CHARADES - o, meet & greet

[MYERS]

[align=center][div style="text-align:justify;width:55%;font-family:verdana;"]"I am Ahab." No, he isn’t. He is a name he gave to himself - took for himself, even then unable to claim anything as his own that hadn’t been given. He’s everyone. He’s nothing and everything. As faceless as he is the face of many, living as a lonesome word rippling through a crowd, both one and a thousand all at once. That weight in the chest that holds one’s breath is where he’s made his home.

His paws carry themselves to the fire. He watches himself move from somewhere just off to the left. Watches himself sit down hard, clumsily, not thinking much of balance and less of poise. His head hangs a little, hunched between the mountains of his shoulders. He’s listening. Processing the command: to tell a story.

Ocelot reminds him of something, of many things. Unimportant fragments of a forgotten past. The fire jolts something primal, frightened in him: a sudden urge to shove the wildcat in makes his palms sweat. Relief comes in the knowledge that he won’t. Instead he just stares, first at the faces as they introduced themselves, then at the dancing campfire when eyes pierce too deeply. He swims in the motions of that fire, struggles against the weight that pulls his expression down.

“The first day I spent alive I ripped my own foot off.” A metal claw reaches out, curls into the base of the fire; he shuffles the branches around and makes sparks dance. He can feel it, distantly: heat that rises up the rest of his flesh arm, the base of the bionic beginning to burn the longer he held the metal in the flames. He retracts his paw. “I was tired from fighting. I went back to sleep. I visited the place where things that aren't quite alive or dead tend to go.”

He remembers a lot of things, more than he’d ever let on. They’d tried to force the memories out to put something calm and complacent in his place, but he remembers the metal clamp around his paw, the taste of his own blood as he struggled to unhinge the trap. The clap of gunshots, the feeling of burning alive and yet seeing no fire - only blood, only sharp needles digging into his skin, a thousand little pinpricks that made the pain no less bearable but lulled him to silence. He remembers the faces closing in as he fell. The memory of gore paints thick sheets of metal over his teeth, a taste he'd know forever.

“On the second day I woke up in an empty room. I had slept for a long, long time... But I was tired, still. No sleep could fix that. I looked...” His voice is slowing considerably - there’s a building slur to his words, sounds mixing on a heavy tongue and thoughts blurring together. The fire keeps him in place. He tethers his memory to it, holds on tight. Remembers... Nothing. The grizzly’s metal claws flex into the dirt as he struggles to finish so simple a tale. “...And I had lost something very important to me. I slept again, and looked for it in my dreams. I couldn’t find it, even there. I still feel it at my side, sometimes, the memory is so familiar.”

He thinks of them discussing love, of wholeness and family. There was a hole where that ought to be - no mother, no father, no friend nor sibling to care for him. He was born in that clean room, painting blood on its walls and roaring like a screaming newborn. He was brought to life and raised in a day - many days, but time tended to blur when he scrutinized that era too closely - and then set off to live. If there was purpose in his existence, even the continuance of a lineage, he wasn't sure if even the man in Ocelot's story could tell him so.

“In the room, I learned to be alive. I was taught who I had been, where I had come from before waking. I was told to remember things that I couldn’t, so they showed me… And I know, now, who I am.” The branching numbness that weighs in his chest has spread to the back of his skull, to the muscles of his forelimbs. He wants to lay down. He wants to sleep for a long, long time again - perhaps never wake up, just stay here by the fire and melt into the earth. Become one with it, one with something. There's lies in his “I learned a lot in those days. I was given time to rest. When I woke, I was here. I crossed the train tracks and found home on the other side.”

Pain creases the deep scars on his face, paints the bags under his eyes dark with an exhaustion that would never end. He'd told his story. Behind his body he watches himself sigh, looking up at his clanmates with practiced calm. Abandoning the present and delving into the past always left him... A little shook up.

But, he only spoke of the truth.

Right?