More of the Same

Hi. Or something. Do you ever get the feeling you're talking to no one? I get that feeling all the time.

I keep its because I do that so often....

Where did we leave off? Hmm... Right. Just finished explaining how that piece of shit Duckie killed my brother.

I can look back at that now and appreciate that I went a little off the deep end. Lke, I don't know, maybe a in out. A foot tops! I'm not crazy and I'll fucking kill you if you try to prove otherwise, I swear to fucking god I'll snap your lying jaws off and cram them into your brain through your fucking ears.

... So I snapped the tiniest littlest bit. I abandoned my squad, my brother's sword in hand, and I started trying to track Duckie down so I could kill the ugly son of a bitch. That didn't work out so much at first.

Tracking people is hard. I ended up have to go through an information broker. An information broker that,in hindsight, sounded, looked, acted, and had the same eye and hair color as our new glorious leader, the infamous Lord Betrayer, Sloth.

Retrospection tells me that the only reason I was able to get at him was because Fracture was sending Sloth to sell me information to get at Duckie. We'll get more into that later.

I fought Duckie a couple of times after that. At the same time, my old squad was hunting me. Some of them wanted to bring me back. Some of them thought I was a rabid dog that needed to be put down. I could see why they might have thought, hurtful though it was. I they backed off after one of them nearly got their head crushed by one of my fire extinguisher traps.

For all of my efforts at that time, I discovered I had quite a knack for improved traps. It amazes me what I can do with a saw, a hammer, and fish line. I'm like proxy MacGyver sometimes, to reference something fewer and fewer people would understand and that I myself have never seen. One day, a MacGyver will refer to a great improvised craftsman and no one will know where the fuck that name came from anymore.

Rant aside, for all my success against my former life-mates, I found little success against Duckie. I always refused to use traps against him. I didn't just want to kill him. I wanted to be better than him. I wanted to destroy him. So I met him in an honorable way where I announced myself and came at him with my brother's sword, which I still found unwieldy at the time.

Duckie wouldn't just beat me through, he would beat the shit out of me. Later on he'd take a knife to me when I couldn't stand and he'd mark me.

And when he decided I wasn't improving, and those were his words, 'I can see this isn't going anywhere, you're just not improving. You're a disgrace to your brother's memory. At this point I'm doing him a favor,' he ran me through with my own sword, Trent's sword, and then had me slowly slide off of it... off the roof. To fall to my death.

They say your life flashes before your eyes when you're gonna die. Others say you find a moment of clarity to reflect on your life and ask your higher power of choice for forgiveness if you should find yourself worthy of such grace.

Only one thing came to mind as wind rushed faster and faster around me as I plummeted toward the ground. And I spoke it out loud. So overpowering was the sensation that I had to make it audible.

"Fuck!"

I would have died there if Fracture hadn't teleported in and plucked me from the sky into the compound, or as we apparently call it today, the Free Market. As a quick aside, the Free Market is a terrible name for an organization. Like, the worst name imaginable. Of all time. -938573 out of 10.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with everyone that they let that travesty happen.

</rant>

I don't know how long I was out after that. When I woke up Fracture gave me a whole speech about how my brother use to work for him and how he wanted me to work for him and how he'd make sure Duckie got what he had coming to him if I did.

Apparently this kind of recruitment was pretty common at the time. I get the sense I was supposed to be a patsy. If you ask any one from the years 2002 to 2012 that signed up with Fracture in that time frame, they'll tell you Fracture faked their death and stole them from the Bureaucracy. Something they typically agreed. I've certainly not met anyone that claimed to have refused his offer...

So naturally, I agreed. In hindsight, Duckie did get what was coming to him in a big way. Even if I couldn't appreciate it at the time... apparently. I've read I didn't but I was apparently a crazy bitch for the last 3 years or so, so who knows what I was thinking during that time frame.

I spent a lot of time locked in the compound. Fracture and Lord Fire refused to let me leave until I had actually learned to wield a sword. And after a good year of practiced dedicated training, I had. I even made friends like Ivan, Whisper, and Gravel Father rest his troubled soul. Occasionally I even found love, not that I'm willing to name any names here on that topic. And I got my self a pet Mask, useless though Moth usually is hes reliable.

Everything was... good, for a little while. And then Fracture took me out on a trip into the Path... and I whited out under... I remember screaming. It wasn't mine, but there was constant near endless screaming everywhere...

Huh. My bad eye started bleeding. Weird...

Back to the story, as I need to wrap it up before this post gets any longer. Like I said, I whited out. I woke up a few weeks ago with no memory of what happened for the last 3 years. Ivan refuses to see, talk to me, or ever talk over the phone. He seems terrified of me. Fracture and Whispers won't look me in the eye. Pained looks of shame and guilt take them and they make an effort to make our encounters brief. Gravel's long dead, he was apparently shot down by a group of fellow runners working under someone called 'Moriarty' for the grave unforgivable crime of sympathizing with proxies. Glad to see the runner ranks are still flush with filth.

Just me and Moth... and my new pet Navi.

I keep trying to explain to my old friends that that wasn't me... that I'm me again and things are different now but...

It just feels like I'm talking to no one... because they aren't listening.

PaKaSo out.