13th metal . spam & text . cw: self-harm

[godsays]

[ He winds long bandages around his arms before he goes to take a shower, covering himself from elbow to palm. He makes it look more like gauntlets than anything else, to minimize any questions asked, moves furtively and quickly, dodges out as soon as possible. And he longs for the days when the servants had to bring him a bath, and he didn't care what they saw - let them gossip, let them spread the word that he hurts himself. Let it add to the terror they see in him.

Here, it only adds to his shame and frustration. The voice is gone, and he shouldn't need to control himself this way, but the longer he resists, the greater the need becomes, and he always gives in eventually.

It seems wrong to him, anyway, that his arms are mostly bare of scars. That his chest, too, is unmarked. That the other evidence of his violent life is erased, leaving his skin as ordinary as a child's. Sometimes he remembers the scars and he feels the temptation to bring them back.

He has also often been stepping into the gardens and the greenhouse lately, mostly just sitting still and watching the plants. He recognizes their progress. Tries, though it makes him feel a little ridiculous, to murmur things to them sometimes. To talk to them. ]

[ text ]

If you have scars, are they important to you? Do you think they matter?

[ video ; private to Charles ]

I told Megamind you wouldn't object to me attending school. I knew it was the kind of thing that you like.

Comments

[godsays]

How would you put it?

[halftheman]

Every man has two sides. [ He holds up his coin, it's face clean -- Lady Liberty in scuffed silver. ]

The face we are expected to present. The face that believes in truth, justice, God; the things that man has built to make sense of the world that is in truth-- [ The coin is turned, revealing it's double head, scratched out ] equal parts savage horror, kill or be killed, might makes right. The first face make living one step away from the second more... palatable, for most.

We show our true selves; the man and the monster.

[godsays]

You and your killer, then.

[ Sounds like a dark side to him. The halves of his own nature that he has trouble integrating sometimes. Or telling apart.

Maybe the clear boundaries help this man. ]

[halftheman]

[ There was a grating laugh. ]

You say that like it's all that I am. [ Two-Face had taken over; it was in the glint of his bad eye, the way his sneer deepened. ] Like that's it. Just a fucking thug. I'm so much more than that.

[godsays]

If I'd meant Thug, I would have said it.

[halftheman]

Not a lot else you can attach to killer. I controlled gangs, I ran city blocks. Protection money, rackets, gambling. More than a killer.

[godsays]

A killer can be an assassin. Someone skilled and ruthless who hits from the shadows and can't be stopped.

Controlling gangs sounds more like a thug to me.

[halftheman]

Spoken like a man who has never had to run anything in his life.

They're thugs. I'm the boss.

[godsays]

I've led an army.

[ And in his mind, a nobleman's mind, controlling criminals is low; controlling soldiers is sophisticated, a pursuit worthy of a nobleman. ]

[halftheman]

Soldier, huh? Ain't so different, these days. We're better armed and organized than platoons, sometimes.

[godsays]

A nobleman. Not a common soldier. Noblemen don't run criminal enterprises.

[halftheman]

Hah. I'll sure I'll tell that to Cobblepot, some day. He's as close as we get to that sort of stupidity.

[godsays]

Stupidity?

[halftheman]

Nobles. We don't have that shit.

[godsays]

Oh.

No, it doesn't always seem like it would be a good idea.

Especially if the people who aren't nobles aren't made inferior.

[halftheman]

Safe to say, we aren't. We're made of the same crap as anyone else. Accident of birth don't make a person anything except alive.

[godsays]

It's not accidents - in my world, nobles were made better.

[halftheman]

How? How do you make someone better?

[godsays]

Smarter. More potential for Allomancy and powers. Built to lead, not to follow.

[halftheman]

Bullshit. Eugenics is a crock -- always has been, always will be. And that's what you're spinning. May as well claim you're the master race.

People are too complex for that.

[godsays]

It was a master race. And the skaa are a servant one. They're built to be stout and strong, to have shorter lives and more children, and not to be as intelligent.

[halftheman]

Fuck your world. That's not how it works.

[godsays]

Why not?

[halftheman]

Because people are more than their genes.

[godsays]

That must be why the Final Empire endured with that system for more than a thousand years.