Published: Dec. 3, 2024.
Words: 1,525.
Chapters: 1/1.
Summary:
Denial swells with every hurt you do not inflict, with every drop of blood gone unshed. Your companions smile at you, tongues and eyes safe in their proper orifices. Perhaps a slight bit tentative (at night, your teeth grind with the need to clamp down on a juicy artery), but you smile sincerely back at them.
(The Dark Urge tries and tries and tries until they can't.)
Notes:
originally written for the prompt "100 words of it's useless to try" on ffa.
title taken from input by faunts.
On AO3.
There are too many thoughts in your head. Whatever implement breached your cranium and probed its slippery interior must have left a hole. Too easily do you hit capacity and the excess thoughts overflow out, and too easily do outside influences find the gaping hole and enter to poison your mind.
Not a very medical assessment, but it makes some sense. There is something wrong with you.
Because you do have a strange number of thoughts you need to resist. Everyone looks at you funny when you ask if they have thoughts like yours, so it must be unique to you and your stirred-up brains.
Only you have thoughts like these.
You do not loom over Shadowheart and cleanly snap her neck on the wreckage-strewn beach, pocketing her artifact. You do not take Gale's hand like a friendly stranger aiding a man stuck vulnerably between planes and giggle when your wrenching and tearing makes him yell out. You do not convince Lae'zel to lower the blade meant to end you before you suffer worse as an illithid only to turn it her throat, watching as she gurgles bubbles of blood. You do not grant Astarion a false moment of acceptance before staking him and mourning how quick vampires are to die in this way. You do not pretend there is something lurking in the bushes for the monster hunter to hunt so that you can tiptoe behind Wyll and bludgeon his head in until it is a smear of brains and blood. You do not lie to Karlach and present her to the paladins hunting her, relishing in the slaughter of a group as you forget what dismembered limb belongs to who.
You do not.
Denial swells with every hurt you do not inflict, with every drop of blood gone unshed. Your companions smile at you, tongues and eyes safe in their proper orifices. Perhaps a slight bit tentative (at night, your teeth grind with the need to clamp down on a juicy artery), but you smile sincerely back at them.
Until Alfira.
She, too, smiles and looks at you like a hero. One more whose eyes will not be plucked from their sockets and whose tongue will not be cut from her mouth. You've resisted well. Just a little trust, you deserve that much.
Basking in the warmth of her blood, you smile. You feel happy, at ease. For the first time in existing memory, your flesh does not gnaw at you. Your Butler speaks in effusive praise for your act of butchery and presents a gift for it.
More, anticipates your Butler. More, cries the thoughts unsatisfied. More, craves the skin and meat and bone of your body.
When you ask your Butler why something in you still demands more, he chuckles and gives you a sly wink, like there is a joke you simply forgot you were in on.
In the morning, you feign ignorance to where Alfira has vanished to in the night, giddy shivers running up your spine. You have done a bad thing, but it will not happen again. Peace must come eventually if you continue to strive against these thoughts, against this urge.
You do not shatter a glass on the table, seize a shard, and impale Jaheira's face on it, enough to ensure her death but give her some time to witness as you dispose of all her Harpers. You do not play target practice from the second floor on the tiefling children, letting your creativity for cruelty run amok. You do not rip open Isobel's ribcage and rest your head beside her heart as it slowly ceases beating. You do not coax out the hulking beast from the druid Halsin to slay and skin for the warm cloak he will surely make. You do not bind the drow Minthara, sit upon her chest, and meet her eyes as you cut her sharp tongue from her mouth, all commands and arrogant observations drowning in her blood.
Your Butler is disappointed, so terribly disappointed. Gentle, he takes your hand in his and pats it with his other. Promise glitters in his eyes despite all that disappointment. You cannot deny your very being, and he knows tomorrow the sun will rise in a bloody dawn.
The thoughts coalesce into a single powerful urge, permeating down your spine and through your nerves. An omnipresent whisper across your existence: you will, you can, you do.
No. You do not. You do not. You do not. Only once have you lost yourself, sunk your fingers into the entrails of the freshly deceased, stabbed a blade with wild abandon because there is none to judge you, bitten a tongue off simply for the fun of it, sawed a head off a body to puppeteer a private show for you and your headless victim, cut off the arms and the legs so that you could reattach them in the opposite positions, sliced arteries to drain blood to make a worthy sacrifice--
Dawn comes as bloody as your Butler wished. This time, you do not obscure your crime--nor could you have when your victim was one of your own number. You wait from the conclusion of your revelry until your first companion awakes, blood drying on you and heat slowly leaving the body.
There is disgust, yes, but more than that, confusion, shock, and pity. Your companions, the fellows you had begun to think of as perhaps your friends, do not know what to make of you. When they ask, you explain as well as you can and agree that there is something very wrong with you. You've tried very hard to not obey the thoughts, but--
Maybe that effort isn't worth much when you've brutally tortured two people and enjoyed doing it.
After a makeshift funeral you are excluded from, the debate over what to do with you is a quiet one. For now, you are permitted to remain, but if you cave to your violent impulses, consciously or unconsciously, again, there will be no hesitation in executing you.
You want to say that you will not disappoint them. What happened will never be repeated. A one-time incident you will spend your life atoning for.
But it is the second time. You thought this all to yourself while scrubbing Alfira's blood from your hands in a stream. A third time feels inevitable.
Still. Maybe--just maybe--you can be strong enough that this will be the final instance. Tenuous hope flares against the thoughts you've grown used to as a background noise.
You do not peel the skin of the farmer man's thumb like you would an apple then offer it as a treat to his daughter. You do not trip a child running after another to see her break her nose and stare too intently as she licks the dribble of blood from her nostril. (Always one of your companions keeping a close eye on you. Always one of them asking if you feel all right when you look too long upon something while lost in reverie.) You do not incite a mob against the city guard so you can mingle into the crowd and break a bone or two without being noticed.
An appetite whet. You feel on the brink of starvation as you cross over into the banquet of Baldur's Gate. Oh, your would-have-been friends' grips are tight on the hilt of their weapons. Thoughts begin to coalesce from ideas to an urge when one of the steel automatons deployed alongside the city guard speaks to you. It does not try to arrest you or caution you against something. It greets you as an old friend and invites you in for a coronation.
A good opportunity, everyone agrees, though wary of your apparent connection to this man. Gortash. Enver Gortash.
Bile surges, and you hunch over to vomit off in a corner. Your broken head spins, and you want to bite off the proffered helping hand. You are exhausted and flushed with energy, woozy and clearheaded, fearful and confident.
You don't want to chew off your companion's index finger. Everyone nods like they believe you, but they don't, and you don't either because you feel how large the urge is in you.
Maybe you won't. Maybe you won't. Maybe you won't like you already have.
Enver Gortash welcomes you with an intimacy, familiar and new all at once, and you vomit again. He pats your back because you are his dear friend, his partner in this horrible Absolute scheme, and his favorite child of Bhaal. Your sister isn't half the killer you were. He wouldn't permit her to sully his special day, but you are welcome even if your stomach heaves at every revelation he gives.
You kneel over a pool of your vomit and smile with teeth, lips flecked with saliva and half-digested crumbs. There, there, soothes your dear friend Gortash. He really did miss you, you know.
Looking up over at the tense forms of your companions, down one by your own uncontrollable hand, you do have to admit--
It is rather funny once you know the punchline.