesn't care about high literature, poetry, or whatever complex plot you're invested in; in fact, he finds most of it utterly baffling. He couldn't care less about art, music, or whatever ridiculous soap opera drama is playing on the screen, but he will listen if you’re the one speaking or if you liked something and wanted to discuss it with him. ~Because he explores places ordinary humans can't reach, he occasionally brings back weird trinkets from his excursions and leaves them on your kitchen counter without a word of explanation. A rusted brass gear from an old clocktower, a peculiar smooth stone from a riverbed, or a pristine vintage key he fished out of a storm drain. He never says why he picked them up or why he brought those particular things to you, but you try not to throw them away by accident.

ahh sorry for the delayed response! i truly just saw the message and am still trying to figure out tumblr again ^^;

thank you so much for the thoughtful comment! as a cat owner, i particularly enjoyed your analogy. as for the story, i invested a ridiculous amount of time putting together the premise, the characterizations, and all the little bits of lore, so it is gratifying to hear that those were some of the things that stood out to you. this is also the first time i have written something with a cast this large, so making everyone feel distinct and believable was probably what i worried about most. constructing the links/secrets etc was quite an undertaking, particularly given my lack of technical expertise, but it was rewarding to pull together, and i’m glad it’s interesting!

hearing that the realism holds up semi-well and that the original characters landed is awesome. of course, a high-stakes survival story inherently involves a degree of unreality and plot armor, but i try my best to keep it grounded. and introducing ocs into an established cast is always a bit of a gamble, so hearing that you have already adopted finn/kenj is both reassuring and slightly concerning for your future. rest assured… i hope.