DIONYSUS: 2099 | the death of salem castlea first draft excerptword count: 726, warnings: graphic vi

DIONYSUS: 2099 | the death of salem castlea first draft excerptword count: 726, warnings: graphic violence, depiction of deathtag list: @obanshee | @ouranox | @queenie-dragon | @shewolves ​| @bebenovels | @agentorange-writes | @cohldhands | @phloxxiing | @abookishfay | @thewordreaper | @rkmoriyama | @many-minds (pls ask/dm/reply to be added/removed!)“Do you remember much from the night you died?”“Yes.”“Shit, that’s intense,” Hawk says, casually taking a cigarette out of one of his pockets and lighting it. In the short amount of time Salem has spent in the future so far, Hawk is the only person he has seen still smoking real tobacco. He takes a deep drag and holds it in his chest and Salem watches him carefully, imagining with the vague triggers of a memory the burn he must be feeling in his lungs. As he finally exhales and Salem registers the smell of the smoke he feels the uncomfortable itch of a craving under his skin. Useless and human, it’s an itch he can’t scratch. A craving he can’t satisfy. A feeling he remembers but has no use for. He turns towards the street and leans forward into the concrete parapet of the building.“They used a hunting knife,” he says, not looking at Hawk but at the billboards across from them: $12.99 for a girl at the Styx Club on one, $34.97 for ramen at some restaurant around the corner on another. “They had to use the serrated edge because the blade was blunt. They had to saw back and forth to get it started.”Without looking, without them even touching, he senses Hawk go stiff beside him along with the air around them, feels a kind of horror settle in as Hawk draws in a tense breath. He keeps his eyes fixed on the billboards.“Did you know anything about MemCloud and the link before you found me? Before you found parts of me?” he asks. “Did you know that it was able to store a small amount of backup power that allowed it to continue to finalize and send a report in the event that I died in action? I did. But what I didn’t know was that it was capable of functioning like a generator. I should have realized — you can’t keep drawing data from a dead brain. It used the power it stored to keep my brain alive as long as it needed to.”“Fuck—” The air around them gets heavier and heavier until like an overfilled balloon it finally bursts. Hawk breathes out. “—You were alive the whole time. I’m so sorry.”Salem turns and looks at Hawk, his face flat. “What?” Hawk scrubs at the back of his neck. “I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have asked if I knew it was— I mean, that must have been excruciating.”Salem’s chest rises and falls — oxygen entering a vacant cavity and leaving again unchanged — and turns back towards the parapet, this time looking down at the street thirteen floors below.“My husband, Felix, was dead before they even put the knife to my neck. He was laying there on the floor, colorless and lifeless, with a tear stuck to the tip of his nose. A drip that just wouldn’t fall.”In order to protect itself from complete devastation the human brain has the ability to change the way that it functions during times of severe trauma. It can alter and block out the absolute worst of our memories, change whatever it needs to make the heavy weight of living even the slightest bit easier to bare.An artificial brain being fed raw data from a sixty year old packet file can offer no such comfort. Salem looks at the pavement below them and the people walking past but in his mind he’s trapped and screaming in that room again.“I wanted to die. They were hacking my head from my shoulders with a blunt hunting knife and all I could think was ‘at least I won’t have to see him like this anymore,’ y’know ‘at least I won’t have to try and figure out how I’m supposed to go on without him.’ But MemCloud wouldn’t let me die. They kept me alive, staring at my husband’s dead body, just so I could send them one last mission report. That’s the part that hurt.”Hawk says nothing.“And now you’ve brought me back and I get to live with that image forever.”Salem plucks what’s left of Hawk’s cigarette from his dry lips and tosses it over the building’s edge before turning to leave.A feeling he remembers but has no use for. -- source link

More pics about