Dirk Strider (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
string_instrument) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thenashira2025-11-18 09:44 pm
string_instrument) wrote in thenashira2025-11-18 09:44 pm
All Night, Me And My Wretched Device
Who: Nova Pastos, Lil Cal, the Abyss, and-- (you!)
What: Catch-all for Nova Pastos' time in the Abyss
When: 7/31 and on until they're saved
Where: The. Uh. The Abyss.
Warnings: Suicidal ideation, derealisation and depersonalisation, break with reality, child neglect, more to be added as things are written
Like failure itself, the Abyss knocks the wind from him.
Not physically, and not like a punch, but mentally and like the hard, bone-shattering impact with the water's surface tension. It cracks across his psyche just like that, splintering across the sheer plane of his mind. It wants him to break first, of that he's sure, but he doesn't.
The pain, however, wraps around his brain the same way his body was engulfed by ocean--in that dream.
But this is not the Abyss of his ocean. In some ways, it's similar. Endless, with an infinite depth and a vastness of existence that renders any single living object irrelevant. But it still has solid ground, and gravity, and air to breathe. The terrain varies from lifeless sand to gritty soil, peppered with inert rock. It's like the earthy quasi-beach before one reaches the ocean shore, but without ever seeing the sea at all.
There is no ocean.
The dark sky yawns hollow above him, void of sun or moon or stars.
This is also reminiscent of the ocean, but without the pressure, the movement, or the power. It's thin and strange and empty. There is an absence, a death of substance, that he feels every time he breathes in, filling his lungs with nothing and leaving him aching for purchase, for presence, for reality--for any sense of realness at all. It is as though reality itself has disincorporated him, and it...
It is horribly familiar.
It feels like home. Like his penthouse suite, its rooftop 168 metres in the air, a perfectly isolated habitat soaring above the Chalra skyline and filled with a restless accumulation of stuff. Computers, horse statues, movie posters, horse prints, puppets, furniture, weaponry, mechanical dreams, workout equipment.
But it never felt any less empty.
Now, in this uncanny echo of that infinity of loneliness, that lonely infinitude--the reality he holds in his mind gives way to the tangible waste of his existence. It seeps into him through the cracks of his broken heart--the soup can, rent asunder into mere atoms, compressed and devoured by the sea. A discaded husk whose failure was inevitable. And that was okay. It was always meant to be.
But not like this. Not like this. There is nowhere for him to go, nothing for his essential nature to become.
This is not his ocean.
There is no ocean.
This is just stone, and grit, and Nova Pastos, and Lil Cal.
And--
What: Catch-all for Nova Pastos' time in the Abyss
When: 7/31 and on until they're saved
Where: The. Uh. The Abyss.
Warnings: Suicidal ideation, derealisation and depersonalisation, break with reality, child neglect, more to be added as things are written
Like failure itself, the Abyss knocks the wind from him.
Not physically, and not like a punch, but mentally and like the hard, bone-shattering impact with the water's surface tension. It cracks across his psyche just like that, splintering across the sheer plane of his mind. It wants him to break first, of that he's sure, but he doesn't.
The pain, however, wraps around his brain the same way his body was engulfed by ocean--in that dream.
But this is not the Abyss of his ocean. In some ways, it's similar. Endless, with an infinite depth and a vastness of existence that renders any single living object irrelevant. But it still has solid ground, and gravity, and air to breathe. The terrain varies from lifeless sand to gritty soil, peppered with inert rock. It's like the earthy quasi-beach before one reaches the ocean shore, but without ever seeing the sea at all.
There is no ocean.
The dark sky yawns hollow above him, void of sun or moon or stars.
This is also reminiscent of the ocean, but without the pressure, the movement, or the power. It's thin and strange and empty. There is an absence, a death of substance, that he feels every time he breathes in, filling his lungs with nothing and leaving him aching for purchase, for presence, for reality--for any sense of realness at all. It is as though reality itself has disincorporated him, and it...
It is horribly familiar.
It feels like home. Like his penthouse suite, its rooftop 168 metres in the air, a perfectly isolated habitat soaring above the Chalra skyline and filled with a restless accumulation of stuff. Computers, horse statues, movie posters, horse prints, puppets, furniture, weaponry, mechanical dreams, workout equipment.
But it never felt any less empty.
Now, in this uncanny echo of that infinity of loneliness, that lonely infinitude--the reality he holds in his mind gives way to the tangible waste of his existence. It seeps into him through the cracks of his broken heart--the soup can, rent asunder into mere atoms, compressed and devoured by the sea. A discaded husk whose failure was inevitable. And that was okay. It was always meant to be.
But not like this. Not like this. There is nowhere for him to go, nothing for his essential nature to become.
This is not his ocean.
There is no ocean.
This is just stone, and grit, and Nova Pastos, and Lil Cal.
And--
no subject
Every frustrated, sleepless minute of the Abyss' desolate prison has been eroding his tolerance--for his actions, for his thoughts, for himself--like wind erodes a canyon. And the chasm in Pastos already ran deep.
Left to his own devices with nothing to do except think, and walk, and think, and pace, and think, and try to wear out his body with every exercise he knows to no avail, and think some more--having something for the relentless storm of his own brain to break against is not only just and deserved, it's almost a relief.
Finally, something in him seems to say. I don't have to do it all myself.
Paradoxically, Pandora stops borrowing his voice; they speak to him, and look at him, like a real person. Like the person they supposedly 'are.' Is that a trick, or is it for real? He doesn't get to follow that train of thought anywhere, because their next words are an ice bath.
It's okay. We all forgive you.
Their tone is vaguely comprehensible, but the words don't really register as having meaning.
He's silent. Still.
They breathe, and then they speak.
He remains silent.
His face is once more a stony, callous mask, so rigidly inexpressive as to simply be a void of emotional information--other than, perhaps, the unmistakeable intensity he can never truly hide. To look at it is to see in him the place where human communication--human connection--goes to die.
When they move, he doesn't. When they start to reach for him, he doesn't move to recoil, or to knock their hand away, or anything else--but their words have started to come together in a meaningful way inside his brain. Dsbelief is giving way to comprehension and insult and desperation and rage, and while he doesn't make any move at all to avert the contact that never come, he stiffens noticeably.
But they don't touch him. Maybe, on some level, they could tell it would be too much. Too far.
(But if so, why didn't they? Is this not a punishment? What better way to hurt him than to go too far?)
He manages, at least, to hold it in long enough for 'Pandora' to finish what they're saying, but by that point, the sour bile in his gut has risen to fill his mouth, nausea and fury and despairing incredulity swirling inside the shell of his flesh like the sea-spiralling breath of Charybis.
"Is that the best you've got?" He says, sounding flat and calm in the way of a machine and not a man. "Because I'm not buying it. I mean. Holy shit. We?" he echoes. "Who is 'we?' The Nova Knights? Does that include Nautis? Or are you speaking for the whole world? Every last human being on the planet, forgiving me? Not even I'm arrogant enough to claim to speak for everyone, and that's saying something--"
A bit of dryness creeps into his voice, which is really bitterness wearing the veneer of civility.
"But let's have it your way. If it's not my fault, then it's nobody's fault, and nothing that happened was ever under anyone's control and no one is at fault for anything because we're all simply subject to the whims of an irrelevant universe in which nothing we do matters, and we all know that's bullshit. Or is that the trick--maybe I should just lie down and wait for the next uncontrollable happenstance to come along and do all the work for me, and I won't have to worry about the consequences of anything I do or don't do, I don't have to feel anything at all because none of it matters and that's one less Nova Knight for the Abyss to worry about."
He angles his head, the corner of his mouth tugging in an uncertain direction--perhaps it's just a little extra tension in his jaw, or maybe he's about to smirk, or scowl, or sneer, but whatever it is, it doesn't actually happen. He feels like he's moving too fast in time--not that he's moving much at all, physically, but as though his thoughts, his words, his existence is all accelerated in a way that's incompatible with the near-standstill of temporal reality's moment-to-moment sluggish progression. The agitation he feels is trapped internally, and he can't get it out no matter how emphatically, how precisely and purposefully he speaks.
"Your fictitious absolution means nothing to me because it means nothing to anyone. Not to Pandora, who would not fucking say that. Not to Mortis, or Nautis, or the billions of people you or I are supposedly representing on the grand stage of fate, and on whose behalf I have colossally beefed it. And 'no one who cares is going to blame me?' Who's that? Who 'cares' so much about me that they don't care about what I do? The only reason anyone cares about me is because of what I do, and what I did here was fuck it up. You say it could have happened to anybody," he says, echoing their exact intonation. It sounds even hollower the second time. It's almost a comedic moment, except he can't find it in him to laugh quite yet.
"But it didn't. It happened to, and because of, me. It happened to Justicar because of me. It's my fault because I didn't think it through, I got distracted and impatient, I let him open that door without splitting us up, without holding him or me back in case whatever was behind it was more than just engine and machinery. I went into the first mission to capture that constellation thinking I had it all under control, and when I didn't, you and Mortis suffered the consequences. I went into the mission to fix my own mistakes so ready to get it solved and done that I failed to control the situation, and Justicar suffers the consequences. Everything else follows from there. If it's not my fault, what is there to forgive? Nothing. So, if you want to forgive me, tell me what I'm being forgiven for. For being a colossal fuckup? For my personality? You don't like me, you clearly don't listen to a damn thing I say until it's inconvenient that you didn't, and yet you forgive me? Then tell me what about me warrants forgiveness. What about what I've done is forgiveable? What forgiveness have I earned, what have I done to deserve your merciful grace? I'll spare you the effort: nothing. You want to talk about arrogance--" he throws a hand up, although he has nothing to do with it except gesture, futilely--
The cruelty of their superficial benevolence is actually disgusting.
"You know? I'm done with it. I'm not interested in your pity or your platitudes. If that's the best you've got, then you're the worst apparition to do it yet."
no subject
None of it is beyond what the Abyss expected to hear. They don't know him well, certainly not as well as the form they're stealing right now. But they know enough about him just from what he's shown them now, from the way he's behaved towards Shellustria and the monsters it's sent out into the world, and from consuming Pastos all those years ago. They know that this is simply the way he believes he is.
They sigh again and break their gaze, disappointment weighing down their head. "You always do this, Dirk," the form of Pandora says. "You never let anybody apologize to you. You never accept that some things just happen." They lift their head again, but tilt it to one side after a moment as they ask the question that kicks off their next screed.
"Does it make you weak, do you think?" They right their posture. "To reject everyone else. To make yourself into this... righteous pillar that holds the world on his shoulders. To take in all the blame and fault and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and tell yourself 'no, this is how it has to be'." And they begin walking slowly, casually, a wide arc around their captor with their hands folded behind their back.
"What do you think will happen if you let someone in enough to bear some of that weight? Are you worried they'll drop it?" Before he can answer, they shake their head. "No, that can't be it. Because then you'd just take the blame for letting someone try to help. You can't trust anyone else to do the job that you have to do. You're the only thing that you can count on in this world. Everyone knows that. So what is it?"
They've kept the same calm demeanor even as their words trend more... direct. Probably not vicious. Why bother trying so hard to cut into him? Even if it works, he'd never let anyone see how much these things affect him. That's what the point of the shades is.
"I think, and stop me if I'm wrong here," they say with a small laugh chasing the words, "I think that you spend all this time and energy driving everybody away and lashing out at anyone who tries to be nice to you because you're scared." They come to a stop and look at him again, and they're smiling like they've said something way too obvious. "Simple, right? You don't need to be an expert psychoanalyst to figure that one out. But the reason it scares you, now, that's the tricky part. My best guess is that if you let anyone get close to you, even a little bit, you might find out that there are some people you can trust. Or you might find out that even if someone helps and screws up, picking up the pieces is easier with a second person.
"And if you find that out now? At your big age?" They spread their hands in front of themself, making the same gesture he'd taunted them with. "Well, that would just mean that it's always been an option for you. It would mean that you didn't have to face all of this alone, and you still chose to be alone anyway." And they shake their hands out as if wiping the whole thought clean. "Nahhh, best not to think about that one too hard. You're probably just a prickly, standoffish asshole who deserves everything that's ever happened to him. Isn't that easier for you?"
Traumadumps about his ex to the Abyss
It wouldn't have made him like its response any more, obviously, but he would have appreciated the effect. Alas, he doesn't even have that metatextual balm to salve the open wounds the Abyss is digging its cruel fingers into. It's right, however; he won't show the weakness of pain. He won't show fear. He doesn't move with Pandora's figment as it paces, doesn't dignify the predatory pattern with so much as a turn of his head to follow it as it circles him. He stands stoic. Unmoving.
Not relaxed, not by any means--but not so tense that it would inhibit him. Primed. Ready. Aware. He tries, to the best of his ability, to let those words roll off of him, or at least pass by him without reaction. This misunderstanding of his character. This misrepresentation of his motives.
The broad strokes are true, of course. He has no idea what Pandora means by saying he 'always' does this, but he does take the world on his shoulders. Because that's why he's here. That's what it's all for. That's not weakness. It's not strength, either. It's simply right. It's something he get behind, something he can commit to. Something he can live with, and something he can die for. Having all of it in one package is convenient in a dark kind of way.
He doesn't correct them, though--he can hold his tongue, suck it up and stuff it down and be aware, consciously and coldly aware, that the Abyss' misunderstandings might be a good thing.
If that was there was, he might have been able to wait it out. He might have gotten through this, drawn his sword, and changed the trajectory of the conversation in a metaphorically complementary fashion.
What gets to him, in the end, is the supposition that he hasn't tried. That he just saw the way his life was, found he was unhappy, and went 'well, nothing to do about that!' and started taking it out on other people.
That. Is what goes too far.
It starts with that laugh, that cutesy, condescending little laugh. 'Stop me if I'm wrong,' they say, and Dirk says nothing. He stands, silent, his jaw set firmly against anything they might be about to cook up.
Which is a lot of bullshit, frankly. Chasing people away? Lashing out? Do they think he was trying to send Pandora storming off into the night, or Mortis fleeing the hideout in unmistakeable horror? (Do they even know about that?) He could almost twist this in his favour as complimentary--it is presuming a level of competence he just does not fucking have, but he'd love to take the credit for being so catastrophically awful to be around on purpose. It sure as fuck sounds better than the truth.
If nothing else, Dirk is aware that saying 'no, no, I am horrible to other people uncontrollably and by accident' is worse.
Of course, this does scare him. It scares him a lot, because he does not know what happens in the space between himself and another person and he seemingly has no control over it--but the experience of fear is usually filtered into frustration, and from there the fact that he's afraid of anything is lost on him. He is simply aware of it, as he can't help but but to be aware, and he adjusts accordingly when he can. That's reasonable. It's inevitable, even--what else would he do except adapt and adjust to his own circumstances, or the seeming consequences of his own nature?
If the Abyss had just stopped there, if it had only stopped there--
But it doesn't. It keeps going. It accuses him of being some kind of self-absorbed, insular troglodyte with no imagination or try. It accuses him of cowardly, malicious assumption, of weak-minded and weak-willed self-deception. It accuses him, effectively, of making the choice to be Dirk Strider, as though that was the worst thing he could be, and as though he would have chosen to be it anyway.
And it accuses him of being a purposeful dick to people for some inexplicable, self-serving reason on top of it.
He shouldn't react. He knows he shouldn't. He wants to bite his tongue, to clench his jaw, to grind his teeth together and keep all of it inside of him, to just draw his sword and--
And instead, he opens his mouth.
"I tried that. You want to know how that went?" His voice is quiet, but it's usually quiet. It's a regular issue; growing up alone, he had no point of comparison for the volume of normal speech--at least, no point of comparison that didn't come with a volume slider or wasn't an increasingly distant memory. Over time, the sound of his own voice grew louder in his mind, and quieter outside of it--he only needed to hear himself over the sound of a city hundreds of metres down, and even the later 'encouragement' of old man Harley could only do so much to counteract his own awareness of his speaking sound.
In a way, it's been useful. People are forced to shut up to listen to him, and if they don't listen, then he doesn't need them. If they do, there's a bit of a sunk cost fallacy to keep them around.
But then there's times like now, when he's not necessarily sure he wants to be saying what he's about say, and it tricks him into saying what he shouldn't. Tricks him into starting. And once he's started--
He doesn't stop.
"I don't talk about it, is how it went. It's not worth talking about. I would, if it meant anything, but it doesn't. I learned some hard lessons but they're not anyone else's fucking business. I didn't even want him to leave, I had no fucking idea he was going to do that. No warning at all. After forgiving him and advising him and loving him, custom-crafting solutions like his own live-in bespoke lifestyle coach and personal artisan of the self, which I did not because he asked me to, but out of the actual goodness of my genuine loyal heart. And I'm not claiming I'm perfect. I'm not fucking perfect. Neither was he. God damn, I had a few issues with him too, but I didn't quit on him. No, he quit on me. He even had a whole list of issues with me by the end of it, I could probably recite them from memory. But what it all comes down to isn't how nice I am or am not, or how well I do or don't open up--which I am perfectly capable of doing, by the way. I'm not standoffish. Nothing could be further from the truth. I'm pretty sure that was actually the problem. The real one. He can blame me or he can blame himself or he can just down another bottle and find someone else to lose himself in for another night somewhere or he can text me again at 2 am like he wants to hang out and then refuse to talk about anything meaningful at all, but the raw truth is that he couldn't take it, me, what I had going on, like I wasn't the one carrying all of that and his shit on top like an alcohol-soaked commitment-issues cherry. I wanted it to work. I wanted us, I wanted him. So all the things I did for him, and the things I took on the chin, it was all worth it, to me. He--we--that was worth it. But the more effort I put in, the worse he apparently felt about me. Not that he was 'over me' like he claimed--it was so fucking obvious he wasn't. It was more like spite. He kept telling me how he was 'his own man' and how he had all this 'free will.' Of course he had free will. What the fuck was that even about? It was like anything I said was suddenly so much more obscene than any other option. Then he realised the ultimate use of it would be to prove he didn't need me at all, so he broke up with me over it."
He takes a deep breath, his lungs hollow and strained not from lack of oxygen--well maybe a little from that--but from the sheer agonising hollowness in him. A horrible, aching hole in his ribcage where his lungs and heart should be, where anger and bitterness and grief and remorse should have lived, if only there was room for anything else, anything at all except the wrenching void of total emptiness that sucks his emotions out of him instead.
"What else do you want to know? How much crying he did? The movies we watched together? How far we got in the bedroom? How far we got out of the bedroom? What he said during our last fight? What I said? Too bad. You aren't getting any of that. You can infer whatever you want, it doesn't matter now anyway. Like I said, it's just as well it worked out the way it did. I'd like to think it could have gone differently, but if I'm being honest? I've come to think that it was inevitable. That it was always going to end like that, that one way or another he would have been broken under the weight of it all, and not for any reason that had to do with him, or maybe even me. But if it was me, then I think it's in everyone's best interests that I take that experience and shelve it, for good. Like I said, I'm not here to get a happy ending for me. I know that. The fucked up part is that I knew I was doing two people's worth of work--more than that, if we're being honest--but you know? I think I was happy. I thought we were happy. So in a way, you're right. For me, it was great. Problem is that apparently that was only one of us. Two with Cal around. He was pretty good to Cal, too. I thought that was a good sign. But it doesn't really matter what I thought, does it? If anything, what I thought is predetermined to be wrong, if not by some metaphysically driven force, then because I'm 'intense' and 'demanding' and 'dramatic' and 'philosophically self-obsessed' and, okay, maybe I am an asshole, but not for lack of good intentions, or good choices, or simply fucking trying. How many human beings is it ethically responsible to subject to me in the quest for self-improvement and/or absolution and/or the opportunity to simply get laid and distract myself from own interminable internal machinery before the moral weight of my efforts tips the scales and sends me and everyone else screaming into the fires of a strictly metaphorical hell of my own selfish creation? Something to chew on, I guess, while I sit here marinating in myself. Serving up some of my sordid personal history for mutually self-masturbatory mastication. It's a good thing for the world that I won't have time to find out in any practical way, but I can tell you all that because there's really nothing you can do with it to hurt anyone else. Or me, frankly. Once I'm out of here, I have bigger things to worry about."
no subject
They begin floating in the air again somewhere around Dirk talking about his loyal heart, stretching out on their stomach as if on an invisible bed and kicking their feet up behind them. They cradle their head in their hands and just continue to listen. And listen, and listen. It's around the time that he starts complaining about how he thought he was happy that they end up rolling over on their back in the air, otherwise holding the pose exactly and looking at Dirk through the lenses of lightly-drooping glasses.
A blithe look on their face, they offer, "That's rough, buddy."
And for a moment that might be all they consider saying, but why would they do that when there's so much more meat on these bones now? "But it's so weird... it's like you got burned trying something out once and then decided never to do it again." They tap their chin. "I wonder where we've all heard that one before." And they don't think they need to echo it directly—what's the point when he already knows where they're going with it? "Oh no, you had a bad relationship with somebody you gave too much of yourself to. Oh no, you accidentally smothered someone because you were young and didn't know how to regulate anything. How tragic. You know this isn't a unique experience either, right?"
They roll back upright in the air and prop their head up on one hand instead, letting their other arm dangle off the edge of that invisible surface. "It happens to millions of people every day, and they don't turn out like you. Not as fast as you have, at least. Of course, it's never happened to them," and they point at their own head briefly, "But they have enough things going on, wouldn't you say?"
With a deep sigh, they let their shoulders drop and their head hang. "That's the saddest part. You and them might actually be friends. You're similar enough, but the thing is that they actually cop to their problems. You've rewritten your own problems to make you someone who never has to admit to them. You never have to get better because you like who you are now, and you think who you are now is someone worth being forever." Slowly, they shake their head, coming just short of tut-tutting Dirk Strider like some kind of disparaging mother.
"At least they're trying. What are you doing?"
"Only" 1500 words this time!
The truth is something he rarely acknowledges even to himself. And if he hadn't just broken that glass, it was a pearl--polished and refined through maladaptive methods, its smooth surface insulating the vulnerable meat of him from the endless unhappiness generated by its presence. Its torments could be reinterpereted as a valuable quality. Layers upon layers of self-hatred and dissatisfaction wrapped over the foundational core of his selfhood, built up over years of unwantedness, self-blame, and inadequacy... but turned to noble purpose, its rarefied drive propelling him in his endless quest for self-improvement. So, a positive trait.
If he hadn't broken that glass, he might have even agreed--I like myself just fine--or, if he decided in that moment that the Abyss was wrong, then its misapprehension would have been proof he was still in control. Phew. You really had me going for a minute there, that Dirk might have said. But you're wrong. You've misunderstood my character completely.
If he hadn't broken that glass, hadn't cut himself open on the memories and the hurt and the longing and anger and need for love. If he hadn't--
But he did.
"That's what you got out of that? That I think I'm some happy paragon of self-realised human potential?" There's incredulity under the cold tone and flat affect. Blink and you'll miss it.
"Yeah. That'd be a no. And I don't know whether to blame myself for this one or if you're just saying it to fuck with me. But I don't think it would be possible to be more wrong--at least not while still somehow being close to getting it right." The corner of his mouth pulls up sardonically.
"Is that what they thought I was saying?" A beat, and then--somewhat more aggressively, "Do you even know?"
He waits, seemingly for a response, but before he can receive one, he cuts them off.
"I don't know why I'm asking. Even if you answered me, I'd be forced to assume any affirmative response is a lie. I might as well waste my breath asking if you know what really happened to Dave Strider."
Even if the original question was meant to be cutting, a rhetorical cruelty, but it's more sincere than he wants it to be. And maybe he could have played that off, but in typical Dirk fashion, he gives himself away in the process of trying--and the more the tries to dispel and disavow the ideas and information he adds, the more he reveals.
"Never mind. Forget I said any of that." He doesn't have the capacity for embarrassment, at least not like this. So he doesn't feel any. Instead, he feels the same way he's felt this whole time--gradually but increasingly more insane. At first, he thought this Pandora might be some kind of magic phantasm or a ghost--either a shade left by the real thing, or some kind of construct. Now, though, he feels less like he's arguing with someone else and more like he's just going around and around with his own consistently uncharitable and inconsistently-aligned self. Always splitting his perspectives up into contrasts that ultimately agree in the worst ways, always turning his own feelings and thoughts and words and actions against him. Maybe that's why it's so hard to resist being pulled into saying more, into having another 'last word' and another and another, without end--a sadomasochistic compulsion with no outlet except to turn itself inwards. He thinks of this endless oscillation of perspectives sometimes as separate parts--a part that inflicts and delights in it, maybe out of hate or maybe out of monstrosity, and a part attuned to self-flagellation and penance, which is itself a kind of egotism. But really, it's all one ouroboros of self-hatred and self-gratification, and he can't cut himself off. He's never been able to turn his own brain off or even turn it down.
"I said I knew a thing or two about their situation because I know there are similarities. That's why I had the answers. Sure, the things they found so completely insurmountable were actually trivial and the problems were all in their head, but If they didn't listen, or believe me, then that's not my fault. I can only say so much without making it about me. Which would have been a real fucked up thing to do--hey, you're so desperate for a way out of this perpetual motion death spiral of failed gratification and failed self-improvement that you're begging for help from the first person to pass by who seems to have his shit together, and I hear you. But instead of giving you clear instructions and an actual choice, I'm going to monologue about my problems and all the ways you've reminded me of them. Maybe if I go on about myself long enough, I'll experience some temporary form of catharsis. What? Your problems? Oh, that. Just do what I do, and don't worry about the fact that nothing I've done has actually addressed anything wrong with me." He doesn't laugh--because laughing, like so many social behaviours, either failed to develop in Dirk or else was extinguished by the long years spent so unnaturally alone. Instead, he huffs a single breath in approximation of a laugh, but the humour is dark and forced.
"And how fucking sick would it be for me to assume that they need to believe I'm as horrible as they think they are in order to listen to what I'm saying? That didn't even cross my mind. It would have been a lie, anyway. Pandora's problems are all completely solvable if they just stop being so self-obsessed about it. Pretending to be their peer would have been manipulative at best. Not to mention cruel. It might have worked in the moment--hell, maybe it would have prevented this atrocity of a conversation." Ha. "But imagine for a moment--go on a little odyssey of the mind with me--how that would have gone down once they found out who I was, and got to know me, and started to realise just how fucked up I am?" He waves a hand in illustrative defeat.
"Did you know that Mortis fled the fucking room to get away from me? I still don't even know what it was, exactly, that did it, but she did. Pandora hates me, but I'd almost rather they hate me for their misunderstanding of me. I can't please everyone, and I'm not going to try. The only person who needs to understand me, or like me, is me."
He pauses; there's a kind of pain in his voice that sounds like grim resolve, but on his face simply looks like nothing at all. He shows nothing, gives nothing. Nothing except more nothing.
"You can make all the little jokes you want, but Jake is the one who broke up with me. Lucky him, right? If I'm so 'suffocating' and 'unstable' and self-absorbed and all all those other pejorative little twists on my character, then maybe I should congratulate him on his good fortune in being able to get the hell out of the blast radius of Dirk Strider. You can say 'not a unique experience' all you want, but I'm not convinced. On the surface, sure. Just another celebrity breakup. Just more teenage psychodrama. Just more human messiness, like Pandora crying and throwing a half dozen hard-boiled eggs on the ground because they didn't like what I had to say. But I have to grapple with the fucking reality of myself every day, and the shit going through other people's heads is so obviously happening on a completely different level than mine that I can't ignore it. I'd love to figure out what it is about being... I don't know, a human being, a person, maybe just being alive that everyone else seems to find so natural and easy that they get stuck on little solvable problems like 'not giving up on playing the guitar.' I can't even imagine what that's like. There's a compatibility problem here. I'm running some software that no one's ever heard of, and I have to do more than just find a way to make that work--I have to wield it, I have to hammer out the imperfections and chisel it into some kind of usable shape and polish it into something that can be used, and used for the better. And so every fucking day I fight the urge to end the joke of my existence and spare everyone around me the suffering of my continued presence, I get out of fucking bed, and I put in the work of forging myself into a version of Dirk Strider I don't fucking hate. Call it my other life's work--the one that isn't preserving the fabric of reality from the forces of profane dissolution."
no subject
"You'd be considered a modern miracle outside these walls, you know. Knowing exactly where to dig your fingers into your own torso to rip out everything except what you need to keep living." He's leaving a lot of himself on the ground, sure, but his hands can get as red as he wants and he'll still find some way to keep standing. Isn't that the way it has to work with him? Didn't he just admit to exactly that?
"So you get up every day and slap on your best face and pretend to be a human. You pretend like you know what's going on and how to exist around everyone else because you don't know how to work your meat suit. Can I ask you one real quick question, Dirk?" They lean forward in their smug little chair pose and look down at him. "How's it been going for you? You get any closer to finding the answers you're looking for on your own?"
They know the answer to that without even needing to know his inner thoughts. It's obvious. "How long are you going to let this go on before you consider talking to someone else about it? Someone who's not a figment of your imagination, I mean," they say, dismissively waving their hand. "Sure, you're driving everyone away. Sure, you can't help that. It's just what you do, blah blah blah blah." They make a yapping gesture, of course. "I thought you were all about fighting like hell using every advantage you can steal from the universe's gaping maw, or whatever."
The shade frowns, and it's as pointed an expression as everything else has been. It's practically a sneer, and they've definitely picked it up from a Harbinger, or at least the memory of one. "But the universe hands you a team of people who you obviously already knew in your past life and you're still doing all this? Never thought that maybe you could see if anyone else has gotten memories of you that you can bond over? Figure out just what made Pastos different from you and see if you can use any of those lessons to solve your own problems?" They sigh and hang their hand loose at the wrist, boredom overtaking them. "Pathetic. You do love Japan, you isolationist fuck."
And he took that personally,
Maybe, having cut himself open and shown that he bleeds, the colour of his blood, the consistency, the volume; having pulled open the edges of the wound to show the twitching muscles and yellow fat--flesh that was once whole, now exposed and raw and inflamed; having begun to dig his hands in deeper, ripping out everything and stripping his so-called humanity down to all but his most brutally essentialist points--as the Abyss itself noted--flinging it all into the dirt in a desperate mix of despair and fury; having done practically all of the work for it--
Maybe he's left himself with no strength left to take another blow.
Or maybe it's simply that the Abyss' contempt--like Shellustria's before it--finally strikes something vital: his pride.
"Fuck you." He almost spits those two syllables out. Venom, finally, directed not at himself, or reality, or the circumstances of his existence--but at the Abyss. Personally. "In complete and total, absolute fucking seriousness. Fuck you, and fuck your agenda. Do you think I'm that stupid? You spend ten or twenty minutes digging up all the humiliating ways I've ever failed at anything, and why any time I haven't failed, that was actually the real failure." He can see the pattern now. It's so obvious. How the fuck did he fall for that? Why did he play along?
He knows why. Because it's exactly how he thinks, how he approaches the problem of himself--just with some extra magic bells and whistles, and Pandora's face to distract him from the slight-of-hand happening right in front of his gullible fucking face. Well, no more.
"Then, when it doesn't work on me--because I spend that much time doing the exact same thing every morning before breakfast--suddenly it's time for life coaching. Like that trick isn't so completely obvious, it's basically a horizontal move. You've painted a tunnel on a cliff wall, enticing me with the promise of clear passage, just waiting for me to run into facefirst into it at top speed and flatten myself into a two-dimensional piece of shit. 'Go ask your fellow Knights if they remember this other guy who was already you before you were!' Nothing could possibly go wrong there. Follow the advice of the absolute destruction of all things real, trust it to know something you don't, there is no possible way this will be a trap of some kind. Is this how you make me your villain? String me along by my own brain until you get me so I think I see an out, and take it--hook, line, sinker, cartoon slapstick, comedy time? No. No, I am not going to fucking do that. Fuck that, and fuck you."
His sword appears in his hands, gleaming silver.
He's gripping it so tightly that he's just short of white-knuckled.
He considers warning them--or it, or whatever. The consideration lasts only a fraction of a second. He's done.
And so he lunges, blade arcing for the mocking image Pandora's exposed neck.
cw: gore, decapitation
And then, the blade connects.
It goes through skin, tendon, muscle, bone, all like it was never even there, and goes through each layer in the opposite order on the way out and slices Pandora's head off their neck entirely. Their body falls to the ground, blood gushing from the open wound, arms and legs and chest spasming as every neuron fires at once in a last-ditch effort to dump every single chemical that was on its way to or from the brain before finally falling completely still.
Pandora's head, propelled by the force of the blade, flies off to one side, hitting the ground with a wet thud that's less loud but no less weighty than the one that had overcome their body. Blood leaking from their severed neck, their voicebox wheezes a few rattling, shaking times, movements that could just be a force of habit but definitely no longer qualify as breaths.
With the last molecule of strength in them, before their brain dies completely, Pandora rasps, "You'll always be like this." And their eyes go dull, and they die with a grim, wretched smile on their face.
no subject
Or was, anyway.
But before that, in the second between contact and follow-through--as they begin to mockingly imitate the cartoonish qualities he accused them of, and as he begins to realise what is about to happen, what he is about to be allowed to do--there is a single moment where the Abyss' mouthpiece might be close enough to see past his shades. To see how his gaze locks with theirs, how Dirk's focus-narrowed eyes widen just slightly, how his tight-clenched jaw and cruel-set lips slacken just a hair.
The element of surprise.
And then, just like that, he's through. Blood sprays, not neatly. It trails in the wake of his gleaming sword, speckling his hair and spattering the bare skin of his face and neck. He doesn't feel it at all. He doesn't feel anything, actually. The sound of a human body hitting the ground--lifeless, uncontrolled weight meets packed earth--reaches his ears, and the numbness has already settled inside him like it was meant to be there. It forms strange wall surrounding the burn of the anger and humiliation of their conversation, and he turns to look--
Just in time to see its (their) lips moving and hear their (it's?) final words.
He's his with a sudden paroxysm of sickness and agony inside him, and it becomes a horrible, overwhelming physical impulse. A bit he wants to vomit--but instead of bile, it's emotion. His mouth is full of saliva, and maybe someone else's blood. (Or maybe his own blood. He might have bitten his tongue in the heat of the moment.)
He almost feels like he's out of control.
He's breathing hard. Sweat sticks to the back of his neck (he thinks it's sweat.) He's weirdly light, but his insides are impossibly heavy.
This is what he meant to do, though. He meant to kill it--them--and that's what he did. This was a deliberate action. They just caught him by surprise, that's all. They caught him by surprise. But he meant to do it.
He keeps breathing.
The thought calms him.
Everything is under control.
He's been staring at his sword. The tip is angled into the dirt; the blood adheres to the gleaming metal as it runs down its length towards the point.
Strangely, he finds he's not even mad any more. It's like the quiet afterward swallowed up all that emotional noise and tumult he'd just been so violently afflicted with.
And now he's fine.
Yeah. He's fine.
(Is this... is this catharsis?)
Eventually, he becomes aware of something wet and warm and cooling on his face.
(Probably not tears.)
He walks calmly past the slumped body and stops next to the decapitated head, its flesh inert and pallid. The clean stump of the neck is dark with blood and the dirt.
He picks it up. To look at it.
no subject
Their head doesn't seem interested in speaking. Purple eyes, one of them cracked through the center like a lightning bolt, stare up at the Nova Knight. The only Nova Knight remaining here, as far as Pandora knows. As far as a corpse can know anything. Everything feels real: Skin, hair, the frayed edge at the base of their neck.
By all accounts, this is a person. This was a person. There's a point where they were alive and a point where they became meat, and Dirk connected those dots with one thick red line.
Once Pandora's body finishes draining, it disappears in the wind like dust, leaving only a wine-dark puddle behind. Their head stays right there in Dirk's hands.
CW suicidal ideation/fetish(?), snuff fetish!?!?, generally just an unwell man processing a murder
His eyes are drawn downward. Past their face, their mouth (their lips are parted, he could open their mouth if he wanted--push his fingers inside to press against their tongue and palate, feel around in their teeth or the back of their throat), down to the dark-caked stump of the neck.
The blood is mostly drained--which he disconnectedly notes assures him of brain death--but dirt and grit and clumps of solidifying blood remain on the raw edge where his blade had cut it clean. The bone is visible, the open larynx now slick and wet in a new way--but most of it is simply meat. Something about the sight, gruesome and unsanitary as it is--feels sharp. Like an adrenaline shot. Like it cut something inside him open.
And in that gap, the mirrors from Shellustria's spell loom rapidly out of the void of his emotional memory--the emptiness where emotions should be, a crack through which they might pass--and eclipse his mind's eye with a rush of remembered blood, the severing of his own consciousness from the meat and bone and blood and electricity of life. The red arc across a clear, uncluttered sky. The dizzying excess of his own processes, at once both finally, fully realised... and finally, fully terminated.
A jolt passes through him, from his brain to his groin, all the way down his spine in a rush; his hips jerk slightly, a muscle spasm of unconscious reflex, and his fingertips press into the dead surface of 'Pandora's' skin, gripping the severed material of their own terminated selfhood too tightly. He sucks his breath in through his teeth, feeling ravenous, needy heat down one end and a delrium of sympathetic vertigo up the other.
He blinks and the feeling isn't gone... but he's in control of the space behind his own eyes, at least. He turns this feeling, this thought, over in his mind. As he does--having wrested consciousness from impulse--he turns the head around in his hands. Processing it through the physical details, tactile and visual. The colours, again. The textures. Even scent. Blood, obviously. Familiar in its own right. But maybe more. He imagines he could smell their shampoo.
Maybe next time he sees them, he'll know.
Deliberately--and wordlessly--he drops the severed, in-death (as-in-life) head of what pretended to be Nova Pandora.